1970 Geloof en Wetenschap : Orgaan van de Christelijke vereeniging van natuur- en geneeskundigen in Nederland - pagina 114

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FROM TERRITORIAL IMAGE TO CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT

seen in this context, is unavoidable, once man changed his environment in a deliberate manner. The term pollution denotes a negative action which makes foul, impure or corrupt that which was clean, uncontaminated or sacred. We assume that nature kept itself pure, before we started behaving in such a manner that not all consequences of our activities could be neutralized or removed by natural processes. Such pollution then would have negative consequences for man, as is clearly demonstrated in an extreme form by the history of the plague. When man started to live in larger groups (an important step in the psycho-social evolution, made possible by the deliberate use of language) the cycle of spontaneous dumping of refuse and the accompanying proliferation of rats and fleas was set in motion. Only recently have large scale interventions in our previously spontaneous manners of life, serving deliberate public hygiene purposes, interrupted this cycle for the majority of mankind. But, anything added to our way of life can lead to harm, each technological advance brings its disadvantages. (For instance, instead of providing us with the peace of mind it promises, placing the world „at your fingertips", the telephone often becomes a source of nervous tension, because anyone can literally intrude unannounced into a household, even if it is only because of a dialing error. All that which results from the dichotomy between our deliberate and spontaneous behavior is pollution, be it of earth or atmosphere, its nature organic or social. Mankind will live only if it finds means to lessen the impact of social pollutants, which form whole series of inter-related and often contradictory results of cultural progress having to take place in animal embodiments. The struggle is agonizing, because understanding how much we humans owe to the organic evolution of the past, makes clear why we do not easily want te change old images for new ones. Thus, when Copernicus described the image of the earth circling the sun, practically all in a position to evaluate this claim refuted it. From the individual point of view, this attitude may be related to the connection between the earlier image of the earth being the center of the universe and the home territory being the determinant of all activities. From the collective point of view, the refusal to accept the new image related to the

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