ENVIRONMENT.

The term environment became specialized beginning in about the 1960s to designate the context of human and animal groups, with a special emphasis on the natural world and its physical and vegetal components. Within this framework, the word took on an even more limited meaning and in the early twenty-first century refers primarily to the interaction between human and animal activity on the one hand and to humans and the natural world on the other, principally the impact of the former on the latter. In this context, "environment" is often linked with notions of habitat deterioration and species endangerment, and with appropriate responses to these threats, such as species recording and protection and natural-resource and habitat conservation. In a broader sense, however, environment refers to all elements (physical, biological, psychological, social, and cultural) that constitute the context in which life (vegetal, animal, and human) has evolved and continues to evolve. Four major components of this complex notion are taken into consideration here for their particular historical relevance and importance in Western culture: the notion of animism; materialist conceptualizations of environment (including diseases, medicines, and astrology); theological understandings; and contemporary approaches to the environment and environmental issues.

Early Environment and Animism

In addition to sustaining life, the environment has been a major factor in the shaping of life (vegetal, animal, and human) from its origins. For example, some plants produce chemical substances called alkaloids, known for their therapeutic properties; in some cases alkaloids have a toxic effect, interpreted as an adaptive response of the plant to a stress from the environment, specifically predation. Through their negative action on animal physiology (producing intestinal disturbance or even death), such substances aim at provoking an adaptive reaction in predators (avoidance of grazing), defending the plant species against animal aggressions and reducing the risk of or avoiding extinction.

Human beings are so deeply shaped by environment that not only their behavior but their individual physical characteristics have been interpreted as adaptive responses to environmental parameters. A science of the impact of external factors (including but not limited to the social environment) on individual physical features developed as early as the fourth century b.c.e. in ancient Greece; physiognomy dealt with the description and interpretation of individual physical characteristics. In its original form, it consisted in comparing human and animal characteristics, and in interpreting the former with respect to a resemblance to the latter. Although this science did not explicitly appear before the fourth century b.c.e., it certainly predates that time: already in Homer's Iliad, which related historical happenings dating back to the twelfth century b.c.e. and was probably written during the eighth century b.c.e., warriors are frequently compared to animals. In one of its most evolved forms, such theory aimed, principally with the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), at predicting the behavior (especially deviant) of individuals on the basis of the observation, measurement, and type of their physical characteristics, as they were considered to be almost totally determined by environmental factors, particularly but not exclusively of a social and economic nature.

Although the earliest history of the conceptualization of environment cannot be reconstituted, anthropology throws some light on the subject by means of a comparison with contemporary Aboriginal societies. Australian Aborigines, for instance, believe that the environment was created by ancestor beings who are still living in the physico-geographical peculiarities they created (mountains, rivers, deserts, and so on). As a consequence, the environment cannot be modified, for it is charged with totemic value. Similarly, humans belong to and are shaped by their environment (not vice versa). This is so ingrained in Aboriginal thought that individuals consider that they cannot be separated from their territory.

Another approach is provided by analytic ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology—that is, the analysis of the constitution of botanical and pharmacological knowledge in the so-called traditional culture (in fact, non-Western ones). Discovery on the part of human beings of the properties of environmental constituents (for example, the nutritive and therapeutic value of plants) is interpreted as having occurred in two different and opposite ways in the general context of a learning theory by trial and error: (1) by biological transmission from animal to human (namely genetic vertical transmission in the tree of life); or (2) by cultural acquisition through at least two possible procedures (neither of which is exclusive): human imitation of animal behavior (for example, that of bees gathering pollen), and human assessment of heads of poppy as remarkable influenced human cultivation of poppies for medicinal use.

Aboriginal thinking was not absent in the Western tradition. In the cultures of the Near East (Mesopotamia), human diseases were understood to be caused by spirits living in specific areas. Ponds, for instance, were supposedly inhabited by bad spirits generating illness, perhaps what a later age would determine to be malaria. Animistic conceptions of the environment lasted until the classical period, as the treatise On Sacred Disease, attributed by tradition to Hippocrates (c. 460–after 377 b.c.e.), shows: the author, probably a physician of the second half of the fifth century b.c.e., argued that epilepsy resulted not from spirit possession but from an internal physical malady.

