Book Cover -- Title -- Contents -- Preface -- The Contributors -- General Introduction -- Introduction -- Planet Earth -- The ever-changing climate -- The biosphere -- Human evolution -- The geography of language -- Religion: nature and origins -- The modification of the earth by humans in pre-industrial times -- Introduction -- European settlement, 1450 1750 -- European expansion and land cover transformation -- The origins of the capitalist world economy -- Industrialization and world agriculture -- Changes in global demography -- Origins of modern environmentalism -- The saviour city: beneficial effects of urbanization in England and Wales -- From a 'cultural' world to a 'political' one -- Introduction -- Unity and division in global political geography -- The geography of conflicts and the prospects for peace -- A new 'geo-economy': patterns, processes, problems -- Third World urbanization -- From riches to rags: the international debt crisis -- Monitoring, modelling and mothering the environment: the impact of science and technology since the Second World War -- Environmentalism on the move -- Introduction -- Climatic variation and global change -- Ocean uses, environment and management -- Water: confronting the critical dilemma -- Surface instability and human modification in geomorphic systems -- The tropical rain forest -- Humanity's resources -- Environmental hazards -- The sustainability of sustenance: land and agricultural production in the Third World -- Famines and surplus in world food production -- The nature of Third World cities -- Western cities and their problems -- Changing countrysides -- The quality of life: human welfare and social justice -- Introduction -- The expansion and fragmentation of geography in higher education -- Achievements of spatial science -- Geography and humanism in the late twentieth century.

Structural themes in geographical discourse -- Challenging the boundaries: survival and change in a gendered world -- Place -- Introduction -- Concern for geography: a case for equal emphasis of the geographical traditions -- Home and world, cosmopolitanism and ethnicity: key concepts in contemporary human geography -- Palaeoenvironmental narrative and scenario science -- Geographical futures: some personal speculations -- Index.