Am trying to write a paper about the role of human geography in environmental/ecological issues. Encountering some problems. They don’t address environmental issues as a discipline. And I feel like I get slightly scoffed at for mentioning ecological economics. I could not figure out why I couldn’t find much of anything, despite the fact that some spatial economists pointed out (nearly 10 years ago…am I the only one listening?) how, for instance, the ecological footprint could be improved upon from a spatial perspective. When I finally read Castree’s ” Environmental issues: Signals in the noise” in Progress in Human Geography, I could not help but burst out laughing. Some key lines:
It is a peculiar fact that. while the natural environment is one of geography’s key research and teaching foci, it is difficult to specify what the discipline’s distinctive contributions to environmental understanding are.
uh huh…
Here I want to take an honest look at the diversity (incoherence?) and character of human geographers’ research into environmental issues.
You noticed?
though strangely environment doesn’t get a formal mention in Holloway et al.’s recent Key concepts in geography (2003) except under the rubric of ‘physical systems’
They are making me read that, and I also noticed.
Theoretically, the most exciting and original thinking about the environment seems to occur in other disciplines. Human geographers acknowledge this fact by importing ideas from sociology, science studies and philosophy (among others). These ideas are then finessed and applied to new empirical contexts, but rarely reconstructed.
Maybe I will try if my patience for the discipline does not run out this week. Back to my comment above, that some suggestions came 10 year ago.
Am I exaggerating? When I recently attended an environmental reading group in London, an eminent environmental sociologist expressed delight and surprise that human geographers were studying environmental issues too!
Geographers also seem surprised that I am studying environmental issues, despite being in the Faculty of Environment.
i am glad he resisted the trend by not reducing “environment” to “resource management”, the latter being terminology I really don’t like at all, because it does not invoke understandings of the impact of the economic (capitalist) system.
What has this meant for me this term? All of my papers have involved reconceptualizing work from other disciplines into geographic inquiry.
