Humanisation of nature and stop-and-go

As people understood their environment better, they developed better technology. They moved from a state of necessity to a state of freedom: they could make choices and create possibilities with the resources nature offered.

Human activity has left its mark everywhere, creating a cultural landscape: health resorts on the highlands, huge cities, fields, orchards and pastures in the plains, ports on the coasts, sea routes across the oceans, and satellites in space. This view, that nature offers opportunities and humans choose how to use them, is called possibilism. Nature becomes humanised.

The book's example: Kari, who lives in Trondheim, in Norway, near the Arctic. In winter there is almost no daylight and fierce cold. But her home is warm with electric heating, and her office has a glass dome that keeps out the snow; her fruit and vegetables are flown in from warmer places. Technology lets her live well despite the harsh climate.

But there are limits. The developed economies made a 'free run' at nature, and caused environmental damage: the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion, global warming, retreating glaciers and degraded land.

So the geographer Griffith Taylor proposed a middle path between determinism and possibilism: neo-determinism, also called 'stop and go' determinism. Like traffic lights, nature shows red, amber and green: humans can develop, but they must stop when nature signals danger. As he put it, humans can conquer nature by obeying it: develop, but within nature's limits.