Your Environment is a Product of You
Applying Human Geography Means Relearning Stewardship
Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, character, and statecraft, rather than passing fads.
North America is burning, but I was thinking about stewardship and human geography anyway.
We think we choose where and how we live.
In the past you didn’t. Not really. For most of human history, the map was not a picture; most people never saw one, and could not put their finger on one and say “we are here.” The “map” was a set of rules that determined the possible.
Water decided who lived and who starved. Weather patterns decided who stayed and who died trying to migrate. Geography drew the lines of human potential before a single person showed up to debate the finer points of international transit.
Things have changed but some things remain hard-coded. Look at where we actually live today. Almost 80% of humanity is packed onto a thin ribbon of land beside rivers and oceans. 250 years after declaring Independence from the British monarch and most of the American population still lives east of the Mississippi.
Humanity is still a waterbound, almost coastal species, still tethered to the liquid of life the same way our ancestors were. However, our technological advancements and especially the modern democratic age mean that we can no longer pretend to be victims of our environment. Our choices show that we stopped just adapting to geography a long time ago. Now we are rewiring the Earth.
We shattered the civilizational harmony of properly cultivating nature. We lost the discipline of preventative cultural burning.
Every fire our predecessors lit to clear a forest was a message to the planet: we are curating the landscape to keep the balance. However now we transform at industrial scale and act as if we do not live in ecosystems. Rather, we take them apart and rebuild them to fit a spreadsheet to look good for a capital call.
Which means neither the ground under your feet right now nor the air you breathe is neutral. It is not just “Planet Earth.” It is a decision made by people. Some that you never got a vote on, but many you did.
Greenhouse gases did not simply change the climate. They flipped the hierarchy; for the first time in this planet’s story, the physical world is adapting to us — not the other way around. The polar ice caps are not melting because of nature. They are melting because of an invoice.
Folks still think of geography like it is two separate subjects — the physical world and the human world. That split is a mistake, and an expensive one. There is only one system, we just have more agency now.
Geography shapes our world perspectives, which expand or constrain our political imaginations, and they in turn determine the priorities and rules that govern us. Like what resources to allocate toward preventing forest fires smothering half a continent.
Once our lived geography was habit forming, now our habits combine with technology to shape how we engage our habitat. That’s human geography, and today our environment is a product of us.
Negligence, mismanagement, and exploitation of the seas, forests and air are changing how—and maybe where—we will live in the future.
We’ve lost our community focus on collective stewardship and responsibility. We lack a political mindset of management for equilibrium rather than simply ownership for extraction. The goal isn’t stasis but human flourishing and even improving the conditions we inherited. Tech is not the problem, our selective use of it is.
Our future as a species, with a healthy optimal environment, requires asking questions beyond “where”, and getting back to “how” and “why” of the ways people live in their communities. Especially how that contributes to culture and political-economy. And how these habits keep us from making the decisions needed to solve problems that are intractable by choice.
Our choices.
I think, this rhymes with the concept of noosphere, which was introduced by one Volodymyr Vernadsky, who also happened to be one of the founders and the first president of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine