ARTUR GLIKSON 
of people living under intolerable conditions of poverty and 
overcrowding in these few overgrown shanty-towns is steadily 
increasing with the influx of new multitudes seeking survival. 
In our ‘‘One-World’’, these extreme contrasts of wasted wealth 
versus wasted humanity cannot exist concurrently for long, 
be it for political or moral reasons. Because of its functional 
inner-incompatibilities and the absurdity of its relation to 
world problems, we must assume that the metropolis in its 
present form will prove to be a short-lived phenomenon. Its 
breakdown would have decisive effects on the vast regions which 
depend in some form on metropolitan centres. The future of 
big cities and their regions of influence has therefore become 
a problem of critical urgency. The relationship of the metro- 
politan inhabitants to their environment has taken on an 
“explosive”? character. A revolutionary attitude is essential. 
In vast areas of the world, man has become a pathogen, a 
disease of nature, and there is a high degree of probability that, 
as Marston Bates says, ““when the host dies . . . so does the 
pathogen”’. 
AIMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL RENEWAL 
It is an open question whether our period will be able to add 
anything new to the general aims of environmental relation- 
ship; but their recovery and adaptation would open up an 
entirely new and hopeful prospect for environmental renewal 
and human evolution. Renewal involves a readiness to respect 
and be formed by external biological and physical conditions. 
As breathing is vital to the maintenance of life, so an alternating 
passive-active relationship seems essential for human and 
environmental evolution. 
In striving for such participation, our starting point should 
be awareness of the contemporary human situation. Of 
particular relevance are population increase, mechanized mass 
production of commodities, enhanced mobility, the meeting 
of divergent cultures, and the world-wide interrelation of human 
and environmental problems. Under these conditions, the 
achievement of the fundamental aims of the man-environment 
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