While we might argue about the nature of the effects that removing people from their home-place has, there is certainly a long tradition of explaining the character and behaviour of people according to the nature of their environments. Throughout history, people of all cultures have assumed that environment influences physical and psychological well-being. Aretaeus (2nd century A.D.) claimed that those suffering from laziness should be ‘laid in the light and exposed to the rays of the sun, the disease is gloom’. Posidonius (4th
century B.C.) stated that ‘melancholy occurs in autumn, whereas
348
The quest toward remembering at-homeness and belonging, it might be argued, has reached pandemic proportions and is manifest in a range of global activities and movements, among them; a revival of interest in personal and family histories and genealogies, new-age theory and practice, environmentalism, deep ecology and the recovery of indigenous philosophies and spiritualities.
mania in summer.’ Ancient Greek wisdom held that weather and climate influenced body fluids and in turn individual disposition. Both Hippocrates and Aristotle made analogies between the four humors (or bodily fluids)—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood; the four elements—fire, earth, water and air; and the four seasons—summer, autumn, winter and spring. Hippocrates claimed that it is the changes of seasons that produce diseases of both mind and body, calculating their onset in relation to climatic variations, referring to the corresponding element and bodily fluid for diagnoses and treatment. 349
Atmospheric conditions are commonly held to elicit psychological and physiological responses. There is little doubt that there is a climatological influence on our physical and mental health and well-being. Prolonged exposure to unaccustomed levels of heat and cold, light or darkness can produce physiological and psychological symptoms, while sunshine does indeed make us happy, and, according to some research, increases altruistic behaviour. Highly increased hours of sunlight, such as experienced in the Arctic regions, has been associated with elevated suicide levels. For centuries physicians have observed that cycles of depression and mania suffered by some patients are linked to the seasons. This condition, in the guise of ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’ is still acknowledged and treated by western medicine.350
Those disorders popularly known as ‘cabin fever’ (depression and/or anxiety caused by prolonged periods in which one is prevented from going outdoors) and ‘going troppo’ (wild and erratic behaviour said to be caused by long periods living in tropical climates) are versions of the same malady.
Furthermore, although little research seems to have been done on the effect of wind on human beings, plenty of anecdotal evidence from teachers suggests that on windy days school children display elevated levels of stress, inability to concentrate and behavioural management challenges. From my own experience, the direction of the wind can have an enormous impact. I once lived on a small island in the middle of Bass Strait where the prevailing winds were constantly strong and westerly. On those rare occasions when the wind was easterly in direction, many in the small community stayed home from work or
349 Winifred Gallagher, The Power of Place: How Our Suroundings Shape our Thoughts, Emotions and
Actions, New York: HarperPerennial, 1994: 12.
350 Paul A. Bell, Thomas C. Greene, Jeffrey, D. Fisher & Andrew Baum, Environmental Psychology,
school and retreated to their beds. It was common knowledge in that small community that the easterly wind caused ‘problems with the head’ that prohibited activity.
Some theorists believe not only that human beings are profoundly influenced by their environments, but also that human habitat preferences are biologically determined. In this regard it is not just that fluctuations in climatic conditions are thought to have a discernable and parallel effect on our health or temper, but that where we come from is part of our biological inheritance and plays a more fundamental role in determining our functional profile. Ibn Khaldun held that temperate climates fostered industry and technological development, such that these conditions favoured the development of superior civilisations. Khuldun believed that it was the cooling effect of the Arabian Sea that moderated and balanced the Arabian Peninsula sufficiently to produce the perfect climate for sophisticated material and intellectual culture. In the seventeenth century Robert Burton observed in his Anatomy of Melancholy that:
Hot countries are most troubled with … great numbers of madmen … They are ordinarily so choleric in their speeches, that scarce two words pass without railing or chiding in common talk, and often quarrelling in the street
… . Cold air in the other extreme is almost as bad as hot … . In those northern countries, the people are therefore generally dull, heavy, and [include] many witches, which [some] ascribe to melancholy.351
Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784 argued that geography formed the natural economy of a people, and that their customs and society would develop along the lines that their basic environment favoured. Furthermore, when Henry Buckle advanced the same basic theory in his The History of Civilisation in England, published in the mid-nineteenth century, it was received enthusiastically. Buckle held that while hot climates produced laziness and promiscuity and cold climates inhibited labour, while the temperate climates of the middle latitudes, such as that in England, led to sharpened intellects. In such climatic conditions, where land was fertile, overproduction ensued, permitting the emergence of a leisure class, which, according to Buckle, was responsible for the cultural and economic
advancement of society.352
Other theorists, like German zoologist/biologist turned bio- geographer Friedrich Ratzel, influenced by the work of Charles Darwin, argued for German expansion on the geo-political grounds that states have no geographical borders, but rather that a nation’s territory is determined by the bond between it and the people who draw sustenance from it. 353
Ratzel is credited as the founder of Environmental Determinism, the tradition guided by the notion that human activities are controlled by the environment. The basic argument of the environmental determinists is that aspects of physical geography, particularly climate, not only influenced the psychological temperament of individual people, but also determined the form and nature of their culture and economy. It was then deemed important to trace the migrations of groups to see what environmental conditions they had evolved under. Ellen Semple brought Ratzel’s thinking to prominence, theorising that human disposition, culture, religion, economy and social organization are all derived from environmental influences, and consequently that environment provides the physical basis for history. According to theorists like Churchill, the story of global expansion and human diversification is most comprehensively understood in terms that recognise the power and influence of the physical environment on human behaviour.
