Changing approaches to the environment Flashcards
(28 cards)
Describe environmental concern
- 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
Describe 19th century environment and public health
- Industrial revolution led to concentration of people and pollution
- Water and sanitation under developed
- 1875 Public Health Act
Describe urban environment and socialism
- Poor living conditions became focus of socialist and environmentalist concern
Describe nature and the romantics in the US
- 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
Outline some early environmental preservation in UK
National voluntary environmental organisations:
- 1865 commons preservation society
- 1889 RSPB Royal society for birds, plants and pleasant places
- 1895 National Trust
How was nature an escape from the city?
- 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
Outline some legislation to protect the country side
1947 - town and country planning planning act
1949 - national parks and access to the country side act
Describe the rural/urban divide
- In post-war planning, green belts set up around cities to stop urban sprawl
- Buffer zones between rural and urban areas
Outline the ghettoisation of nature
- Natural spaces becoming smaller due to enrichment of cities
- Growing desire of desire rural space
How has science helped the protection of nature?
- 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
What book by Rachel Carson brought awareness to human impact to environment
- Silent Spring
- Introduced ideas of pesticides and fertilisers in food chains can impact humans and animals
- Cancer in humans
What bodies dealt with the protection of the environment?
1970 - UK department of the Environment
1972 - first UN conference on the human environment
What is the Club of Rome?
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
What is ecological modernisation?
- 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
What approaches have been used in the past to study the environment?
- Colonial geographies
- Geography as a social science
What is the enlightenment?
- 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
Outline colonial geography as an approach to study the environment
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
Outline social science as an approach to study the environment
Emergence of environmental science - this helps analyse human environment relations
- Helps with management of environmental problems and sustainable development
What are the 3 different approaches to studying nature-society relations?
- Cultural geography approaches
- Health geography
- Marxist approach
How is cultural geography used to study nature- society relations?
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
What are the critiques of cultural geography approaches?
- Tendency to focus on elite images and constructions
- Focuses exclusively on on human agency - nature is reduced to an imaginative construct of human cultures
How is health geography used to study nature - society relations?
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
How is Marxist approaches used to study nature - society relations?
- 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
What were Marxist perspectives?
- Nature is constantly being transformed through the interrelationships with human society
- Nature is being commodified by western societies
