"Environment" is a dandy, helpful word.

"Environment" is a good word for helping us give meaning to an event, place, or process. It is one of those words that allows us to mean a specific meaning while not pinning us down to fist fights over meaning. It is not a good word for the dogmatically oriented.

On the one hand, when we speak of the "environment," we might be speaking of an internal or external environment. On the other hand, when speaking of either, we are talking about more than the "internal" or "external" environments. In either case, we are talking about a place without solid, inflexible boundaries, but we are talking about a place. We are talking about a place that exists with relationships between internal and external environments.

Added to this, we are talking about temperature, cycles, seasons, and a becoming and passing away, processes. We are talking about habitat for critters, human and non-human, internally and externally. We are talking about what it is that makes an "environment," whether its embryonic fluid, human and non-human, or undersea habitat for deep sea critters. In both cases, most cases (not to be dogmatic), there is an internal and external flowing of material, be it gas, liquid, or solid material, an inward, outward flowing motion not unlike the Secret of the Golden Flower -- not to change the subject, either.

"Environment" works well with the word "total,' although when using the phrase "total environment," folks tend to understand the internal and external places with and without a connection, places that exist in relationship to other places without connections. For example, I can say the total environment of "symbiotic relationships for lichens," or I can say the "total environment" for "teenage relationships," and in both cases I can explain the two as if I can explain everything about the two. One exists in an environment influenced by temperature, moisture, light, humidity, nutrients, and seasons. The other exists in an environment influenced by family, friends, school, and more. So I can speak as if I am speaking about something common to either, but neither exists as it was an instant ago. Both are being, becoming and passing away because of their total environment's being, becoming, and passing away.

Then again, "Environment" does not work well with the word "total," because "environment" is the total. It is what it is because it contains the totality of what it needs to be an "environment." It is an odd word because to exist it exists by adjoining to another "environment." While it is doing this adjoining, it is also overlapping what it adjoins. And it still has a certain meaning for its users!

To really add to this mystery of the environment, the language mystery, "environment" has no real existence out there, out there in the non-human World. It is, in a way, like the tree in the forest. The tree in the forest which does or does not make a sound when it falls is silent, unless there is someone there to hear it fall, someone there to give meaning to the tree's total environment, its internal environment and external environments, the hearer's internal and external environments.

In the end, the word "environment" has its own environment, a World of contextual clues, meanings, to give it its own place in human usage. "Environment" is just one of those words that make life more interesting and understandable. It is an important word.

I am jabbering. It's late.

eddie evans
crime scene cleanup