Navigating together without a map: Metaphors for making Geography’s future

This article sets the scene for the 10 papers comprising the special issue ‘‘Geographical research for the 21st century: trajectories and possibilities’. It asks the hoary question, ‘by what means, and to what ends, should Geography be directed?’. It does not, however, venture a substantive response because there is no single answer that will suffice. Instead, the article offers resources for those seeking to respond to this question. It identifies 12 parameters that define the ‘operating space’ that most geographers worldwide now have to act within, like it or not. These parameters not only impose constraints but also offer opportunities. The article then focuses on metaphors that might help us better understand who we are as a research and teaching community: after all, metaphors can distil the essence of our ongoing preoccupations. I venture a ‘new ecological’ metaphor that might enable accuracy and hope in our self-understanding as we enter the third decade of an already extraordinary century. It may seem paradoxical to say, but we can navigate forward purposefully without a map, avoiding the polar opposites of an infeasible disciplinary unity and an undesirable Balkanisation of our activities. </jats:p

Making the Environmental Humanities Consequential in “The Age of Consequences”

Abstract This article suggests that global environmental assessments (GEAs) may be a potent means for making the environmental humanities more consequential outside universities. So far most GEAs have been led by geoscientists, with mainstream social science in support. However, there is no reason why the concept of assessment cannot be elasticated to include the concerns of interpretive social science and the humanities. Building on the forty-year history and authority of GEAs as a means to bridging the gap between the research world and the wider world, this article identifies the potential that reformatted assessments hold for more impactful work by environmental humanists. It suggests some next steps for rethinking the means and ends of assessment toward a new paradigm that bridges geoscience, mainstream social science, and humanistic thinking about the nonhuman world. This paradigm would explore the human dimensions of environmental change fully. The timing is propitious: independently GEAs are undergoing change at the very moment that the “What next?” question is being asked by many environmental humanists. This article is intended to inspire debate and, ultimately, action. It both makes the case for more humanistic GEAs and offers examples of potential work packages.</jats:p

Marxism and the logics of dis/integration

Marxism is a large and diverse body of thought that has weathered many storms over the last 150 years. While its explanatory and political relevance to today's world is enormous, Marxism lacks mass appeal and largely resides in universities (notably, the social sciences and humanities). While this is, in one sense, a sign of defeat, in another sense it's been productive insofar as it's offered exponents space and time to make sense of capitalism's ever-changing configurations. This article homes-in on classical Marxism and its enduring importance as a tool of analysis and political thinking. It focuses on the author's attempts to understand how the biophysical world is entrained in the dynamics of capital accumulation, especially during the period of neoliberal political economy that began around 35 years ago. Marxist geographers continue to offer important insights into capitalism in a more-than-capitalist world that is, nonetheless, utterly dominated by the contradictory logics of growth, economic competition, endless technological innovation, uneven development, accumulation by dispossession and crisis. For me, classical Marxism's attention to capitalism as an expansive ‘totality’ is critical, obliging us to attend to how different places, people and political projects are brought into a single, if exceedingly complex, universe. The article reflects on how the embrace of classical Marxism necessarily folds the professional into the personal, though in ways that inevitably highlight some of the contradictions that Marx and Engels identified. It's to be hoped that a new and talented generation of Marxist geographers will continue the work initiated 50 years ago by David Harvey and others. The article suggests that a key research frontier for Marxist geography is normative: what sorts of political visions and proposals will gain traction in a variegated yet tightly connected world where capitalism is so manifestly dangerous for people and planet? </jats:p

The Discourse and Reality of Carbon Dioxide Removal: Toward the Responsible Use of Metaphors in Post-normal Times

