Approaching the society-nature dialectic : a plea for a geographical study of the environment

Abstract

At a time when the environmental problem is becoming one of the major political and socio-economic issues, geography seems to face difficulties in approaching the subject. Although the study of society-nature interactions was the very foundation on which geography built itself as an academic discipline at the end of the previous century, today’s geographical work reveals a deep gap in the representations of physical and human processes. We shall discuss the historical production of this gap through an explanation of the rise of modern sciences and a brief history of geographical approaches of nature. In doing so, the paper tries to draw attention to the major concepts that could help combining physical and human geographies in a new and more promising manner. Using ‘political ecology’ and ‘historical materialism’, we shall demonstrate how society and nature can be seen as dialectically linked to each other, and how geography is able to analyse the socio-ecological processes that shape the ‘world’. This analysis merges together space, society and nature in a single framework without falling into the earlier dualist perspectives (i.e. determinism and possibilism).

Keywords

• geography
• geographical theories
• representations of nature
• historical materialism
• political ecology
• water