On the modern conception of environment

Abstract

Currently a large number of geographers and representatives of related sciences claim to have created integrated environmental concepts. This applies, inparticular, to the concepts of "environmental science", "sociogeosystems", "anthropogenic landscape", "eco-geosophia", etc. All of them confirm the importance ofsolving the global environmental problem, and the need to unite scholars in all specialties.There is a significant revival of interest in the integral essence of geography, especially among anthropogeographers. This testifies to the fundamental unity of geographical science without its distinct division into natural and social geography, which divides the discipline up into a plethora of specific objects and subjects. Anthropogeographers have come to understand that the earth's space was initially organized by Nature itself. Mankind from the Neolithic Age has transformed his use of nature into the noosphere. If before the Neolithic revolution there still existed natural landscapes on the surface of the planet, then the neolithic populations of Homo sapiens started to actively change the environments they inhabited. Approximately then, the search for ways to justify such,often destructive, intervention began. Such a change in the landscape was brought about by man, which encouraged scientists unwittingly to develop an "intentional paradigm", according to which the methodology of each science tries to take into account the role of man not only as a component of nature, but as its researcher. Even Strabo having realized the many-sidedness of human existence on our planet, already in ancient times, considered himself "not a geographer, not a historian, but a philosopher." Hettner, with his idea of "embedding" into the earth's space of all things, considered the object of studying geography this very earthly space with objectsand phenomena that filled it and interacted with each other. According to Hettner, the connections between them have a landscapecausal nature. To such systems of geobjects, Hettner also related human society. The idea of"through" was found in the works of our contemporary physicist and geographer Aleksey Reteyum, who discovered integral (socio-natural) spatial entities on the surface of the planet ("choriones" and "sphragids"), once again proving the "right to exist" of the noosphere suggested by Volodymyr Vernadsky. At present, it is geographers who must create an adequate concept of the environment, which is not yet developed incompleted form. Its final design will require the rejection of the mechanistic perception of the world, divided into objects and subjects of research. It is geographers who should identify in time and space such integrated environmental systems (socio-natural systems, whose subsystems can be natural landscape systems and sociogeosystems), whichare shaped as a result of the joint development of nature and society. Prospects for the productive development of environmental science are related to the concept of noosphere ecosystems.