Sustainability

Earth

Landscapes

How man modifies the environment

The environment is a system whose processes are continuously interacting with the organisms that live in it. We have seen, for example, that rainwater changes the Earth’s surface, and that vegetation plays an important role in rock disintegration and soil formation. There are many human beings in the environment. Man is the only individual to be able to build and use equipment that can modify the landscape in a very short time. Nature would take thousands of years to produce the same changes as the ones produced by man. Human activities on the environment strictly depend on the type of economic activity and how society is organized. In some cases human activities aim at recovering environmental upheaval.
As a consequence, man can be considered as an important landscape-modifying agent.