Man’s Relationship to His Environment 
relationship constitutes at once an enormous difficulty and a 
unique human opportunity. 
It has been argued that such conditions determine the future 
of man and environment. But I believe that they are entirely 
“neutral” facts, and that the quality and direction of human 
action will determine whether, and to what degree, they will 
effect even greater environmental disaster or a renewal and 
enhancement of “environmental breathing’. World-wide 
human contacts are potentially a means to individual and 
communal enrichment of life; we have reached a state in which 
the old ideal of the unity of mankind can be made a reality. 
This unity should lead to the introduction of new influences 
and forms in environmental creation, even on the local level 
of planning new towns and villages, matched with the preser- 
vation of individual and regional identity. Population increase 
offers a chance to intensify land use and settlement, to build 
better towns and villages with the purpose of enhancing the 
identification of man with the environment. Mass mobility 
makes it possible to belong to a particular place yet to enter 
into direct contacts with a world-wide environment and with 
other populations. The technology of telecommunication and 
transportation can be applied to the desirable location and 
distribution of settlements. The mechanization of production 
and construction should serve to meet the vastly increased 
requirements of population and development, and the demand 
to share the achievements of the world community. The 
meeting of cultures, economies, generations, and ideologies in 
all developing regions, calls for their mutual adjustment, or 
integration in a new composite environment. 
The world-wide interrelation of environments is a new fact 
which has emerged in our own times. By accepting this 
situation, we might arrive at the formulation of a new aim for 
the man-environment relationship, namely continuity— mean- 
ing the world-wide spatial continuity of the humanized and 
natural environment as well as its temporal continuity inte- 
grating the natural and historic environment with contemporary 
creations. 
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