ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book illustrates the substantive essays of the wide range of problems falling within a humanist paradigm. The convergence of science and technology, once the Promethean harbinger of utopian society, began to emerge more as a central villain in the exhaustion and despoilation of man's own environment. The linking of scientific rationality and politics, once the hallmark of enlightened democracy, moreover, began to emerge as the chief mechanism for a stronger, if more subtle and therefore less penetrable, despotism. The modern humanism had its precedent in that earlier renaissance of the fourteenth century that similarly sought to defend the variety and the integrity of human existence. The connection between humanism and geography is to be found in the literature of environmental and place consciousness.
