The Total Environment. The phrase “surroundings
and events” has been used in the preceding para-
graph in an attempt to convey the multiplicity and
complexity of the factors covered by the word “en-
vironment.”
The total environment refers of course to the com-
plete physicochemical and social setting in which the
organism develops and functions; it includes elements
that may have no biological effect whatever, and also
elements that are biologically active but have not yet
been defined. In describing the physicochemical envi-
ronment, one usually ignores the whole electromag-
netic spectrum except for the wavelengths of light. Yet
it is sufficient to take a radio or a Geiger counter into
a natural situation to realize that there are in the
environment all sorts of forces that are not detected
by the senses; some of them presumably have impor-
tant biologic effects. It is only during the past few
decades that reliable observations have been made, for
example, on the responses of plants, animals, and men
to the cosmic forces that are responsible for the diurnal,
lunar, and seasonal cycles.
Biologists have so far studied chiefly the environ-
mental factors that are intercepted by the sense organs,
and that constitute therefore the perceptual environ-
ment. But our perceptual environment should not be
regarded as representing the total environment. Each
living thing inhabits a perceptual world of its own.
A dog, sniffing the breezes or the traces of a rabbit
on the earth, lives in a world that a man or a frog
hardly perceives. An insect moving at night toward
a potential mate, a salmon crossing oceans toward its
mating ground, or a bird exploring the soil or a dead
tree for an insect, uses clues that are nonexistent for
another species. Much of animal and human behavior
is thus influenced by stimuli which make the perceptual
environment differ from species to species and indeed
from one individual organism to another.
It is being realized more and more that the responses
of organisms to their total environment embrace much
that seemed paranormal but a few decades ago. Ani-
mals have been shown to receive information through
many unfamiliar ways such as pheromones (substances
excreted from the body and perceived by animals of
the same species), ultra sound waves (in bats), and
infrared waves (in moths and pit-vipers). Men also are
sensitive to radio waves and magnetic fields. Weather
changes have been reported to affect the autonomic
nervous systems and various physiologic processes such
as blood clotting and blood pressure. It is also likely
that man, like other organisms, uses exo-hormones for
communication at the biological level. For this reason,
parapsychologists have suggested that extrasensory
perception “is merely a 'crypto-sensory response.'”
There is no doubt, in any case, that various unfamiliar
channels of communication, once dismissed as non-
existent and indeed impossible, enable us to acquire
information from our environment and from each other
without awakening in us a conscious awareness of the
process.
In addition to the factors that are inherent in na-
ture and can—or eventually could—be identified by
physicochemical methods, the total environment in-
cludes elements that exist only in man's mind. For most
archaic people, on a Micronesian atoll for example,
the environment does not consist only of sea, land, and
sky, but also of a host of “spirits” that lurk everywhere.
These factors of the Micronesian conceptual environ-
ment do not have less influence on the inhabitants of
the atoll for having no concrete existence. The “spirits”
are generally innocuous, but they become malevolent
if not properly treated, and can then elicit behavioral
responses that may be even more dangerous than
wounds inflicted by sharks or moray eels.
Nor is the conceptual environment of less impor-
tance in industrialized societies. Whether learned and
sophisticated, or archaic and ignorant, every human
being lives in a conceptual environment of his own
which conditions all his responses to physicochemical,
biological, and social stimuli. These responses eventu-
ally contribute in turn to the manner in which he
shapes his surroundings and ways of life. In our socie-
ties, the conceptual environment is becoming increas-
ingly powerful as a mediator between man and external
nature.
The phrase “conceptual environment” is almost
synonymous with what psychoanalysts call superego
and even more with what anthropologists call culture.
Its only merit, perhaps, is to help make clear that the
total environment involves much more than the effects
of natural forces on man's body: it is a determinant
of human behavior and evolution as well as a product
of human intervention.
There is no doubt in any case that for thousands upon
thousands of years, human activities have played an
immense role in shaping the appearance and the
productivity of the earth's crust. Many areas commonly
assumed to be “natural” in reality acquired some of
the characteristics by which they are known today in
the course of civilization. The valleys of the Euphrates
and the Nile were profoundly transformed by human
labor during the Neolithic period. Since that time, all
over the inhabited parts of the globe, arable lands have
been created by clearing primeval forests or irrigating
desert areas. The character of the vegetation is also
largely man-made. Many plants now regarded as
typical of the Mediterranean landscape—the olive tree,
for example—were introduced from Iran; and the tulip
was first introduced into Holland from Turkey as late
as 1675. The moors of England, so celebrated in litera-
ture, used to be covered with forests: they became
deforested through the grazing and farming practices
of the medieval monks, and then again later when the
construction of tunnels by the mining industry created
large demands for timber.
Agrarian and urban areas long retain the characters
imposed on them by the conditions that prevailed
during their early development. The growth of cities
is inevitably influenced by the networks of waterways,
streets, and roads as well as by the kinds of activities
that existed at their beginnings. This shaping of the
natural world by man, in turn conditions his activities
and thereby his biological and mental nature.
In civilized life as well as in plant and animal life,
organism and environment continuously transform
each other as a result of their mutual relationships.
Although it is impossible to dissociate organism from
environment, the choices made by living things, and
by man in particular, exert a directive influence that
guides the organism-environment system into channels
from which there is hardly ever any retreat, and that
imposes a pattern on the development of both.
