Nature - autonomous learning

72 the ‘nature’ of geographyWestern environmental movement first gathered momentum. By the late1960s it was clear that population increase, economic growth and massconsumption were having a profound effect on natural resource availabilityand the integrity of ecosystems. Mercury poisoning at MinamataBay, Japan; the Torrey Canyon oil-tanker spill; Rachel Carson’s (1962)best-selling account of how herbicides and pesticides got into the foodchain: these and other incidents inspired the first Earth Day, the foundingof Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, and other seminal early-1970senvironmental initiatives. Geography had a golden opportunity to make‘human impact’ studies its main business – a possibility foreseen in 1956in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, in which an ageing Carl Sauerlamented the environmental degradation wrought by industrial societies.Quite why this opportunity was missed is hard to say (see Simmons1990 for speculations). Although it was grasped at the teaching level,this was not the case at the research level. Chorley’s (1969) Water, Earthand Man – which called for a new focus on human–environment interactions– was arguably the exception that proved the rule. Geographers conspicuouslyfailed to analyse the local and global ‘environmental problems’that became ever more apparent from the early 1960s (Mikesell 1974).Morally, the discipline also virtually ignored the pro-nature (or ecocentric)arguments being made within the wider environmental movement. Instead,a relatively small number of geographers complemented the natural hazardswork of White et al. with a rather anthropocentric focus on resourcemanagement.This resource analysis was usually empirical, quantitative andconducted in what geographer Tim O’Riordan (1976) called a ‘technocentric’mode. In other words, this research looked at how best to conserveresources for present and future human needs. It rarely took issue withthe fundamental causes of resource depletion and was very human-centred(Box 2.3). Relatedly, a number of physical geographers were interestedin the impact of human activities on the parts of the environmentthat interested them (and vice versa) (e.g. Hollis 1975). Like resourcemanagementstudies, their research had a policy dimension becauseenvironmental management needed to be based on a proper understandingof its objects (e.g. rivers, soil erosion, predator–prey relationships).Yet despite its apparent ‘ethical-neutrality’, this sort of research was arguablyvalue-laden because it did little to challenge the human actions and valuesystems that generated environmental degradation in the first place. It wasvery much ‘status quo’ research.