The Traditions and Development of Human-environment Geography in English-speaking Countries

This paper summarizes the development of human-environment geography in English-speaking countries with the emphasis on its traditions and development in the past 100 years.Its development falls into three phases:(1) Parallel development of two traditions before the 1950s: human efforts at changing the earth and the influence of the changing earth;both try to reinterpret the human-environment relationship by abandoning environmental determinism. The former has a close relationship with history and anthropology and emphasizes past changes.Thus,it is called historical geography or cultural landscape.The latter,called human ecology,absorbs the ideas and concepts from ecology and pays attentions to resource management in modern times.(2) Critique and refutation phase during the 1960s and the 1970s: both traditions encountered criticism from both quantitative and Marxism schools.The two schools have grown out of cultural landscape in response to the criticism.One is cultural ecology-political ecology and the other humanistic geography-new cultural geography.The human ecology has developed into an interdisciplinary research in response to the criticism.(3) Disintegrating and unifying phase after the 1980s,which finds expression in the fact that it is difficult to generalize the disciplinary traits within one category while most scholars devote themselves to solving the existing environmental problems no matter whether they are oriented to political ecology, global changes or sustainability sciences.