The Dictionary of Human Geography (56 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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environmental movement
A term that has been used to describe any social or political movement directed towards the preservation of natural resources, the prevention ofpoLLution or the control of land use with the goal of con servation, restoration or improvement of the material environment. Though practices of environmental protection have been conducted in many places around the world for centuries, the movement as a modern phenomenon has its sources in different currents and critiques of modernity. Some of the main currents have their sources in critiques of industrial capitaL ism?s treatment of land and labour as commod ities, others in transcendental, religious and aesthetic thought, still others in the practices of modern rationalist scientific knowledge, and yet others in a troubling search for nature?s ?purity?. These and other tributaries have led to a deeply heterogeneous movement that has proven to be, in the best of times, a broad coalition of caring engaged critics and thoughtful visionaries of alternative futures and, in the worst, a deeply divided, exclusionary and even reactionary force for the reproduction of elitist and racist fears. Given this diverse history, it is no surprise that the movement has many current expressions, including political parties such as the Green Party, community non profit organizations, international lending organizations, radical affinity groups, mainstream environmental organizations, legal advocacy firms, green corporations, and consumers, who operate through just as many diverse political tech niques, including lobbying, scientific research, legislation, education, organizing and direct action. Regardless of its exact origins, members and strategies, the movement?s most powerful contemporary expressions seem to be found in international grassroots communities and organizations that challenge the violent effects of early twenty first century gLobALizatioN. jk (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gelobter, Dorsey, Fields et al. (2005); Gottlieb (2001); Kosek (2003); Guha and Martinez Alier (1998); Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2004); Shutkin (2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
environmental perception
A general term referring to the myriad ways in which actors (usually human) perceive, engage with and sym bolically represent environments. ENviroNMENT in this sense encompasses both the ?natural? and the ?built?, and includes other people and animals as key elements. Equally, perception should be understood in the widest sense, refer ring to both the bio psychological idiosyncrasies of individual sensing, information processing and cognition, and the issue of collective cul tural beliefs, values and aesthetic judgements concerning natural and built environments. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although the study of environmental perception has never been a sustained core element of human geographical research, the topic has been investigated by writers from often quite different intellectual traditions. Early work on perception in geograpHy, in the 1940s and 1950s, was concerned to high light the importance of human perceptions, attitudes and values in shaping beliefs, under standings and decisions concerning the envir onment. Here, an acknowledgement of the nuance and complexity of human perception (and consequent behaviour) was intended as a corrective to human geographies that either ignored the human, or sought to under stand human behaviour in solely rational or objectivist terms. The notion that human geographers should delve into the realms of human perception, meaning and value was further clarified in Kevin Lynch?s (1960) The image of the city, which sought to program matically investigate the relationship between an urban built environment and the mental perceptions of its inhabitants. Lynch?s work was seminal for bEHaviouraL geographies through the 1970s and 1980s, especially inso far as these elaborated the notion of the mental map (Gould and White, 1993 [1974]) as a key element of environmental perception. For the most part scientific, quan titative and empirical in approach, these behavioural geographies connect with broader, interdisciplinary enquiries regarding the role of environmental perception and ?value? vis a vis the design and planning of urban and rural landscapes. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In contrast to the instrumental and objective approach to environmental perception charac teristic of much work in the planning and design fields, Yi Fu Tuan?s (1974) Topophilia: a study of environmental perceptions, attitudes and values articulated a humanistic (see humanistic geography), interpretative and mythopoetic approach to the topic. Tuan was mostly concerned with environmental percep tion at the collective cultural level and, in particular, with illustrating how symbolically meaningful and keenly felt relationships with the environment resonated deeply in both Western and non Western cultures. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The humanistic approach advocated by Tuan and others fell from favour with the advent of critical and radical approaches emphasizing the study of socio economic structures, and the salience and viability of subjective and emotional geographies of envir onmental perception was at risk through much of the 1980s and 1990s. However, over the past ten years, with the emergence of new, non representational approaches to embodi ment, practice and performance, and with the development of vitalist geographies of nature and environment, environmental per ception has re emerged as a substantive issue (see non representationaL theory). A key text here has been the anthropologist Tim Ingold?s (2000) The perception of the environ ment. Ingold queries what he terms the ?build ing perspective? commonly adopted by academics examining questions of environ mental perception and cognition, and imputed to those being studied. This perspective is, he argues, structured around the mistaken assumption of ?an imagined separation between the human perceiver and the world, such that the perceiver has to reconstruct the world, in consciousness, prior to any meaning ful engagement with it? (2000, p.191). According to Ingold, both cognitivist accounts of mental mapping and the humanistic inter pretations of writers such as Tuan equally fall into this epistemoLogicaL trap. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ingold?s alternative approach to environ mental perception which he terms ?the dwelling perspective? draws heavily upon the phenomenological phiLosophy of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau Ponty (see phenomenoLogy). Here, environmental per ception is pictured as an ongoing, reciprocal, bodily process of engagement and involve ment, a process in which ?perceiver? and ?world? are enrolled, and from which they are continuously emergent. This approach to environmental perception, and to self Landscape and cuLture nature relations more generally, has begun to exert consider able influence upon cultural geographers (NEW PARAGRAPH) attending to questions of perception and embodied practice. jwy (NEW PARAGRAPH)
