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Environmental Studies and Human Geography

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DOI: 10.1016/B978-008044910-4.00280-7

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Abstract
Human geography and environmental studies identify and analyze environmental changes and human–environment
relations in distinct yet interrelated ways. The phrase ‘human–environment geography’ describes a subfield of human
geography that is useful in capturing geographical work that is most directly comparable to research and teaching in
environmental studies. Human–environment geography and environmental studies evolved along different intellectual
trajectories, which partially explain many of the peculiarities of the two fields. The two fields converge in their embrace
of pluralism, and their mutual concern with material transformations of the environment, human drivers of such
transformations, and human conceptions of nature. Conversely, the fields diverge along several lines, including dis-
ciplinary training, relative attention to social theory, and degree of engagement with public policy. Consideration of the
convergences and divergences across the fields of human geography and environmental studies draw out the ways in
which practitioners and scholars in each field might draw lessons regarding the innovations and shortcomings of their
counterparts.

F
Keywords
Ecological sciences; Environmental geography; Environmental policy; Environmental politics; Environmental studies;

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Human–environment geography; Human geography; Political ecology.

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Author and Co-author Contact Information

PR
C. Sneddon
Dartmouth College
Hanover
NH 03755
USA
Tel.: þ 1 (603) 646 0451 D
N
Email: CSSneddon@Dartmouth.Edu
O
C
SE
ER
VI
SE
EL
 HUGY00280

HUGY00280

A0005 Human Geography and Environmental Studies

C. Sneddon, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH, USA
& 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

planet. Human–environment geography, as with human

Glossary
geography, employs a diverse array of qualitative and
G0005 Environmental Policy The realm of public policy that
quantitative methods and methodologies, including
deals explicitly with environmental concerns through
case studies, historical research, textual analysis, survey
creation, negotiation, and implementation of
research, and statistical analysis among others. Environ-
environmental legislation and regulations at local,
mental studies, in a fashion similar to human–environ-

F
national, and global levels.
ment geography, examines how human interactions
G0010 Environmental Politics The realm of politics that

O
produce environmental changes and how those changes
deals explicitly with social conflicts over the access and
in turn influence social dynamics. It is a broad field of
use of resources, conflicting discourses over nature, and
inquiry that includes within its purview both the natural

O
debates over solutions to environmental deterioration.
environment and human-produced environments such as
G0015 Human–Environment Geography One of the core
cities and agricultural systems. Environmental studies is

PR
areas of the field of geography, focusing on the dynamic
strongly oriented toward the study of current environ-
interactions, at multiple scales, between the social
mental problems and the complex set of biophysical,
sphere and a range of biophysical systems.
economic, political, and cultural dynamics that have
G0020 Interdisciplinarity An approach to education and
produced them. The problem-oriented nature of en-
research that emphasizes the need to employ and
vironmental studies has produced a strong set of linkages
integrate multiple approaches to knowledge production
in order to confront the full complexity of societal
D
between its practitioners and a variety of policymakers
and advocates in government agencies, the popular
N
problems.
media, independent research institutes, nongovernmental
G0025 Sustainability The assortment of theories and
organizations, and community groups.
O

practices that define and put into practice a normative

Roughly 400 colleges and universities in North P0010
vision of how to reconcile human activities with the long-
America offer an undergraduate program in environ-
C

term integrity of the planet’s biophysical systems.

mental studies, and there are over 220 graduate programs
in environmental studies. According to Educational
SE

Directories Unlimited, an online guide to graduate pro-

grams, there are an additional 150 graduate programs in
environmental studies and hundreds of undergraduate
S0005 Introduction programs with an environmental studies orientation be-
ER

yond North America. This represents a remarkable rate

P0005 As academic disciplines, the fields of geography and of growth for a discipline that originated in the late
environmental studies share common themes of study, 1960s. While environmental studies is by definition an
theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches. interdisciplinary field of study that embraces education
VI

