Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
students and others dependent on academic expertise. Put differently, the discourse
of environmental geography is not colloquial, tacit or everyday. In the fi fth place,
whether couched in 'realist' or more 'constructivist' language, the claims advanced
by environmental geographers are intended to tell us something about the actualities
(today, yesterday or tomorrow) of human-environment relations. It is - at least
usually - the opposite of science fi ction, ungrounded speculation or metaphysics, a
feature very much in keeping with geography's long-standing reputation as a 'practi-
cal' discipline that has its feet fi rmly on the ground. Finally, as all the chapters of
this topic make clear and as we have had already noted, environmental geographers
of all stripes are intellectually outward-looking. They draw upon (and seek to con-
tribute to) debates in cognate fi elds in both the social and the biophysical sciences,
as well as in the humanities (see, e.g., the chapters by Zimmerer, Mels, Olwig,
Turner, and Jones).
These various commonalities are real enough, but they may - understandably -
strike many readers as being far too generic to defi ne a real, as opposed to a con-
trived, fi eld of research, teaching and practice. Indeed, the fi nal commonality
mentioned above may appear to render questionable the very idea of 'environmental
geography' since the fi eld routinely blurs into so many others as to lack any defi ning
features of its own. Not surprisingly, we beg to differ with this rather dim assess-
ment. True, environmental geography is diverse and lacks coherence philosophi-
cally, theoretically, methodologically and in terms of its practical applications. Its
exponents produce an array of cognitive, evaluative, expressive, methodological and
applied knowledges; and they vary greatly in the spatio-temporal scale and topical
foci of their concern. Whatever unity environmental geography possesses is,
pace
the six commonalities listed above, certainly quite general. However, the fi eld's
diversity is nonetheless a structured one and we regard the heterodoxy of environ-
mental geography as a strength not a weakness. Let us explain.
Even though environmental geography - like the wider discipline of which it is
a major part - does not posses the sort of 'hard' external boundaries one fi nds in,
say, the discipline of economics, it nonetheless has a very real identity - a 'structure
of feeling' in Raymond Williams' evocative but nonetheless defi nite sense of the
term. Over a century on, the legacy of Mackinder, Davis, Ratzel and like-minded
pioneers is tangible: Geography remains one of the few places where it is possible
to fi nd social science, humanities and physical science perspectives on the environ-
ment rubbing shoulders. In other words, academic geography is constituted so as
to permit something that one still fi nds rarely elsewhere: namely, a 'full spectrum'
approach to understanding human-environment relations, albeit in the form of
separate, asymmetrical contributions. For this reason, geography is 'recognized as
possessing unusual strength in integrated, human-environment science' (Turner,
2002, p. 63). Compare this with, say, earth science (which excludes the human
factor) or sociology (which has 'rural' and 'environmental' branches but both of
these bracket biophysical issues for the most part).
This internal permissiveness - this encouragement and toleration of widely diver-
gent research, teaching and policy work on human-environment relations - can be
regarded as a virtue. This may seem counter-intuitive. Typically, the ongoing debates
about the (dis)unity of geography as a whole depicts intellectual diversity as syn-
onymous with fragmentation, and thus, intellectual weakness. This much is obvious
in the topic
Unifying Geography
, whose normative, aspirational title speaks to the
editors' desire to reconnect the discipline's many (in their eyes) amputated limbs.