Materialist Conceptualization and Pharmaceuticals

Within Western culture, materialist conceptions of the environment do not seem to take shape until the sixth century b.c.e. by the philosophers of the school of Miletus (in Asia Minor). From Thales (625?–?547 b.c.e.) to Anaximander (610–c. 547 b.c.e.) to Anaximenes (fl. c. 545 b.c.e.), these thinkers proposed to reduce the multiplicity of the world to its primary substance or archê (principle): water (in the case of Thales), air (Anaximenes), and an undetermined, eternal substance (apeiron ) containing all contraries (Anaximander). It was Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) who fully transformed the environment into an object of study by introducing the concept of matter (ulê ), which made it possible to conceptualize physical processes (from generation to transformation and movement). Significantly, the period from the sixth to the fourth centuries b.c.e. saw the first systematic inventories of all components of the world: physical geography with Anaximander and Hecataeus (sixth–fifth century b.c.e.) also from Miletus; human geography with Herodotus (c. 484–c. 420 b.c.e.); astronomy with Thales and Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 400–c. 350 b.c.e.); zoology with Aristotle and his Historia animalium (Research on animals); botany and geology with Theophrastus (c. 372–c. 287 b.c.e.) in the Historia plantarum (Research on plants) and De lapidibus (On stones), respectively.

A fundamental question was the interaction between environment and humans, particularly health issues. The Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places, probably by the same author as On Sacred Disease (second half of the fifth century b.c.e.), is a study of the implications of environment on human health. The wealth of data provided in the work suggests that the idea was not new at the time, and indeed probably had a long history. The discussion centers on diseases and medicines (especially those made from plants). Diseases were attributed to two different, but possibly complementary, causes: internal disturbances (imbalance of the bodily components) and external effects of the environment. The latter was especially implicated in cases of contagious disease—epidemics, in the current meaning of the word—provoked by some corruption of the air, specifically material particles (the miasmata ). As for medicines, their action was explained according to two systems, which perhaps developed chronologically: first, a physical immaterial property (heat or cold, for instance) was understood to be transmitted from the medicinal matter to the body. This system implicitly underpins the most important treatise on medicines of antiquity, De materia medica by the Greek Dioscorides (first century c.e.). Whatever its nature, such a property was conceived as a material element transmitted from the medicinal plant—for example, to the body—in a way that recalls an archaic conceptualization wherein an immaterial element is transmitted from environment to humans. The nature of the property to be introduced into the body was determined by the nature of the disease, and was intended to compensate for a deficiency according to the principle of allotherapy (contraria contrariis ). In this way, the environment allowed a return to the natural state of the body.

In a more abstract and probably successive phase, the action of medicines (including plants) was conceived as an exchange of atoms (considered as small indivisible particles, not the atoms of contemporary science). Such a system, which was rooted in atomistic thinking and its medical application, so-called methodism (first century b.c.e.), was best represented by the Greek physician Galen (129–after 216 c.e.). Although more elaborated (since it could account for a wider range of properties), such explanation relied at the end on the same idea as the previous—that is, an exchange between environment and human physiology—with the idea of reestablishing the natural equilibrium of the body. Dioscorides's system, which was most probably not devised by him but utilized anterior knowledge, included a classification of environmental materials ranked so as to form a hierarchy from positively connoted elements to their opposite, with a gradual loss of qualities according to the principle of entropy. Such a classification reflected the history of the world as narrated in the account of the four ages of humankind. According to ancient tales, humankind passed through four ages (from gold to silver, bronze, and eventually iron), each of which corresponded to a degradation of humans' environment and living conditions. Iron era, the present one, is characterized by work, sufferance, and death. Evolution was seen as regressive, not dynamic as in nineteenth-century Darwinian theory, where evolution proceeds by adaptation to changing circumstances and, consecutively, by selection.

Environment and Theology

Astrology presented a special case of the relationship between the environment and health. According to the archaic theory of the symbiosis of environment and humans, planets were among the elements that exerted an influence on individuals, particularly one's health and the course of one's life. Such a system, already attested in Babylonia at the end of the sixth century b.c.e., was transformed in the Greek world from the fourth century b.c.e. onward, with the development of scientific (observational and explanatory) astronomy: as the passage of planets across the sky was predictable, so was their action on the human body. At the end of the fourth century b.c.e., astronomic astrology encountered Eastern and Egyptian religions (where celestial bodies were personalized and venerated as divinities), particularly with the expedition of Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.e.) to Persia and India, the conquest and occupation of Egypt, and the creation of Alexandria (332b.c.e.). Astrology had a new meaning: from its abstract mathematical form, it was personalized and transformed into a religion-like practice, in which the action of divinities—that is, of elements of the world—could be solicited and guided to a determined target, provided that ritual forms were duly followed.

