Introduction

The environment is, in many ways, one of the core traditional themes of political geography. And yet, as this section title suggests, and as most of the authors in this section propose, there is a pressing need for political geography to re-engage with themes of nature, environment and non-humans. For some of the earliest writers in this field, like Halford Mackinder (1904) or Friedrich Ratzel (1963), the environment held the promise of explaining the world of politics, including the dominance of certain states in international affairs, or the imperatives of colonization (see Bassin, 2003, and Braun, this volume, for reviews). The metaphorical use of environmental or biological terminology to explain social processes, like the expansion of states, spatial ...