Surroundings

According to Etienne S. Benson, the concepts of neither environment nor environmentalism are self-evident. His 278-page book explores a number of interpretations and shifts in the use of these terms. He takes two approaches in dealing with environment. First, he works backward to the 1770s, describing how a range of thinkers coined environment, or similar terms such as milieu and defined what they stood for. Explorer-naturalists and museum collectors regarded organisms as adaptations to environments. They named, categorized, and labeled them according to their points of origin and different ways of adjusting to change. Benson details how statistical specialists, using the term to equal condition, measured the outbreak of diseases, linking them to climate and the sanitary conditions in which people lived. In the 1800s, progressive reformists improved buildings, streets, and workplaces in industrial-urban landscapes to create better living conditions. Looking forward from that century, Benson notes how scholars inherited but also discarded the term. For example, Donna Haraway and others rejected its epistemological value, blaming its use for oppressing others. Others used environment as a synonym for nature and sought to preserve wildness, save endangered species, and restore blighted flora and fauna in the nonhuman world. Others broadened its scope to include urban forms and agricultural landscapes as globally important and worthy of protection as heritage sites

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