The human body is inextricably linked with the environment in which it exists. Using its natural resources, it satisfies its immediate needs and, without noticing it, changes the surrounding area, forms completely new landscapes. As a result of active human activity, a special system is formed: "man - the environment." It is to this system that our article will be devoted.
So, human environment - what is it? What components does it consist of? How does this environment affect a person? And how does a person affect his environment? You will find the answers to all these questions below.
The human environment is … Definition
Every day, a person satisfies a number of his needs - biological, social, labor, economic, etc. Moreover, a resident of a large metropolis has a wider range of these needs than a resident of a remote village. Of course, he takes the resources for their satisfaction from the environment.
So what is a human environment? This, in the broadest sense, is a combination of biotic (natural) and abiotic (artificial) conditions and factors in which a particular species lives. In simpler words, this is the reality that surrounds a person and acts on him (directly or indirectly). In biology, this concept often intersects with the term "area".
The human environment is a fairly complex system consisting of several subcomponents. Its structural organization will be discussed later in our article.
“Man is the habitat”: general features of the system
In its life cycle, the human body interacts closely and continuously with the environment, thereby forming the system mentioned in the subtitle. In the XXI century, the interaction of man and the environment can be conditionally expressed in the following scheme:
As can be seen from this scheme, a person interacts with the biosphere through the so-called technosphere, which he himself created. The technosphere began to form at the moment when Homo Sapiens first took control of primitive tools and began to transform the surrounding landscape.
Over time, people improved, the size of the global population increased, and the social way of life changed. Along with this, the environment also changed: cities, industrial enterprises, transport appeared in it, the underground bowels and depths of the Ocean were actively developed. A little more time passed - and for the first time man went into open space.
Human activity at the present stage of its development is aimed, first of all, at solving three fundamental problems:
- Satisfying basic biological needs for food, water and clean air.
- Creating maximum comfortable living conditions.
- Development of methods of protection against negative environmental influences (for example, earthquakes, floods, extreme temperature drops, etc.).
In the system "man - environment" there is a constant exchange of flows of matter, energy, and information, in accordance with the fundamental laws of the preservation of life. However, this exchange should be carried out within certain acceptable limits. Any excess of the levels of these flows is necessarily accompanied by negative consequences, both for the person himself and for his environment.
Natural and artificial environment
In environmental science, it is customary to distinguish between natural (natural) and artificial (technogenic) habitats. The first includes components of exclusively natural origin: air, water, rocks, soil cover, flora and fauna. The natural human environment looks approximately as shown in the following image. In the photo - the jungle of the Amazon River, the world's largest rainforest.
Of course, in our time on Earth there are practically no natural landscapes that are not affected by any human activity. What habitat is called artificial? The technogenic environment is saturated, and sometimes oversaturated, with substances and objects of anthropogenic origin. These are residential buildings, industrial facilities, roads, pipelines, power lines, etc. Natural components and complexes are present in technogenic landscapes, but in a very modified form.
Key habitat factors
The human environment has a very complex, multi-level and multi-component structure. It includes a number of smaller subsystems:
- natural (lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere);
- social;
- production;
- household;
- space, etc.
Individual elements of the environment, which to one degree or another affect living organisms, are commonly called environmental factors. They can be divided into three large groups:
- Biotic (or organic).
- Abiotic (or inorganic).
- Anthropogenic (or technogenic).
It is important to note that the effect of all of the above factors is always interdependent. For example, excessive and uncontrolled deforestation in the mountainous region can provoke river floods and floods. And this will primarily affect the residents of this region themselves, who have begun to actively modify the surrounding natural landscape.
Further, we will focus more specifically on each of the groups of environmental environmental factors.
Biotic factors
Scientists attribute to the biotic environmental factors the diverse effects of some living organisms on others within the same biogeocenosis. Here are just a few examples of such influences:
- The decline in the field mouse population in lean years.
- The destruction of the soil cover by moles.
- Destruction of woody vegetation by a beaver colony.
- Insect collection of nectar and transportation of plant pollen.
