ABSTRACT
Human geography has a long tradition of engagement with the relationships between people and nature. From the nineteenth-century contribution of Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie, human geography moved through environmental determinism and possibilism to a focus on anthropogenic change – the manners and circumstances within which people ‘opposed themselves to Nature as one of her own forces’, creating livelihoods embedded in landscapes of human learning, innovation and history. Geographers studied the past and present lifeways and landscapes of their own and other places, reporting on the diverse and intricate arrangements through which people lived within and changed the world. But as we have studied the world, the world has changed. The last 200 years have been a time of massive ecological change, driven by the political and economic expansion of one way of life – industrial capitalism – writing over the landscapes and lifeways of other human cultures. Attention to ‘our place in nature’, must thus engage the institutions by which we organise our own lives and livelihoods if we intend our work to contribute to a human geography that values ourselves and others (human and non-human) now and in the future.
