ABSTRACT
In retrospect it is clear that Semple’s book facilitated a (re)turn to environmentalism in geographical scholarship, and that it contributed to the discipline’s ‘entry into modern science’ – two issues bound up in a positive reception of the text and the ideas it sought to communicate. The response to Influences varied considerably through time, however, as well as between and within the different contexts of its reception: institutional, disciplinary, metropolitan, among
others.5 The dissimilarity in the responses that Semple’s text provoked at the various sites of its reading are striking. These differences in reception and what they reveal about the circulation and consumption of environmentalist thought in American geography are the central concern of this chapter.
