In common with many other higher animals, man has certain biological and environmental needs that must be met if his well-being is to be maintained, and these needs go far beyond the obvious necessities of adequate food and fresh water, essential as they may be.

We do not like to think of ourselves as animals for, somehow, this lowers us in our own eyes. Man has not assigned to himself the role of "King of the beasts" for he has chosen not to think of himself as a beast. Through the centuries, man has paid a great price for his pride and in the end, if he fails to use effectively those special gifts which set him apart from other animals, he may lose the opportunity to exercise dominion over anything.

Man's physiological requirements are not unlike those of swine: his diet has many similarities; his nervous system is about the same bulk as that of a Mexican burro; and he knows fear, hunger, passion, and other emotions which, as any ethologist will tell you, are common to all higher animals. Highly developed language and technology are what set man apart.

If we accept man as an animal, albeit a rather special one, we know that his reactions to his environment will be exactly those of other higher animals. Much of man's internal conditioning is predictable on the basis of known biochemistry, and his response to his environment is effected by the.same biochemistry. The expressed feelings of hate, love, passion, humility, fear, and other emotions have physiological counterparts in biochemical metabolism, and it is well known that prolonged emotional disturbance or stress may bring about physiological disorder, disease, or even death.

Much that is good about American society is good because it satisfies man's organic and biological needs by providing an abundance of food, water, and ease. But man's metabolism is capable of generating enormous energy and his body is mostly muscle—thus, man has energy and muscle for which modern life has little use. The activities of man the thinker may burn up a lot of the energy, but this in no way compensates for the inactivity of the mass of his muscle or helps keep his body in proper physical condition.

Some of man's past achievements with hand labor stand today as lasting monuments to his physical ability. The pyramids were built by hand, canals were dug by hand, and cathedrals immortalized not only man the artist but man the builder. Laboring from dawn to dusk, man built these monuments using physical labor and that most ingenious combination of tools, a pair of hands and strong back coupled to a human brain. This extensive use of man as an instrument of labor is in sharp contrast to the 8-hour working day of the present, most of which requires little physical effort and almost no manual work. Computers and automated machinery have relieved modern American man of the necessity to use physical labor. Today's major forms of transportation in the United States even substitute mechanical and chemical power for muscle. We have allowed technology to dictate our mode of living and this mode of living is often in conflict with the requirements of man.

The consequences to American society have been serious. Man the thinker, the technologist, built the megalopolis with its resultant urban sprawl. Man the thinker and technologist built superhighways and metropolitan beltways which compounded the confusion, congestion, and pollution in our urban areas. We have arrived at the Dinosaur age of technology, where no machine is too big, no amount of earth too great to move, no building too tall, no road too long, and where hydrogen detonations can accomplish major excavations in an afternoon.

In all of this frantic activity, we have forgotten that man's organic being is conditioned in part by his environment, and it is from this environment that man derives a feeling of tranquility, anxiety, anger, comfort, security, well-being, ecstasy, fear, or passion. Moreover, man's physical and mental health will be enhanced if his environment provides an opportunity for reflection and introspection.

At the end of the working day, man the technologist drives home and, if he is concerned about his physical well-being, changes clothes and goes jogging. Physical activity needed to sustain the health of man becomes recreational activity relegated to weekends and holidays. This indicates the absolute necessity of parks and recreational facilities in modern society, but it also emphasizes the equally important principle of incorporating parks into cities and particularly into neighborhoods where people live and work. Urban recreation in the city must be an integral part of the network of urban ecosystems.

In most major cities of the United States it is dangerous to venture out at night. Our city streets are the scenes of muggings, holdups, rapes, and assaults of every kind, and the problem of vandalism is severe, not only in the ghetto but in the residential neighborhoods and the suburbs beyond. We have built great cities and marvelous engineering projects but we have not succeeded in coupling the concept of the ecologically mature community with the progressive aspects of our technology. We are left with a glittering technology and sterile or vicious human environments on the one hand and, on the other, we maintain human environments within the mainstream of technical progress but outside the community requisites for the welfare of man.