Environmentalism

• Environmentalism has two linked meanings in geography.
  • In the history of geographical thought, it is the paradigm that explains human life, culture and development mainly through the physical environment. In this sense it is almost a synonym for environmental determinism and its family of related views.
  • In its modern sense, it is an ethical, social and political movement to protect the environment from harmful human activity. It seeks to change economic and political organisation and humanity’s view of its place in nature.
• The bridge between the two is geography’s oldest theme, the man–environment relationship. The question has turned from “how does nature shape people?” to “how are people reshaping nature, and within what limits?”
• Modern environmentalism entered human geography through the relevance movement of the 1970s. It drew on welfare geography, with its concern for human welfare, and on radical geography, which tied environmental damage to power and capitalism.

Environmentalism as a Paradigm through History

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Views of Nature and Society

• Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967) traces three ideas through Western thought:
  • humanity in harmony with a designed nature;
  • humanity shaped by nature (environmental influence);
  • humanity as modifier of nature.
• East and West differed in emphasis:
  • The old cultures of monsoon Asia mostly saw nature as a benevolent provider to be preserved. Use was kept within nature’s power to renew itself.
  • The Hebrew and Greek traditions grew in harsher settings, where nature had to be conquered. The industrial West later treated nature as “usufruct”, a resource to be used, a view that also excused the exploitation of the weak and of colonies.
• The Indian tradition treats man as part of nature: sacred groves, the protection of trees and animals, and the merit of planting trees and building tanks.
  • The Bishnois of Rajasthan, whose members died protecting khejri trees at Khejarli (1730), are often cited as an early conservation movement.

Classical and Early-Modern Environmentalism

• From Hippocrates (Airs, Waters, Places) and Aristotle to Strabo, ancient writers explained the health, temperament and politics of peoples by climate and site.
• Arab scholars such as Al-Masudi and Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377) read human character from climatic zones.
• In the Enlightenment, Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) linked climate to laws and government. Immanuel Kant and Carl Ritter accepted environmental influence on human character, and Henry Thomas Buckle tied civilisation to climate, soil and food.
• Limitation: these were speculative generalisations, often flattering the author’s own people as the product of the “best” climate.

Scientific Environmentalism after Darwin (1859–1920s)

• Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) made adaptation, struggle and selection the language of science. Herbert Spencer carried it into society as Social Darwinism.
• Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) gave environmentalism its scientific form in the German school: Anthropogeographie (1882, 1891), the organic state and Lebensraum (1901).
• Ellen Churchill Semple (Influences of Geographic Environment, 1911) and Ellsworth Huntington (Civilization and Climate, 1915) made it the leading view in the American school.
  • William Morris Davis defined geography as the relation between inorganic control and organic response.
• Why it flourished: it offered a “scientific” justification for European imperialism. Racial and regional differences in achievement were blamed on nature, so empire looked like nature’s verdict.
• Dissent: Peter Kropotkin argued that nature teaches mutual aid and co-operation, not only struggle. The Russian school as a whole kept its distance from strict determinism.

Forms of Environmentalism

• Environmentalism is best read as a family of positions on a spectrum, running from “nature controls man” to “man controls nature”. Each grew as a reaction to the excess of another, and together they make up the long debate between determinism and possibilism.

• Environmental determinism: man is a passive product of climate, relief and location. “Similar locations lead to similar modes of life.”
• Possibilism: the French school made man an active partner. Lucien Febvre wrote that there are “no necessities, but everywhere possibilities”.
• Middle positions: Griffith Taylor’s neo-determinism and Spate’s probabilism accepted human choice within limits that nature sets or weights.
• Cultural determinism reversed the arrow: the environment is neutral, and ideas and technology decide its use.