Environmental determinism was very popular around the turn of the century and dominated American geography until about the 1920s. One of its most influential twentieth-century exponents (and probably the cause of its coming into disrepute) was Thomas Griffith Taylor who argued that how far a nation’s culture and economy can develop and progress is dependant upon its natural environment. Griffith Taylor’s work is particularly salient to Australia. In his Australia: A Study of Warm Environments and Their Effect on British Settlement (1940) he theorised that Australia’s prospects for growth would be seriously constrained by its environment. On the other hand, its companion volume Canada: A Study of Cool Continental Environments and Their Effect on British and French Settlement (1947) predicts a much more positive future for Canada based upon geological and climatic criteria. However, perhaps his most controversial
352 Bell et al. (2001): 175-176.
353 Ratzel produced the foundations of biogeography in his two-volume Anthropogeographie (1882 and
1891). For an interpretation and analysis of this work see Ellen Semple, Influences of the Geographic Environment (New York: Russell, 1911).
work was Environment and Race: A Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settlement and Status of the Races of Man (1927) in which he lays out his theories of human evolution under the influence of environment. Ideas communicated in this work, and others like it, are easily turned into rationales for racism and imperialism.
Because of these connections, it is argued that Environmental Determinism as a movement came increasingly under fire during the 1940s, and then officially fell into disrepute. It could be argued, however, that variants of environmental determinism are still very much alive and well in contemporary research and environmental discourses. A similar orientation is found in the current work of evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond354
who argues that ‘geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, Sub-Saharan Africans and aboriginal Australians.’355
It is also common in the work of many contemporary geographers, environmental psychologists and other place professionals.
Most biological explanations for human responses to environmental characteristics are steeped in evolutionary theory. One aim of those who study human biology is to determine how far human evolutionary history can account for particular human behaviours. Human beings do have biological or physical responses to habitats (including positive or negative thoughts and feelings about places) and these responses must figure in their reckonings as to whether they settle in a particular place or not. That people are connected in such a way might explain why some people are attracted to particular kinds of environmental settings, while others are drawn to very different kinds of environments and places—why some people feel as if they belong here and others there.
Many contemporary environmental psychologists, for example, believe that humans behave in accordance with functional evolutionary principles. Behavioural Ecologist Gordon Orians356
explains landscape preferences in terms of human evolution.
354See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997)
and his other works.
355
This is a quotation from the back jacket of Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (London: Vintage, 1998).
356 Gordon H. Oriens, ‘An Ecological and Evolutionary Approach to Landscape Aesthetics’ in Edmund
Pennings-Rowsell & David Lowenthal ed., Landscape Meanings and Values (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986): 3-25.
Orians suggests that human responses to environments relate to expected survival and reproductive outcomes. ‘Good’ habitats—those deemed apposite—evoke positive responses. In this sense habitat preferences are the product of long-term natural selection—the most widely preferred environment mimicking the savannah of Tropical Africa where human beings as a species began life.357
Human beings, so it is argued, have a ‘genetically transmitted predisposition for the surroundings of the species’ birth and early development.’358
This predilection has been studied and tested from numerous researchers across a wide range of fields; Orians examines the impulse of gardeners to include (maybe even privilege) savannah prototype landscaping and vegetation; ecologist John Falk examines the general preference for images of grass-scapes over those of rainforests and deserts. His study collected responses from people of all ages and on at least three different continents, finding that savannah type environments—grassy expanses with scattered vegetation—were overall equally preferred to the participant’s native landscape, even in some cases where a grassland environment had never been seen before.359
Not only is it argued that human beings make similar aesthetic judgments or show a preference for particular natural environments, but that our positive reactions to natural phenomena per se may have a biological basis. E.O. Wilson used the term ‘biophilia’ to describe what he believed to be a human affinity for nature—a biological human need for natural surroundings and an associated ‘innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.’360
Wilson argues that while complex social organization is only apparent for a tiny fraction of human history, human beings have been involved in a complex ecological organization since their genesis. ‘Earth is our home in the full, genetic sense, where humanity and its ancestors existed for all the millions of years of their evolution’.361
357 See also Stephen Kaplan & Rachel Kaplan, Cognition and Environment: Functioning in an Uncertain
World (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982).
