I'm writing a paper on how environmental and geographic factors influence economic development and, having already established that as my research question early in the semester, am having trouble actually defining the difference between the two. It seems like there's a lot of overlap. This is a slightly more subjective question than just the straightforward English definitions, but I'd appreciate any help you can give me.
Edit: I just realized that maybe the relationship between environment and geography is a sort of micro/macro relationship, where environment encompasses more of the micro-level details of an ecosystem and geography is more a macro-level analysis. Thoughts?
Edit 2: I should clarify that I'm writing about the features of the natural environment, rather than environment in a more abstract sense.
Best Answer
Are you defining "geography" to encompass only natural phenomena such as the shape and location of landmasses and their features? Or are you including demographic and sociological factors like population density, literacy rate, and so forth?
If the former, consider something like geophysics (which would be better used in adjectival form, e.g. "geophysical factors") or physical topology.
If the latter, that's probably too broad a category to be considered as a single unit, although in a pinch you could resort to something unwieldy like "geographic and demographic factors."
In either case, "environment" should suffice as a contrasting category once you've differentiated it from the other one.