Geoscience Reference
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pline, while much of the subject's popularity in schools is due precisely to its focus
on human-environment interactions. Yet the reality is that for most academic geog-
raphers 'environmental geography' is a small and often pretty elusive thing com-
pared with the dominant human and physical wings of the discipline. (It may also
be less familiar to North American readers where environmental geography has
maintained more of a central role in some departments and topics, following for
example, the traditions of human-environment geographers such as Carl Sauer or
Gilbert White.)
One impetus for this topic is to raise the profi le of environmental geography both
within and beyond the discipline. The environment is now widely touted as one
important reason for 'Rediscovering Geography', to quote the title of a US National
Academy of Sciences (1997) report on the future of geography. Echoing such calls,
Billie Lee Turner (2002; cf. Zimmerer, 2007) is just one of a number of prominent
fi gures urging geographers to embrace their long-ignored human-environment tradi-
tion so as to revitalise the discipline and secure its historically precarious place in
the academy. Environmental geography, according to this way of thinking, provides
a unifying link holding the two parts of the discipline together. It promises to make
good on the integrative vision of geography celebrated by Mackinder, Davis and
Ratzel but foiled as the discipline has become progressively more segmented and
specialised since the Second World War.
While we certainly support those aspirations, they will only be achieved by over-
coming three misconceptions about environmental geography. The fi rst is about its
place in the discipline of geography. Though environmental geography is often
understood as a sort of middle ground between human and physical geography, this
greatly oversimplifi es the shape of the discipline and thus the problems we face in
forging closer bonds of collective connection, collaboration and solidarity among
its various parts and branches. Rather than thinking about geography divided hori-
zontally between human and physical geography, we also need to recognise that the
heterogeneity within those very broad divisions means they are also stretched out
in the vertical dimension (fi gure 1.2), as indeed in a third temporal dimension of
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
HUMAN GEOGRAPHY
Ecology
Hydrology
Geomorphology
Quaternary
Climatology
Economic
Political
Social
Cultural
Historical
Figure 1.2
The multidimensionality of disciplinary divides in geography.