There's little doubt that a variety of CDR techniques will be employed worldwide in the decades and centuries to come. Together, these techniques will alter the character and functioning of the biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, pedosphere, and atmosphere. More locally, they will have immediate impacts on people and place, within diverse national state contexts. However, for the moment CDR exists more in the realm of discourse than reality. Its future roll-out in many and varied forms will depend on a series of discussions in the governmental, commercial, and civic spheres. Metaphor will be quite central to these formative discussions. Metaphors serve to structure perceptions of unfamiliar phenomena by transferring meaning from a recognized “source” domain to a new “target” domain. They can be employed in more or less felicitous, more or less noticeable, more or less defensible ways. Metaphors help to govern future action by framing present-day understandings of a world to come. To govern metaphor itself may seem as foolhardy as attempting to sieve water or converse with rocks. Yet by rehearsing some old lessons about metaphor we stand some chance of responsibly steering its employment in unfolding debates about CDR techniques and their practical governance globally. This Perspective identifies some key elements of metaphor's use that will require attention in the different contexts where CDR techniques presently get (and will in future be) discussed meaningfully. Various experts involved in CDR development and deployment have an important, though not controlling, role to play in how it gets metaphorized. This matters in our age of populism, rhetoric, misinformation, and disinformation where the willful (mis)use of certain metaphors threatens to depoliticize, polarize, or simplify future debates about CDR. What is needed is “post-normal” discourse where high stakes decisions made in the context of epistemic uncertainty are informed by clear reasoning among disparate parties whose values diverge.</jats:p

Finding the coast: environmental governance and the characterisation of land and sea

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.In environmental governance for land and sea, the cultural is increasingly imbricated with the natural in the language of ecosystem services and the promise of integrated management. We are witnessing accelerated efforts to bring cultural and natural landscape character assessments into dialogue with other sorts of planning and governance mechanisms for coastal and marine environments. As land, sea, nature and culture are brought into closer correspondence, the coast assumes ever greater significance as a site and object of decision‐making in planning and environmental governance. In this paper, I draw on the critical analytical techniques of cultural geography to argue that coasts suffer from definitional ambiguity and conceptual insufficiency, both of which are exemplified by landscape and seascape characterisation, with specific consequences for environmental governance. I argue that we need to (1) both recognise and destabilise the unhelpful dichotomy between land and sea embodied in landscape and seascape character assessments, which have their provenance in landscape architecture; and (2) engage new language and conceptual tools that help us to rethink coasts critically. To this end, later on this paper, I briefly discuss alternative ways of conceptualising the coast, for example as a liminal space

The future of global environmental assessments: Making a case for fundamental change

Since the late 1970s, over 140 global environmental assessments (GEAs) have been completed. But are they any longer fit for purpose? Some believe not. Compelling arguments have been advanced for a new assessment paradigm, one more focussed on problem-solving than problem-identification. If translated into new assessment practices, this envisaged paradigm could prevail for the next several decades, just as the current one has since the late 1970s. In this paper, it is contended that the arguments for GEAs 2.0 are, in fact, insufficiently bold. Solutions-orientated assessments, often associated with a ‘policy turn’ by their advocates, are undoubtedly necessary. But without a ‘politics turn’ they will be profoundly insufficient: policy options would be detached from the diverse socio-economic explanations and ‘deep hermeneutics’ of value that ultimately give them meaning, especially given the very high stakes now attached to managing human impacts on a fast-changing planet. Here we make the case for GEAs 3.0, where two paradigmatic steps forward are taken at once rather than just one. The second step involves the introduction of political reasoning and structured normative debate about existential alternatives, a pre-requisite to strategic decision-making and its operational expression. Possible objections to this second step are addressed and rebutted. Even so, the case for politically-overt GEAs faces formidable difficulties of implementation. However, we consider these challenges less a sign of our undue idealism and more an indication of the urgent need to mitigate, if not overcome them. In a world of ‘wicked problems’ we need ‘wicked assessments’ adequate to them, preparatory to so-called ‘clumsy solutions’. This paper is intended to inspire more far-reaching debate about the future of GEAs and, by implication, about the roles social science and the humanities might usefully play in addressing global environmental change. </jats:p