HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTION IN SCIENTIFIC AND HUMANITARIAN THOUGHT AT THE END OF XXTH CENTURY: CAUSES OF PLURALITY

Environmental approach to human history remains one of the most alluring and unequivocal since its origin in ancient times. At the beginning of XXIst century complicated interdisciplinary studies of cultural history where contemporary methods of instrumental analysis are used are often bringing us to the necessity to take environmental issues into account when conceptualising local peculiarities of cultural evolution. Three main approaches of human-environmental interaction in historical retrospection could be distinguished in contemporary humanitarian and scientific thought. One of them known as “geographical determinism” is concentrating around environmental impact on human history. During the second half of XXth century most powerful among its concepts becomes adaptation theory, which is discussed in the frameworks of “New” and behavioral archaeology, environmental psychology, phenomenological and processual schools of culturology etc. The second approach, concerning with human agency in nature development, becomes popular alongside with global reconsideration of human role in the Universe took place at the times of scientific revolution. Among theories and concepts developed in its frameworks attention should be paid to environmental archaeology, geoarchaeology, palaeoeconomic modeling, local and regional palaeoecological approach, landscape history, cultural landscape school, concept of anthropogenic landscape, theory of landscape as artifact and others. Adepts of third approach tend to interpret human-environment interaction as integrated system all elements of which are of equal importance and are engaged into complicate reciprocal influence. In this context attention should be paid to general and ecological stresses theories, concepts of social and ecological resilience, regulation and sustainability, to co-evolution theory, to geosystem notion as well as to wide spectrum of post-modern concepts. Such theoretic plurality appears to be positive when trying to create exhaustive picture of human-environment interaction in past and present.