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time. The implications of this verticality are several. First, the vertical gaps within
human geography between, say, modellers of land-use change and various post-
natural theorists of the environment can be even more yawning than the putative
human-physical divide. But second, acknowledging this verticality also implies that
there ought to be many more potential points of contact than is suggested by the
simplistic ideas of environmental geography as some kind of halfway house between
human and physical geography. (Third, it indicates the multiple points of possible
connections with other disciplines and communities.)
The second misconception stems from this fi rst one. Seeing environmental geog-
raphy as the mid-point of a one-dimensional divide between human and physical
geography leads to a very narrow defi nition of what environmental geography is
and ought to be. Implicit in many geographers' thinking today -
so
implicit that it
is now arguably part of geographical lore - is the idea that only a fully 'symmetrical'
approach to human-environment relations counts as 'real' environmental geogra-
phy. By symmetrical we mean an approach that pays
equally
detailed attention to
both people and non-humans as they interact. For instance, a symmetrical approach
to the study of a new urban greenspace would need to account for how this patch
of country in the city sustains migratory and local wildlife, reduces surface rainfall
runoff, moderates solar radiation and so on, but it would also need to examine
how people perceive and use this greenspace, taking care to differentiate age,
gender, ethnic groups and so forth, while also considering issues of leisure as well
as crime.
Historically, this kind of symmetrical understanding of human-environment rela-
tions was achieved and embodied by the individual geographer. Indeed, Mackinder
made little distinction between individual geographers and the wider discipline they
comprised. For him the integrative role as bridge between the natural and social
sciences applied equally to both. But specialisation within the sciences, along with
the exponential increase in the stock of scientifi c knowledge, has meant that even
at the smallest geographical scale, this kind of all-encompassing and fully symmetri-
cal account of human-environment relations is very diffi cult, if not impossible for
any one individual to achieve: it requires broad expertise and a great deal of time
if it is to be done well. Furthermore, the sorts of integrative and symmetrical under-
standings that individual geographers could provide also run the risk of being dis-
missed by specialists as trivial for failing to advance knowledge in more narrowly
defi ned areas of research. For all these reasons, few geographers even try to achieve
fully symmetrical understandings ideal typically associated with environmental
geography.
One response to this dilemma is to relocate the sites for symmetrical environ-
mental explanation to the level of discipline or research programme. When Marston
(2006) refers to geography as the 'original integrative environmental science', the
claim is not about the knowledge of individual geographers but about the potential
of the discipline as a whole to bridge the divides between the various kinds of
specialist expertise germane to understanding human-environmental relations.
Similarly, many science-funding agencies are now looking to support large, multi-
component research programmes that bring together the different sorts of specialist
expertise to address the pressing problems of our times. Because the discipline
of geography combines specialists from both sides of the divide who ideally have
had some undergraduate-level training in both human and physical geography,
geographers ought to be well placed to respond to environmental initiatives like
