environment

The conditions and influences of the place in which an organism lives. The large number of different types of environment (eg urban environment, tropical rainforest environment) makes it impossible to formulate a single definition. In general, the physical environment describes the characteristics of a landscape (eg climate, geology) which have not been changed markedly by human impact, whereas the geographical environment includes the physical environment together with any human modifications (eg agricultural systems, industrialization, urbanization). The relationship between living organisms and their environment forms part of the subject of ecology. Concern that large parts of the physical environment are suffering from misuse and overexploitation is central to conservation, and the environmental movement which promotes conservation has gained considerable momentum in recent decades as new threats (eg acid rain, soil erosion, ozone depletion) are widely recognized.

In physics, chemistry, and engineering, the "environment" is the collection of matter and energy outside of the system that is being studied. The environment may or may not be able to interact with the system, depending on whether it is a open or closed system. The natural environment is such an environment that is relatively unaffected by human activity. environmentalism is a concern with the preservation of the natural environment, especially from human pollution, and the ethics and politics associated with this. In social science, environmentalism is the theory that the general and social environment is the primary influence on the development of a person or group. Another social science concept is the Social environment, also known as milieu. In computing, an environment is the overall system, software, or interface in which a program runs, such as a runtime environment or environment variable, or through which a user operates the system, such as an integrated development environment in which the user develops software or a desktop environment. In mathematics and programming languages, an environment is a set of variables that have been bound. Some kinds of environment also map variable names to values or to types. An environment gives meaning to free variables. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

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