The purpose of this chapter is to trace the historical and socio-political context of “environment-in-geography”, including key moments as well as epistemological and institutional debates. We highlight in particular a sub-field called “political ecology”. In doing so, we transgress geography’s disciplinary boundaries, as the roots of this approach are found as much in anthropology as in geography, and the current political ecology community of practice spans the social sciences and beyond. But as this book addresses a Francophone audience, and given the important role of political ecology in recent developments in French environmental geography, this disciplinary focus is justified. We conclude with a section on geography in France.