Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century

276 · Environment/Society Dynamics
the exceptions of Simon Dalby (1996, 2000). The most
consistent analysts of international environmental
policy from a geographic perspective have been Gilbert
White in the United States (White 1982, 1991, 1993) and
Timothy O’Riordan in Britain, especially through his
regular editorials and reviews of environmental institutions
in the journal Environment (O’Riordan 1991, 2001,
2002; O’Riordan and Jordan 2002).
Geographers have studied specific international policy
issues. For example, Peter Morrisette (1991) dissected
international agreements on ozone depletion to show
how the parties achieved cooperation and to identify
how the lessons might apply to other issues such as
global warming. Danny Harvey has evaluated and criticized
the policy of joint implementation, a system by
which a company or country can claim credit for reducing
greenhouse gas emissions in another company or
country through investments in reforestation or energy
efficiency (Harvey 1995; Harvey et al. 1997). Steve
Lonergan (1999) focuses on issues of environmental
security, such as the relation between environmental
degradation, migration, and conflict, and also led in the
development of the IHDP core project on Global
Environmental Change and Human Security.¹²
Critical Perspectives
A set of challenges to global change research has emerged
from social theory and science studies. Various authors
argue that quantitative modeling is inappropriate or
unsuccessful when it comes to predicting social trends
and human futures, that global change is essentially
about power relations and equity, and that international
environmental policy and global change research are
constructed as discourses to serve particular power
groups or to spread global capitalism through economic
integration (Dalby 2000; Proctor 1998; Redclift and
Benton 1994; Waterstone 1993; Wescoat 1993) Some
geographers believe that social problems are more
urgent—poverty, homelessness, trade—or that local
environmental issues are more important and salient
(Peet and Watts 1996). Others believe that geographers
are being coopted to serve the agenda and to maintain
the funding of the earth scientists, or that it is important
to remain skeptical about the meta-narratives of global
¹² IHDP Global Environmental Change and Human Security
, last accessed 10 November 2002.
change and the debates over scientific “truth” (Blaikie
1996; Buttel and Taylor 1994; Demeritt 2001).
Future Directions
Although there has been considerable progress in understanding
the human dimensions of global change,
there are still many unresolved questions and several
important new areas for research. Of the many possible
arenas for geographic contributions, some of the most
significant include:
• Promoting regional approaches to global change
research, including the regional dynamics of changes
in land use and land cover, greenhouse gas emissions,
and vulnerabilities;
• Advancing the downscaling of climate impacts and
forecasts from global, to regional, to local scales;
• Understanding the interactions between global
change and socioeconomic globalization, including
the responses of states, local communities, ecosystems,
and individuals to these changes through actions such
as consumption, technological shifts, adaptation,
social movements, and institutional change;
• Integrating remote sensing, geographic information
systems, and other information technologies with
social and biophysical data to monitor, explain, and
develop policy to cope with global change;
• Anticipating and responding to emerging and new
driving forces and global change issues, to sudden or
surprising change, and to more certain environmental
forecasts in ways that are sensitive to heterogeneous
human and physical geographies.
Geographers are in a unique position to contribute to the
overall human dimensions of global change research
challenge because geography, by tradition, has bridged
the physical and social sciences and worked between
global and local scales. Their ability to translate across
disciplines and scales and to work with a variety of quantitative
and qualitative methods allows them to provide
intellectual leadership and to develop collaborative
projects within and beyond the discipline.¹³ The critical
stance promoted by social theorists demands selfconscious
participation in policy-making and agenda
setting, attention to the broader political and social
¹³ See, for example, the large number of entries by geographers in
Oxford University Press’s Encyclopedia of Global Change (Goudie
2002).