Environment

Environment

The environment is the symbiosis between the physical environment and the biological life forms within the environment, and includes all variables that comprise the Earth’s biosphere. The environment can be divided into two categories: the natural environment and the built environment, with some overlap between the two.The built environment has become an increasingly significant part of the Earth's environment.

Constituents

The scope of the environment is all that contained in the biosphere, which is that part of the Earth in which all life occurs. Ecosystems of which there are numerous types and are a defined part of the biosphere, collectively make up the whole of the biosphere. Within an ecosystem there are habitats in which an organism exists. At its most natural, an environment would lack any effects of human activity, although the scale of this activity is such that all areas of the Earth have had at least some influence by humans. At the other end of the scale is the built environment. The environment can vary in scale from microscopic to global in extent. They can also be subdivided according to their attributes. Some examples may be the marine environment, the atmospheric environment and the terrestrial environment.

Environmental science

Environmental science is defined as the study of the interactions within the biophysical environment. Part of this discipline is the investigation of the effect of human activity on the environment. Ecology, a sub-discipline of biology and a part of environmental sciences, is often mistaken as a study of human induced effects on the environment. Environmental science is a broader academic discipline that is the systematic study of interaction of humans with their environment. It is a broad field of study that includes the natural environment, built environments and social environments.

Natural environment

The natural environment is generally referred to as the environment, is a term that encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally on Earth. The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished by components:

Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive human intervention, including all vegetation, animals, microorganism, soil, rocks, atmosphere and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries.

Universal natural resources and physical phenomena that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air , water and climate, as well as energy radiation electric charge and magnetism, not originating from human activity.

The natural environment is contrasted with the built environment, which comprises the areas and components that are strongly influenced by humans. A geographical area is regarded as a natural environment, if the human impact on it is kept under a certain limited level.

Built environment

The built environment is the man-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging from the large-scale civic surroundings to the personal places. The term is also now widely used to describe the interdisciplinary field of study which addresses the design and use of these man-made surroundings and their relationship to the human activities which take place within them. The field is generally not regarded as an academic discipline in its own right, but as a "field of application" which draws upon the individual disciplines of economics, law, management, design and technology in sustainable sense. In architecture and environmental psychology, the phrase is a useful acknowledgement that a small fraction of buildings constructed annually, even in the industrialized world, are designed by architects, and that users of the built environment encounter issues that cross the traditional professional boundaries between traffic engineers, zoning authorities, architects, interior designer, industrial designers etc. Historically, much of the built environment has taken the form of vernacular, and this is still the case in large parts of the world. In the industrialized world, many buildings are produced by large scale development remote from its eventual users. In landscape architecture, the built environment is identified as opposed to the natural environment, with the recognition that places like Central Park may have the look, feel, and nourishing quality of natural surroundings while being completely artificial and "built," thus blurring the line between the two. Recently there has also been considerable dialogue and research into the impact of the built environment's impact on population health.