Approximately 3.5 million years ago our ancestors first learned to walk upright.  They were “homo erectus”, and with this innovation of walking upright they began to appreciated some things that we take for granted today like having our hands free, and increased mobility.  As humans progressed along their history they earned the distinction of “homo sapiens”.  This title was conferred as the brain casing increased in size indicating the developmental process of human thought.  Our ability for abstract thought has given us the ability to effect the places where we live.  Today we have the distinction of “homo sapiens sapiens”, and we are spectators of the ever more rapid pace of human development.  The environment has played a major role in dictating the course human history and the technologies that have been developed.  Humans have always struggled with being able to stay alive in many different environments, and we have learned that it only gets easier with an increased ability to live in those environments.  The ability to live in our environment improves as our knowledge of that environment increases.  With the knowledge that we gain from our experiences we are able to adapt and survive in many different circumstances.  And it is around those circumstances that we base our modes of existence.  The ability to survive in, coexist with, and in some cases exploit our environment has transformed humans from just another animal to the dominant species on the planet.  We have been able to mold and use our environment through the development of different technologies to maximize our own sustenance.  Because of the ability to effect the environment in which we live, humans today live in environments that are largely human created.

Today many people see technology and its advantages in their everyday lives.  Technology is embodied in such things as the houses (or dormitories) that we live in, the computers that we write our papers on, the telephones that we talk to our friends and family on, the televisions that we watch, and video games that we play… the list goes on.  But life hasn’t always been like this. The chain of events and inventions that lead up the things we take for granted today started millions of years ago when humans first walked upright.  Early humans began as just another animal living in a world where everything was uncertain.  Their main concern was where their next meal was coming from.  As time passed they learned how to gather, and where to find the best food.  This lifestyle has been termed a hunter/gatherer lifestyle, and according to Thomas Hobbes it was “nasty, brutish, and short”.  This lifestyle, though, was all that humans and their abilities were capable of sustaining.  The state of the cultural and physical environment made it so that “the population was small, thinly spread, living in groups which probably depended mainly on the gathering of nuts, seeds and plants, which they would have supplemented by scavenging dead animals killed by other predators and perhaps hunting of a few small mammals.”(Ponting, 19)  They needed to move around to find food, and couldn’t afford to be weighed down with large amounts of people.  There is evidence of such things as infanticide, abandonment of the elderly, and other methods of controlling the population density.  Also, the subsistence of these groups depended “on a deep knowledge of their local areas and in particular an awareness of what types of food will be available at different places and at different times of the year.”(Ponting, 22)   In this manner the environment of humans dictated the lifestyle that they were able to sustain.  In some cases this meant that the hunter/gatherer groups were more in tune with their environments.  If they overtaxed their food supply then there wouldn’t be enough food to survive.  But in some cases like the Americas there was such a surplus of food supply that they “exploit[ed] large herds of bison and other animals.  These were often killed in a crude and highly wasteful way.”(Ponting, 30)  Hunter/gatherer societies were the predominant form of human existence until approximately 10,000 years ago.  Humans learned a lot about their environment in that time, and how to live in the easiest manner possible.  This path of least resistance leads to the development of agriculture, and sedentary societies.  Humans saw the development of a hierarchical settled society, and the emergence of a leisure class.  By leisure class I mean a portion of the population that did not produce food.  As these stratified societies emerged they necessarily became interdependent.  The leisure class was dependant on the farmers and hunters because they provided food for the rest of society, while the leisure class made the food producing people dependent on them by controlling the land they were farming on.

With the advent of agriculture, technological advances really got their foothold and human society began to develop at a much faster rate as did the population.  Essentially the development of all human technologies came about because of the way we were able to understand how to provide food for ourselves; an essential part of human existence and human nature.  Hunting has improved with innovations such as spears, snaring or trapping, the taming of dogs, meat transportation/saving, and fire as corralling mechanism, and recently with the invention of guns.  Fire itself is a technology that has had varied effects on several aspects of human society.  There is evidence that fires in Australia brought about the extinction of several species.(NPR)  But fire has also improved the quality of human life by allowing us to cook food, melt metal, and improve other technologies, and keep us warm on a cold night. Agriculture has been improved with the taming of oxen, the invention of the plow, and recently with tractors and other heavy machinery.  All of these improvements in technology have had their own effects on the environment, and changed the way that humans live their lives.  Some of the technological changes have produced detrimental environmental effects, but some have revolutionized the ease of human existence.  For too long we have ignored or been unaware of the effects that we have had on the environment. Since we live in a world that we have helped to create it’s time that we make an effort toward sustainability, and minimize the detrimental effects that we have on our environment.