This article is concerned with the nature of what federal legislation calls “the human environment” as a preliminary to understanding impacts upon it and risks to it. After discussing the features that distinguish human systems from others, emphasizing nonmetrical aspects of their sociocultural characteristics, eighteen points concerning risks and impacts are made. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible place in the human environment of what Stephen Toulmin calls “post-modern science and risk analysis.”
R. A. Rappaport , “The Human Environment: Appendix B,” in Assessment of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Studies Program, vol. 3, Social and Economic Studies, by Committee to Review the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Studies Program, Socioeconomics Panel (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992).
3.
3. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Post-Modern Science and Natural Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
