Contested Identities: Human-Environment Geography and Disciplinary Implications in a Restructuring Academy

ions are homologous, and will the understanding gained prove significant to problem-solving? As a discipline, we may have grown comfortable in our understanding and acceptance of the connections between the two identities. However, we have failed to demonstrate that the partitioning of knowledge logically requires a field of study and research predicated on the combined interests inherent in the spatial-chorological and humanenvironment identities, and we have not demonstrated that useful abstractions (i.e., rules, laws, lessons) follow from the coupling of these identities. This last hurdle is critical to a geography that more or less retains its current structure and yet gains secure acceptance within the architecture of higher education and research beyond the humanities. Review and Implications With intellectual antecedents found in antiquity, the human-environment identity has vied with a spatialchorological one, at least since the nineteenth century, as the formal justification of the geographic in the partitioning of the Western academies, with implications for geography’s position as systematic or synthesis science. The central place of the human-environment identity was downgraded in geographic thought during the last half of the twentieth century, a time in which the spatialchorological identity held formal dominion, and yet large numbers of practitioners were attracted to the “other” geography—integrated assessment and understanding of the human-environment condition. Entering the new century, the questions of the human-environment relationship have been elevated throughout the academy and public at large, and geography is recognized as possessing unusual strength in integrated, human-environment science. The discipline has pragmatically taken advantage of this moment, but it has done so while maintaining various positions—sets of assumptions with different implications—in regard to geography and the academy. The first position views as resolved geography’s historically contested dualism in favor of the spatial-chorological vision, the disciplinary legitimacy (partition of knowledge) of which is secure