| Abstract: | The ‘Clark Phenomenon’ began in 1966 with two major events: the publication of a special number of the Journal of Social Issues with the (now admittedly sexist) title of ‘Man's Response to the Physical Environment’, and the arrival of Jim Blaut on campus. This watershed year, just two decades ago, also may have marked the transition from infancy to adolescence of the reborn field of ‘environmental cognition’. This article traces these early middle years of environmental cognition and its related emphases at Clark, the leadership of certain members of the faculty of the Graduate School of Geography in bringing the new field to full flower, the spinoffs and inevitable reactive forces, and the application of environmental cognition to problems of intercultural communication on environmental issues of an international scope. Such application is a later reflection of the social and political consciousness of the 1960s, the concern to relate environmental psychology to what was taking place in the U.S.A. and in the ‘emerging’ nations of the so-called developing world. In all of this, the Clark influence was, and remains, relevant. |