The Eclipse of Environmentalism (1920s–1960s)

• Critiques piled up:
  • Harlan H. Barrows (Geography as Human Ecology, 1923) preferred the study of human adjustment to environmental control.
  • Carl O. Sauer (The Morphology of Landscape, 1925) made culture the agent and the cultural landscape the result.
  • Karl Wittfogel (1929) argued that organised human labour, not nature directly, moulds the material base of societies.
  • Richard Hartshorne (1939) rejected the split of nature as cause and man as effect, because it broke the unity of geography.
• Empirical failure: similar environments carry very different societies. Examples include the Bakarwals and Kashmiris of Jammu and Kashmir, and the Tharus and Sikhs of the Tarai.
• Ideological taint: links with racism, imperialism and the expansionism of German Geopolitik made “determinism” a discredited word after 1945.
• The quantitative revolution of the 1950s–60s treated space as a geometric plane. The physical environment became a background variable, and human geography drifted away from nature.

Neo-Environmentalism: The Rejuvenation of Environmentalism

• From the 1960s the environment returned to the centre of geography in a new form. The concern was no longer nature’s control of man but man’s damage to nature and the limits within which development must run.
• Neo-environmentalism is used in two senses:
  • sometimes for Griffith Taylor’s stop-and-go determinism, a “new” environmentalism;
  • more widely, for this post-1960s ecological environmentalism, which joins physical limits with human responsibility.

Why It Returned

• Visible crises: pesticides, smog, oil spills, nuclear fallout, deforestation, species loss and the oil shocks of the 1970s.
• Landmark works:
  • Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) on pesticides.
  • Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), a neo-Malthusian view that population growth drives environmental damage. Its remedy was zero population growth.
  • Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (1971), which blamed polluting technology and the economic system rather than numbers.
  • The Limits to Growth (1972), the Club of Rome report by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows and colleagues. Its computer model warned that exponential growth would overshoot the earth’s resources within a century.
• The relevance movement in geography asked what the discipline was for. Environmental quality became a test of relevance.
  • The Association of American Geographers set up a panel on environmental education and a Task Force on Environmental Quality (report 1973). It argued that geographers were well placed to lead environmental education because of their breadth, their multi-causal view of explanation and their spatial focus.
• Roots in the discipline: George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) had already shown man as a destructive agent. The Princeton symposium Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (1956), shaped by Sauer, revived the theme.

Ecological, Systems and Hazard Approaches

• Human ecology (Barrows) and cultural ecology (Julian Steward, the Berkeley school) studied adaptation rather than control.
• The ecosystem as a geographical model: David Stoddart (1967) proposed it as the integrating concept of geography. Robert Bennett and Richard Chorley’s Environmental Systems (1978) linked physical and human systems.
• Hazard research: Gilbert F. White (Human Adjustment to Floods, 1945) and later Ian Burton and Robert Kates (The Environment as Hazard, 1978) studied how people perceive and adjust to floods, droughts and cyclones.
  • Their key finding was that hazard losses depend on human choices (settling floodplains, building embankments) as much as on nature.

Ecocentrism and Technocentrism

• Timothy O’Riordan (Environmentalism, 1976) described environmentalism as “a collage of values” and, first of all, a social movement. He identified two poles, and held that the tension between them gives environmentalism its dynamism:

• Gaianism: James Lovelock’s Gaia (1979) treats the earth as a self-regulating system in which life keeps conditions fit for life. If disturbed, Gaia will readjust and survive, but not necessarily the human species.
• Deep ecology: Arne Naess (1973) distinguished shallow ecology, concerned with human welfare, from deep ecology, which affirms the intrinsic value of all life.
• Anthropocentric versus biocentric: a parallel division separates human-centred concern (health, recreation, resources) from life-centred ethics.
• In practice most environmental policy mixes both. Biodiversity conservation, for instance, combines biosphere reserves (ecocentric) with radio-collaring and captive breeding (technocentric).
• Indian expression: the Chipko movement (1973), the Appiko movement in Karnataka and Mahatma Gandhi’s ethic of limited wants are read as Gaian or deep-ecological practice.

