It is an important distinction to recognize that as organisms we live in two environments. It is a distinction we have overlooked in the last few generations, and this over-sight has created serious problems. What is man's relationship to nature? Very few of us have thought of the city as a until quite recently. And to a large majority of our population, I am sure, Expo 67's habitat was a new concept. The very word was new. It is a word the French have lived with and have appreciated longer than we have. To us, was jargon, an ecologist's term. We are, fortunately, becoming more aware of the fact that we do interact with our environment, but we have a good deal to overcome by way of old attitudes and old prejudices. For example, Ortega y Gasset, Spanish commentator and social philosopher, said that to be human is to be divorced from nature. True, to be human means to turn inward and to explore our own potentials, but we cannot long afford to be divorced from nature. I am told that fifty years ago Franz Boas, the anthropologist, said that language was essentially a polarized screen through which we apprehend our environment. We are only now really becoming aware of this. If we read Boas then he might have broadened our perceptiveness, or particularly our receptivity, to environmental factors, but we would not have understood him. These insights often take a whole generation to be taken up and accepted. Alfred North Whitehead told us over a generation ago that a thing is where it is and where it acts, but we didn't reflect on this. In fact most of us who have read Whitehead, have done so only in the last decade or so. But Whitehead taught philosophy at Harvard a generation ago, and the things he had to say about interrelationships and the total environment are still very important to us. It is the tragedy of our educational approaches that we limit ourselves too much. In coping with the need to specialize and grapple with hard facts, we fail, somehow, too often, to be alert to the fact that the flow of ideas is a current one and that we need to be in touch with what has been and is being thought. Today's thinking will become tomorrow's orthodoxy. So it is a grievance of mine that I wasn't introduced to people like Whitehead when I was in college. I had to discover him for myself a decade or two after leaving school. I personally feel that the crisis of the atom, which has come in our day, has forced upon us a great reappraisal of all the things we stand for, of all the values we have held dear. This is good for us. Ours is a time of testing, a time of uncertainty, which may, if we survive it, lead to a higher, better approach to adapting ourselves to the realities of this universe. Our modern environmental awareness goes back to people like William Vogt who wrote The Road to Survival in 1948. And surely Rachel Carson, in 1963, helped wake up many people to the realities of ecology, to the fact that it does matter what someone else does to our environment. Others like LaMont Cole, Barry Commoner, and Frank Egler have helped reorient those who were interested in learning. For the non-specialist in particular, I look to two people as having provided new orientation that is important, and will be, I think, exciting to all those of us who discuss ideas, and will be a way of stimu-
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Jan 1, 1970
P Fleischman 
Open Access