Economic Geography

10 Towards an environmental
economic geography
David P. Angel
When I first started teaching economic geography during the 1980s it 
was commonplace to begin an introductory class by asking the students to 
think about the geography of the clothes they were wearing. Students turned to 
each other and the tactile experience of pulling back the shirt collar connected 
the students personally to the course in a way the syllabus could not. The shoes
‘Made in China’ and the shirt ‘Made in Sri Lanka’ led easily into a discussion of
economic globalization and of living and working conditions around the world.
The students read the opening pages of Global Shift (Dicken 1986) and we were
away. What is striking to me in retrospect is how little time we spent thinking
about the resources from which the shoes and shirts were made, the chemicals
used to turn a shirt sparkling white, the flow of waste water from the leather
tanning factory, and the energy and pesticides expended in cotton fields. 
The material foundations and environmental consequences of economic activity,
flows of energy, water, materials and waste, were if anything, less visible for me
and the students than the social conditions and geography of production and
consumption.
Nowadays undergraduate students are eager to discuss at least some environ-
mental and material aspects of economic activity. Instead of asking where the
iPod is made, we have an interesting discussion of whether or not the battery is
recyclable, and what to make of Apple’s adoption of a take-back policy on ‘old’
iPods. Is there an economic rationale behind the take-back policy and how does
this rationale fit into the social regulation of business and into the market strate-
gies of firms in the contemporary political economy? We talk a bit about the use
of heavy metals in electronic equipment and the significance of the European
Union RoHS directive.
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We debate whether tough environmental regulation of
economic activity stimulates innovation, or whether environmental regulation
slows economic growth. Sometimes we make it to a discussion of energy inten-
sity, greenhouse gas emissions and climate change and perhaps to thinking about
the economic impacts of pollution. But we do not find much of this in the current
textbooks of economic geography. Where is the ‘environmental economic geog-
raphy’ equivalent of Global Shift? Alternatively, we might ask whether the above
topics are of economic geography at all, or part of some other disciplinary or
inter-disciplinary field of inquiry.

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One of the striking elements of teaching economic geography in the 1980s
was the easy alignment of topics taught with concepts and theories of the field.
Students eager to engage with theory found a blossoming economic geography
literature on industrial districts, commodity chains, agglomeration economies
and the like that spoke directly to issues of concern, whether it be the loss of
manufacturing jobs in OECD economies or the rapid rise of the Asian newly
industrializing economies. More generally, these meso-level concepts nested well
within broader theories of political and economic change, such as regulation
theory. Stated differently, the focus and scope of theoretical work underway
within economic geography was well aligned with the kinds of research questions
that were in play and also connected well with some of the major public policy
debates of the time.
In retrospect, this alignment of the topics and the theory of the field in the
1980s was constraining as well as it was enabling. As detailed in many of the
other chapters of this volume, the past two decades have seen both acceptance
of a broader definition of economic geography (symbolically marked in the
United States by a shift from industrial geography to economic geography), and by
a proliferation of alternative theories and epistemological standpoints. In some
instances, such as that of feminist analysis, these new directions in economic
geography have had a transformative impact on the theory and methods of 
the field. In other cases, such as the interest in finance capital, existing theories
and method have proven adaptable to the issues of concern. Recent reviews 
of economic geography scholarship have stressed the polyvalent character of 
the field today and the added value generated by diversity of method and
approach (Clark et al. 2000). As discussed later in this chapter, one consequence
of this broadening of the concept of the ‘economic’ has been the engagement 
of economic geography with research that maintains an emphasis on human-
environment relations, an emphasis that was largely absent from industrial geo-
graphy during the 1980s.
But what has been the experience of researchers practicing environmental
economic geography? As efforts are made to recover the material foundations
and environmental consequences of economic activity, what happens to the theo-
ries and methods that we use and teach as part of economic geography? In this
chapter, I reflect on the growing engagement of economic geography with issues
of the environment. My central interest is with the theories that we have at hand
to study economic geographies that are as much about flows of energy, material
and waste as they are about flows of capital and goods produced, and about meas-
ures of success that relate to the energy intensity of economic activity as well as to
livelihoods maintained, jobs created, and profits made. The chapter is bound by my
own intellectual path dependency in that the discussion is limited to industrial
activity.
I describe two principal approaches that have emerged within the field. The
first approach is labeled the greening of industry. This approach in essence takes
much of the existing conceptual apparatus of economic geography, from studies
of commodity chains to work on innovation and technological change, and
Towards an environmental economic geography
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applies this work to issues of resource use and the environmental impact of
economic activity. I argue that this approach aligns well with the actual practice
of many industrial firms today. It is also an approach that is fundamentally 
firm-centered. The second approach, that is labeled a political ecology of indus-
trial change, is far more nascent within the field, and largely absent from the
economic practice of industrial firms. Here the theoretical and empirical frame of
analysis shifts to a structural form. The fundamental question to be addressed is
the ways in which the material foundations of economic activity – from resources
used to waste generated, along with attendant environmental impacts – impact
patterns and processes of industrial change. As the reference to political ecology
suggests, however immutable biophysical processes and geochemical cycles might
be, the engagement of economies with the environment is fundamentally a social
process that requires interrogation through social (and economic geography)
theory.