Introduction: Knowing Nature, Making Space

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book probes the mutual entanglement of ecology and space from a historical perspective. Its first and most immediate goal is to advance space as a critical context for the study of the history of scientific ecology. The second goal of the book is to use ecological knowledge processes as a lens to shed new light on the spatial history of the natural environment. Space and place, for a long time only the preoccupation of geographers, have recently begun to occupy a central role in the research agenda of the humanities and social sciences. This 'spatial turn', as this reorientation has been dubbed, has manifested itself in a new interest in the cultural dimension of spatial entities such as cities, regions, nations, and landscapes.