The Human Environment: The Road Not Taken, The Road Still Beckoning

Abstract

Repeated attempts to establish a monistic description of geography ignore the essential pluralism of our four traditions. From the 1960s on, the spatial tradition came to dominate the field. Thus following the environmental revolution in the late 1960s, the man-land or human environment tradition in geography was too small to provide the training and leadership for the increasingly professionalized movement despite high levels of scientific leadership and interdisciplinary competence evidenced by many individual geographers. The great enduring, scientific challenges of the human environment persist, and new opportunities are offered geographers to use their skills, knowledge, and values for human survival. These challenges include the Malthusian dilemma of population and resources, the nature and determinants of the human transformation of the earth, and the sustainable development of the biosphere. I describe a brief intellectual history of these problems, offer selective examples of work underway, and suggest opportunities for geographic participation.

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