ABSTRACT
Environmental geography emerged as a somewhat distinct area of study in the early nineteenth century. Alexander Von Humboldt’s Cosmos and George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, each in different ways, represent foundational early texts. Regrettably, the environmental focus in geography reached its early popular apex soon after with imperialist and often racist-tinged environmental determinist scholarship. By mid-twentieth century, environmental geography all but disappeared into the broader disciplinary retreat from analysis into description, only to resurface with analytical rigor with the rise of Marxist geography in the 1970s. The broad field of political ecology arguably represents the leading edge of contemporary environmental geography.
