Relations between society and nature

People obtain everything they need for life from nature, so society, as a part of nature, is closely tied to it. The geographic environment is the part of nature with which society interacts; the technogenic environment is objects and substances made by people; the environment (surroundings) is the natural and technogenic environments together as conditions for living and working. Society's impact on nature is divided into stages: in the primitive-communal era people gathered and hunted, adapting to nature and hardly changing it; the agricultural revolution (which began about 10–12 thousand years ago) brought farming, herding, settled life and the first cities; from the 18th century the industrial revolution led to wide use of natural wealth and regional ecological problems; from the second half of the 20th century, in the era of the scientific-technical revolution, the impact became global, but environmental knowledge, laws and organisations also developed. The aim for the future is development in harmony with nature that values a clean environment and economic growth equally.