This paper documents the perennial role of energy in geographic thought. The science of thermodynamics initially challenged geography's evolutionary and geological precepts. This incommensurability was overcome by the development of organismic theories of statehood. Energy went on to provide a means to make determinate statements about the relation between climate and society. With the rejection of such determinism, energy slowly regained eminence, particularly in post-war French geography. This work encouraged economic geographers to draw on new national records of energy use to describe and analyse growing industrial economies. Concurrently, physical geographers showed renewed interest in energy as means of explaning the natural world. However, in both branches, a nascent energy geography was subsumed by a more general systems approach. It took the energy crises of the nineteen-seventies to affirm the need for applied energy geography. Today, it is clear fossil energy use has transformed Earth's atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles, requiring studies which address new and complex relations between energy and society. While encouraging such work, it is argued that new geographies of energy have much to learn from the old.

本文记录了能量在地理思想中的长期作用。热力学科学最初挑战了地理学的进化和地质学说。这种不可通约性被国家有机体理论的发展所克服。能源继续提供了一种手段，可以对气候与社会之间的关系做出明确的陈述。随着这种决定论的拒绝，能量慢慢地重新获得了卓越的地位，特别是在战后的法国地理中。这项工作鼓励经济地理学家利用新的国家能源使用记录来描述和分析不断增长的工业经济。同时，自然地理学家对能量作为解释自然世界的手段表现出新的兴趣。然而，在这两个分支中，新生的能源地理学被更一般的系统方法所包含。十九世纪七十年代的能源危机确认了应用能源地理学的必要性。今天，很明显化石能源的使用已经改变了地球的大气和生物地球化学循环，需要研究解决能源与社会之间新的复杂关系。在鼓励这样的工作的同时，有人认为新的能源地理可以从旧的那里学到很多东西。