Sustainable Development

• The Brundtland Report (Our Common Future, 1987) defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. It sought a middle path between developers and ecologists.
• O’Riordan separated sustainable utilisation, using a resource no faster than it renews, from sustainability, a wider ethic of accountability to future generations and other species.
• Critics call it a convenient formula that keeps growth going while avoiding hard questions of distribution and power.

Political Ecology and Environmental Justice

• Political ecology explains environmental degradation through political economy: land rights, markets, debt and state policy.
  • Piers Blaikie’s The Political Economy of Soil Erosion (1985) and Blaikie and Harold Brookfield’s Land Degradation and Society (1987) showed that poor farmers degrade land because they are marginalised, not because they are ignorant.
• Radical geographers such as Neil Smith (Uneven Development, 1984) argued that capitalism produces nature, which dissolves the old nature–society divide.
• Environmental justice asks who bears pollution and displacement, and who gains. Indian examples include the Narmada Bachao Andolan (from 1985) over dam displacement and the 2013 Supreme Court-ordered gram sabha consultations on bauxite mining in the Niyamgiri hills.

The Anthropocene and the New Limits

• Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) proposed the Anthropocene: humanity has become a geological force.
  • In March 2024 the International Union of Geological Sciences rejected it as a formal epoch, but it remains a powerful framing concept.
• Planetary boundaries (Johan Rockström and colleagues, 2009): the 2025 Planetary Health Check found seven of nine boundaries crossed, with ocean acidification the latest.
• The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2021–23) separates soft limits to adaptation, which technology and policy can shift, from hard limits, which cannot be crossed. It is a modern echo of Taylor’s “stop” signal.
• Neo-environmental determinism: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and work linking tropical disease to poverty brought environmental explanation back.
  • Andrew Sluyter (2003) warned that it repeats colonial habits of thought. Mike Hulme (2011) warned against climate reductionism.
• The rejuvenation is real but transformed. Environmentalism now speaks the language of limits, risk, vulnerability and resilience, not of racial or civilisational ranking. Human action, not nature, is the main driver of change.

The Environmental Movement

• Early conservation: Marsh (1864) and Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the US Forest Service (1905), pioneered the wise use of resources. John Muir stood for wilderness preservation.
• Organised movement: the WWF (1961), Friends of the Earth (1969) and Greenpeace (1971) grew into international lobbies with national branches.
• Green politics:
  • The first green parties were the United Tasmania Group and New Zealand’s Values Party (1972). The first green member of a national parliament was elected in Switzerland in 1979.
  • Green parties entered mainstream politics in Europe from the 1980s.
• Global environmental governance:
  • the Stockholm Conference (1972), which created UNEP;
  • the Rio Earth Summit (1992), with Agenda 21 and the conventions on climate and biodiversity;
  • the Kyoto Protocol (1997);
  • the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement (2015).
• India:
  • People’s movements: Chipko (1973), Silent Valley (protected as a national park in 1984), Appiko and Narmada.
  • Laws and institutions: the Ministry of Environment (1985), the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and the National Green Tribunal (2010).
  • Recent commitments: environmental impact assessment, Mission LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment, 2022) and a net-zero target for 2070.

Evaluation

• Continuity: environmentalism is geography’s most persistent paradigm. It was dethroned in the 1920s, sidelined by spatial science, and rejuvenated by ecology, climate change and the Anthropocene.
• Change of direction: the classical form made nature the cause and man the effect. The modern form makes man the main agent of environmental change, but accepts nature’s limits and feedbacks.
• Strengths: it restores the unity of physical and human geography, gives geography a social role in policy and education, and links local land use to global systems.
• Weaknesses: it can slide back into determinism (climate reductionism) or into technocratic management that ignores power and justice. Its ecocentric wing can neglect the development needs of the poor.
• Current view: neither master nor neutral stage, the environment sets constraints and probabilities. Human choices, shaped by power and culture, decide how close societies come to those limits.