Nature

The topic of nature-of the physical environment with or without human interactions and interrelations with it-has been treated somewhat ambivalently by human geographers over the discipline's history. In opposition to the dualist ontology and epistemology which dominated the philosophy and practice of geography throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, human geography research on environment and human society-environmental interrelationships has sought to encourage new ways of living in the world, and of avoiding major human-induced environmental crises. Strongly influenced by Marxian, feminist, postmodernist, and poststructuralist standpoints, approaches to the research of nature have, since the early 1990s, spanned across a diverse range of topics, highlighting how nature is actively physically made over by humans in the process of capitalist exploitation, but also how what we come to think about and know as a supposedly external, biophysical nature is always mediated by discourses of, for instance, imperialism, racism, or sustainable development.