The meaning of the word ‘environment’

Essentially, and in its broadest sense, the word ‘environment’ embraces the conditions or influences under which any individual or thing exists, lives, or develops. These surroundings can be placed into three categories:

1. (1) the combination of physical conditions that affect and influence the growth and development of an individual or community;

2. (2) the social and cultural conditions that affect the nature of an individual or community;

3. (3) the surroundings of an inanimate object of intrinsic social value.

The environment of the human being includes the abiotic (devoid of life) factors of land, water, atmosphere, climate, sound, odours, and tastes; the biotic factors of human beings, fauna, flora, ecology, bacteria, and viruses; and all those social factors which make up the ‘quality of life’. The concept has emerged of the environment as an assembly of people and things which render a stream of services and disservices to the individual and which take their place alongside the stream of services rendered by real income, commodities, homes, infrastructure, and markets generally.

The European Commission, the governing body of the European Community (EC), has defined the environment as ‘the combination of elements whose complex inter-relationships make up the settings, the surroundings and the conditions of life of the individual and of society, as they are or as they are felt’.