Introduction

Geography arose in its modern form as the science of environmental relations, specifically the natural determination of human structures and events. This version was discredited in the 1920s but survived in disguise as possibilism in the regional geography of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. With geography’s new fascination with questions of abstract space in the late 1950s and 1960s, disciplinary interest in the natural question diminished. Like many a choice of new direction, this turn towards space had more than a touch of pathos. For exactly as human geography became predominantly the quantitative analysis of space, human societies came into a heightened tension with their natural environments. As Rachel Carson (1962) was warning of the widespread poisoning of the environment, Brian Berry (1961) published the final results of geographic investigations into central places in space. And as scholarly interest in the environment promoted clones of geography under different names (ecology was exactly what human ecology only promised to be), geography in the 1960s became more exclusively the science of a specifically de-naturalized space in the form of location theory.