Human-environment relationships in modern and postmodern geography
Abstract
In this article we analyse the human-environment relationships in geographical research from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st century. We highlight paradigms, which affected our way of thinking about man-environment relations. Discussing scientific approaches and paradigms in geography the leading scientists who had influential thoughts and helped the shaping of a paradigm will also be mentioned. The research on human-environment relations has appeared in geography from time to time, but the connecting paradigms had also different stories through time and space. Undoubtedly, the nowadays reviving determinism had the greatest influence, but possibilism has also had a significant impact on our discipline. Research on human-environment relationships reappeared in a new form through the discourse on global climate change. Postmodern, poststructuralist, and postcolonial approaches changed radically the basis of human-environment research. In this paper, we argue that geography needs to renew not only its philosophical basis and theoretical context, but the connections between the two subdisciplines of geography (i.e. between physical and human geography) must be refreshed too.
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