Man’s Relationship to His Environment 
EVOLUTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL VALUES 
The ecological integration in the primordial landscape and 
the time use of the early hunters and collectors form a human 
trend which can never be lost. It reappears in most sedentary 
cultures, in the desire for contact with new ecological life- 
systems, in landscape exploration and later in the ideals of 
“‘a return to nature’’, and in the recreational aims of recovering 
the sensation of life and mobility in undisturbed nature. 
Sedentariness is a cultural achievement, not because it ends 
the more animal and mobile kind of life and replaces it by 
another, but because it succeeds in uniting the animal and 
vegetative trends of environmental relationship in a new spatial 
order of rest and movement, and because it combines land use 
with time use in a new pattern of human life. One of the 
contributions of sedentariness to the quality of man’s relation- 
ship to environment is that man can identify himself with an 
environment by feeling that he belongs to it, and by being 
aware of his obligation to maintain it. It is a central motif of 
the man-environment relationship, which we shall always 
endeavour to recover in some form in the course of environ- 
mental modification. 
The town is a superior human environment, because—or 
rather, if—it constitutes a place and organ of inter-communal 
unity and cultural continuity. In it, mobility and sedentariness, 
biological and social systems, poor and rich regions, the 
various cultures, the individual and the community, the past 
and the present, all come in contact, coexist and further each 
other, without losing their identity. This function has been 
most thoroughly elucidated in Lewis Mumford’s The City in 
fMistory. ‘Today, in regional planning, we regard the quality of 
an integrated urban-rural region as an ideal to be regained in 
the improved environment of densely populated regions, 
though we cannot restore it in its past forms. 
The sequence of these stages, and of others not mentioned 
here, constitutes what may justly be called ‘environmental 
evolution”. The human environment is an organization of 
relationships and facts, but the evolution of this organization 
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