Combining historical, social and regulative analysis, this book builds a compelling critique of 'frontier thinking' and demonstrates its pernicious amplification in contemporary human affairs.

This book systematically identifies the ways in which images of nature and society are formed by historically developed frontier-oriented narratives. It illustrates how these narratives have underpinned much Anglo-American and Anglocentric thought, and have even come to form our assumptions about social and environmental organisation - in ways that are relevant not least to the present environmental crisis. The book confronts these conceptions at large, showing that they never held empirically, and contrasts them with the situation in northern Europe, where diverging assumptions are integral to this day. Through this juxtaposition, the book illustrates not only the pervasiveness of structures of understanding in steering policy, but also the varying traditions in different countries regarding how understandings of the environment can be formed.

The study highlights how historical thought patterns, formed for very different reasons than exist today, continue to shape our assumptions - about nature, the relation between urban and rural areas, and our understanding of ourselves in relation to the environmental crisis. The book will be of wide interest to a range of academics and students in the fields of geography, anthropology, environmental studies, sociology, political science and development studies, amongst others.