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Environmental geography examines the reciprocal relationships between human societies and the natural world. Unlike physical geography, which studies environmental processes in their own right, or human geography, which often treats the environment as a backdrop, environmental geography insists that society and nature are mutually constitutive. How geographers have understood that mutuality has changed dramatically over the past century and a half, producing a series of frameworks that redefined what counts as an environmental question.
The first systematic framework for thinking about society-nature relations in geography was Environmental Determinism (1880–1920). Its proponents argued that the physical environment—climate, terrain, soils—directly caused human cultural and economic development. Tropical climates, in this view, produced lazy or backward societies, while temperate zones fostered industriousness and civilization. The framework gave geography a powerful explanatory claim: the discipline could explain why human societies differed by reading the physical landscape. But determinism also carried a political edge, often serving to justify colonialism and racial hierarchy.
Possibilism (1920–1950) emerged as a direct counterweight. Rather than treating the environment as a cause, possibilists argued that nature presents a range of possibilities, and human culture, technology, and choice determine which possibilities are realized. The same river valley could support irrigation agriculture, industrial milling, or recreational tourism depending on what people decided to do with it. Possibilism did not deny environmental influence; it narrowed determinism's claim by insisting that human agency mediates environmental effects. For several decades, the determinism-possibilism debate defined environmental geography's core tension. Possibilism gradually became the common-sense position within the discipline, but it left a crucial question unanswered: if environment constrains rather than causes, what exactly drives the choices people make about their surroundings?
Spatial Science (1950–1970) largely bypassed that question. Importing quantitative methods from economics and physics, spatial scientists sought to model human-environment systems through measurable variables: distance, density, diffusion rates, and resource distribution. The environment became a set of factors to be mapped, measured, and optimized. Central-place theory, von Thünen's land-use model, and gravity models of migration all treated environmental conditions as inputs into spatial equations. This approach abandoned both determinism and possibilism by reframing the environment as a neutral, apolitical variable in spatial systems. Its strength was analytical precision; its weakness was that it stripped environmental questions of power, culture, and meaning. By the late 1960s, critics within geography began to argue that spatial science's models explained very little about real environmental conflicts, resource struggles, or the unequal distribution of environmental harms.
The 1970s and 1980s brought a cascade of new frameworks that rejected spatial science's apoliticism and reopened the question of power in society-nature relations. Three of these frameworks—Political Ecology, New Cultural Geography, and Feminist Geography—emerged around the same time and have coexisted ever since, each offering a different diagnosis of what spatial science had missed.
Political Ecology (1970–Present) grew out of the intersection of cultural ecology, peasant studies, and Marxist political economy. Its central move was to link environmental change to structures of power: class relations, global capitalism, colonial legacies, and state authority. A drought, for example, was not simply a climatic event but a disaster produced by land tenure systems, market pressures, and political marginalization. Political ecology absorbed the possibilist insight that human choices matter, but insisted that those choices are shaped by unequal power relations. It also absorbed elements of Marxist geography's focus on capital accumulation, though it broadened the analysis to include non-class dimensions such as ethnicity and, later, gender. From the start, political ecology was materialist: it focused on who gets access to resources, who bears environmental costs, and how political-economic structures produce environmental degradation.
New Cultural Geography (1980–Present) took a different path. Drawing on cultural theory, post-structuralism, and the work of scholars such as Denis Cosgrove and James Duncan, it argued that nature is not simply a material reality but a cultural construction. Landscapes, maps, scientific classifications, and even the concept of 'wilderness' are ways of seeing that reflect particular cultural values and power relations. Where political ecology asked who controls resources, new cultural geography asked how nature is represented and whose representations become authoritative. This constructivist orientation did not replace political ecology; rather, the two frameworks entered into a productive tension. Political ecologists sometimes accused cultural geographers of losing sight of material inequality, while cultural geographers countered that political ecology's materialism naively assumed a nature 'out there' unmediated by discourse.