358 Tony Hiss, The Experience of Place (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991): 37. 359 Hiss, 1991: 36-37.
360 E. O. Wilson, ‘Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic’ in S.R. Kellett & E.O. Wilson ed., The Biophilia
Hypothesis (Washington: Island Press, 1993): 31.
For the very much greater part of our history, ecological, rather than social principles, guided human life and thought. Given this, we may be biologically programmed or predisposed not only to value ‘natural’ environments, but to privilege them over ‘artificial’ ones—those that we have modified. Indeed, the biophilia hypothesis explains the restorative powers of nature in biological terms. For such theorists human beings have an innate affinity for certain landscape aesthetics and relate to these aesthetic features in a positive way in both psychological and functional terms.362
Of course, in the last few thousand years human beings have modified their environments in significant ways. How far they continue to belong in the ‘artificial’ environments that they have created is an issue of contemporary debate. Ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson asks the question: ‘Why has man changed the shapes and substances of his environment?’ and answers it in the following way:
To change what it affords him. He has made more available what benefits him and less pressing what injures him. In making life easier for himself, of course he has made life harder for most of the other animals. Over the millennia, he has made it easier for himself to get food, easier to keep warm, easier to see at night, easier to get about, and easier to train his offspring.363
According to this way of thinking, as human beings have evolved biologically and psychologically they have shaped the physical world around them so that it reflects and supports those changes. Where they have been successful they have flourished. Where thy have not they have perished. Human beings have proved to be extremely adaptable and resilient creatures. If belonging is a relation to an environment that matches the form and character of human functionality then human beings have learnt to belong in a diverse range of environments—both ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’.
Insofar as urban environments are taken to be ‘unnatural’ settings for human beings, urban living is taken to be one of the most challenging and extreme human developments. Living predominantly inside air conditioned buildings and under artificial
362 Bell et al., 2001: 41.
363 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence
lighting the functional profile of human beings deteriorates.364
The challenge for those who work in the area of environmental health is to create urban environments that allow people to live fully human lives with normal psychological and physiological functioning.
There is a substantial corpus of research into place with a scientific orientation— studies by architects, town planners, health professionals and environmental psychologists to name a few—examining the way in which physical environments influence the behaviours, health and well-being of those who engage with them. The common aim of many of these studies is to ascertain how people react to particular features in landscape (both built and natural) in order that experiences of place can be predicted, ameliorated and/or enriched. It is not only that urban living separates human beings from the natural world in the sense that their lives are spent increasingly indoors, but that the aesthetic of the cityscape itself is alien and alienating.
Some years ago a group of architects in the United States spent almost a decade studying the aspects of urban places that ‘make people feel alive and human’. They came up with 253 elements or aspects of the urban environment that have links to positive experience. These included warm colours, the presence of elderly people, open spaces and plazas and buildings no greater than four floors. Tall buildings and uniform configurations in the built landscape were among the elements they found not only unappealing, but able to actually damage people—both mentally and emotionally.365
A number of models have been developed over the last several decades articulating which environmental properties support and enhance human biological functioning and well-being. Most of these models are founded on the assumption that intelligibility is an important measure of environmental comfort, and therefore that predictors such as complexity and coherence underlie aesthetic judgments. The Kaplan and Kaplan Preference Model is probably the most well known and influential. This model is a preference matrix with four main components—coherence, mystery, complexity and legibility. Coherence and legibility relate to understanding, or making sense of, the environment. Mystery and complexity relate to the degree to which one is stimulated to
364 Gallagher, 1994: 13-14.
engage with, or explore, the environment one is in. According to the Kaplans, the more one is able to understand a place, and is stimulated to explore it, the more supportive and enriching being in that place will be.366
Geographer Jay Appleton367
recognises two more preferences in landscape—prospect and refuge.
‘Prospect’ means a long, sweeping vista—a place where viewing is unhindered and we can take in information from miles around. ‘Refuge’ means a hiding place where, from concealment, we can see without being seen, and gain information without giving away any information about ourselves.368
Environments in which these experiential criteria can be met are environments that maximise human functionality, and in doing so, according to the rationale favoured by environmental determinists, facilitate our being human. The environment in which one belongs, on this account, is that which maximises human functioning.
What it means to function as a human is, of course a point of debate, and how we ought live as fully human beings is equally as contentious. These issues raise ethical questions with regard to the ways in which we think and behave in relation to the environment. However, they also bring into consideration the ethical status of ‘belonging’ if what we mean by that term is a relation to the physical world that maximises human efficacy. Questions regarding the ethical implications of belonging (in its environmental designation or others) surely deserve much more thought and analysis. What can be demonstrated here, however, is the danger of slippage between understanding that the environment has a powerful influence upon the physical and psychological functioning of human beings and using environmental determinism to justify the alienation of people from their environments. We have seen how the work of Griffith Taylor was reportedly used to naturalise racism and imperialism and it was