They are first and foremost themselves,
despite the many meanings we dis-
cover in them. We may move them
around and impose our designs upon
them. We may do our best to make
them bend to our wills. But in the end
they remain inscrutable, artifacts of a
world we did not make whose meaning
for themselves we can never finally
know. (Cronon, 1995: 55)Nature is replete with animate, sentient beings
possessed of agency as well as instinct – namely,
animals. Many animals are essential to human
survival, are foundational to our ontology and
epistemology, and form the basis of countless
cultural norms and practices. Curiously, although
explaining relatious between nature and human
society has long been a central goal for geographi-
cal research, animals have largely appeared as
biotic elements of ecological systems, available
for human use, or forms of symbolic capital.
Have animals simply been too insignificant, too
irrelevant to human affairs, and thus unworthy of
serious contemplation as subjects or actors? Or
are animals so indispensable to people and tied
to visions of progress and the good life, that even
geographers, trained to analyse nature–society
relationships, have been unable to see them?
As the twenty-first century opens, geo-
graphers in the United States and Britain are
bringing the ‘animal question’ to the forefront of
geographic debates, and in ways different from
in the past. Why animals, and why now? The
reasons are complex, but several forces are at
work. One is that the plight of animals has never
been more serious than it is today. Billions of
animals annually are killed in factory farms,
poisoned by toxic pollutants and waste, and
driven from their homes by logging, mining,agriculture and urbanization. Dissected,
re-engineered and used for spare body parts,
animals are kept in captivity and servitude,
discarded when their utility to people wanes.
Another factor is that these multiple assaults
have stimulated a vocal politics of resistance
and fears about the ‘end of nature’. In addition,
stimulated in part by these environmental and
socio-ethical dynamics, intellectual currents
within the academy have blurred boundaries
between humans and animals, and encouraged
recognition of human–animal bonds at multiple
levels of analysis and spatial scales.
This chapter traces relationships between
geography and animals over the past century. In
the remainder of this introduction, we examine
the historical origins of zoögeography, a subfield
of physical geography, as well as the parallel
rise of a culturally oriented geography of
animals. Both approaches had receded from view
by the mid twentieth century. After several
decades, however, another vision of animal
geography – sharing little with either zoögeogra-
phy or cultural animal geography – emerged.
And so we turn to consider this new approach
and its implications.
Although never prominent in the discipline,
geographers have long shown some interest in
animals. Indeed, an identifiable branch known as
‘animal geography’ was actively researched, at
least since Marion Newbigin’s Animal Geography
(1913) (Figure 9.1) and her posthumously
published Plant and Animal Geography(1936).
Newbigin pointed to the need for distributional
studies of animal populations, examining floral
and faunal regions and their relations (Maddrell,
1997). Animal geography was also accorded a
role in Hartshorne’s grand statement of what
geography ‘is and ought to be’ in The Nature of
Geography(1939). Hartshorne regarded the apex9
Reanimating Cultural Geography
Jennifer Wolch, Jody Emel and Chris Wilbert
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