Our starting point is the question, “Who invented the environment?” Chapter 1 describes how humans’ awareness of their impacts on the environment developed and when and why the concept of the environment was invented. Chapter 2 provides a first definition of environmental literacy and introduces the value that transdisciplinarity can bring to how humans address environmental issues. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of environment based on an organismic, cell-based definition of the human individual and the complementarity of material–biophysical and social-epistemic levels of human and environmental systems. Here we describe the basic ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie our world view and thesis