They also differ according to how their relative co- and training in the natural sciences, social sciences, and
herence as a distinct academic discipline, how they define humanities, a majority of programs at both the under-
and employ interdisciplinarity, and how they relate to graduate and graduate level are firmly oriented toward
SE

public opinion and public policy. Human geography is
the part of geography that explores the patterns and
processes that shape social relations and delineates
human interactions with the environment. Human–
EL
environmental science. The variety of disciplinary ex-
pertise and course offerings in environmental studies is
quite broad. Topics of study in the biophysical sciences
include environmental chemistry, environmental tox-

environment geography deals directly with the latter, and
typically requires some understanding of the dynamics of
climatology, geology, ecology, hydrology, biogeography,
and geomorphology, in addition to the multiple historical
and social processes that produce the diversity of cul-
tural, economic, and political institutions across the
icology, geophysical sciences, conservation biology,
wildlife ecology, and host of applied fields oriented
toward natural resources such as fisheries, forestry, water
resources, and the like. The breadth of social science
approaches within environmental studies is similarly

1
 HUGY00280
2 Human Geography and Environmental Studies
wide, spanning anthropology, environmental sociology,
environmental politics, environmental and resource
economics, and geography. While fields from the hu-
manities are not as well represented in environmental
programs, many programs do include a focus on en-
vironmental literature, ecocriticism, or similar areas of
study. Finally, a significant number of programs are ori-
ented toward or include aspects of environmental en-
gineering and public health, while many also have
linkages with environmental law and public policy
programs.
S0010 The Historical Roots of Disciplinary
Identities
The historical trajectories of human–environment geog-
P0015
raphy and environmental studies as academic disciplines
and as approaches to the study of human–environment
relationships provide a foundation for interpreting their
current place within academia and within the public eye.
Human–environment geography, as a core concern of the
broader discipline of geography, has waxed and waned
following the fortunes of its parent discipline from the
time of geography’s formalization within European aca-
demic structures in the late nineteenth century and
throughout its development, particularly in the United
States, during the twentieth century. By contrast, en-
vironmental studies emerged as a response to mounting
societal concerns over environmental pollution, resource
depletion, and nature conservation in the latter half of
the twentieth century. Many of the earliest environ-
C
mental studies programs in Canada and the United States
came about in conjunction with the enactment of a sig-
SE
nificant amount of national environmental legislation in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. The key differences that
drive how scholars in human geography (and sub-
sequently human–environment geography) versus those
in environmental studies interpret environmental change
ER
and human–environment relations derive from the quite
different historical development of the two fields. A
closer examination of these histories reveals, on the one
VI
hand, human–environment geography’s maturation al-
most entirely within the strictures of academic insti-
tutions and, on the other, environmental studies’
SE
emergence in response to an array of external actors and
events located within broader society.
P0020 Geography, and as a result human geography, traces
its roots to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
EL
when it became more or less established as a scholarly
endeavor in a variety of European and North American
academic settings. Geography as the study of human–
environment relations owes its early academic standing
to the efforts of European practitioners – active in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – such as
Alexander von Humboldt and Frederich Ratzel in Ger-
many, Elisée Reclus in France, Joachim Schouw in
Denmark, Vidal de la Blache in France, and Halford
Mackinder in Great Britain. Oftentimes, these efforts to
inculcate geography within academic institutions were
directly linked to the nationalist sentiments and geo-
political aspirations of these scholars’ nation-states,
where the descriptions of the physical and human char-
acteristics of new places were useful to expanding colo-
nial empires. These geographers, through their research,
writings, and participation in pubic forums, sought to
define geography’s unique place in academia as both a
spatial–chorological discipline and a field concerned with
explaining the dialectical relationship between human
activities and environmental processes.
F
In the United States, the human–environment tradi- P0025
tion in geography was carried forward in the early
O
twentieth century by scholars such as William Morris
Davis, Ellsworth Huntington, and Ellen Churchill Sem-
O
ple, all of who strongly advocated the idea that geo-
graphical circumstances determined human behavior.
PR
This perspective, now recognized as environmental de-