environmental psychology
An interdis ciplinary and disparate field of study, enrolling researchers from psychology, geography, anthropology, sociology, planning and design, environmental psychology examines percep tual, cognitive and embodied relationships between humans and the environment, both ?natural? and ?built?. Environmental psych ology is most closely and commonly associated with forms of behaviouraL geography, prom inent in the 1970s and 1980s (though recently renascent; see Kitchin and Blades, 2001). In contrast to the cognitivist and representational approach to human environment relations usually adopted in this area, phenomenologic ally inspired forms of ecological psychology (e.g. Gibson, 1979) emphasize human(and animal) environment relations in terms of a rolling nexus of conjoined embodied action, perception and affordance. jwy (NEW PARAGRAPH)
environmental racism
Environmental racism includes differential exposure to harm and limiting of access to resources that are reliant on, or that reproduce forms of, racial differentiation. The term is commonly attrib uted to the Reverend Ben Chavis, who in 1982 was the director of the United Church of Christ?s Commission for Racial Justice when toxic chemicals were sited in Warren County, Virginia, because it was predominantly poor and black. Chavis understood this action as part of a broader institutional history of racism in America, and coined the term environmental racism to call attention to the official sanction ing of the life threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in communities of colour, including those of African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos/ Latinos and others (Chavis, 1991). This defin ition has been amended to include not just the actions of institutions, industries and govern ments, but also their failure to act, as in the case of the federal government?s lack of response to Hurricane Katrina (Sze, 2005). In addition, the current definitions hold institutions and individuals accountable whether their acts are intentional or not (Bullard, 1994). Examples include the military industrial complex?s dis proportionate exposure of Native Americans to nuclear fallout and waste dumps, creating large ?national sacrifice zones? in the Southwest (Kuletz, 2001). This, for example, may not be an intentional act, but is still widely considered an example ofenvironmental racism because of (NEW PARAGRAPH) the notions of race inherent in decisions that make dumping in some sites rural reserva tions, poor urban areas, immigrant communi ties more ?logical? than dumping in upper class white communities. Finally, still rare but growing trends in the definitions of environ mental racism are both attention to environ mental justice beyond the USA and attention to the ways in which racism is culturally formed or reproduced through the efforts and exclu sions of the environmental movement itself (Gelobter et al., 2005). jk (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) LaDuke (1999); Pulido (1996); Romm (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
environmental refugees
A term that became used in environmental debates, start ing in the 1980s, to refer to people displaced as a result of immediate environmental change, but also including those forced to move as a result of floods and the other indirect effects of global change. The category carries the rhet orical force of the word ?refugee?, but not the international legal status of a person forced to cross a state boundary. ?Ecological refugee? is a synonym, but has also been used in the nar rower sense of people displaced by the expan sion of commercial farming and forestry operations to feed the expanding metropolitan economy of India and elsewhere. sd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gadgil and Guha (1995); Jacobsen (1988). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
environmental security
As the cold war ended in the late 1980s, policy makers and scholars argued that environmental change was now a major threat to international secur ity: advocates of this ?environmental security? perspective argued that it required top priority from states because of the potential for ser ious disruptions caused by environmental refugees and likely future resource wars. Policy advocacy on these themes was part of the rationale for holding the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sceptical scholars were unconvinced that the causal mechanisms between environmental change, disruption and conflict were proven, however frequently they were asserted as fact. Some suggested that, given the broad general ity of both terms, scholarly research should be focused more narrowly on acute conflict and resources. In the 1990s, scholarly research established that there were some plausible pos sible links between environmental scarcities and conflict, but suggested that simple causal mechanisms were lacking (Homer Dixon, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . It was also concluded that the likelihood of wars between states as a result of environ mental change was small, despite numerous public pronouncements that water wars in particular were an imminent danger in many parts of the world. More generally, the litera ture on the causes of war also suggests that environment has rarely been a direct cause of inter state conflict and, indeed, might present considerable opportunities for cross border co operation and peace building. