Many developments since the 16th century, both in the study of humankind and the world, have encouraged the development of modern cultural geography. These are illustrated by the work of Copernicus, Newton, Buffon, Werner, Hutton, Darwin, Ratzel, G.P. Marsh, C.O. Sauer, and Marvin Harris. Significantly, these people were interested in the physical world, our perception of it and human nature in general. But geographers make too much of the importance of trends and the development of ideas. After all, we can find out all we need to know about the world by looking at a dot map showing modern distributions. Since human beings are also animals, agriculture is just a natural way of satisfying our need for basic nutrition and we make too much of differences in agricultural systems Swidden and modern systems are basically the same thing. The ideas of Thomas Malthus are so depressing that idealistic college students should not be exposed to them just as Aristotle's world view was so naive that it does not belong in the university. In general, non agricultural people have only a casual knowledge of the plants and animals available to them. They know nothing about their environment: they live in superstitious awe of it, and fear to change it. Furthermore the environments in which they lived precluded the development of agriculture and for that reason non agricultural people were only found in tropical areas of the world in 1500. It is also true that when Europeans arrived in the New World they found the land in its natural state inhabited by semi savages.
Culture comprises all the patterns of behavior and learned thought that are characteristic of a particular societal group. In cultural geography, these behaviors and beliefs are assessed with regard to such factors as location and climate. Throughout human history, both geography and ideas have interacted to influence the evolution of modern cultural geography.
Since the 1...