Man’s Relationship to Mis Environment 
ARTUR GLIKSON 
AM going to use the term “‘human environment”’ to describe 
the space which surrounds human movement, work, 
habitation, rest and interaction—towns and _ villages, 
settlement influence areas, the rural and the accessible 
virgin landscape. ‘This environment is generally defined as a 
set of biological and physical facts in space, as modified by 
man. 
Nothing would distinguish the principles of man’s relation- 
ship to environment from those of other species, were it not for 
the fact of his own evolution. Man, a powerful agent of change 
in space, himself undergoes change in time. This fact trans- 
forms his role in any natural community into a dynamic, 
unstable and often contradictory relationship unique among 
species: dynamic in space—the give-and-take relationship with 
the earth and its life—and dynamic in time—the recurrent 
change, destruction and renewal of such give-and-take relation- 
ships in reference to new situations. All established settlement 
regions show evidence of the continuous imposition of new 
environmental patterns on top of the old—of a temporal 
dimension in settlement structure. 
INTERACTION OF HUMAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL EVOLUTION 
The elucidation of human evolution would provide a key to 
understanding the changing shape of human environment. But 
human evolution itself cannot be understood without reference 
to the interaction of man and environment. A distinction is 
generally made between the cultural and biological aspects 
of human evolution. Whereas biological changes are heredi- 
tary, cultural acquisitions, such as knowledge, ideas, tools 
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