design fields, Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1974)Topophilia:
a study of environmental perceptions, attitudes
and values articulated a humanistic (see
humanistic geography), interpretative and
mythopoetic approach to the topic. Tuan was
mostly concerned with environmental percep-
tion at the collective cultural level and, in
particular, with illustrating how symbolically
meaningful and keenly felt relationships with
the environment resonated deeply in both
Western and non-Western cultures.
The humanistic approach advocated by
Tuan and others fell from favour with the
advent of critical and radical approaches
emphasizing the study of socio-economic
structures, and the salience and viability of
subjective and emotional geographies of envir-
onmental perception was at risk through much
of the 1980s and 1990s. However, over the
past ten years, with the emergence of new,
non-representational approaches to embodi-
ment, practice andperformance, and with
the development of vitalist geographies of
nature and environment, environmental per-
ception has re-emerged as a substantive issue
(seenon-representational theory). A key
text here has been the anthropologist Tim
Ingold’s (2000)The perception of the environ-
ment. Ingold queries what he terms the ‘build-
ing perspective’ commonly adopted by
academics examining questions of environ-
mental perception and cognition, and imputed
to those being studied. This perspective is,
he argues, structured around the mistaken
assumption of ‘an imagined separation
between the human perceiver and the world,
such that the perceiver has to reconstruct the
world, in consciousness, prior to any meaning-
ful engagement with it’ (2000, p.191).
According to Ingold, both cognitivist accounts
of mental mapping and the humanistic inter-
pretations of writers such as Tuan equally fall
into thisepistemologicaltrap.
Ingold’s alternative approach to environ-
mental perception – which he terms ‘the
dwelling perspective’ – draws heavily upon
the phenomenologicalphilosophyof Martin
Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (see
phenomenology). Here, environmental per-
ception is pictured as an ongoing, reciprocal,
bodily process of engagement and involve-
ment, a process in which ‘perceiver’ and
‘world’ are enrolled, and from which they
are continuously emergent. This approach
to environmental perception, and to self–
landscape and culture-nature relations
more generally, has begun to exert consider-
able influence upon cultural geographers
attending to questions of perception and
embodied practice. jwyenvironmental psychology An interdis-
ciplinary and disparate field of study, enrolling
researchers from psychology, geography,
anthropology, sociology, planning and design,
environmental psychology examines percep-
tual, cognitive and embodied relationships
between humans and the environment, both
‘natural’ and ‘built’. Environmental psych-
ology is most closely and commonly associated
with forms ofbehavioural geography, prom-
inent in the 1970s and 1980s (though recently
renascent; see Kitchin and Blades, 2001). In
contrast to the cognitivist and representational
approach to human–environment relations
usually adopted in this area, phenomenologic-
ally inspired forms of ecological psychology
(e.g. Gibson, 1979) emphasize human(and
animal)–environment relations in terms of a
rolling nexus of conjoined embodied action,
perception and affordance. jwyenvironmental racism Environmental
racism includes differential exposure to harm
and limiting of access toresourcesthat are
reliant on, or that reproduce forms of, racial
differentiation. The term is commonly attrib-
uted to the Reverend Ben Chavis, who in 1982
was the director of the United Church of
Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice when
toxic chemicals were sited in Warren County,
Virginia, because it was predominantly poor
and black. Chavis understood this action as
part of a broader institutional history ofracism
in America, and coined the termenvironmental
racismto call attention to the official sanction-
ing of the life-threatening presence of poisons
and pollutants in communities of colour,
including those of African-Americans, Native
Americans, Asian-Americans, Chicanos/
Latinos and others (Chavis, 1991). This defin-
ition has been amended to include not just the
actions of institutions, industries and govern-
ments, but also their failure to act, as in the case
of the federal government’s lack of response to
Hurricane Katrina (Sze, 2005). In addition,
the current definitions hold institutions and
individuals accountable whether their acts are
intentional or not (Bullard, 1994). Examples
include the military–industrial complex’s dis-
proportionate exposure of Native Americans
to nuclear fallout and waste dumps, creating
large ‘national sacrifice zones’ in the Southwest
(Kuletz, 2001). This, for example, may not be
an intentional act, but is still widely considered
an example of environmental racism because ofGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_E Final Proof page 203 1.4.2009 3:17pmENVIRONMENTAL RACISM