ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. It provides a comprehensive overview of the very rich thinking about environmental issues which has grown up in Russia since the nineteenth century, a body of knowledge and thought which is not well known to Western scholars and environmentalists. Furthermore, it acknowledges the relatively limited engagement with the work of Russian geographers in the English-language literature in spite of their discipline's enduring efforts both to describe and explain the functioning of the physical environment and their understated attempts to contribute to broader understandings of anthropogenic environmental change. A focus on the Russian geographical tradition draws attention to a range of themes which tend to remain rather muted in the Anglo-North American tradition. The discussion at the time rarely focuses on issues central to the present work, one understands of Soviet scientific attitudes and of the Russian.
