HUMANS AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Humans and the Environment



Humans and the Environment

Introduction

The changing relationships between humans and their environments are fundamental elements of geographical knowledge and research. Humans are in complex and evolving relationships with their surroundings, and species are connected through interlocking relationships. Issues of environmental management are also gaining increasing attention, and communities worldwide are aware of the significant implications of environmental degradation, including accelerated climate change, water scarcity, and decreasing biodiversity. In response to the impacts of humans on the environments in which they live, the disciplines concerned with environmental management have developed a means to assess, control, and manage those relationships. While the discipline of geography is an important contributor to the discourses of environmental management, it relies on specialist knowledge from other environmental sciences and institutional management areas to operationalize environmental management.

In seeking to understand and establish management systems and processes, the dominant institutions and discourses of environmental management have used the natural sciences as a means of classifying aspects of the environment and separating them from each other and from humans. For example, reliance on scientific classifications of environmental components can facilitate the division of responsibility for the environment into distinct functions and structures across government agencies and community groups. In asserting control over specific human-environment relations, these dominant discourses have created an artificial separation of humans from the “natural” environment. Environmental management is more than simply using science to classify and make sense of the world in order to assert human control as management. Recognizing the connections and inherent relationships among species provides windows for more ethical and contextualized engagements with place. Reorienting and balancing environmental management discourses to recognize the importance of process and connection provides more robust and appropriate approaches to ensuring socially just ecological sustainability.

This entry contrasts this dominant “managing the environment” approach with approaches to human-environment relations that highlight the connectivity and relationships between all species, including humans. In particular, it balances the discourses of environmental management by providing space for marginalized approaches, such as indigenous understandings, which focus on the connections between people and place and the interrelationships between all species. It advocates acknowledgment of and commitment to diversity in understanding and managing human environment relations in the future.

Managing the Environment

Most dominant discourses of environmental management focus on the need for humans to manage the environments in which they live. Western natural science is often the unquestioned basis for such management decisions and is considered the most important and appropriate mechanism for understanding humans' relationships with the environment. Many textbooks, for example, argue that science should be the sole approach for making environmental management decisions. Scientific discourses typically allow for unambiguous categorization of the environment into its components, as if those categories are self-evident and universal—an approach that is often displayed by government environmental agencies, which separate, for example, the functions of water management from air quality, land from sea, and conservation areas from urban spaces. Such a perspective denies the intimate connections among these various environmental ...