CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY

CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTS AND TERMINOLOGY

1.1. Definitions and Concepts of Natural and Built Environment:

Natural environment is often used as a synonym for habitat and ecosystem. The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to the Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. The concept of the natural environment has two distinguished components:

Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive civilized human intervention, including all vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, atmosphere, and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries and their nature. 

Universal natural resources and physical phenomena that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water, and climate, as well as energy, radiation, electric charge, and magnetism, not originating from civilized human actions.

The prehistoric natural environment study identified that, earth did not technically exist as a physical environment before 2.3 billion years ago. At this time, simple, single-celled bacteria appeared and produced oxygen making the Earth suitable for widespread life. The first members of the animal kingdom, organisms resembling modern-day mollusks, did not appear until around 545 million years ago. At this time, the Earth was covered in a warm, shallow ocean. Between the dawn of complex organisms and the emergence of modern humans, the Earth has experienced a great variety of physical environments including this early planet wide ocean, a super-continent that formed during the Carboniferous Period and extreme climates unfit for most animal life.

Since human evolution, a total of 190,000 years before present, the first modern human was born. When compared to prehistoric environments, the Earth has not changed drastically in the past 190,000 years. It did, however, experience an ice age that was at a maximum around 20,000 years ago. Today, the Earth has, on average, a temperate, accommodating environment for human standards. Today, anything that supports life, such as the atmosphere, the oceans and climate zones such as deserts, tundra and tropical rain-forests, which exist worldwide, is considered a physical environment.

In contrast to the natural environment there is the built environment. In such areas where man has fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly modified into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photo-voltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Although, many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams, and the works of Mound-building termites, are thought of as natural. As humans have progressed through history, man-made environments have been created. Anything from palaces made for ancient rulers to modern cities are considered man-made physical environments because they sustain human life.

Today, a complex man-made physical environment exists. Humans live in, interact in, and are influenced by a highly technological and developed society. Homes, businesses, and streets make up the man-made physical environments of the world. Previously natural physical environments, once manipulated, can become human-made physical environments. For example, forests, natural physical environments, that are cut down to make room for trails become man-made physical environments.

References: 

1. From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_environment (retrieved 11/8/2018) 
2. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Built_environment (retrieved 11/8/2018)