What is environmental geography?

Abstract

Environmental geography has its roots in a tradition - research about the links between society and nature - that is, in fact, one of the most popular and distinctive ones in the realm of geography. However, the loss of prestige of this tradition within the discipline, especially between the 1970s and 1990s, makes contemporary environmental geography, which has emerged in the last fifteen or twenty years as an attempt to revitalise that tradition on a new basis, a relatively recent phenomenon. Its challenges are manifold, among which the following ones can be highlighted: 1) to promote a broad understanding of the concept of the ‘environment,’ not limiting it to ‘first nature’ or reducing society to an abstract ‘anthropic factor’; 2) to update the geographical epistemological project of a ‘dialogue among different types of knowledge’ without resorting to the empiricism that characterised the classical geographic discourse, and understanding environmental geography as an approach rather than as a ‘new branch’ of geography; 3) to bring geography closer to the interdisciplinary field of political ecology; 4) to value, in addition to the dialogue with other disciplines (and with philosophy), also the dialogue between scientific knowledge and vernacular or popular knowledge.