Chapter 16 - Geomorphology, Geography, and Science Bernard 0

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386 SCIENTIFIC NATURE OF GEOMORPHOLOGY geology from that which was geomorphology - they were one and the same. Geography, on the other hand, had not yet attained prominence as an academic discipline. Consequently, the importance and intimacy of the geography-geomorphology relationship have suffered from a historical transparency. Accounts of geography's development have tended to consider geography's geomorphological concerns, quite erroneously, as short-lived or marginal. This perspective concentrates more on geography's short academic lifespan than its long-standing intellectual traditions. The situation is further complicated by geography's wide-ranging concerns that extend beyond the earth's surface per se into the realm of human nature and behavior. The contemporary situation is rather different. Geomorphology has become a central specialization in academic geography, whereas marginalization of geomorphology and geomorphologists on the part of some mainstream geologists is not uncommon. Even as early as 1958, the retiring President of the Geological Society of America observed that 'Quaternary studies [geomorphology] gradually lost an aura of respectability which is attached to "hard-rock" geology' (Russell 1958, p. 1). Geography recognizes its beginnings in the writings and speculations of the ancient Greeks such as Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Hecataeus, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Pytheas, Eratosthenes, and Ptolemy (James and Martin 1981). Early geographical ideas were largely physical-geographic, if not geomorphologic, and they survive because Strabo's writings on geography were found intact. Strabo described the role of the geographer as explaining 'our inhabitated world - its size, shape, and character, and its relations to the earth as a whole' (quoted in James and Martin 1981, p. 36 from a translation by Jones 1917, pp. 429-43 1). This perspective of earth as consisting of two domains - the habitable and the uninhabitable - can be traced to Strabo's predecessors, Aristotle and Eratosthenes. Aristotle had been concerned with the ekumene or inhabited part of the earth (James and Martin 1981, p. 28) which he associated with the temperate zones in the Mediterranean region. Habitability, he suggested, decreased with latitudinal distance toward the equator and toward the poles. Such speculation accorded well with observation, and the remaining task was to explore the reasons for these associations. This laid the foundation for Eratosthenes to coin the term 'geography' and establish its raison d'etre as the study of earth as the home of man (James and Martin 1981, p. 31). This theme has been retained in varying form and degree through to the present, and Aristotle's concept of the ekumene eerily foreshadowed the paradigms of geographical influence and environmental determinism in geography and other related sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. The focus on earth's surface as the object of study by the Greeks is at the same time geographical and geological, and there is little evidence to suggest that these early philosophers contemplated humans as anything more than passive elements on the landscape. Humans as agents of environmental change is a theme not espoused until much later, first by Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in the late 1700s, and then by many geographers in the late 1800s. Geographers ultimately championed this paradigm in the 1950s (e.g. Thomas 1956), and it remains a central concern in most earth sciences and social sciences. Up until the mid-1800s, most scholars had interdisciplinary backgrounds and concerns - they were naturalists, scientists, and philosophers. Several individuals during this classical period could claim mastery of the sum of accumulated scientific and philosophical knowledge, and it would be inappropriate in most cases to attach a single
GEOMORPHOLOGY, GEOGRAPHY, AND SCIENCE 387 contemporary disciplinary label to them. The storehouse of knowledge had been growing exponentially, however, and disciplinary specialization became inevitable. It is at this phase of transition from a generalized to a specialized academy (roughly from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s) that most modern accounts of the foundational bases of geomorphology, geography, and geology search for their ancestry. Geographers identify individuals such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), Carl Ritter (1779-1859), Arnold Guyot (1807-1884), George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908), Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833-1905), and Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), among many others, as academic forefathers. Geologists, on the other hand, are more likely to point to James Hutton (1726-1797), John Playfair (1747-1819), Charles Lyell (1797-1875), James Dwight Dana (1813-1895), John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), Clarence E. Dutton (1841-1912), and George M. Wheeler (1842-1905) as foundational figures. Are these reasonable and illuminating choices, and why is there little overlap between the lists? Not surprisingly, such foreshortened retrospective searches for disciplinary roots end up pointing to only a select few that differ depending on disciplinary orthodoxies. This phenomenon has been recognized elsewhere and has been called the Whig interpretation of history (e.g. Livingstone 1984, p. 271), a process by which disciplinary historians judge the merits of affiliation with certain widely recognized scholars according to the contributions they are believed to have made toward establishing modern theories or paradigms (e.g. Brush 1974, p. 1169). Such retrospective reconstructions of academic lineages 'extend from personal viewpoint and experience to selection of material, the time dependence of ideas, the scientific context at a particular time, and the temptation to suggest that consensus of opinion exists where this may not indeed have been the case' (Gregory 1985, p. 2). An inherent danger to Whig historiography is that it 'looks at the past in terms of present ideas and values, rather than trying to understand the complete context of problems and preconceptions with which the earlier scientist himself had to work' (Brush 1974, p. 1169). It searches for a seed when no such beginning may realistically exist. Most 'founding fathers' are usually little more than symbolic figureheads because, in most cases, they founded neither the contemporary academic structures (e.g. departments, institutions, societies) nor the intellectual heritage of the discipline. Disciplinary histories and heroes so created can be very influential because the superficial logic is easy to grasp and because they are often the perceived essence and legitimation of a discipline or a disciplinary paradigm (see Tinkler 1985, pp. 229-230 or Sack 1992, pp. 258-259 for views about the shift from a 'Davisian' to a process-oriented school of thought; or Davies 1989, pp. 7-10 for a broader geomorphological perspective). These perceived essences, rightly or wrongly, appear to have direct bearing on the future evolution of a discipline (cf. Sherman, Chapter 4 this volume). An equally viable, if not more realistic, interpretation of disciplinary histories would recognize a common intellectual heritage, much like branches sprouting from the trunk of a tree that is supported by a diffuse root system representing the distant, less visible past. In this way, geographers, geologists, and geomorphologists alike ought to be able to trace their academic branches to Greek roots through a common trunk that spans the post- Renaissance era. However, contemporary academic ties to these distant figures are rather loose, and the notion of a common academic heritage does not sit comfortably with some disciplinary stalwarts. Thus, it is difficult for geographers to look past von Humboldt, or
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Chapter 16 - Geomorphology, Geography, and Science Bernard 0

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