The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography

Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann, Stuart N. Lane, Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann, Stuart N. Lane

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319714608
• eBook ISBN: 9783319714615
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This handbook is recognition of the need to better integrate physical and human geography. It combines a collection of work and research within the new field of Critical Physical Geography, which gives critical attention to relations of social power with deep knowledge of a particular field of biophysical science. Critical Physical Geography research accords careful attention to biophysical landscapes and the power relations that have increasingly come to shape them, and to the politics of environmental science and the role of biophysical inquiry in promoting social and environmental justice.

The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography lays out the scope and guiding principles of Critical Physical Geography research. It presents a carefully selected set of empirical work, demonstrating the range and intellectual strength of existing integrative work in geography research. This handbook is the first of its kind to cover this emerging discipline and willbe of significant interest to students and academics across the fields of geography, the environment and sustainability.

Part IIntroduction

© The Author(s) 2018

Rebecca Lave, Christine Biermann and Stuart N. Lane (eds.)The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geographyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing Critical Physical Geography

Rebecca Lave¹ , Christine Biermann² and Stuart N. Lane³

(1)

Department of Geography, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

(2)

Department of Geography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

(3)

Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

Rebecca Lave (Corresponding author)

Christine Biermann

Stuart N. Lane

End Abstract

Critical Physical Geography (CPG) is an emerging body of work that brings together social and natural science in the service of eco-social transformation, combining attention to power relations and their material impacts with deep knowledge of particular biophysical systems (Lave et al. 2014). By studying material landscapes, social dynamics, and knowledge politics together, CPG answers the periodic calls for integrating geographic research (e.g. Thornes 1981; Goudie 1986; Massey 1999; Clifford 2002; Harrison et al. 2004, 2006, 2008 special issue of Geoforum; Bracken and Oughton’s 2009a special issue of Area). This mission is particularly timely given the explosion of interest in ‘the Anthropocene’ (Fig. 1.1) and the widespread understanding that the material world is now shaped by deeply intermingled social and biophysical processes. If the biophysical world that surrounds us is now an eco-social hybrid, our research must be, too.

Fig. 1.1

ISI listed papers using the term ‘Anthropocene’. No reference was made in the ISI to the term before 2002

Yet CPG differs in significant ways from other calls for integration in light of the Anthropocene, challenging a dominant discourse that reduces eco-social relations to the unidirectional influence of humans on the environment and often precludes a deeper understanding of complex power relations that shape and are shaped by the biophysical world. The current conversation leaves a number of fundamental issues at the margins, including those actions that the Anthropocene is being used to legitimate, the presumptions that underpin environmental science and decision-making (e.g. a preoccupation with GDP as a goal), and the diverse suite of eco-social relations that comprise the Anthropocene. Methodologically, research on the Anthropocene has tended toward global-scale modeling and highly simplified understandings of human actions, failing to consider the material realities of day-to-day life that might give rise to very different definitions of what is important in the Anthropocene. Aspiring to a richer and more open consideration of the Anthropocene, CPG not only rethinks and breaks down the divides between conventional disciplines but also engages with fundamental questions about the conditions within which we find ourselves as a society and the role of scientific inquiry in shaping those conditions.

In this Handbook, we advocate and demonstrate careful integrative work that addresses crucial geoscientific questions while taking seriously the power relations, economic systems, and socio-cultural and philosophical presumptions upon which modern society has been built. This body of work showcases what Castree (2014, p. 244) calls ‘engaged analysis’, where researchers ‘get their hands dirty in the places … scientists operate’ while simultaneously ‘questioning scientific representations of the world’ and recognizing that scientific knowledge profoundly affects the systems it purports to know. We term this emerging field ‘Critical Physical Geography’, pointing to the integration of insights, methods, and theories from both critical Human Geography and Physical Geography.

While CPG includes a wide range of environmental topics, research methods, and epistemological commitments, it is centered on three core intellectual tenets. First, most landscapes are now deeply shaped by human actions and structural inequalities around race, gender, and class. These power relations are not social drivers, external to nature and shaping it from the outside. Rather, structural power relations incorporate and draw on the materiality of nature, creating inextricably eco-social systems. Thus, it no longer makes sense (if it ever did) to concentrate natural science research on pristine systems or to separate research on the environment into the natural sciences and the social sciences (Urban, this volume). Second, the same power relations that shape the landscapes we study also shape who studies them and how we study them. Both natural and social science are inextricably imbricated in social, cultural, and political-economic relations that affect the questions we ask (or ignore), the way we conduct our research, and even our findings (King and Tadaki, this volume). Finally, the knowledge we produce has deep impacts on the people and landscapes we study. The myth of the ivory tower is just that: a myth. Our research has unavoidably political consequences; our choice is thus not between being political or apolitical but among different possible political commitments (Law, this volume).

