Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
(making apparently incommensurable knowledges speak to one another) and check
for the 'robustness' of knowledge (i.e., can it be made meaningful to a wide array
of stakeholders or not?).
These and other views on the future of the university and its disciplines matter
greatly for environmental geography and cognate fi elds. 'The environment' and the
way humans use it is of such widespread and fundamental social importance that
the creation, validation, disputation and circulation of human-environment knowl-
edge will become ever more important for ourselves and the future of the biophysical
world. To date, practitioners of environmental geography have gone about their
research largely unmindful of the big debates on the university and the knowledge
society. Looking to the future, this ought to change for the simple reason that the
institutional and social context of knowledge production profoundly affects its
content and aims. There is no 'context-free' knowledge and the precise role that
environmental geographers play in wider epistemic debates on human-environment
relations in academia and society will depend almost entirely upon how the univer-
sity (re)defi nes itself as an institution.
Conclusion
This topic is by no means an exhaustive introduction to environmental geography.
For various reasons, certain things were left out (e.g., the Approaches section would
have benefi ted from chapters on 'urban political ecology' and 'environmental res-
toration'). So this could have been a much larger, more comprehensive volume.
Even so, it offers a fairly complete sense of what environmental geography currently
is. In so doing, this topic - and our attempt in this introduction to explain its aims
- will, we hope, remind professional geographers that the 'middle ground' is not
nearly as small as many often think it to be, while showing other readers outside
geography that the discipline offers a virtually unique suite of theories, approaches,
investigative methods and substantive insights into human-environment relations.
As we have explained above, environmental geography does not 'represent itself':
rather, it needs actively to be made sense of given the apparent dominance of geog-
raphy's two halves. We hope very much that this topic helps environmental geog-
raphy to be seen by readers as what many of our contributors already regard it as
being: that is, a major area of activity, at least equal in size and signifi cance to
human and physical geography, respectively.
This topic, with its expansive sense of environmental geography, clearly says
much about how 'the geographical experiment' is currently being conducted, and
we in this introduction have suggested how it might be altered in years to come.
It almost goes without saying that this experiment needs to continue on into the
future and to have a proper institutional home in universities and other research,
teaching and policy environments. Geography remains one important place for
investigations of human-environment relations to be undertaken and communi-
cated, though not the only one. It ultimately matters not where and under what
banner such investigations occur. What is far more important is that societies
continue to properly fund and resource them. After all, even in our supposedly
digital, post-industrial, knowledge-intensive, 'weightless', information technology
era, all of us draw upon the non-human world ineluctably as fl eshy, emotional,
thinking and acting beings. Current worries about the nature and impacts of
'global environmental change' are only the most dramatic reminder of this fact.
