Environment

An environment is the whole of conditions surrounding a thing — what is around it, what it interacts with, what it is coupled to.

The simplest view: the environment is everything external to a thing that affects it or that it can act on. A plant’s environment is the soil, light, water, air, nearby organisms. A person’s environment is the city they live in, the people they know, the climate they experience. The boundary between the thing and its environment is clear: there is the thing itself, and there is everything around it.

But this simplicity breaks down. Jakob von Uexküll (1934) showed that every organism has its own environment defined by what it can perceive and act on. A tick’s world consists of temperature, butyric acid scent, and tactile contact — nothing else exists for it. A deer beneath the same bush perceives grass, slope, wind, the movement of other animals. The same physical space contains different environments. Neither is a misperception; both are genuine worlds shaped by the organism’s sensory capacities and powers of action.

This is Uexküll’s key insight: there is no single objective environment. There are multiple genuine environments, each one real for the organism that inhabits it. The environment of a thing is what that thing can perceive and act on, given its nature. This is relational, not external.

James Gibson (1979) deepens this through the concept of affordances. The environment is not a collection of things to be perceived. It is structured as affordances — possibilities for action. A chair affords sitting to a human; it does not afford sitting to a fish. A branch affords perching to a bird, swinging to a monkey, climbing to a squirrel. Affordances are neither purely objective (the branch has a certain thickness and strength) nor purely subjective (the capacity to use the branch depends on the animal’s body and skill). They are relational: they emerge from the coupling of the organism’s capacities with the world’s structure.

Structural coupling, as articulated by Maturana and Varela (1980), is the dynamic co-determination of organism and environment. The organism’s structure determines what perturbations it can sense and respond to. A frog cannot see a stationary fly; it is structured to detect movement. The environment determines what perturbations it can deliver. The frog’s native pond offers the visual patterns the frog evolved to detect. When the coupling works, the organism thrives. When it breaks (place the frog in a laboratory with scrambled patterns), the organism becomes effectively blind.

But organism and environment are not separate things that happen to couple. Tim Ingold (2000) argues that organisms are not in environments like things in a container. Organisms are constituted by their movements through a meshwork of relations. A bird in flight is not a thing moving through an air environment; the bird-in-flight is the integration of perception, muscle action, air pressure, thermal updraft, visual landmarks. The boundary of the organism (the skin) is not the boundary between organism and environment. It is a place where different movement-lines meet.

Karen Barad adds that the boundary between thing and environment is not found in nature; it is enacted through practice. Different instruments and ways of looking draw different boundaries. Analyzing a fire’s temperature makes the thermometer part of the system; analyzing its color makes the light part of the system. Neither is capturing a pre-given boundary; each practice enacts a boundary. The environment of a thing is what the question you ask makes of it.

The environment is not a neutral container or background. It is the structure of what is possible for a thing. It is the set of affordances the thing can register and act on. It is dynamic — the coupling changes as the thing changes, as the environment changes, as their structures drift together. It is multiple — the same physical space contains different genuine environments for different organisms. It is enacted — different practices draw different boundaries and reveal different environments.