ABSTRACT
Yi-Fu Tuan's early research is marked by suspicion of the ideal of harmonious human-environment relations. Simultaneous with his interest in discrepancies between environmental attitudes and actions, Tuan explored teleological aspects of Western environmental philosophy—ways in which earth systems were interpreted as demonstrating the "wisdom of God. During the 1980s the general shift toward academic interest in power relations resonated in Tuan's work. Tuan revealed affection as deeply contaminated by the wish to control and twist something to our purposes and whims. By the 1990s Tuan broadened his focus to the distinctly geographical project of revealing how human experience is structured within a continuum of scales from the home or hearth to the universe or cosmos. In the past decade Tuan has engaged in yet another way with environmental thought by expressing his strong objections to "environmentalist" efforts to understand and mitigate human impacts on ecological systems.
