environment

noun

1. The surroundings of, and influences on, a particular item of interest.

   “What was seen from the top down, as a large environment with many difficult trade-offs, is instead seen from the bottom up--as 10 million microenvironments, each to be regulated in its own right. It is this inversion of perspective that distinguishes microgovernment from other kinds of regulation, and that accounts for its often-bizarre behavior.”

2. The natural world or ecosystem.

   “It is tempting to speculate about the incentives or compulsions that might explain why anyone would take to the skies in [the] basket [of a balloon]: […]; […]; or perhaps to muse on the irrelevance of the borders that separate nation states and keep people from understanding their shared environment.”

3. All the elements that affect a system or its inputs and outputs.
4. A particular political or social setting, arena or condition.
5. The software or hardware existing on any particular computer system.

   “That program uses the Microsoft Windows environment.”

6. The environment of a function at a point during the execution of a program is the set of identifiers in the function's scope and their bindings at that point.
7. The set of variables and their values in a namespace that an operating system associates with a process.