ABSTRACT
As we argued in the introduction to this book, ‘academic and geopolitical shifts have destroyed the certainties that underpinned the geographical imaginations of development in the mid-twentieth century’. Just as our understandings of development have been challenged, so geographical conceptualisations of the environment have also been transformed in the last three decades. In part this re-evaluation has been stimulated by the emergence of ‘the environment’ as a subject of political concern. Geographers have long been concerned with human-environment relationships. Lowenthal’s 1965 edition of Marsh’s Man and Nature highlighted over a century of scholarly interest, and in the latter part of the twentieth century environmental change remained a core area of geographical research (Lowenthal 1965; Goudie 1979, 1981). Early recognition of a wholly new conceptualisation of the environment as a field of political action was given shape by O'Riordan (1976), and in academic geography there is now a strong focus on exploring conceptualisations of the environment from both cultural and physical perspectives (Redford et al. 2001).
