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 of solving 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 objects and phenomena that filled it and interacted with each other. According to Hettner, the connections between them have a landscape causal 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 in completed 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), which are 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.

Geographical analysis of ecology-dependent diseases of Kryvyi Rih population in order to provide a sustainable development of the industrial regions

“…Considering it necessary to research the theoreticalmethodic turns of the ecologically-dependent diseases' problem, the authors made the analysis of the conducted theoretical and practical researches of the population's sick rate's problem and indicated the methodological landmarks strictly for the geographic sciences: -the problem of the population's sick rate is almost not determined without the getting used to the space-time continuum. The first scientific researches in this direction didn't deal without the geographic maps [10]; -the spreading of the sick rates in the form of the epidemics, epizootics or epiphytes expresses the aspiration for the model "center-outlying area" [11], generally known in the geographic sciences, and still further -the theory of the innovations' diffusion of T. Hegerstrand [12,13]; -the majority of the medical-geographic researches is connected with the natural centers of the diseases' appearance and uses the landscape-scientific approaches [14]; -the medical-geographic researches of the ecologicallydependent diseases (changes of the arterial pressure, the disease of the respiratory organs' systems, the urinarysexual system and others) are more frequently connected with the anthropologic-genetic changes of the environment (the contamination of the atmospheric air by dust and chemical combinations, the radio-active contamination, the influence of the electromagnetic artificial fields and noise on health) [15,16]; -the joint task of the Medicine and Geography is the search of the ways of the optimal interaction between the individual, economy and environment, both as the natural one and as the one, created by him (her) [17], the same tasks are solved by the conception of the stable development [18,19]; -the single conception of the non-zero or the accepted risk dominates at the present time, because the risk's level in any system cannot be equal to zero and it changes in the limits of the probability from 0 to 1, where 0 is the probability of the absolute inertness (the event does not happen in any case), 1 is the risk is realized (the event has happened) [20]; -there is no distinct definition of the notions social, ecological, medical risk, the risk of the human diseases' appearance. There is the notion "environmental risk" [21] in the foreign publications as the risk for the human health in the result of changes of the environment's quality; there is the notion "risk factors in health and disease" [22], in which the ecological factors, influencing the health state of the individual and the appearance of the diseases, act as the separate component.…”

“…The interest of the geographers to this problem grows more and more [8]. The legitimateness of such approaches' use is confirmed in the classical works on the diffusion of the innovations, where the spatial widening of the diseases is connected with the definite periods (stages) of the geographic space's focusing [13].…”