Environment

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Environment has been defined as “the aggregate of all the external conditions and influences affecting the life and development of an organism” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary). The aim, then, with either individual organisms or communities, is to distinguish between factors arising from outside the system and factors inherent in the system itself. This sounds simple enough, but in practice the distinction between organism and environment is not always easy to make.

In the first place, there is a problem of limits. This is essentially a matter of definition; to illustrate with an absurd example, when does an apple that a person eats cease to be a part of the environment and start to be a part of the man? Perhaps as soon as it enters the mouth; perhaps not until digestion has been completed. Most people, in any case, would consider indigestion caused by eating a green apple to be an environmental effect. Similarly, internal parasites would be considered part of the environment of the individual in which they live, even though they are entirely inside the system: the question is one of origin rather than present position.

The limit problem is not very serious. More confusing is the problem of interaction between organism and environment. The earth’s atmosphere, for instance, with oxygen and carbon dioxide as component gases, is an essential part of the environment for life as we know it. Yet we now believe that these gases were not part of the early atmosphere of the planet; their existence is a consequence of the action of living organisms, as well as a necessary condition for life. The relation between vegetation and soil provides another type of example. The kind of forest growing in a particular region is at least partly the consequence of the type of soil in that region; yet the nature of the soil is partly determined by the sort of vegetation that has grown on it.

The interaction problem is particularly confusing in the case of man and the human environment. In orienting and judging our surroundings, we depend on our sensory systems; yet, as psychologists can so easily show, what we perceive is in part a consequence of conditioning and learning. We have thus really created many aspects of the shapes, colors, sounds, and smells in the world about us, at least as they influence our behavior.

The concept of culture is responsible for many difficulties in this connection. Should culture be looked at as a part of the individual or of the community? Is it a part of the environment? The answer surely varies, depending on the nature of the study.

For instance, if we are concerned with the ways in which peoples (or individuals) cope with their natural environment, we almost necessarily look at the physical man with the cultural equipment at his disposal for this purpose. Thus the same physical surroundings, the same environment, may have quite different meanings for, say, a food-gathering pygmy, an agricultural Bantu, or a western European. We are here concerned primarily with cultural adaptations or maladaptations. This is the case with many sorts of geographical and anthropological studies; in extreme cases, human nature may be taken as a constant to be ignored and study concentrated on the interaction between culture and environment in this sense of the term.

In many kinds of psychological studies, on the other hand, cultural traits are dealt with as parts of the environment: we become interested in the ways in which individuals are taught to accept their culture, or the ways in which they are frustrated by it and the forms that rebellion takes. In physiological studies, by contrast, culture may or may not be considered as environmental at all. Work on heat stress, for instance, may involve a naked man on a treadmill under controlled climatic conditions, in an attempt to eliminate cultural effects; alternatively, it may involve clothed men under natural conditions. Investigations of such concepts as “comfort zones” assume that people will be wearing culturally acceptable clothing.

Clothing illustrates nicely many aspects of the man-culture-environment relationship. Clothing is definitely external, stemming from outside the system of the individual organism. Yet in many kinds of practical studies, we must assume that people are wearing clothes and observe environmental effects on clothed individuals. Furthermore, the kind of clothing worn may influence individual personality—witness the effect of uniforms, of formal dress, or of work clothes.

Organism and environment, then, are not contrasting or mutually exclusive terms; rather, they represent interacting systems, and the distinction is useful in analysis only when this is kept in mind. Environment is often contrasted with heredity, as in the long controversy over “nature versus nurture” in shaping human personality. There is no “versus.” Every individual is the product of a certain genetic potentiality finding expression in a particular environment or series of environments.

In studies of biological communities, the concept of ecosystem has proved useful: this term covers both the living organisms and the abiotic factors of the environment in which they occur. Biologists thus avoid the dangers of looking at the living members of the community as separate from their surroundings. The extension of this idea to man, to human ecosystems, will surely be rewarding.

Ecologists have tried various ways of analyzing environments to study and compare their different components, but no single system is completely satisfactory. One way involves the separation of the biological and physical environments: the living and the nonliving elements in the surroundings of an individual organism or a species. Thus, one can isolate climate as an aspect of the physical environment. In the case of man, some geographers have thought climate to be a controlling factor in cultural development, considering civilization, for instance, to be a response to a particularly stimulating climatic situation. On the other hand, they see climates that are too warm, too humid, or too cold as having a retarding effect on cultural development.

Climate illustrates another aspect of environment, that of scale. Climate is ordinarily measured in standard meteorological stations that reflect conditions under which few organisms live. Conditions in a forest or meadow, within the soil, or in a pond may be quite different from those where the standard measurements are made. It is, in fact, useful to distinguish among three levels of climate: the microclimate in which an individual lives, perhaps conditions in a cranny in bark or on the underside of a leaf; the ecological climate of some particular habitat, like a forest; and the geographical climate measured by the standard station. The same kind of difference, depending on the focus of interest, applies to many other aspects of the environment.