Such para-religious practices, which were not incompatible with the official forms of religion of the Hellenistic and Roman world, collided with Christianity. Following the Jewish tradition, indeed, the new religion conceived the world as God's creation. A new literary genre appeared as early as the fourth century c.e., the Hexaemeron (The account of the six days [of creation]), which narrated the whole process of Creation, from the universe to humankind, including the paradisiacal environment. Similarly, a new anthropology developed, first represented by Nemesius of Emesa (fourth/fifth centuries c.e.). Creation included a hierarchy at the top of which was human beings, who had been created in God's image. In this context, there was no place for evolution: Creation was perfect, all the more because the negative forces of the world had been defeated. Humans were entrusted with the mission of governing and preserving the world, because humans were a reflection of God's wisdom. This theological concept had an impact on such scientific questions as the causes of disease and the origin of the therapeutic properties of plants and other natural substances. Neither resulted from natural causes: diseases were inflicted by God as punishment of sins, and plants were curative owing to the grace of God. The materialistic system was abandoned in favor of that proposed by Galen, which was much more compatible with the Christian understanding of the environment, due to its immaterial nature. As a result of this new vision of the world, human beings' relationship with the environment was no longer direct, but mediated through God. Such a triangular understanding, which lasted until the seventeenth century at least, did not prevent, however, humans from studying and knowing the world: such an undertaking reflected human beings' nature as God's creation. The study and contemplation of the environment, and the exploitation of its resources, became occasions for individuals to discover and adhere to the plan of God.

Contemporary Approaches

From the Renaissance onward, the idea of the environment underwent several successive and rapid transformations. The natural world became a sphere of aesthetic feeling and theist religiosity; it could restore well-being and reflect as well as be imbued with human emotion. It became an object of positivist study and exploitation for human economic activity during the industrial revolution and afterward. In the twentieth century, understanding of the environment was shaped by a broad range of factors such as extensive farming and overexploitation of natural resources; the systematic screening of floras in search of new molecules with previously unknown therapeutic activity; global transportation favoring the transfer of plants and animals into nonnative habitats, where they become invasive, threatening native biota; and the escalation in the size of industrial plants and commercial vectors. The latter concern is related to such major environmental catastrophes as the oil spill of the supertanker Torrey Canyon off the coast of England in 1967, and of a spill by the Amoco Cadiz almost ten years later (1978) affecting the beaches of France and England; the emission of a vapor cloud containing toxic dioxin after a chemical facility explosion in Seveso, Italy, in 1976; the partial meltdown of an atomic reactor at Three Mile Island in the United States in 1979; and the explosion of a similar reactor at Chernobyl, in Ukraine, in 1986.

The absence of preventive regulations and of policies to compensate for damages to persons and the environment after such disasters, in addition to advances in genetic engineering enabling modifications in nature, and globalization, creating a feeling of ubiquity and a common model of thought, contributed during the last decades of the twentieth century to initiatives addressing uncontrolled technological development and the dangers posed to the environment. The modern ideology of continuous and cumulative advances in technological civilization and hence of social well-being came into question, with lingering concerns that history does not necessarily lead to a better future. This was accompanied by the notion that social and technological progress had led to humans being cut off from their environment. Perhaps in reaction to this feeling, an avid search for connection began, for a recovery of a direct and personal contact with nature, a reengagement with traditional environmental values. Such a return took several different forms and affected many if not all areas of contemporary societies in developed countries, from scientific research in traditional (natural) medicines, for instance, to repatriation programs, to protection of the intellectual property of local, namely traditional, communities on the uses of natural substances, to large-scale international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992). "Ecotourism," environmental management, and sustainable development were all concepts aimed at leaving to future generations a healthy and viable world.

See also Animism ; Bioethics ; Evolution ; Materialism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought ; Nature ; Religion ; Science: Overview ; Technology .

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Alain Touwaide