terminism, was challenged later in the century through
the work of Harlan Barrows, who called for stronger links
between geography and the budding field of ecology, and
Carl Sauer, whose unique vision of landscapes as mutu-
D
ally constituted by cultural and biophysical processes
dominated discussions of human–environment geog-
N
raphy certainly up to and including the 1960s. From the
late 1960s to the present, however, geography’s concern
O
with the human–environment condition has witnessed an
efflorescence of theoretical and methodological ap-
proaches. These approaches – ranging from older tradi-
tions such as human ecology, cultural ecology, and
hazards research through to more recent iterations such
as political ecology and the social construction of nature
school – have been influenced by a variety of social
theories that became incorporated into the discipline
during this period. The most prominent of these, from
the standpoint of human–environment geography, in-
clude Marxist political economy, ecological Marxism,
feminist theory, post-structuralism, social constructivism,
and more recently postcolonialism, science studies, and
cultural studies. These perspectives have at times rested
uncomfortably against human–environment geography’s
continuing engagement with ecological theory and a
broad array of biophysical sciences. During the past two
decades, scholars working within human–environment
geography have also widened their geographical purview.
The array of approaches collectively identified as polit-
ical ecology have been particularly ardent about in-
vestigating human–environment relations in the Global
South, where a majority of research has focused on the
intersections among resource-dependent communities,
developmental states, and an evolving global economy.
 HUGY00280
Tellingly, efforts to define the essential character of
human–environment geography and its place within the
social sciences by its practitioners throughout the twen-
tieth century have taken place almost entirely within
academic settings.
P0030 Environmental studies, although its roots can in part
be traced back to the nineteenth century and the seminal
work of George Perkins Marsh, is a relatively young
discipline in terms of academic recognition, becoming
more or less firmly established in a variety of North
American and European institutions in the 1970s and
1980s. In contrast to human–environment geography, the
origins of environmental studies and the continuing ac-
tivities of its practitioners are the result of a series of
dialogs between academic institutions and individuals
and events located within broader societal contexts.
Authors whose scientifically grounded arguments were
explicitly targeted at a broader audience – including
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Barry Commoner’s The
Closing Circle, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and a
host of others – exerted significant influence over the
early development of environmental studies. Environ-
mental studies owes its existence, in large part, to the
efforts of students and faculty who became intellectually
and politically engaged with the debates over environ-
mental quality and resource exhaustion ignited by these
widely read works and the ensuing public debates over
their ramifications.
P0035 In the United States, as support both within and
outside of academia grew for programs of higher edu-
cation focused on environmental problems, a number of
undergraduate programs emerged in the 1970s. These
C
early programs, such as those at Dartmouth College and
Middlebury College in the northeastern United States
SE
during the late 1960s and early 1970s, linked together a
loose confederation of faculty whose primary research
and teaching responsibilities tended to be identified with
traditional disciplines. The primary goal at these and
other liberal arts institutions was to raise awareness of the
ER
rapidity and intensity of environmental changes con-
fronting the planet and to educate undergraduate stu-
dents in both the fundamentals of environmental science
VI
and how environmental knowledge is applied in society
at large through policy and advocacy mechanisms. At the
graduate level, environmental studies became interlinked
SE
with applied sciences, focusing on the training of re-
source professionals who upon graduation typically
found employment with state and federal resource
management agencies or specific resource-based indus-
EL
tries. For example, a number of natural resource and
forestry schools and colleges embedded within broader
university settings, including those at Yale University, the
University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, and
many others, broadened their graduate educational pro-
grams to embrace growing societal concerns over the
Human Geography and Environmental Studies 3
long-term effects of pollutants, the global degradation of
ecological systems, biodiversity loss, and, significantly,
the need to address these problems through policy
measures. In addition, research and writing in environ-
mental studies have both critically analyzed and been
influenced by a range of philosophical perspectives, in-
cluding the ecocentrism of the ‘deep ecology’ movement,
James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, and ecofeminism.
Programs in environmental studies, in North America, P0040
