What is Environment?
The purpose of this blog is to familiarize you with the relationship between man
and his environment. After reading it you will be able to understand the meaning
of Environment and man’s place in the environment. You will also be able to see
the complexities of, man-environment inter-change and the impact that has been
made on the environment since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Environment may be broadly understood to mean our surroundings. It can be
divided into non-living and living components. The Environment provides
resources which support life on the earth and which also help in the growth of a
relationship of interchange between living organisms and the environment in
which they live. It is important to realise that humans enjoy a unique position in
nature due to their exceptional ability to influence and mould the environment. In
the recent past the term nature has been used as parallel to word environment. It
has been generally believed that nature is what man has not made. In our
discussion environment and nature have been used as synonym, which incorporate
most of the visible manifestation of geography. Raymond Williams defines nature
as ‘the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings.’
Tracing the history of the term he suggests that ‘nature’ has meant the
‘countryside’, the unspoiled places’, plants and creatures other than man.’
Similarly, there are several vantage points from where environment has been
studied and most of us follow a complex combination of these methods. There are
ecologists who are primarily biological scientists and focus on relationships
between environment and the living being in general. Another set of scientists,
generally termed as environmental scientists, try to examine the functioning of the
earth and the nature of human interactions with it. Declining bio-diversity has
iven rise to conservationist biologists who stress application of scientific
knowledge for conservation of bio-diversity, which they rightly consider as centre
of existence of life on earth. Accepting the role of human agency in the
‘deterioration of environment’, the environmentalists are suggesting scientific
interventions to mitigate the ill impacts of human activities. Conservationists
along with accepting the role of human activities in the deterioration of
environment also recognise the needs of present and future generations of humans.
They stress the prudent use of resources to ensure the present and future needs of
human society. More recently, the role of disparity both economic and social
within the society and among societies and nations has defined the agenda for the
study of the environment by social scientists, particularly at the level of policy
formulations.
The traditional understanding of nature has been that it is a system created by God
for the sustenance of humans. The general belief was that the Earth was the hub
of the universe and man had a central place in it. It was also believed that the
environment was a static entity with little or no possibilities of change. This had
been the dominant view until the advent of enlightenment in the early modern era.
However, with the growth of scientific thinking and reason it came to be gradually
accepted that neither the Earth was at the axis of Universe, nor the Humans were
the core of the Earth. Science also established that there has been continuous
change in the nature of environment all along the history of the Earth, though the
speed of change differed for different components of nature and even this speed
had not been a uniform speed. This holds true for the evolution of both living and
non-living components.
The industrial revolution heralded a completely new era in which the term
‘environment’ attained new dimensions. The present day concerns of
environmental pollution, decay of bio-diversity and the green-house effect have
necessitated a redefining of the concept of the man-nature relationship. Anothercorollary has been the problems related with the modern concept of development
and resultant compulsions of conservation. In their attempt to conserve the
dwindling bio-diversity, humans started demarcating fragile ecological zones
ranging from forests, wet lands, bio-sphere reserves, mangroves, etc., as reserves
to preserve not only the flora-fauna but also the physical attributes of ecological
niche itself. It often led to conflicts with the communities sustaining on such
resources, e.g. forest-dwellers. Similar kind of conflicts can be located on the sites
for big-dams and ancillary activities which necessitated displacement. Therefore,
it is mandatory on our part to also examine the historical evolution of social
relations in their interaction with the ecological conditions on the one hand and the
multiple issues of contemporary environmental discourse on the other. The first
section of this essay deals with the historical evolution of the concept; it is then
followed by a discussion on the contemporary conflict between notions of
development and environment; the last section traces the significance of biodiversity and firms up the case of inevitability of bio-diversity conservation for
survival of life on Earth.
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