Critical physical geography

Abstract

It is a young and emerging concept, first referred to in publication in 2014 by Rebecca Lave and colleagues (Lave et al., 2014). The fundamental basis of CPG is that geography is a subject that offers an opportunity to study human-environment interactions in a truly integrative way, and that such integration is fundamental. No discipline other than geography offers a training that can extend from environmental applications of the mass conservation laws derived from fundamental physics through to the emotions surrounding the way in which we relate to the environments we experience. Geographers have shown repeatedly that there is a class of problems (e.g. desertification, soil erosion, river restoration, deforestation, climate change, sea-level rise, environmental pollution) of which our understanding is incomplete without the integration of the different perspectives that come from the social sciences and the natural sciences. Geographers, then, have a contribution to make through integrative work addressing humanenvironment interactions.