Europe, and elsewhere, have increasingly taken a global
perspective. This has manifested in two distinct ways.
The first concerns recognition on the part of scholars in
environmental studies that the scope of planetary prob-
lems such as climate change, transboundary pollution,
degradation of marine ecosystems, changes in biogeo-
F
chemical cycles, and biodiversity loss are genuinely
global in scope. Again, foundational publications identi-
O
fied with environmental studies – for example, The Limits
to Growth by Donella Meadows and her co-authors, the
O
World Conservation Strategy by IUCN (World Conser-
vation Union), and the assortment of publications put out
PR
by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) – bolster the claim of environmental studies
scholars that biophysical processes transcend political
boundaries and the resolution of global environmental
problems’ demands an international perspective. The
D
second global perspective focuses on questions com-
monly grouped under the rubric of environment and
N
development studies. As questions over North–South
relations, intergenerational equity, and sustainable de-
O
velopment were catapulted into the public sphere by
publication of the Brundtland Commission’s Our Common
Future in the late 1980s and global fora such as the United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED) and the follow-up World Summit on Sus-
tainable Development (WSSD) in 1992 and 2002, re-
spectively, environmental studies began to embrace
difficult questions regarding rapid ecological changes in
the developing regions of Latin America, Africa, and Asia
in the context of industrialization, agricultural intensifi-
cation, and diverse political settings.
Converging Identities and Themes S0015
Human geography and environmental studies converge P0045
in their embrace of a plurality of approaches to their core
subject matter, and in their mutual concern with material
transformations of the environment, human drivers of
such transformations, and human conceptions of nature.
Perhaps the most-striking similarity between human
geography and environmental studies is that both are
fundamentally interdisciplinary in their outlook on
knowledge production, although this becomes evident
within the two fields in different ways. Both fields draw
 HUGY00280
4 Human Geography and Environmental Studies
on multiple epistemological and methodological tradi-
tions – ranging from positivist to constructivist and from
quantitative to qualitative – to examine the dialectical
relations between social and biophysical changes. There
are several hybrid approaches, inclusive of scholarly
traditions beyond geography and environmental studies,
which defy easy categorization, but include fields such as
cultural ecology, human ecology, political ecology, en-
vironmental geography, and numerous others. The ac-
ceptance of interdisciplinarity as a fundamental condition
of human–environment geography and environmental
studies has provided a unique opportunity for re-
searchers in both fields to employ multiple methods and
transcend narrow discipline-based topics and approaches.
In environmental studies, in particular, it also signifies
recognition that the resolution of problems brought
about by anthropocentric forms of environmental deg-
radation demands an approach able to understand and
interpret the economic, cultural, and political aspects of
biophysical change.
P0050 Despite the similar claims of interdisciplinarity by
advocates of both human–environment geography and
environmental studies, scholars typically come to the
fields via quite different educational pathways. Most
faculty members in geography enter into academic pos-
itions thoroughly socialized into the traditions and con-
ventions of the discipline, broad as these might be in
terms of the physical and human branches. As a result,
human geographers, and in particular human–environ-
ment geographers, tend to have at least tangential
experience in reconciling their methodological predi-
lections with the substantially different and largely
C
quantitative orientations of their colleagues in physical
geography and the mapping sciences. Scholars within
SE
environmental studies programs, by contrast, tend to
settle within their academic bases after attaining far more
specialized degrees from a wide variety of natural and
physical sciences (e.g., ecology, conservation biology, and
biogeochemistry), social sciences (e.g., political science,
ER
economics, sociology, anthropology, history, and geog-
raphy), and humanities (e.g., philosophy and literature
programs). Moreover, this fragmentation of disciplinary
VI
identities in environmental studies is in many cases re-
inforced by the institutional milieu in which programs
reside. Many, if not a large majority of environmental
SE
studies programs, consist of loose confederations of in-
dividual faculty members whose primary intellectual
attachment remains with the academic field within which
they received their graduate degrees. Institutionally,
EL
many faculties in environmental studies programs are
more strongly linked to their primary departmental
home – whether it be in chemistry, the biological sci-
ences, sociology, political science, or within a pro-
fessional school – than to their colleagues and students in
environmental studies. While the reverse may also be
true, the implications of this are profound. At one level,
