Discussion Of The Volume Priroda I Obshchestvo [Nature and Society]

In March 1969, a group of geographers at the Geographical Society USSR in Leningrad convened a meeting to discuss the volume Priroda i obshchestvo (Moscow, 1968), a collection of articles concerned with the role of geography in investigating the man-nature relationship. Selected articles appeared in Soviet Geography, May 1969. Some of the discussants were critical of certain authors on the ground that they argued in favor of a unified geography to deal with the man-nature relationship as a whole and did not differentiate between socioeconomic systems (capitalism, socialism) in appraising society's attitude toward nature. The official report of the meeting, in which five principal discussants participated, follows.