Essay on the Physical Factors of Social Change – The physical factors consist of the surface of the earth, climate, rainfall, rivers, mountains, natural vegetation, forests, animal life, minerals, etc. They have a profound influence upon the human society Social change is, to some extent, conditioned, by the physical or the geographic factors. Rate and direction of social change are governed by the physical environment.
At the Polar Regions and in the deserts there can be no cities and almost changeless stabilities are maintained. The surface of the earth is never at rest. Slow geographic changes as well as the occasional convulsions in the form of storms, famines and floods, cyclones and hurricanes and earthquakes do take place.
They may bring about social change. But these changes in nature are usually unaffected by the human activity. Here, the causation is onesided. The great volcanic eruption of Yokohama in 1923 was responsible for the new kind of architecture in Japan. It is said that the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Indus valley withered away due to bad climate.
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However, certain changes in the environment may be attributed to human activity. For example, soil impoverishment has taken place in South Italy, Greece, Palestine, Egypt and Morocco. The desert wastes of North Africa were once green and well populated. Man has disturbed the ecological balance by exhausting the minerals, destroying the forests and devastating the land and by the mass killing of the wild life.
The modes of culture and the whole system of social institutions have undergone modifications. Consequently, the centres of population, the routes of trade, the seats of empire and the systems of structures of societies have been vastly affected.
Some social geographers and social ecologists have attributed too much importance to geographic factors in bringing about social change. The influences that geographic factors exert upon human societies are neither decisive nor negligible, they are limiting but not determining.
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Man is capable of modifying the ‘natural landscape’ into a cultural landscape.”Geographic factors account for what can be and for what cannot be in human societies, but they do not account for what is”-Robert Bierstedt.
Geography alone cannot explain the rise and fall of civilisations. “For no period of human history do we have information of a geographic character that will adequately account for the social changes that occurred.” As human societies grow in complexity and as culture accumulates, geographic factors steadily decrease in sociological significance.
“Geography, in short governs the possible, not the actual. History is not a simple function of habital, nor culture of climate; neither mistral nor monsoon determines morality, nor soil society.”— Robert Bierstedt.