2025/09/06 by Dylan Simon · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · #History of Science and Natural History #American Environmental and Regional History #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
paper · doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2025.08.004
openalex publication_date 2025/09/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The French geographer Max Sorre (1880–1962) developed a brand of human ecology from the 1920s onwards. Discernibly distinct from the human ecology developed by sociologists in Chicago, Sorre's human ecology deepens humankind's relations to the physical and living environment (including through medical geography). This cognitive horizon manifested itself in extensive and distinctive research on life, disease, climate and diets. Through such an ecological understanding of humankind, the aim was to return to a geographical question: understanding the durable conditions for the habitability of the globe, and explaining the inhabited earth. In addition to analysing these issues, this text also seeks to delimit the various procedures by which Sorre and the biological and medical sciences reciprocally imported one another's ideas. Indeed, Sorre showed himself to be particularly open to other disciplines, corresponding with climatologists, zoologists and physicians. In return, the latter also adopted certain proposals formulated by the geographer, notably his concept of the ‘pathogenic complex’. Finally, the text will try to objectify the constituent conceptions of this ecological knowledge, considering it as the rendering of material relations to the environment, but also as the result of certain scholarly representations.