From the latter part of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century, the intellectual arena is marked by the emergence of a clearly pronounced "situational conceptuality" in scientific and philosophical thinking pertaining to all spheres of being distinguishing thus this period of history from that of the twentieth century on the whole. If the twentieth century was the "century of systems," thus manifesting the systems mentality, the twenty-first century is the "century of situationality" which necessitates the situational and situative thinking.

The founder of the general theory of systems was the Austrian biologist Bertalanfi. According to him, the world is the system of systems. The new world vision with its unstable, chaotic, and ambiguous world pattern began to form as the theory of catastrophes, Prigozhin - Glensdorf - Nicolis - Stengers fluctuation theory of irreversible processes, synergetics of Eigen and Haken, computer-aided technologies of multidimensional virtual space were developed.

The "situation" has a number of distinguishing features such as the dynamism of successively changeable states, probabilistic character of qualitative changes, multi-factor determination, low degree of predicting the domination of this factor or another one. The most important characteristics of situational comprehension of world are hence the mobility, fortuity, uncertainty, fuzziness of boundaries, factor equivalence, and poly-variance.

Situation is something that creates the system and precedes by it, as well as something that specifies the system state and is available in it; besides, it is something that leads to the disintegration of the system or its transformation.

In the long run, the field of being can be represented as a totality of infinite number of interacting situations with different qualities; the world is represented as a situation of situations (N. Solodukho, 2003) .

The situational approach assumes ever-growing significance in studies and researches of ecological, geographical, economical, political, psychological, and some other situations. Between the ecological problems and situational approach exists a certain internal meaningful link. The special case of interest here may be seen in the prevention and control of abnormal, emergency, and nonstandard situations.

The "control of situations" is the supreme task of the situational approach.

The time is ripe for the situational movement to consolidate itself so as to meet the intellectual challenge of the new millennium, and for the special research centers to be established devoted to concentrated situational research. And this process is now in the making!

* Bibliographical description: N.M.Solodukho, Manifesto of situational movement (full text), in: Vestnik of Tatarstan division at Russian Ecological Academy, no.3, pp.3-4, Kazan, 2003.