Changing approaches to the environment

Question 1

Describe environmental concern

Answer 1

• Plato compared hills and mountains of Greece to the bones of a wasted body
• Ancient Romans were aware of air pollution
• They called it heavy heaven or infamous air

Question 2

Describe 19th century environment and public health

Answer 2

• Industrial revolution led to concentration of people and pollution
• Water and sanitation under developed
• 1875 Public Health Act

Question 3

Describe urban environment and socialism

Answer 3

• Poor living conditions became focus of socialist and environmentalist concern

Question 4

Describe nature and the romantics in the US

Answer 4

• 19th and 20th century
• The rural and wilderness became more desirable as no one no longer worked there - not a place of labour
• Wilderness parks preserved for public recreation - Yosemite

Question 5

Outline some early environmental preservation in UK

Answer 5

National voluntary environmental organisations:

• 1865 commons preservation society
• 1889 RSPB Royal society for birds, plants and pleasant places
• 1895 National Trust

Question 6

How was nature an escape from the city?

Answer 6

• Country side becomes place of retreat, well being and health
• Spa cities became popular - Bath and Buxton 1850s
• Urban parks
• Central Park in NY - 500 acre park
• Set of ideals among wealthier classes about idyllic environment

Question 7

Outline some legislation to protect the country side

Answer 7

1947 - town and country planning planning act

1949 - national parks and access to the country side act

Question 8

Describe the rural/urban divide

Answer 8

• In post-war planning, green belts set up around cities to stop urban sprawl
• Buffer zones between rural and urban areas

Question 9

Outline the ghettoisation of nature

Answer 9

• Natural spaces becoming smaller due to enrichment of cities
• Growing desire of desire rural space

Question 10

How has science helped the protection of nature?

Answer 10

• Environmental legislation comes out of environmental disasters - oil spills, nuclear station leaks, climate change, great pacific garbage patch
• Satellite images showed that the earth was init - has limits

Question 11

What book by Rachel Carson brought awareness to human impact to environment

Answer 11

• Silent Spring
• Introduced ideas of pesticides and fertilisers in food chains can impact humans and animals
• Cancer in humans

Question 12

What bodies dealt with the protection of the environment?

Answer 12

1970 - UK department of the Environment

1972 - first UN conference on the human environment

Question 13

What is the Club of Rome?

Answer 13

They published a report - limits to growth - predicted the depletion of the worlds resources

Report argued that depletion will be reached in the next one hundred years if trends stay the same

Question 14

What is ecological modernisation?

Answer 14

• Need of a major shift to deliver new products and services with lower environmental impacts
• Build on peoples growing awareness of social and environmental concerns

Question 15

What approaches have been used in the past to study the environment?

Answer 15

• Colonial geographies

- Geography as a social science

Question 16

What is the enlightenment?

Answer 16

• A philosophical and intellectual movement
• In 17th and 18th centuries
• Advanced the view that the world could be rendered knowable and explained systematically by the application of rational thought - science

Question 17

Outline colonial geography as an approach to study the environment

Answer 17

A belief in the ability of Western science to get to the truth about the natural world and a devaluing of indigenous knowledges

Environmental determinism - mans character and person was determined by his geography - racist ideology

Question 18

Outline social science as an approach to study the environment

Answer 18

Emergence of environmental science - this helps analyse human environment relations
- Helps with management of environmental problems and sustainable development

Question 19

What are the 3 different approaches to studying nature-society relations?

Answer 19

• Cultural geography approaches
• Health geography
• Marxist approach

Question 20

How is cultural geography used to study nature- society relations?

Answer 20

Representation - the cultural practises and forms by which human societies interpret and portray the world around them and present themselves to others

• Natural world - representations prehistoric cave paintings to the televisual images and scientific models that shape our imaginations today

Question 21

What are the critiques of cultural geography approaches?

Answer 21

• Tendency to focus on elite images and constructions

- Focuses exclusively on on human agency - nature is reduced to an imaginative construct of human cultures

Question 22

How is health geography used to study nature - society relations?

Answer 22

Involves study of the relationship between health and place, ; including

• the ways in which health and illness are socially constructed
• how environments and societies within which people live shape their experiences of health and disease

Question 23

How is Marxist approaches used to study nature - society relations?

Answer 23

• Social and economic theories that focus on the the organisation of capitalist society and the social and environmental injustices that can be trace to it
• Production of nature - careful selection and breeding methods for commercial use

Question 24

What were Marxist perspectives?

Answer 24

• Nature is constantly being transformed through the interrelationships with human society
• Nature is being commodified by western societies

Question 25

What is an example of a Marxist perspective?

Answer 25

• The globalisation an industrialisation of agriculture

- rapid concentration of industrial farming methods

Question 26

What is political ecology?

Answer 26

It is concerned with;

• Economic and environmental decision making processes
• How global institutions influence national and local environmental policies
• The uneven distribution of and access to and control over resources on the basis of class and ethnicity

Question 27

What is Marxist political ecology?

Answer 27

Marxist urban political ecology - integrated and relational approach that untangles the interconnected political, economic, social and ecological processes that go together to form uneven urban landscapes

Question 28

What are the critiques of a Marxist approach?

Answer 28

• Political and economic analyses focus on looking for broader underlying structural explanations - capitalism
  This leads them to lose sight of the more localised social and political issues
• All approaches focus on human agency, nature is reduced to a passive object human act upon