Q.Describe some kinds of environment-related social change.

Environment shapes social change in more than one way, not only through disaster. …

The chapter identifies environment/ecology as one of five broad sources of social change, and shows its influence working in contrasting ways — destructively, constructively, and through the slower shaping of everyday life.

First, before technology gave human beings much control over nature, the physical environment directly shaped a society's food, clothing, livelihood and social interaction: desert-dwellers could not practise the settled agriculture possible in river plains, and people in cold climates, port towns or mountain passes developed correspondingly different ways of life. Second, sudden catastrophic natural events can force drastic, often irreversible change: the December 2004 tsunami that struck Indonesia, Sri Lanka, the Andaman Islands and Tamil Nadu destroyed livelihoods and permanently altered the social structure of many coastal villages, since people could not simply return to what they had lost. Third, environmental factors can be constructive rather than destructive: the discovery of oil in the deserts of West Asia transformed the societies of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE, much as the discovery of gold in 19th-century California transformed Californian society. The chapter also notes that the environment's influence on society is gradually changi …