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Subsequent critical work has pointed out that many of the more alarmist public discussions lack necessary analyses of either the history of resource appropriations in rural areas, or of the disruptions caused by the processes of develop ment, and fail to adequately take these import ant contextual factors into account (Dalby, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Critics have also argued that linking mili tary understandings of security to environmental matters is confusing, both because military solu tions are not the appropriate measures to deal with environmental difficulties andbecause mili tary activities are themselves especially dam aging to environments. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographical scholarship has recently con nected insecurity with hazard vulnerability assessments and the literature on political ecology has engaged the discussion linking the global economy directly to social change. This shows that insecurity, environment and their interconnections are much more com plex social phenonema than was initially assumed in the 1980s (Peluso and Watts, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Despite these conceptual ambiguities, and the difficulties of establishing links between environmental change and conflict, the discussion of environmental security con tinues apace in policy and academic circles (Dodds and Pippard, 2005). sd (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Dalby (2002); Dodds and Pippard (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
environmentalism
The ways in which the relationships between people and their sur roundings are understood and acted upon. These have varied greatly through time and within and across cultures. One, undoubtedly Western, typology for understanding some of these shifts is provided by Glacken (1967). Three environmentalisms are developed from an exhaustive history of understandings of human environment relations. First, there is the notion that the Earth exists by design, one fitted in particular for human purposes. Such an environmentalism is evident in (NEW PARAGRAPH) Graeco Christian and Hebraic theologies, wherein creation for human purpose can lead to a legitimization of human domination over the non human world. There are strong echoes of this form of environmentalism in contempor ary thoughts and practices, which tend to be human centred (anthropocentric). The second environmentalism is underpinned by the notion that environments act as the major influence on human affairs (environmentaL determinism). The reductionism and sometime racist inflec tions of this mode of thinking have been discre dited in regionaL geography (Livingstone, (NEW PARAGRAPH) , yet it is a form of environmentalism that has enjoyed a new life at a global scale and as a normative discourse. The physical resource limits of a finite planet and the capacities of global systems to adapt to human activities became major environmentalist debates and causes in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively. The third environmentalism that Glacken traces is the attempt to understand human environment relations in more dynamic and co evolutionary ways. It involves an under standing of the Earth and its inhabitants including humans as unfinished matters. Furthermore, any human change involves changes to environments and vice versa. The three environmentalisms are complex and overlap historically and culturally, but can be summarized as human mastery over nature, environmental determinism and co evolution. In turn, these can be roughly mapped on to contemporary inflections, including (1) anthropocentrism and technocentrism, (2) ecocentrism and (3) mutualism. O?Riordan (1976) gave particular attention to the contrast between technocentrism, which posited faith in the ability of human technical ingenuity to tran scend earthly limits, and ecocentrism, which cautioned people to live within their environ mentally determined conditions (see also deep ecoLogy; popuLation geography). The utility of the distinction can instantly be recognized in debates over food and energy technologies (genetic modifications versus organics, renew ables versus nuclear energies and so on). The third stream is perhaps where most energies have been invested in geography in recent years. This is in part a reflection of the proliferation of humans and non humans in recent centuries, making firm human environment distinctions more difficult. Transgenic animaLs, genetically modified foodstuffs, holes in stratospheric ozone layers and climate change all undermine any firm distinction between people and envir onment, cuLture and nature, politics and sci ence. Human environment diaLectics (Harvey, 1996) and feminist and post structuRaList informed reformulations of human environ ment relations (Haraway, 1991c; Ingold, (NEW PARAGRAPH) have produced a range of writing that attempts to pair together humans and envir onments through such varied endeavours as poLiticaL ecoLogy (Robbins, 2004), ecofe minism and cosmopolitics (Latour, 2004; Hinchliffe, Kearnes, Degen and Whatmore, 2005). There is a good deal of variety in these literatures, but to varying degrees they all move away from a firmly fixed or founda tionaL view of environment and towards accounts where the mattering of environments (which include humans), their contribution to human and non human vulnerabilities and to life chances, become central concerns. There is recognition in all these non foundational accounts of uneven environments, of the need for eNVironmentaL justice, of shifts in local and global patterns of deveLopment and con sumption. Finally, in this gradual move towards a non foundational environmentalism there are huge dangers and debates. The reli ability of science as an ally to environmental ism comes under scrutiny once the fixity of environments has been unsettled, and once uncertainties and indeterminacies of scientific ways of knowing become more widely under stood. The ability of science to mediate nature and act as an authority on environmental con cerns has become a matter for heated debate (see risk society). Environmentalism is there fore currently in a crucial political moment as it negotiates between the uncertainties of socio ecological dynamics and the calculations and arguments required for a shift in the ways in which humans dwell in the world. sjh (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) O?Riordan (1976). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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