Geography and environmental concerns: A history of parallel efforts, wasted opportunities and competing narratives

Abstract

Geography and environmental concerns: A history of parallel efforts, wasted opportunities and competing narratives

There have always been problems of the type that we now call ‘environmental.’ However, there is no record of societies before ours that created an entire discursive apparatus to deal, with insistence and alarm, with environmental disasters and phenomena of degradation or destruction of ecosystems and biomes. Much less was there any talk of an ‘environmental crisis’ – and there was also no major ‘ecological movement,’ nor even widespread ‘environmentalist’ activism. What seems to have represented new and decisive factors were the advent of capitalism as a mode of production, with the replacement of simple reproduction of capital by expanded reproduction, and the rise of a civil society whose movements began to be driven, in the second half of the 20th century, by increasingly diverse agendas.

How has geography positioned itself in the face of all this? What have been its contributions? Despite studying ‘nature’ with the aim of understanding geobiophysical phenomena, physical geographers have often refrained from taking a strong public stance on environmental issues, omitting themselves from related debates. On the other hand, many human geographers have been seduced by the idea of an “epistemological purification” – that is, by the attempt to transform geography into a “pure” social science, free from the task of studying geobiophysical processes – since the 1970s and 1980s. This ‘epistemological purification’ has had several consequences, starting with the fact that, for many human geographers, ‘nature’ has been reduced at best to a historical-philosophical-sociological discourse on something that, nevertheless, has become uninteresting for them from the perspective of empirical research and detailed knowledge. This ‘epistemological purification’ ultimately fueled a tendency among many physical geographers to increasingly distance themselves from human geography, which made it even more difficult for them to have a solid understanding of issues related to public policies, planning, and territorial management, especially from a socially critical or radical viewpoint.

As a result of all this, geography, in general, and despite many specific technical-scientific contributions (and an immense epistemological potential), has for decades been wasting the opportunity to play a leading role in the public debates that have come to partially dominate the political landscape and the public imagination since the last decades of the 20th century, with its discussions on the climate crisis, environmental injustice, ocean acidification, the unbreathable air in large cities, the extinction of species and the eradication of entire ecosystems and biomes, and so on.

Keywords: Nature and Society; Environmental Concerns; Hybrid Epistemic Objects; Geography.