Environmental geography
Environmental geography examines interlinkages between human and natural systems. This discipline combines parts of human geography and physical geography.
Introduction
History of environmental geography
Environmental determinism
Separation of human and physical geography
Environmental movement
Renewed study in nature-society relations
Branches of environmental geography
Hazards
Hazards research includes study of human-made (anthropogenic), environmental (natural), and blended disasters. Hazards frequently studied include: fire, drought, earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornados, toxins, pollution, and more. This study is intricately tied to risk analysis.
Energy and resource geography
Cultural and political ecology
Environmental perception
Environmental perception is the study of both individual and group understandings of the environment, the creation of those understandings, and their impacts on decisionmaking.
Systems theory
Landscape studies
Landscape studies involves the interactions between humans and the environment in concrete areas. The term landscape comes from the German Landschaft, referring the the area that one's eye can comprehend in a single view. This work includes study of both physical and human systems, with much attention paid to cultural, political, and aesthetic aspects. Carl Sauer's work traced the transition from a physical landscape to a cultural landscape, marked and defined by human activity.
Marxian environmental geography
Sustainability
Environmental geography is one of many disciplines active in the study of sustainability and sustainable development. Work in this branch includes economic, social, and environmental development. Specific topics include food, energy, the built environment, population, consumption, modernization, conservation, globalization, and others.
Environmental governance
Environmental justice
Environmental justice is a term that includes both the academic study of disparate environmental impacts as well as activism to address those impacts. This body of study grew out of the anti-toxic movement of the 1980's, and the findings of the time that environmental harms often correlated with race, class, or other axes of difference.
Selected list of notable environmental geographers
- Gilbert Fowler White (1911-2006) - central figure in natural hazards research
- Carl Sauer (1889-1975) - developed idea of cultural landscapes which evolved into cultural ecology
- Yi-fu Tuan (1930-) - seminal work in environmental perception
- David Harvey (1935-) - integrated the environment into Marxist geography