Adapting to the environment adapted to us

So, here's a not-too-particularly-novel rambling on our relationship to our environment.

Humans are quickly becoming masters of their own domain. We're increasingly able to adapt our environment to ourselves rather than allowing ourselves to adapt to our environment. It's a strange, technologically inspired impatience. We live in large cities, travel enormous - inhuman - distances, eat industrially produced food, and have become accustomed to living in an environment we've substantially designed to service our various "needs." But, this does NOT mean that adaptation has transferred entirely to environmental management. On the contrary, I believe we continue to adapt to our environment; only now it's an environment of our own creation and the means of adaption are predominantly social, cultural and, yes Virginia, TECHNOLOGICAL - something I mean to write about in much greater detail soon.

What I find really extraordinary about this scenario is that while we can - and do - wax philosophical about how we ought to construct our environment to meet our various needs (and isn't this exactly what "policy" is largely all about?) we are still continually surprised by how we ourselves (collectively and individually) respond to environmental changes; i.e. despite ever more complex theories and models, "externalities" inevitably arise and shock us. We're continually forced to re-evaluate our ideas of both ourselves and our environment.

All this is a round-about way trying to get to the idea that, perhaps we should be more concerned with managing what we call our 'needs' (many of which are, if we're honest with ourselves, as much a human construct as our environment) and less concerned with managing an environment designed to meet them. In my opinion, we'd better start thinking of some humane ways of tackling such an agenda, because our environment (such as it is) is turning us into foul creatures indeed . . . and may well kill us.

It's just a thought.