Geoscience Reference
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pragmatism that at times has come under fi re as naïve and under-theorised (Watts,
1983a). At its core, however, human ecology's pragmatic concerns for societal
response to environmental change and risk, and the ways these shape human vul-
nerability to environmental conditions, remains a theme of fundamental impor-
tance to geographical approaches to environment and development. The similarly
practical nature of geographical work in land-use/land-cover change, resource
geography, and urban and regional planning is fundamentally concerned with the
relationship between society and environment, and strongly infl uences geographi-
cal work in environment and development. Methodologically, GIS and remote
sensing technologies are surely the geographical techniques most highly sought
after by NGOs and state agencies working in development today. Thus, the endur-
ing concern in geography for applied research and theoretical relevance lends itself
well to the professional fi eld and real-world concerns of environmental manage-
ment and development policy.
On the other hand, it can convincingly be argued that the contemporary pairing
of environment and development grew out of tensions that arose in the 1960s and
1970s between the emerging environmental movement in the global North and
concerns about economic and social development (primarily, though not exclu-
sively, in the global South). Poverty and underdevelopment were largely viewed as
problems of the 'Third World' a view reinforced by the so-called Brundtland Report
(WCED, 1987), which emphasised ecological degradation as largely a result of
Third World poverty, as opposed to First World affl uence. In the context of an
expanding Cold War apparatus of international development (Escobar, 1995),
North American and European intervention in the global South sought to replicate
the model of industrial capitalism under the guise of 'modernisation', while dismiss-
ing pre-capitalist or communal forms of economic production and resource manage-
ment as ineffi cient and 'backward' (Rostow, 1960). For instance, it was widely
reported that smallholder farming practices in Nepal led to widespread deforesta-
tion and soil erosion, with potentially disastrous implications for downstream popu-
lations in India and Bangladesh (see Thompson et al., 1986). Similarly, as Turner
(1993) reports, mal-adapted livestock management and associated overstocking
were commonly thought to cause grassland degradation and desertifi cation in sub-
Sahelian Africa, in a classic 'tragedy of the commons' scenario (Hardin, 1968). In
these cases and others, conventional wisdom held that, if traditional resource use
practices were the problem, the logical solution was the modernisation of environ-
mental management and development policy - an assumption that fi t well with
Rostowian notions of linear 'stages of growth' development and Green Revolution
agricultural technologies supported by international fi nancial institutions and the
United Nations (Rostow, 1960; see also Escobar 1995; Peet and Hartwick 1999).
The industrial model of development promoted by US and European govern-
ments, and fi nanced by the World Bank and other multilateral institutions (as well
as private banks) was frequently premised on radical environmental transformation:
the conversion of rainforest to cattle pasture, the damming of rivers, rapid urbanisa-
tion, the widespread use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture. The
often disastrous environmental implications of such practices were soon apparent,
and by the 1970s and 1980s came under steady criticism from an increasingly
infl uential and well-institutionalised environmental movement in the USA and
Europe. These concerns emerged most visibly in the discourse of sustainable devel-
opment, fi rst proposed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature
