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the ongoing Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) of the UK Research Councils
(www.relu.ac.uk) (or the calls for integrative environmental research initiatives
within the EU or US National Science Foundation). However, as the development
of Earth System Science (see Wainwright, this volume) shows, the discipline of
geography has not always profi ted from such initiatives.
This is at least partly because the lingering hold of Mackinder's normative vision
of geographical knowledge as fully symmetrical has been so great that we have not
always recognised the valuable contributions to be made by the profusion of 'asym-
metrical' environmental research evident within geography today. By this term, we
mean research and teaching that stitches together separately fashioned pieces of the
human-environment jigsaw. People and the non-human world are connected in a
multiplicity of ways; there are varying degrees and kinds of interactions, associa-
tions, couplings, feedbacks, interferences, transformations and accommodations
going on. It is perfectly possible - and for a variety of reasons defensible, even nec-
essary - to examine human-environment connectivities in 'asymmetrical' ways. For
instance, physical geographers who are expert in river restoration may go about
their work without having to know why certain social groups like restored rivers
or why government planning regulations prohibit more restoration projects from
occurring. Likewise, the 'Third World political ecologist' can say important things
about how and why peasant farmers use their land in the ways they do, without
having to know all the biological intricacies of crop rotation, soil fertility and plant
germination.
This topic is mostly about environmental geography in this asymmetrical sense
- which is to say, the form in which it predominantly exists today. This does not,
as we are suggesting, make the research reported in its many chapters an ersatz
version of 'symmetrical' environmental geography. The latter has become a hard-
to-achieve and highly normative ideal that many geographers have, understandably,
found of little use to describe their own and others' work. In our view, the expanded
defi nition of environmental geography that we are working with here - namely, any
form of geographical inquiry which considers formally some element of society or
nature relative to each other - is usefully open-ended. It opens up a much broader
landscape of shared knowledge and practice, whose richness and potential only
becomes apparent once we shake off the older vision of environmental geography
as necessarily symmetrical.
This more expansive sense of environmental geography highlights a third mis-
conception about environmental geography, namely that it is confi ned to the disci-
pline of geography. Environmental geography bleeds into other disciplines and fi elds
that share its interest in 'the geographical experiment' (and human environment
interactions). As noted above, we can formalise both points by drawing a distinction
between the 'discipline' of environmental geography and a wider discourse that goes
beyond it (cf. Gregory, 1995). This includes specialised fi elds like environmental
sociology and environmental economics, as well as relatively young, purposefully
cross-disciplinary fi elds like environmental science, 'science studies', 'environmental
studies' and the already mentioned Earth Systems Science. Unsurprisingly, little of
the work done in these and cognate fi elds uses the term 'environmental geography'.
But it does share the same commitment to investigating the social and non-human
worlds in relation to one another (albeit 'asymmetrically' in many cases). On the
social sciences side of all this, something of the scale and diversity of the discourse
of environmental geography is captured well in Pretty et al.'s (2008) recent Hand-
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