Teaching and Learning Guide for: Environmental Economic Geography

Abstract

environment. Likewise,modern (post-1960) economic geography largely sub-disciplined itself around aninterest in employment (e.g. industrial geography) or in nature (e.g. environmentalgeography). Fortunately, the nature of the debate is changing rapidly andpolitical, business and environmental leaders have recognized that economicdevelopment and environmental sustainability, the two central challenges facingthe world in the twenty-first century, depend on each other as potentially mutuallycompatible imperatives. Recognition that economic evolution is driven byinnovations of all kinds that restructure relations between economy and environmentsupports this view. If these restructurings have been overwhelmingly negative forthe environment in the past, a re-calibration of institutional and technologicalinnovation towards a Green Paradigm that seeks to realize positive sum relationshipsbetween economy and environment is feasible. Moreover, a Green Paradigm needsto be both global in scope and sensitive to geographically uniqueness. Economy–environment relationships are distinctive in particular places and connected acrossspace; climate warming, for example, is a global phenomenon in which processesand outcomes are locally varied. The vital role for environmental economicgeography is to assess how place and space influence economy–environmentrelations that are site-specific, globally interdependent and multi-scalar, and toprescribe (local–global) relations that will realize economic and environmentalvalues. Normatively, with respect to the achievement of economic and environ-mental values: How should innovation systems be organized globally and locally?What is the proper distribution of economic activities? How should cities andresource peripheries be remapped? How should value chains that directly andindirectly link multi-faceted (resource, manufacturing and service activities)activities in the supply of goods and services for consumers best be organizedlocally and globally? These are some of the fascinating questions facing environmentaleconomic geography.