In the case of man, we have to consider the cultural as well as the biological and physical environments, bringing up the whole series of problems mentioned earlier.

Another way of analyzing environmental factors is in terms of whether or not they affect the particular organism under consideration, and whether or not they are perceived. The sum of the forces and materials in any situation can be looked at as the total environment, but this includes many elements that have no influence on behavior. We live, for instance, in the magnetic field of the earth, but this does not affect our physiology in any known way; and we cannot perceive it without the aid of some instrument like a compass. Similarly, we cannot perceive viruses without instruments, but many of them do affect us by causing disease. Viruses would, then, form part of our operational environment, although not a part of our perceptual environment.

We tend to confuse our own perceptual environment with total reality: to think, for instance, that the forest we see is the “real” forest—for squirrels, birds, and insects as well as for ourselves. Yet it is obvious enough, when we stop to think about it, that each kind of animal lives in a particular sort of perceptual world of its own. The forest that a dog sees, hears, and smells is quite different from the forest that we perceive. This is something that must be clearly kept in mind in studying animal behavior as well as animal ecology.

When we turn to man, the concepts of operational and perceptual environments are inadequate by themselves, just as are those of biological and physical environments. For primitive man, the world is full of spirits which form a very real and important part of his surroundings—form what has sometimes been called the supernatural environment.

This sounds a little condescending; we can see that the people themselves created the spirits that so dominate their lives—that the spirits are merely ideas. Yet our own actions are equally governed by ideas. We may not call them spirits or propitiate them with elaborate rituals, but ideas play roles in our lives that often are at least comparable. We might call this world of ideas the conceptual environment. This differs somewhat from the cultural environment: the latter would include all human artifacts, such as clothing, housing, and tools; the former is concerned with the ideas that govern the form and use of the constructs.

When we look at the human environment, the continuing interaction between organism and surroundings is very evident. It is often said that man, far more than any other animal, has developed the ability to modify environment and thus to live under a wide range of physical and biological conditions. He has, in fact, created a new “biome” or ecological formation—the man-altered landscape, which is rapidly replacing other terrestrial landscapes as forests are cleared, grasslands plowed, and deserts irrigated. Man, assuming ecological dominance within this biome, has affected directly or indirectly all other organisms living there; he has become a new geological force.

Most members of the human species now live within this man-altered landscape. But this environment is not only a consequence of human activity; it is also a determinant of that activity. For instance, man has created the city; but the nature of the city, of the urban environment, governs his behavior much as the nature of the forest governs the behavior of tree squirrels. We could perhaps most profitably look at this new kind of biome as forming the human ecosystem.

It is, of course, not a single system; it includes a varied collection of differing environments: cities, towns, rice paddies, orchards, pastures, highway rights of way, abandoned fields, rubber plantations, and areas devastated by industrial wastes. Curiously, both social and biological scientists tend to neglect the study of this human ecosystem, perhaps because its study requires a blending of both social and biological knowledge.

Marston Bates

[See alsoCONSERVATION; CULTURE; ECOLOGY; GEOGRAPHY; PLANNING, SOCIAL, article onRESOURCE PLANNING; REGION; REGIONAL SCIENCE.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The biological concept of environment is developed in ecological textbooks such as Odum & Odum 1953; the sociological, in books like Hawley 1950. The various textbooks of human geography discuss environmental relationships; the point of view of geographical determinism is expressed in Huntington & Cushing 1921. International Symposium 1956 contains much environmental material, with good bibliographies. The point of view of an architect is expressed in Glikson 1963. Bates 1962 develops the idea of the conceptual environment. Dubos 1964 expresses well the need for intensive study of man’s environmental relationships.

Bates, Marston 1962 The Human Environment. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

Dubos, Rene 1964 Environmental Biology. BioScience 14:11-14.

Gmkson, Artur 1963 Man’s Relationship to His Environment. Pages 132—152 in Gordon Wolstenholme (editor), Man and His Future. Papers and discussion of a conference sponsored by the Ciba Foundation. Boston: Little.

Hawley, Amos H. 1950 Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald Press.

Huntington, Ellsworth; and Cushing, S. W. (1921) 195] Principles of Human Geography. 6th ed. Revised by E. B. Shaw. New York: Wiley.

International Symposium on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, Princeton, N.J., 1955 1956 Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Edited by William L. Thomas et al. Univ. of Chicago Press.

Odum, Eugene P.; and ODUM, HOWARD T. (1953) 1959 Fundamentals of Ecology. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Saunders.