Men's Interactions with the Environment

Men are an important part of the bio-tic component of the environment and simultaneously they are an important factor of the environment. Thus, men play important roles in the natural environmental system in different capacities such as biological, social, economic, and technological. All the natural functions of human beings such as birth, growth, health, and deaths are affected and determined by natural environment in the same manner as the cases of other organisms. However, men being most developed and advanced animal both physically and mentally and technologically, is capable of making substantial changes in natural environment so as to make it suitable for his own living.

Human Population and Environment

The environment affects population through biophysical limitations, behavioral controls, and resource availability. Weather and climate affects of human well-being and health. The study of attitudes of human body to changes in the atmospheric environments is known as human bio-meteorology, which lays emphasis on to establish how much of the overall biological variability the result of change in weather, climate, and season is. Three levels of climate environment affect human behavior whereas, micro-climate, which represents weather conditions surrounding an individual living thing, ecological climate, its represent weather elements of the habitat of living thing, geographical climate, weather situation of larger area unit and longer temporal span.

Human body can function properly only in certain suites of environmental conditions in terms of oxygen, heat, light, humidity and precipitation, wind, atmospheric electricity and space. Even the survival of human body depends on the above factors. Lack of required amount of oxygen at higher altitudes makes human survival impossible. Excessive heat and humidity retard body and mental growth whereas very high or very low temperature on the one hand adversely affects human body and on the other hand makes food a scarce commodity to support human life.

Various combinations of environment factors have not only affected but conditioned racial characteristics in different parts of the earth's surface. Environment also effect conditions thoughts, ideologies, and culture of human being. Other hand social, economic, and political behaviors influenced to certain extent by man's perception of environmental factor and his response to these factors. Frequency and magnitude of extreme natural events and environmental factors like earthquake, floods, droughts, landslides, and atmospheric storms influence man's perception of natural environment and decide his reactions and response to these events.

The most significant aspect of the environment of the environment in influencing human activity is the availability of natural resources. The rich or poor quality and quantity all the availability of renewable and non-renewable resources decide the type of human activities towards economic viability, social organizations, political stability, and international relations. In matter of fact, the level of economic development largely depends on natural resources.

Demography and Economics

The meaningful contribution to demography both in theory and application has come from economists. Population studies are being an essential part of course contents in graduate studies in economics. Population size, its distribution and skill quality ate key factors in the total production and utilization process. Labor supply and labor productivity are dependent upon the size and skill composition of the population supply. Resource management, employment generation and distortion in income distribution are key issues that confront today's economists more than what they did hundred years back. There can be no uncertainty that raising the level of living of people is very closely related to the population growth.

Population explosion in the developing countries has left some of their economic programs. Investment priorities of economic and development planning have often been derailed by the rapid population growth. Globalization and cheap labor in the developing countries have become contentious issues in World Tread Organization. Economic issues have effects direct or indirect on fertility, mortality, emigration and immigration, population density, migration towards urban from rural and many human activities.

Demography and Anthropology

These both disciplines share human population as their research subject though they focus on complementary aspects. Demography's primary concern is with the dynamic forces defining population size and structure and their variation across time and space, social and cultural anthropology focuses on the social organization shaping people's production and reproduction. Given these different focuses the methodological approaches too are quite different demography's stress is on collected data, mathematical modeling and the estimation testing system, anthropology is mostly qualitative based on case studies and inductive. Anthropological demography an emerging branch uses anthropological theory and methods to investigate demographic events. The main theoretical concepts in anthropological demography are known as culture, gender, religious institutions and political economy. Generally, its theoretical research approach includes a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies applied to case studies. The ethnographic research and participant observation are often central to this approach as is interpretative reading o primary data historical material.   

Anthropologists tend to be skeptical about demographer's emphasis on statistical representative their comparable nature of data collected through standardized surveys, they claim that the demographer's pay little attention to their validity of the data, to the analytically models and their interpretation. Despite such divergences scholars in both disciplines have occasionally come together, working in multidisciplinary research teams, and created complex research models to build on mutual strengths and reduce disciplinary limitations thus launching their field of anthropological demography. Anthropological demography within demography is still evolving.

Demography and Sociology

Demography and Sociology both considered as man as a social animal and that as a unit of society human being have to perform a series of activities both as an individual as also as a partner of a larger group. A sociologist uses demography as a tool and supplies of social space for understanding social relations, social issues, social interactions, social reactions and the evolution and continuation of social processes. The study of population would be largely incomplete and could be misleading too if social and cultural issues do not receive the attention it deserves. Demography is not simply a study of population compositions, sex ratio in the population, prevailing or changing birth rate, death rate, migration rate and marriage rate. They are meaningful only in the context of social, cultural and economic background of the human aggregate under scrutiny.

When the demography viewed as an applied science, has closest relation with sociology since study of composition and distribution of a population cannot be understood without reference to the social environment that foster them. When structures and compositions are to be understood about a population, the frequently used criterion is social.

It has a strong social base on both fertility and migration; often they are treated as part of a social phenomenon. Even change in death rates especially age-sex specific death rates and marriage rates are mutual related to social customs and cultural determinants.

The population policy which basically is a demographic issue is discussed and debated in social, cultural and economic context. The measures recommended and practiced for controlling birth rate differ from one country to another primarily because of the social and cultural circumstances prevailing in those countries.

A representative mutual relation appears to exist between social status on the one hand and fertility and mortality on the other. Class position has proved ascendancy over others in explaining fertility, expectation of life and even some of the principle causes of mortality and morbidity in a population.

MACRO-AND MICRO DEMOGRAPHY

The difference between macro and micro study lies in the size of the study aspects unit used in data collection and analysis. Marco Demography studies the total population of a region or country or aggregate of people known to share a common culture or genetic origin or some other common social, economical or other characteristics. Usually the units for macro-demographic studies are the continents, nations or the states or larger administrative units within a country. The studies of slow or rapid growth rate of population birth rate, death rate, sex ratio, dependency ratio, migration, public health system etc. are examples of macro demography. Many other issues as literacy rate, employment, income distribution, proportion-consumption, and living standards, relation between population and economic development and environment are the part of macro-demography.

Units of micro-demography are not only small they are included the larger macro-demography. They constitute the internal or primary elements of macro analysis. This unit is totally dependent on the basic an autonomous units of macro-demography. Micro-demography studies the nature of changes in some of the demographic characteristics of a population group that influence the structure and distribution of the population or help bring some readjustment in population groups. The micro-demography uses individual, family, small community or village as the unit for understanding causal connections to some of the changes observed in the population groups.

Some examples of macro and micro demography:-

Macro mortality studies: - role of vaccination reduction of small pox, polio regional differences in infant mortality; causes of mortality in the country.

Micro-mortality studies: - some communities have reservation against polio vaccination? Role of education in public health awareness; do parents discriminate sons and daughter in matters relating to their health and education?

Macro-fertility study: - the relation between birth rate and economic development, urbanization and industrialization, the differences in birth rate between rural and urban population, religion and birth control etc. often are objectives of macro-fertility study.

Micro-fertility studies: - what is an ideal family size? Cost of rearing a child, family planning awareness and interest in birth control, need for education and aspiration for children are example of micro- fertility studies.

Macro- migration studies: - net migration rate by regions, type of migration in Asia, migration and individual development, sex difference in migration.

Micro-migration studies: - individual and family decisions behind migration, impact of immigration from one to another village or state, why is migration rate high with educated people, how has rural economy been affected by rural-urban migration?