Feminist Geography (1980–Present) added a further dimension by insisting that gender is central to environmental relations. Women and men experience environmental change differently, have different access to resources, and possess different forms of environmental knowledge. Feminist geographers showed that development projects, conservation programs, and resource management regimes often reinforce gender inequalities. The framework also challenged the masculinist assumptions embedded in earlier approaches—spatial science's detached modeler, political ecology's class-focused activist, new cultural geography's disembodied observer. Feminist geography coexisted with both political ecology and new cultural geography, and in practice many scholars worked at their intersections. Feminist political ecology, for instance, combined materialist analysis of resource access with attention to gendered knowledge and identity, showing that the three frameworks could be complementary rather than competing.
By the 1990s, a further set of frameworks began to challenge the very distinction between society and nature that had structured environmental geography since the determinism-possibilism debate. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (1990–Present), imported from science and technology studies via Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, argued that agency is not a human monopoly. Rivers, microbes, weather stations, and irrigation pumps all participate in shaping environmental outcomes. ANT dissolved the human-nature dualism by treating all entities—human and non-human—as actors in networks. A farmer's decision to plant a drought-resistant crop, for example, is co-produced by the seed's genetic properties, the soil's moisture content, the agricultural extension officer's advice, and the market price for grain. This was a radical departure from both political ecology's materialism and new cultural geography's constructivism. Political ecology had treated nature as a resource shaped by power; new cultural geography had treated nature as a representation shaped by discourse. ANT treated nature as an active participant.
Non-Representational Theory (NRT) (1995–Present), developed by Nigel Thrift and others, pushed in a related but distinct direction. NRT shifted attention away from representations, texts, and discourses toward embodied practice, affect, and the pre-conscious flows of sensation and response that shape how people inhabit environments. Where new cultural geography analyzed how landscapes are represented in paintings or maps, NRT asked how bodies move through landscapes, how weather is felt on the skin, and how habitual practices like walking or farming produce environmental knowledge without explicit reflection. NRT shared ANT's suspicion of the human-nature divide, but it focused less on networks of actors and more on the fleeting, affective encounters that constitute environmental experience. The two frameworks have coexisted as complementary relational approaches: ANT provides a vocabulary for tracing the heterogeneous associations that produce environmental outcomes, while NRT captures the embodied, affective dimensions that ANT's network diagrams can miss.
Environmental geography today is a pluralistic field. No single framework dominates, and the frameworks that remain active—Political Ecology, New Cultural Geography, Feminist Geography, Actor-Network Theory, and Non-Representational Theory—continue to coexist, overlap, and disagree. Political ecology remains the most widely used framework for analyzing environmental conflicts, resource governance, and the political economy of climate change. New cultural geography has narrowed somewhat into a specialized toolkit for landscape interpretation and discourse analysis, but its constructivist insights are now taken for granted across the subfield. Feminist geography has transformed from a corrective add-on into a core perspective, with feminist political ecology and feminist posthumanism representing active research frontiers. ANT and NRT have opened new lines of inquiry into multispecies relations, infrastructure, and environmental affect, though they have not displaced materialist or constructivist approaches.
What the leading frameworks agree on is that society and nature cannot be studied in isolation. All reject the nature-society dualism that underpinned both environmental determinism and spatial science. All insist that power, meaning, and embodiment matter for understanding environmental change. Where they disagree is on what drives environmental outcomes. Political ecology points to political-economic structures; new cultural geography to representational practices; feminist geography to gendered relations; ANT to heterogeneous networks; NRT to embodied affect. These are not contradictions that need resolution but different angles on a complex subject. The history of environmental geography is not a story of one framework replacing another, but of successive frameworks adding layers of analytical depth while older approaches remain available as tools for specific questions. A student entering the field today inherits this layered landscape: the determinism-possibilism debate as a historical foundation, spatial science as a methodological resource, and the critical and relational frameworks as living traditions that continue to reshape how geographers understand the entanglement of society and nature.