Environmental aspects in Earth sciences and environmental management: a brief overview of author's developments against the background of global trends

Abstract

Earth science and geography are experiencing a new Renaissance, called environmentalism. It is due to the growing importance of threats for the global community because of the negative reaction of the natural environment to the growing workload.

The purpose of this article is to show innovation and investment opportunities that must significantly change the attitude to geography and Earth sciences in general and identify opportunities for the formation and development of environmental geography by radically modernizing the approach, especially research methods, mainly through the latest geographical education, making it an urgent social need. The article summarizes the experience and results of the author and his colleagues’ work over two decades of research.

Main material. Presentation of the basic content of the article is organized into 3 rubrics.

The trends of conceptual changes are considered as an extension of traditional ecology to environmentology. There is a transformation of the subject - object dualism of classical ecology to the realization of complex interaction. It is generally the subject of environmentology. Only in this case, the consumer attitude to the natural environment transforms into the knowledge of natural systems as a stakeholder of mankind. This trend is due to the awareness of the importance of complex natural systems, arbitrarily called the natural environment, in relations with humanity. The relations have to become partnership ones, not aggressive ones. The science that deals closest with this problem is environmental geography.

The importance of the territory as an integral resource of the society is stressed in the trends of sustainable development. It is considered not only as a necessary, though non-economic condition of existence, but as an economic object, that is natural capital. The latter requires a different attitude to itself than just the environment: inventory procedures (like other means of production), objective assessment, amortization, ever-increasing investment and economic transformation into the actual trend.

 Intangible natural resources -the prospect of environmental geography. In this case, natural environment of the external conditions of human existence will become an essential and indispensable part of the global and national wealth of countries. Natural-resource rents should become a way of filling the gross domestic product at different levels of the society’s structuring (environmental economy).

Along with material and energy resources, the value of intangible natural resources and relevant environmental management is significantly increasing, which environmental geography also should deal with.

Conclusions and prospects. 1. In fact, at present humanity is possessed by geographical problems of the environment. Determining the general trend of the world community development, they are at the core of sustainable development. At the same time, these problems are still being solved without the involvement of geographical science and geographical technologies. 2. In the context of the information era, when the problems of negative environmental changes become public and are regarded as the first threat to human existence, geography should become environmental geography. For this purpose, it must change people’s attitude to the natural environment, considering it to be an equitable subject of relations with humanity. 3. The approaches to the environment as natural capital, which provides significant economic surplus value and social value, are considered effective. Unfortunately, these qualities of nature have not received a value expression yet.  They remain public resources, while they should be assets of the environmental economy. 4. The formation of these development trends is able to make environmental geography join the list of avant-garde sciences, providing the prospect of sustainable development of mankind.