there are fewer institutional incentives within environ-
mental studies to undertake the necessary theoretical and
philosophical work of carefully defining, and on occasion
defending, a shared intellectual identity. Such identity
crises have also plagued human geography, and both
fields at various times and places in their histories have
had to defend their continuing relevance when threa-
tened by dwindling resources and academic hierarchies
antagonistic toward their fundamentally interdisciplinary
worldview.
Thematically, environmental studies and human–en- P0055
vironment geography encompass a similar collection of
research topics. A first revolves around the actual ma-
terial transformations of landscapes and waterscapes
F
precipitated by various human activities. A second area of
shared inquiry concerns the creation and maintenance of
O
institutions (e.g., social conventions, regulations, and
policies) for governing, exploiting, and managing the
O
environment. A third focuses on the roles played by
different actors, collectively and individually, in facili-
PR
tating, compounding, or mitigating biophysical changes
that are ecologically and socially disruptive. Finally, a
fourth region of shared concerns relates to human per-
ceptions of nature and how conceptions of nature have
shifted over time. Within these broad areas, researchers
D
in human–environment geography and environmental
studies have carried out a host of interrelated research
N
projects characterized by theoretical sophistication and
empirically detailed accounts of human–environment
O
relations in diverse locations and at household, com-
munity, national, regional, and transnational scales. More
notable examples include: the multiple political and
economic drivers of deforestation in regions as diverse as
the northwest coast of North America, the Amazon River
basin, and the island of Borneo; the multiple historical
determinants of environmental change in the Sahel re-
gion of western and northern Africa; the transformation
of various river systems across the planet via the con-
struction of large dams and irrigation infrastructure to
promote both industrialization and agricultural intensi-
fication; the role of different state agents in facilitating,
inhibiting, and reversing harmful ecological changes
brought about by human production and consumption;
and the shifting understandings of what constitutes na-
ture exhibited by different cultural traditions at different
times and places. While the relative bias toward the en-
vironmental sphere versus the social sphere may be
pronounced in many of these studies, all endeavor to
balance knowledge of biophysical changes with know-
ledge of the human societies whose internal and external
interactions with a host of cultural, economic, and pol-
itical forces produce and shape these changes.
 HUGY00280
S0020 Diverging Identities and Approaches
P0060 In many ways, the divisions within environmental studies
mirror the broad division within geography between the
realms of the human and the physical. If anything, en-
vironmental studies is pulled in even more directions,
attempting to straddle multiple fault lines within and
between the natural sciences, social sciences, and hu-
manities. As a result, much of the work that comes to be
associated with environmental studies might more ac-
curately be described as the work of a chemist, Earth
scientist, anthropologist, ecologist, or sociologist working
within the broad rubric of environmental studies. Fur-
thermore, most research produced by practitioners of
environmental studies tends to be published in journals
that are more specialized in orientation. There are rela-
tively few outlets for publication that are unequivocally
geared toward a field broadly defined as environmental
studies. Moreover, there are comparatively few, if any,
professional associations or regularly scheduled confer-
ences targeted specifically to scholars and educators
within (in the broadest sense) environmental studies.
Thus, it is impossible to identify with any precision what
a typical researcher in environmental studies might
produce. Much of the interdisciplinary work of en-
vironmental studies is carried out primarily through
curriculum development and teaching, not necessarily
through collaborative research, although there are major
exceptions. Human–environment geography certainly
suffers from a similarly fragmented identity, but the
discipline of geography has a wide array of institutional
norms and mechanisms (e.g., journals, professional soci-
C
eties, and regular meetings) that generate and maintain
research affinities for scholars of human–environment
SE
relations.
P0065 Despite the observation that both environmental
studies and human–environment geography champion a
range of epistemological and methodological positions,
the fields manifest this intrinsic interdisciplinarity in
ER
distinct ways. At the broadest levels, a majority of en-
vironmental studies programs in North America, Europe,
Australia, and elsewhere emphasize environmental sci-
VI
ence over approaches grounded in the social sciences or
humanities. Within those programs that seek a greater
divisional balance, faculty members in the natural sci-
SE
ences and social sciences are more equally represented.
With relatively few exceptions, programs with a signifi-
cant number of scholars approaching environmental
