The Dictionary of Human Geography

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the Christian faith. ‘Biblical geography’ also

developed during this time, involving attempts

to identify places in the Bible and to determine

their locations. In the late seventeenth cen-

tury, and particularly in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, nature was seen as a div-

inely created order for the well-being of all

life. Scholars adopting the physico-theological

stance ardently defended the idea that in living

natureand on all the Earth, there existed

evidence of God’s wisdom. In the eighteenth

and nineteenth centuries, following the lead

of Montesquieu and Voltaire, the influence

of the environment on religion was studied.

Geographers adopted a highly deterministic

approach when they sought to explain the

essential nature of various religions in terms

of their environments (seeenvironmental

determinism). This changed in the 1920s,

when Max Weber’s writings marked a turning

point by inverting the earlier environmentally

deterministic doctrine to focus on religion’s

influence on social and economic structures,

and environmental and landscape change.

Further, in the 1960s and 1970s, with envir-

onmental andcarrying capacityconcerns,

interest focused on the roots of environmental

crisis, and a school of thought emerged that

degradation was the result of the Christian

belief that God gave humans dominion over

the Earth.

Geographies of religion were sporadic for

much of the twentieth century, and without

major breakthroughs in perspective and

approach, but especially from the 1990s

onwards, the field has been reinvigorated.

Kong (2001a) characterizes the emerging

body of work as framed by an interest in the

politics and poetics ofsacred space,identity

andcommunity. Such research acknowledges

that sacred space is contested space, just as the

sacred is a contested category. Similarly, reli-

gious identity and community are subject to

negotiations, embedded in relations ofpower,

domination andresistance. Kong (2001a)

urged geographers of religion to develop

‘new’ geographies of religion that emphasize

different sites of religious practice beyond the

‘officially sacred’ (churches, temples, mosques,

synagogues and the like); different sensuous

sacred geographies; different religions in differ-

ent historical and place-specific contexts; dif-

ferent geographicalscalesof analysis; different

constitutions of population and their experi-

ence of and effect on religious place, identity

and community; differentdialectics(socio-

spatial, public–private, politics–poetics); and

different moralities.

Since then, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (see

terrorism) have prompted new analytical

attention to religion: most obviously to the

rise of a distinctly radical or political Islam

(Watts, 2007) – and here it is important

to attend to the culturalist constructions of

what Mamdami (2004) calls ‘Good Muslim,

Bad Muslim’ – but also to the roles of

Christianity, Hinduism and Zionism in shap-

ing both provocations and responses to polit-

ical violence (e.g. Gregory, 2004b; Oza,

2007: see alsojust war). But this new interest

in religion is not only political: the so-called

‘moral turn’ in geography, towards a renewed

concern withethics, has prompted Cloke

(2002) and others to reflect on the place of

the spiritual withinhuman geography, and

Proctor (2006) and his collaborators to pro-

pose a new conversation between geographers

on religion. lk

Suggested reading

Holloway and Valins (2002); Kong (2001).

remote sensing (RS) Literally, the sensing

(study) of an object using instruments of

observation that are remote from (not touch-

ing) the object. This includes medical scan-

ning but, more commonly, the object is the

Earth, which aerial photography and satellite-

based sensors are used to observe.

The basis of RS is that different types of

vegetation, landform and land cover can have

distinctive spectral signatures, meaning that

they emit and reflect electromagnetic radiation

in different ways. The truth of this is evident

by observing that features of thelandscape

have different colours and temperatures.

However, RS involves more of the electromag-

netic spectrum than our human senses allow

access to, using infrared detection, thermal

scanners, radar and microwaves, for example.

RS can be passive, detecting natural radiation

from an object; or active, targeting energy

(such as laser pulses) on to the object, from

the RS device.

RS has its origins with Gaspard-Fe ́lix

Tournachon, a French photographer and bal-

loonist who took aerial photographs of Paris in

1858. It was developed during the twentieth-
      century world wars and thecold war(a flash-
      point of which was when Gary Powers’ ‘spy
      plane’ was shot down over the Soviet Union,
      in 1960) and today is used for environmental
      analysis and monitoring as well as military
      surveillance (see military geography;
      war). In all cases, however, and despite the
      authority of techno-science invested in them,

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REMOTE SENSING (RS)