ENVIRONMENTAL GEOPOLITICS 499orderly (Driver, 2001). But land use change is
inevitably also a matter of environmental change,
and the consequences of large scale
disruptions of ‘nature’ are now fundamentally
challenging the modern assumptions of urban
humanity as separate or somehow in control
of that nature. What is defined as nature and
environment is changing as a result of climate
change, ozone holes and such phenomena as
radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. So too, once
again, is the understanding of humanity’s place
in relation to ‘nature’. In the process the culture
that defines itself as apart from nature is being
challenged to rethink the assumption of this
separation (Beck, 1992; Latour, 1993).
Whether we understand ourselves as modern,
urban and apart from a nature that is of no con-
cern to our lives, or as humans who live in an
active nature that we change by our everyday
actions, has profound consequences for our iden-
tities and for how we do geography. City ‘plan-
ning’ and colonial reorganization of nature to
conserve ‘resources’ are both modern projects
that share the assumptions of a nature out there to
be controlled by being spatially reordered to
human design. Globalization means that these
themes now matter at a planetary scale and our
thinking has to reflect this change, not least by
incorporating them into a critique of the taken for
granted premises of the modern geopolitical
vision that surveys the whole world as an object
of knowledge (Luke, 1997).GEOGRAPHY AS URBAN
SCHOLARSHIPAt the end of the 1980s Margaret FitzSimmons
(1989) addressed these issues in the discipline,
arguing that many of the more radical and criti-
cal approaches to geography had problems think-
ing about nature because of the preoccupation
with spatial themes. She drew on Richard Peet’s
(1977) earlier argument to suggest why space
rather than nature was the focus of concern.
Space was an important theme in the ‘new’
geography of the 1950s and 1960s which applied
statistical modeling and mapping to examining
economies and cities. When the radical
approaches, and the Marxist inspired literature in
particular, criticized the liberal assumptions in
the new geography, it also focused on spatial
matters and related questions of justice in urban
settings. FitzSimmons went on to suggest that the
difficulty of dealing with nature is in part alsobecause intellectuals live and work mainly in the
artificial spaces of large cities. Coupled to this
was the growing role of science in shaping the
intellectual practice of these urban intellectuals,
most obviously in geography in terms of
biophysical research and resources management.
All this, she suggests, adds up to a substantial
blindness to the complex abstractions of ‘nature.’
This is not, of course, the whole disciplinary
story. David Harvey (1974) wrote a powerful
critique of Malthusian arguments in the early
1970s which had implications for the analysis of
questions of natural resources. In the 1980s the
concern with the politics of nature became part
of discussions in geography and more critical
perspectives in particular as the themes of politi-
cal ecology emerged. These used analyses of
underdevelopment to investigate poverty and
linked them to practical understandings of
environmental change, literally ‘on the ground’
in terms of soil erosion (Blaikie and Brookfield,
1987). This concern with environmental change
was connected directly to the daily struggles of
rural people, and farmers specifically, in the face
of the disruptive encroachments by capitalist
agriculture. Extended to rethink the ‘environ-
mental’ assumptions in hazards research, such
considerations have made clear how the uneven
geography of social systems is a key factor causing
vulnerability (Blaikie et al., 1994).
FitzSimmons (1989) argued that urbanization
is about the reconstitution of social life and about
the geographical differentiation between city and
countryside. It also encourages a distinction
between the urban and a pristine nature with
humans constructed as external to nature. These
ontologies reflect some of the most powerful
dichotomies in the Enlightenment culture that
has shaped knowledge production and science in
particular (Latour, 1993). Distinctions between
nature and culture are some of the most persis-
tent cultural dualisms of our time. The efficacy
of numerous moves of ideological ‘naturaliza-
tion’ to render matters ‘true’ because ‘natural’,
and hence beyond political debate, suggests its
practical importance. FitzSimmons finally sug-
gests that the sociological fissures in the disci-
pline of geography accentuated these conceptual
difficulties with urban and economic geographers
emphasizing ‘scientific’ epistemologies and
methods and rural geographers frequently making
the anthropological emphasis on cultural analysis.
In the 1990s, partly influenced by the debates
in social theory, geographers produced scholar-
ship that bore out some of FitzSimmons’ hopes
that critical geography would overcome these3029-ch27.qxd 03-10-02 11:06 AM Page 499