Men are an important part of the biotic component of the environment and simultaneously they are an important
factor of the environment. Thus, men play important roles in the natural
environmental system in different capacities such as biological, social, economic, and technological. All the natural
functions of human beings such as birth, growth, health, and deaths are
affected and determined by natural environment in the same manner as the cases
of other organisms. However, men being most developed and advanced animal both
physically and mentally and technologically, is capable of making substantial
changes in natural environment so as to make it suitable for his own living.
The role of most primitive
biological or physical in the functions natural environmental system was
fundamentally that of user of environmental resources and thus they played the
role of a factor of the environment but as the skill and technology of men
developed with cultural development their roles towards natural environment
also changed progressively such as from user through modifier and changer to
destroy of the environment.
The technology of men has
drastically changed the men-environment relationship from prehistoric period to
the present most advanced industrial period. The industrial and scientific
revolutions have led to rapid change in our environment. However, all the
technology from the most primitive to the most advanced causes some changes in
environment. Modern technology men, intoxicated by highly advanced technology and
materialistic viewpoints, have changed and are changing the environment for
their stake to such an extent that even the very existence of human beings is
threatened.
If we look the historical
progression of men-environment relationships it become clear natural
relationship between men and natural environment during prehistoric period has
changed to hostile relationship between technological men and the environment
at present. This substantial change and shift in the nature and magnitude of
men' interactions with the natural environment has given birth to numerous
environmental problems of serious consequences because the change effected by
men in the environment have become nu-adjustable by the in-built
self-regulatory mechanism of the natural environmental system. The study of
changing relationships between men and environment in historical perspective
may help in demonstrating the increasing adverse impacts of human activities on
the environment. Hunting and food gathering, domestication and pastoral-ism,
domestication and agriculture and science technology and industrialization are
the changing steps of men and environmental relationship.
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