Human Geography
Paul Robbins
Department of Geography and Regional Development
University of Arizona
The fields of human and physical geography, though they developed together over centuries since antiquity, have recently become distinct subfields with human geography dedicated to the study of human activity, culture, politics and economics within its spatial and environmental context. Within human geography a range of subfields are dedicated to elements of the environment/society interface, including risk and hazards science, cultural and political ecology, water resource geography, land use and cover change science, and the human dimensions of global change. All of these share an integrative perspective on the mutual influences between humans and non-human systems and actors.
Environment/society research and theory in human geography
Geographic thinking at the end of the 1900s gave a commanding role to non-human influences in explaining society and culture. So-called “environmental determinism,” with its racist, colonial, and imperial implications, was quickly discarded in the early 20th century, leaving a largely descriptive regional tradition in its wake, through which environmental conditions were understood to be important contexts for human society, but were also seen as molded and formed by human impacts. Important to this early modern tradition was geographer Carl Sauer, whose concept of “landscape” integrated cultural and environmental factors to show human history as co-constituted with the environment.
Environmental issues and problems remained important to human geography through the remainder of the century, largely through the field of risk and hazard analysis. Geographer Gilbert White led this field for decades, proposing a pragmatic analysis of the way environmental conditions become “problems,” an approach that paid as much attention to biophysical factors (e.g. flood periodicity) as it did to political and economic ones (e.g. subsidized flood insurance). Simultaneously, an increasing concern for social and economic impacts on environmental conditions led to research on human impacts, especially on land cover, water course modification, soil quality, fire regimes and biodiversity. These fields of research have been reinforced most recently by geographic technologies in remote sensing and Geographic Information Science (GIS). They have also highlighted the degree to which apparently pristine environments have been influenced by human beings and the way in which human-transformed landscapes have sometimes recovered from past disturbances or entered new system states.
Recent environment/society research in human geography has advanced this area of research especially in the interdisciplinary fields of cultural and political ecology. The former field, dedicated to the functional and ecologically-oriented character of human adaptations (including collective action and cooperation) has led to advances in the fields of Farming Systems Research and Human Dimensions of Global Change. The latter field of political ecology, is dedicated to understanding the political and economic forces, interactions, pressures, that condition human activity and environmental impact, specifically examining the impacts on human behaviors of marketization, privatization, technological development, conservation regulation, and a range of other contemporary institutional changes. This field has most recently become more focused on the reciprocal impacts of environmental actors and conditions in influencing politics and economics.
Human Geography and Conservation
Though the field of human geography is therefore diverse and dynamic, the last hundred years has provided a template of somewhat common understandings, all relevant for contemporary conservation problems:
• Human influences on the environment, though they can be serious for environmental conditions and biodiversity, can be ameliorated; some human behaviors in fact enhance or maintain biodiversity.
• Though resources may be contextually “scarce,” human demands, needs, and impacts on the environment are mediated by culture, economics, institutions, and systems of inter and intra-group power.
• Human understanding of environmental conditions and processes (including biodiversity) are inevitably mediated by cultural and social lenses, whether variously understood as perceptions, cognitive frameworks, cultural biases, or discursive regimes, all of which have social and political contexts.
• Though some social or political conditions may give rise to uncooperative behavior and overexploitation of resources, human beings demonstrate a capacity of collective action and cooperation through institutions.
• Individual human behaviors and decisions are deeply influenced by constraining political and economic contexts; few such behaviors, though they may lead to undesirable outcomes relative to the environment, are irrational in their own contexts.
Members of specialty groups within the Association of American Geographers, including Human Dimensions of Global Change and Cultural and Political Ecology conduct research in and around conservation reserves, typically in collaboration with biologists and ecologists. Human Geographers also contribute to conservation efforts using a range of approaches and tools, including GIS and spatial analysis, remote sensing and land cover change science, ethnographic and community-based research, and comparative regional analysis.
While some of the work operates in direct support of conservation efforts providing ethnographic and spatial data for informed planning, a significant body of work seeks to critically evaluate the problems and limits of conservation efforts, assessing both direct interventions as well as the assumptions and philosophies underlying them.
Useful references on environment/society traditions in Human Geography
• Blaikie, P. and H. Brookfield (1987). Land Degradation and Society. London and New York, Methuen and Co. Ltd.
• Harvey, D. (1996). Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge (US), Blackwell Publishers.
• Johnston, R. J., D. Gregory, et al., Eds. (2000). The Dictionary of Human Geography (4th Edition). New York, Blackwell.
• Robbins, P. (2004). Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction. New York, Blackwell.
• Rocheleau, D., B. Thomas-Slayter, et al., Eds. (1996). Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences. New York, Routledge.
• Sauer, C. O. (1965). “The Morphology of Landscape.” J. Leighly Land and Life, 315-350. Berkeley, University of California Press.
• Turner, B. L. (2002). "Contested Identities: Human-Environment Geography and Disciplinary Implications in a Restructuring Academy." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92(1): 52-74.
• Turner, B. L., W. C. Clark, et al., Eds. (1990). The Earth as Transformed by Human Action. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
• White, G. F. (1945). Human adjustments to floods; a geographical approach to the flood problem in the United States. Chicago, University of Chicago, Dept. of Geography, Research paper no. 29.
Useful References on Human Geography and Conservation
• Braun, B. (2002). The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
• Bryant, R. L. (2000). "Politicized moral geographies: Debating biodiversity conservation and ancestral domain in the Philippines." Political Geography 19: 673-705.
• Cronon, W. (1995). The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature. W. Cronon Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, 69-90. New York, W. W. Norton and Co.
• Sundberg, J. (2004). "Identities in the Making: conservation, gender, and race in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala." Gender, Place and Culture 11(1): 43-64.
• Zimmerer, K. (1994). "Human geography and the "new ecology:" The prospect and promise of integration." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84(1): 108-125.
• Zimmerer, K. S. (2000). "The Reworking of Conservation Geographies: Nonequilibrium Landscapes and Nature-Society Hybrids." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90(2): 356-369.
• Zimmerer, K. S. and K. R. Young (1998). Nature's Geography: New Lessons for Conservation in Developing Countries. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press.
Specialty Groups and Professional Organizations
* Association of American Geographers (AAG)
* Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the AAG
* Environmental Perception and Behavioral Geography Specialty Group of the AAG
* Human Dimensions of Global Change Specialty Group of the AAG