Environment, Historical Geography of

From its inception as a discipline, the study of human impacts on environments past and present has been a defining theme. Before historical geography was even conceptualized as a subdiscipline, the historical geography of the environment has been central to many of the key advances in the discipline: from Von Humboldt's Kosmos, through Churchill Semple's environmental determinism, Sauer's cultural landscapes, to Darby's systematic archival reconstructions. If historical geographers retreated from an explicit focus on the environment through much of the 1970s and 1980s, by the late 1990s interests were renewed, often in very different ways to earlier work drawing on the influence of the rise of environmental history and political ecology. The final half of this essay is then devoted to a systematic analysis of what might be considered to be the six main themes in the field today: political approaches; the culture of nature; the more-than-human; climate and weather; colonialism and imperialism; and, finally, environments from below. The essay then concludes by considering the influence of the concept of the Anthropocene, arguing that historical geographers of the environment are uniquely well-placed to enrich current debates on anthropocentric environmental change but need to rise to the challenge of thinking about times and places currently all but ignored in the field.