This section focuses on how people adapt to their environments through growing food, making clothing, and building shelter. The material presented is designed to help you meet the following objective.
- Analyze ways in which people adapt to an environment through the production and use of clothing, food, and shelter.
Since food, clothing, and shelter are needed for basic survival, their production is common to all cultures, wherever they are located. The production and pursuit of these necessities are high on the list of the ways people adapt to and affect their environment. Acquisition and production of food even today may involve activities such as hunting and gathering, or rely on complex systems such as large-scale monocultures, aquaculture, or intensive animal farming. All methods of food-gathering or production have some affect on the environment—the difference is in the scale of their effects. The same is true of clothing production and shelter-building. Gathering wool to weave on a hand loom is not on the same scale as the labor-intensive growing of cotton and weaving it in a modern textile mill. Raising a tent or chickee involves far less specialization and division of labor than building a modern suburban house. All of these human activities are influenced by the value societies put on natural resources and Earth's environment, and the way they use these resources.
