Environmentalism is the advocation of preservation, restoration, and/or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions.
Movement to protect the quality and continuity of life through conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and control of land use. The philosophical foundations for environmentalism in the United States were established by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. In 1864, George Perkins Marsh published Man & Nature, in which he anticipated many concepts of modern ecology.
The theory that environment rather than heredity is the primary influence on intellectual growth and cultural development.

Advocacy of the preservation or improvement of the natural environment, especially the social and political movement to control environmental pollution. Other specific goals of environmentalism include control of human population growth, conservation of natural resources, restriction of the negative effects of modern technology, and the adoption of environmentally benign forms of political and economic organization. Environmental advocacy at the international level by nongovernmental organizations and some states has resulted in treaties, conventions, and other instruments of environmental law addressing problems such as global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the danger of transboundary pollution from nuclear accidents. Influential U.S. and British environmentalists have included Thomas Robert Malthus, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Edward O. Wilson. In the social sciences, the term refers to any theory that emphasizes the importance of environmental factors in the development of culture and society.
Environmentalism is the advocation of preservation, restoration, and/or improvement of the natural environment, such as the conservation of natural resources, prevention of pollution, and certain land use actions.


Possibilism in cultural geography is the theory that the environment sets certain constraints or limitations, but culture is otherwise determined by people. The Possibilist school of thought would believe that desert cultures would have similarities due to living in environments that have similar limitations, but they would also have important differences due to being different peoples. Paul Vidal de la Blache is often regarded as the founder of this school of thought.



Environmental determinism, also known as climatic determinism, environmentalism, or the geographic factor, is the view that the physical environment, rather than social conditions, determines culture. Those who believe this view say that humans are strictly defined by stimulus-response (environment-behavior) and cannot deviate.

Determinism
The philosophical doctrine that every state of affairs, including every human event, act, and decision is the inevitable consequence of antecedent states of affairs.
philosophical thesis that every event is the inevitable result of antecedent causes. Applied to ethics and psychology, determinism usually involves a denial of free will, although many philosophers have attempted to reconcile the two concepts. Thomas Hobbes, identifying the will with appetites and defining freedom as the absence of impediments, concluded that free will exists where nothing prevents a person from satisfying his prevailing appetite. David Hume argued that a person's willful conduct counts as freely chosen even though his will has itself been determined by his motives. William James called such attempts to fit notions of free will into determinist systems “soft” determinism; “hard” determinism excludes the possibility of free will altogether. The doctrine of determinism is opposed by the principle of emergence, which states that truly novel and unpredictable events may occur out of the composite forces of nature.

Positivism is a philosophy developed by Auguste Comte (widely regarded as the first true sociologist) in the middle of the 19th century that stated that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method. This view is sometimes referred to as a scientist ideology, and is often shared by technocrats who believe in the necessary progress through scientific progress. As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Comte, who saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Comte was thus one of the leading thinkers of the social evolutionism thought. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland. Positivism is the most evolved stage of society in anthropological Evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develops. Marxism and predictive dialectics is a highly positivist system of theory.

Human geography is a branch of geography that focuses on the systematic study of patterns and processes that shape human interaction with the environment, with particular reference to the causes and consequences of the spatial distribution of human activity on the Earth's surface.

Scope

It encompasses human, political, cultural, social, and economic aspects of the social sciences. While the major focus of human geography is not the physical landscape of the Earth (see physical geography) it is hardly possible to discuss human geography without referring to the physical landscape on which human activities are being played out, and environmental geography is emerging as an important link between the two. Human geography is methodologically diverse using both qualitative methods and quantitative methods, including case studies, survey research, statistical analysis, and model building among others.