studies through a humanities-oriented lens are rare. In-
EL
side those programs that have achieved a relative balance
between environmental scientists and social scientists, the
social scientists in such settings tend to be grounded
more in quantitative social science traditions such as
environmental and resource economics, and the policy
sciences. Indeed, while a plurality of disciplinary training
Human Geography and Environmental Studies 5
(e.g., the ecological sciences, environmental health, en-
vironmental economics, ecological anthropology, and
environmental history) is well represented in environ-
mental studies programs, methodological pluralism and a
willingness to accept qualitative approaches as viable and
crucial are more contentious issues.
In human–environment geography, one of the most P0070
obvious manifestations of interdisciplinarity is through
an engagement with a diverse array of social theories and
the methodological options such theories imply. The
recent history of political ecology is instructive in this
regard. At the time of its materialization as an important
research area within geography and cognate disciplines in
the 1980s, political ecology undertook a melding of
political–economic approaches grounded primarily in
F
Marxist theories and a refined understanding of eco-
logical processes. The result was an approach that sought
O
explanations of environmental transformations within a
host of causal mechanisms, ranging from the land man-
O
agement decisions of individual farmers, to state-initiated
development programs and the policies of international
PR
financial institutions. In subsequent years, human–en-
vironment geographers working within a political ecol-
ogy framework expanded their theoretical repertoire to
include, for example, feminist theories to interpret the
gendered character of resource use and management, and
D
post-structuralist theories to demonstrate the historically
and socially contingent character of how different actors
N
perceive and act upon environmental changes. Concerns
over power relations, culturally mediated understandings
O
of nature, and the highly complex character of explan-
ations of environmental transformations led political
ecologists to develop and employ an array of qualitative
research designs and methods, including case-study ap-
proaches, ethnographies, interviews, oral histories, par-
ticipant observation, and textual analyses. Thus, while
interdisciplinarity in environmental studies is best rep-
resented by specialists from the natural and social sci-
ences engaging in collaborations with colleagues with
different methodological tool kits, interdisciplinarity in
human–environment geography is best represented by
the diverse approaches, epitomized in the variety of so-
cial theories incorporated into geographical research,
employed by single researchers and their collaborators.
In part, due to specific institutional histories, there are P0075
important differences in how human geographers and
practitioners of environmental studies, in general, ap-
proach the production of knowledge and, once produced,
communicate geographical or environmental knowledge
to different audiences. While these differences should not
be overstated – there are individuals and specific pro-
grams that transcend this dichotomy – they are important
to an understanding of each field’s institutional cultures
and broad outlook on research and education. Due to its
historical development in response to public calls for
 HUGY00280
6 Human Geography and Environmental Studies
research leading to resolution of environmental prob-
lems, environmental studies has a long tradition of direct
engagement with representatives of government agencies,
nongovernmental organizations, and to some degree the
private sector. For example, a good deal of the early re-
search conducted by scholars in environmental studies
during the 1970s was directly aimed at effecting changes
in environmental policy. This also explains the strong
presence of resource economics, environmental eco-
nomics, and, more recently, ecological economics within
environmental studies programs, since many of the bat-
tles over environmental policy both past and present
revolve around perceived trade-offs between economic
growth and ecological sustainability. The aims of policy-
oriented work in environmental studies revolve around
the desire to insert the results of environmental research
into policy discussions at multiple levels. By contrast,
human–environment geography (and human geography
more broadly) has largely abdicated formal engagement
with public policy, oftentimes assuming a more critical
stance toward the policy realm, particularly where gov-
ernment agents are concerned. While this can in part be
explained by human geography’s intellectual history
within academia, it is also a reflection of many scholars’
insistence that the state, whether through the actions of
specific agencies or broad policy initiatives, is a central
actor in contributing to environmental degradation.
Under this view, a formal engagement with policymakers
is perceived as unnecessarily restrictive in terms of the
types of questions under investigation.
S0025 Lessons and Opportunities
C
P0080 Human geography and environmental studies, as both
SE
disciplinary identities and broad approaches to the study
of human–environment relations, share a great deal. Both