Taking these three core tenets seriously requires us to ask different questions or to add layers to the questions we already ask. For example, while a soil scientist might start and end their study of lead concentrations in urban soils in Oakland, California, with measurements of soil chemistry and spatial analysis, a critical physical geographer of soils, such as Nathan McClintock (2015), would add additional layers of inquiry (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1

Questions raised by a CPG approach to soil science

• What are the concentrations of Pb in soils across Oakland, CA?

• How do political-economic factors, past and present, shape the uneven spatial distribution of Pb?

• What impacts do they have on human health and well-being?

• How are studies of urban soils shaped by particular intellectual commitments of soil scientists (e.g. soil classification systems with little capacity to engage the range of human impacts)?

• How do soil scientists’ aversion to engaging issues of social and environmental justice reinforce existing inequalities in Oakland?

• How is past and current research on soil contamination being taken up in the political debate, and how does that research thus in turn shape Oakland’s landscape?

Similarly, while a sociologist might begin and end a study of desertification with analysis of the rhetoric used in environmental policy debates, a critical physical geographer, such as Diana Davis (2007), would move from discourse into a range of material concerns (Table 1.2).

Table 1.2

Questions raised by a CPG approach to desertification

• What arguments are mustered in support of the desertification hypothesis in francophone North Africa, and how have those arguments persisted or changed over time?

• What political-economic interests are at stake in these debates (e.g. colonial and state attempts to control resources and nomadic populations)?

• How do archival sources, including travellers’ accounts, support or disprove desertification in North Africa?

• What physical evidence is there for or against desertification from pollen analysis, climate data, and so on?

• How have these historical and biophysical data been shaped by social, cultural, and political-economic priorities?

• What are the material impacts of anti-desertification environmental policies on the people and landscapes of francophone North Africa?

Tables 1.1 and 1.2 are just two examples. We could chart a similarly expanded set of questions for any of the chapters in this Handbook and for the existing body of CPG research (e.g. Wilcock et. al. 2013; Engel-Di Mauro 2014; Lave and Lutz 2014; Barron et al. 2015; Doyle et al. 2015; Hatvany et al. 2015; Sayre 2015; Van Dyke 2015; Blue and Brierley 2016; Cullum et al. 2016; Penny et al. 2016; Simon 2016; Ashmore and Dodson 2017; Holifield and Day 2017; Lane 2017; Laris et al. 2017; Sarmiento et al. 2017; Zimmerer et al. 2017). The point is that CPG allows us to investigate material landscapes, social dynamics, and knowledge politics together, as they co-constitute each other. CPG is thus an intellectually and politically robust response to the implications of ‘the Anthropocene’.

We hope that the examples above begin to shed light on the name ‘CPG’. For physical geographers, we argue, a more Critical Physical Geography means paying attention to: (1) how knowledge is constructed in Physical Geography, through the myriad ways in which we frame what it is we wish to research and how we actually go about researching it and (2) the historical origins of the particular ways we have come to conceptualize the subject of physical geographical enquiry (see Sherman 1996). We use the word ‘Critical’ not to claim that physical geographers are inherently uncritical but to argue that Physical Geography might benefit from a parallel version of the transition Human Geography went through in the 1970s, highlighting both a more reflexive attention to knowledge production and a consideration of the social inequalities and power relations that are implicitly bound up with what we study and which may be invoked inadvertently when such relations are overlooked. Similarly, our insertion of the word ‘Physical’ into Critical Geography is an argument that critical human geographers need to engage far more deeply with natural science. The social and environmental injustices on which critical human geographers focus are profoundly material, and we cannot understand their co-constitutive relations without studying biophysical and social processes together.

Barriers to Interdisciplinary¹ Research

Is interdisciplinary research actually a good idea in practice? Why would we go through the extra effort needed to conduct integrative research rather than staying within the comforting confines of a particular field? ‘Interdisciplinarity’ now seems to be considered an obvious good in much of the academic world. There have been dozens of articles and books advocating integrative research (e.g. Wear 1999; Ramadier 2004; Bracken and Oughton 2009b; Hall et al. 2012; Barry and Born 2013), but the continued advocacy of the need to be interdisciplinary suggests that response remains slow.

It is easy to hypothesize why calls for integrated geographical research might go unheeded, as there are formidable barriers to such work. Sometimes the barriers are physical: in many European universities, physical and human geographers are increasingly based in different administrative units and sometimes even housed in separate buildings, preventing the casual interactions and intell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. CPG in Practice
• Part III. Conclusion: Reflecting on Critical Physical Geography
• Back Matter