The human-environment interaction goes back to the remotest possible times in the history of humanity. Sometimes, it is seen as a manifestation of a struggle between the two. There have also been times when this relationship took the form of respectable coexistence. While the history of humanity of the last several millennia is noted for its constant (if not consistent) progress in different walks of life, the mysteries of nature have often proved to be quite tempting to be solved by human thinking and actions.
It is, therefore, not without reason that theOxford English Dictionary gives the meaning of ‘environment' as “the totality of the physical conditions in which a human society lives,” and of ‘ecology' as “the branch of knowledge that deals with the interaction of humans with their environment.” In the emerging field of historical disaster studies looking into the adaptability and agency of pre-industrial societies on a global scale, the special issue of The Medieval History Journal (Vol. 10, 2007) titled ‘Coping with Natural Disasters in Pre-Industrial Societies' brought to the fore the ideas that “neither disasters themselves nor the conditions that give rise to them are undeniably natural”; that “‘natural disaster' is a convenience term that amounts to a misnomer”; and that “disasters occur at the intersection of nature and culture and illustrate, often dramatically, the mutuality of each in the constitution of the other.”
Read in detail at :- http://cdrn.org.in/show.detail.asp?id=22348
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