Margaret Sprout

Environmental factors in the study of international politics

Japanese abroad.... The factor of geographic isolation during ... two thousand years has helped fashion national traits which eventually, and ahnost inevitably, led Japan to political isolation and to crushing defeat in war&dquo; (our italics) (5, pp. 5, 8). Fifth, from a standard treatise on resources, the assertion that invention of the basic steel furnace (which made it possible to produce good steel from the acidic ores of Alsace-Lorraine) &dquo;led inevitably to Germany’s industrial hegemony on the con-

Geography and international politics in an era of revolutionary change

datum of their subject. Every nation-state has a territorial base, a spatial section of the earth’s surface in the idiom of geographic science. Territory is one of the absolute requisites of statehood. In nearly all international transactions involving some element of opposition, resistance, struggle, or conflict, the factors of location, space, and distance between the interacting parties have been significant variables. This significance is embodied in the maxim, &dquo;Power is local.&dquo; That is to say, political demands

National Priorities and the Physical Habitat: Focus of Continuing Controversy

Ever since arresting the progressive deterioration of the physical habitat emerged as a live political issue in the United States in the early 1960s, it has been a subject of continuing disputation—both as to the urgency of repair and protection, and as to who should bear responsibility for deciding what and how much to undertake or to leave undone. Since all societies, especially industrial societies, are exposed to proliferating damage and hazards from diverse sources, environmental programs compete for support with a multiplicity of other claims on disposable resources. Since nearly everything that is done to maintain a decently livable physical habitat affects to some extent the distribution of income within and among nations, public authority has become increasingly the focus of environmental repair and protection, and the budgetary decisions of government the core of that focus—claims of some economists and other specialists to the contrary notwithstanding. The four books compared in this article consider these and related issues from various perspectives, both domestic and international.