ABSTRACT
Reflecting its origins in the natural and social sciences, geography studies the interrelations between humans and the natural environment. In this definition, the term ‘environment’ is broadly understood to include natural processes, conditions and materials such as climate, landforms, soils and resources from and within which people continually make their livelihoods; territory or landscape as the ‘stage’ on which life literally ‘takes place’; and earth distance or space which, whether through friction or content, shapes every movement and is socialized by human activity. In early-modern geography relations with environment were interpreted as determinism-the creation by nature of what were assumed to be innate human characteristics, and the effects of varying mental abilities on the differential evolution of civilizations (Ratzel 1896; Semple 1903; Huntington 1935). The overriding theoretical deficiency of environmental determinism consisted in its positing direct, causal connections between natural processes and racial (natural) characteristics, without adequately conceptualizing the social structures mediating between natural and socialized human being. A theory with this kind and level of deficiency could survive and prosper only because it served ideological purposes in an age of Euro-American imperialism (Peet 1986). The eventual disciplinary reaction against environmental determinism, which gained strength as overt imperial competition declined in relative significance in the interwar years, led to the reorientation of geography-first towards a modified determinism in the regional geography of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, and then towards the spatial dimension of environment in the location theories of the later 1950s and 1960s. Here space was drained of its natural qualities (in idealized landscapes typically called ‘isotropic plains’) while spatial phenomena were ‘explained’ via purely spatial causes in a movement (the ‘quantitative revolution’) later to be diagnosed as having a bad case of ‘spatial fetishism’. Hence, the late 1960s and 1970s saw an increasing disciplinary emphasis on social structures,
both as mediating between nature and human characteristics, and as causes of spatial phenomena. The argument was that in reproducing their existence people combine in social structures, accumulating experience (cultures) and systems of social relations and power (class and gender systems, states, eto.) within which they create their personalities, socialize nature and produce social forms of space.