are concerned with identifying, describing, and analyzing
a broad range of biophysical and social processes, fre-
quently with the goal of demonstrating more ecologically
ER
sustainable and socially just modes of human interactions
with the natural world. Both are inherently inter-
disciplinary, attempting to carve out some semblance of
VI
internal coherence while embracing a plurality of epi-
stemological and methodological approaches. This has
led both fields to engage in a certain level of intellectual
SE
hand-wringing – undoubtedly more prominent within
geography – regarding the relative status of their pro-
fessional identity within the broader contours of the
academy. Although these identity crises play out differ-
EL
ently depending on institutional context, all are reflective
of both fields’ continuing struggles to come to grips with
the tension between intellectual clarity and unity on the
one hand and an embrace of pluralism on the other.
P0085 The interrelated notions of sustainable development
and sustainability constitute a potentially fruitful
intellectual region for collaboration between the two
fields. Discourses and policies concerning sustainable
development, following formalization of the concept
within a wide range of governmental and nongovern-
mental forums during the 1990s, have blossomed in re-
cent years. The broad goal of sustainable development is
to reconcile human social and economic practices with
the long-term integrity and resilience of the Earth’s
biophysical systems. The struggle to define and insti-
tutionalize sustainability takes place at many institutional
levels and geographical scales, and this effort holds sig-
nificant consequences for the way people are able to exert
control over resources that influence the sustainability of
their livelihoods. The explicit linking of human activities
and biophysical dynamics within the broad rubric of
F
sustainability studies would seem to offer productive
avenues of research, advocacy, and teaching for both
O
human geographers and practitioners of environmental
studies.
O
Taking account of the quite specific intellectual his- P0090
tories, different approaches to interdisciplinarity, and
PR
contrasting relationships with the nonacademic world ex-
hibited by environmental studies and human–environment
geography, there are several ways in which the fields might
benefit from the experiences of the other. Environmental
studies would benefit from a deeper engagement with the
D
wide variety of social theories and methodological ap-
proaches currently employed within human–environment
N
geography. Human geography would profit from a more
direct effort to address its research toward a diverse
O
audience of policymakers and citizens. Practitioners of
environmental studies have been more adept in this regard.
As a result, scholars in environmental studies can more
readily make the claim that the knowledge they produce
has a more direct impact on how environmental concerns
are understood, and how biophysical entities are governed
and managed. Yet, because of their general disinterest in
theorizing the multiple social roots of environmental
change, environmental studies scholars risk presenting an
oversimplified and partial explanation of environmental
degradation to policymakers and citizens.
As public concern over environmental issues con- P0095
tinues to increase into the twenty-first century and the
complexity of human–environment relationships con-
tinues to increase, interdisciplinary modes of knowing
will be crucial in increasing public knowledge of a host of
biophysical processes and helping to apply this know-
ledge to the array of local, national, and global en-
vironmental problems that confront human–environment
relations in the twenty-first century. The promise of the
architects of research, education, and outreach initiatives
in both human–environment geography and environ-
mental studies is that these highly interdisciplinary fields
of inquiry are immanently qualified to address these
problems.
 HUGY00280

Human Geography and Environmental Studies 7

See also: Cultural ecology (00931); Ecology (00682);
Environment (00268); Environmental Degradation
(00566); Environmental policy (00569); Environmental
regulation (00154); History of Geography (00699);
Interdisciplinarity (00288); Political ecology (00580);
Space (00320); Sustainability (00586); Uneven
development (00241).
Further Reading
Dickens, P. (1992). Society and Nature: Towards a Green Social Theory.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Maniates, M. F. and Whissel, J. C. (2000). Environmental studies: The
sky is not falling. BioScience 50, 509--517.
Nelissen, N., van der Straaten, J. and Klinkers, L. (eds.) (1997). Classics
in Environmental Studies: An Overview of Classic Texts in
Environmental Studies. The Hague: International Books.
Neumann, R. (2005). Making Political Ecology. London: Hodder Arnold.
Robbins, P. (2004). Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Turner, B. L. II. (2002). Contested identities: Human–environment
geography and disciplinary implications in a restructuring academy.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, 52--74.

Adams, W. M. (2001). Green Development: Environment and

Sustainability in the Third World (2nd edn.). London: Routledge.

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