ARTUR GLIKSON 
the faculty of organization of biotic processes. Man creates an 
artificial landscape, in which fertility and water are preserved 
by actively fulfilling the rule of return observed in nature. 
The disturbed cycles of growth are ever-restored by transporta- 
tion, storage and the use of seed, fertilizers, water, crops and 
materials. This requires a continual investment of human and 
material energy to maintain the artifact, implying far-reaching 
environmental change. By this achievement, man necessarily 
alienates himself from the ecological context; but he uses his 
new position to establish a relationship to the land on a new 
level. On this basis mountains are shaped into cultivated 
step-pyramids and valleys are converted by irrigation into 
huge containers and renewers of fertility. The earlier instinctive 
integration of hunters and collectors in the natural space and 
time is developed into the active identification of farming 
communities with their environment. Land becomes a 
community’s own ground, while a community belongs to a 
specific landscape. Inter-communal contacts are characterized 
by whether they occur on one’s “‘own”’ or “‘foreign”’ territory. 
Man assumes a central position both in the eco-system and— 
physically—on his land. ‘The new order embodies the creation 
of a concentric environmental system, consisting of a nucleus— 
the place of human habitation, storage, processing and com- 
munity life—and of peripheral areas of use of land, water, 
forest, serving a different frequency of human movement and 
a different intensity of land use. 
Human mobility is now essentially confined within the village 
lands. It assumes the form of a radial flow of men, commodities 
and energy from the centre to the periphery and back. Within 
this space man cuts down most of the natural vegetation and 
replaces it by species which support the qualitative and quanti- 
tative increase of his own kind. But the maintenance of this 
artificial environment and its defence against the return of 
natural vegetation call for such constant human attention that 
man becomes inseparable from the very vegetative process he 
introduced. His life now bears the characteristics of being 
both animal-mobile and vegetative-stationary. 
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