環境論ならびに環境生物学論

抄録

Textbooks and papers from both the social and the natural sciences were reviewed in the context of the concept of the environment and the subject matter of environmental biology. Basing on the results, the author concluded that the environment is a subject-dependent entity that is realized only when we take into consideration a living organism as subject, including humans. The human environment consists of many environmental factors, each of which is distributed, at a distance from a human or human group as subject, in an epistemological, non-physical space. A human subject can shorten the epistemological distance from its environmental factors by intensifying recognition of the environment. We can thus recognize the global environment in spite of its physical distance from our bodies. Environmental biology is an environmental science which deals with complex interactions in humans as subject, other living organisms as “second subject” and their environments. The major issues of environmental biology are the human impact on living organisms and vice versa, the impact of living organisms on environments and vice versa, the conservation or reconstruction of biological diversity, and, as a final goal, the establishment of sustainable coexistence between humans and other living organisms.