Environmental History is the study of how settlements alter ecological conditions due to the impacts of human actions.

Farms among the Himalayan foothills.

Measuring the impacts of settlements

Changes in scale with respect to means of transforming surroundings
Characteristics of impacts	NUMERICAL QUANTITY = EQUIVALENT OF IMPACT	stages
Subsistence	1	A
Commercial	10	B
Manufacturing	100	C
Urban	1000	D
Industrial	10000	E

Metropolitan (suburban)	100000	^F
Hyper-industrial	1000000	^G

Next

We also study when and how those changes influence each era's ideas about nature with respect to responsible resource use from one period to the next.

Examples of the change:

characteristics of the periods

Agrarian

River – based

Fur trade

Settlement

Timber

Planting - production oriented

Manufacturing factory and farm

Railroad

Cattle

Urban commerce and trade

Mining

small scale industry

Urban concentration

– production to consuming oriented

Roads

Birth of metro-areas SMSA

Commercial centers

Hyper industrial

Consumption oriented

Year	amount	increases
1790	3 million	base
		+ 27
1860	30 million
		+ 70
1900	100 million
		+200
2000	300 million
		+ 13.5
2012	313.4 million

United States Bureau of the Census

Ideas meaning those concepts associated with the perception, ideology and values that contribute to methods of discovery with respect to our surrounding land, air, and water when contrasted with and Earth's eye view of the past.

Siry, Worster, Merchant, Emerson, Olmsted, Mumford, Egan, Rome

perception, ideology and values

Perception refers how & what one sees or envisions when describing scenery in a terrain.

Ideology is a manifestation of a political and economic faith in how society should function.

Values are a way to speak about ethics or morals in relation to uses, beauty and transcendent qualities of places, persons, or objects.

For example: Agrarian values were an essential part of the Jeffersonian ideology of freedom and limited government that perceived the farmer and those who lived by working the land as the principal sources of virtue in a republic that valued self-sufficiency, neighborliness, and independence.

Powhatan native village reconstructed in Virginia, eastern woodland indian style.

Geography

Beavers

water levels

keystone species

Natives

Settlements

Stockbridge, Mass. in the Berkshire Mountains equidistant from Boston and New York City.

Lewis Mumford

Formula to apply

California foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, c.1880s.

Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology

I = PAT

Any impact is proportional to the number of people, their level of affluence, and the equipment they use to supply themselves and others with a means to make a living.

• technological change, qualities of.

• Conservation.

• Preservation diverges from Conservation as protection.

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