The key biotic factor is the quantity as well as the quality of the absorbed food. It affects both life expectancy and fertility of individuals of a particular species. Moreover, biologists came to one interesting conclusion: smaller animals require much more food to maintain normal life than large ones (per unit of body weight, of course). Thus, a tit with a weight of 10-12 g daily eats about 30% of its own body weight, thrush (80-90 g) - no more than 10%, and an owl (900 g) - only 4-5%.
Abiotic factors
Abiotic factors include inorganic environmental conditions that affect living organisms. These are sunlight, temperature and humidity, wind, atmospheric pressure, soil chemistry, radiation background, and so on. Many abiotic factors have a decisive effect on the rate of all biological processes in living organisms.
For any abiotic factor, there are three zones of its influence:
- optimal;
- zone of oppression;
- disastrous.
We will analyze this zoning using a specific example. The birch tree feels great in the taiga natural zone of the temperate climatic zone. This is the optimal zone of influence of the climatic abiotic factor for a specific genus of plants. Moving north, in the forest-tundra, birch groves noticeably become smaller and wither away (zone of oppression). Further north, in the tundra zone, only some dwarf species of birch are found. Here passes the death zone for this tree.
Among the abiotic environmental factors, sunlight is the most significant. After all, this is the main source of energy for most organisms on planet Earth. In particular, for plants. Using photosynthesis, they turn the energy of sunlight into the energy of chemical bonds, which subsequently participate in the synthesis of organic compounds.
Anthropogenic factors
Anthropogenic factors arose immediately after the appearance of intelligent humans on Earth. These include all forms of human activity aimed at modifying the environment and affecting the life of other living organisms (plant and animal). Examples of anthropogenic environmental factors: hunting, fishing, deforestation, air pollution from industrial emissions, breeding, etc.
The allocation of anthropogenic factors in a separate group is due to only one aspect. The fact is that today the fate of planetary flora and fauna, in fact, is in the hands of man.
Environmental limiting factors
The concept of limiting environmental factors was introduced by the German scientist J. Liebig in the middle of the century before last. He studied the effect of chemicals in the soil on plant growth. Based on the results of his research, he formulated the following principle: "the size and stability of the crop is determined by a critically small amount of a substance".
Let us examine this principle using a concrete example. River trout feels good in water with an oxygen concentration of at least 2 mg / liter. If this value drops below 1.6 mg / liter, then trout in such an environment dies. Thus, oxygen deficiency is a limiting factor for river trout.
For humans, one of the most important limiting factors of the natural environment is climate. Studying the maps of the Earth's settlement, we can conclude that the vast majority of the inhabitants of our planet live in temperate and subtropical climatic zones. And some parts of the globe, such as Antarctica and Greenland, are hardly populated at all.
Classification of environmental conditions for humans
What is the impact of the environment on humans? First of all, it is worth noting that the human body, along with other living organisms, receives everything necessary for its life from the environment. It is about natural resources and conditions.
Factors and environmental conditions are usually divided into four types, depending on how comfortable or uncomfortable they are for humans:
- Optimal - guarantee the human body the preservation of life and health, as well as high performance.
- Acceptable - lead to some discomfort and decrease in labor productivity, without having a negative impact on human health.
- Dangerous - have a negative impact on the health of the human body, contribute to the gradual degradation of the social environment.
- Very dangerous - cause significant damage to health and can lead to death.
Human Impact on the Environment
The human impact on the environment can be both positive and negative. The rapid increase in population, the growth of energy consumption, the emergence of large megacities - all this led to the partial or complete degradation of many natural complexes and landscapes. Entire regions of our planet in the XIX-XX centuries have changed beyond recognition.
The crisis in the relationship between the human-habitat system has led to a number of global environmental problems. The solution to each of them requires tremendous efforts of international organizations, governments of various states and the public. The most acute environmental problems of our time include the following:
- Earth's climate change (global warming).
- Depletion of fresh water.
- The destruction of the ozone ball.
- Air pollution.
- Inland water and ocean pollution.
- Soil pollution and degradation.
- Nuclear pollution.
- Destruction of the biological diversity of the planet.
The detrimental effect of humans on the environment has a mirror effect. So, scientists have already proved that people living in contaminated areas are more prone to various diseases (in particular, cardiovascular ailments). Several centuries of industrialization and total urbanization have led to the fact that the renewed environment has become too "aggressive" to humans.
