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Life and the Environemnt

The mechanical notion of the environment appeared with Newton as intermediary between two bodies in his principle of action and reaction. This is how he explained the transition from the notion of fluid medium to its designation as environment. The Hippocratic treatise, Of the air, water, and places can be seen as the first work to give a philosophical form to the concept of environment.

The environment dominates and controls the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of need, a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values. Changes in the circumstances entail changes in needs, and changes in needs entail changes in actions. Life and the environment which is unaware of it are two series of asynchronous events.

Things begin with the change of circumstances, but it is the living being itself which, at bottom, has the initiative in the effort it makes not to be rejected by its environment. Adaptation and struggle are life efforts to survive in an indifferent environment. Being the effect of an effort, adaptation is not therefore a harmony, it is not providential; it is achieved and never guaranteed.

Watson assigned psychology the program of the analytical investigation of the conditions of the living being’s adaptation to the environment through the experimental production of relations between stimulation and response (the stimulus-response couple).

He concluded that consciousness is illusory as of no use. The environment power dominates and even abolishes that of heredity and genetic constitution. Given the environment, the organism only makes of itself what in reality it receives. The living being’s situation, its being in the world, is a condition, or more exactly, a conditioning.

The theory of the environment was percieved as statue. In the rose’s perfume, the statue is the rose’s perfume. Likewise, the living being in the physical milieu is light and heat; it is carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity.

We must ask ourselves: where is the living being? We can see individuals, but these are objects; we see actions, but these are movements; we see centers, but these are environments (environnements); we see machinists, but these are machines. The environment of behavior coincides with the geographical environment, and the geographical environment with the physical environment.

this methodological norm first found its limits and the occasion of its reversal in geography. Geography has to deal with complexes of elements with reciprocally limiting actions in which effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes which gave birth to them. The trade winds give us a typical example of a complex. Trade winds move the surface sea water heated through contact with the air; the deep cold water rises to the surface and cools the atmosphere; the low temperatures engender low pressures, which give rise to the winds; the cycle is complete and begins again.

Plant species finally form their own environment with exchanges between plants and the atmosphere. The same views should be applied to the animal and man. However, the human reaction to the challenge of the environment happens to be diversified, because of man's possibilities and needs and what he represents to himself as desirable which is not separate from the sets of values.

source: www.eci.ox.ac.uk