Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Introduction: Making Sense of
Environmental Geography
Noel Castree, David Demeritt and Diana Liverman
On the evening of Monday, 31 January 1887, Halford Mackinder delivered a now
famous address to London's Royal Geographical Society. In his lecture - entitled
'On the scope and methods of geography' - he explained how and why geography
should take its place alongside other disciplines within the academic division of
labour. His strategy, at once simple and audacious, was to call that division of
labour into question. Geography, Mackinder (1887) argued, can 'bridge one of the
greatest of all gaps': namely, that separating 'the natural sciences and the study of
humanity' (p. 145). He was not alone in defi ning geography as 'the science whose
main function is to trace the interaction of man [
sic.
] in society and so much of his
environment as varies locally'. At points east and west, others were doing much the
same, such as William Morris Davis in America and Friedrich Ratzel in Germany.
The three men soon occupied important university positions and were followed by
similarly vigorous prosleytisers who quickly built on the foundations their forebears
had laid.
So began geography's career as a university subject and what historian of geo-
graphical thought David Livingstone (1992, p. 177) called 'the geographical experi-
ment'. A century on that experiment continues. Although space and region have
since joined human-environment relations as central organising concepts for the
discipline, many still see geography as the 'original integrated environmental science'
(Marston, 2006). Geography remains one of the few disciplines committed to bridg-
ing the divide between the natural and physical sciences, on the one side, and the
social sciences and humanities on the other. Quite how successful that bridging has
been is a matter of some debate (see, for example, Matthews and Herbert's [2004]
topic
Unifying geography
). Despite the hopes invested by Turner (2002) and others
(e.g., Marston, 2006; Zimmerer, 2007) in human-environment relations as the
unifying link holding the discipline together, many geographers prefer to study other
things. There is no shortage of 'pure' human and physical geographers. Even so,
the scale and richness of geographers' attempts to understand the entanglements of
people and the non-human world are highly impressive. These many geographers,
their fi ndings and their ideas are what we are calling here 'environmental geography'
