Nature - autonomous learning

76 the ‘nature’ of geographyPut differently, it was geared to the control and prediction of environmentalphenomena.On this basis, physical and human–environment geographers attractedlarge amounts of public research funding from the early 1960s. Asuniversities expanded, the numbers of undergraduate and graduate studentsincreased significantly.These students were attracted by the idea of receivinga rigorous ‘scientific’ education that would equip them for the worldof employment. For those students with strong environmental interests,a geographical education at this time would give them specialist knowledgein the workings and husbandry of everything from coastal environmentsto grassland ecosystems to fish resources.This was just the sort of knowledgethat local and central governments needed in the discharge of theirenvironmental-management duties. It was also the sort of knowledge thatfirms whose business was resource exploitation – like British Petroleum plc– needed in their workforce. Of course, there were exceptions. Manygeography departments in the English-speaking world perpetuated pre-wartraditions of research and teaching, while others saw human geographyless as a spatial science and more as the ‘art’ to which I referred earlier.In the USA, for instance, Sauer’s influence lived on, while rising stars likeAndrew Clark (of Wisconsin University) created related approaches tocultural-historical landscapes. Meanwhile, in the UK, the study of ‘humanregions’ was perpetuated in geography departments like Aberystwyth.ONTOLOGICAL DIVISION AND THE DE-NATURALISATIONOF HUMAN GEOGRAPHYAs the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the differences between humanand physical geography grew. It was not simply that the former studiedpeople and the latter studied the environment. It was also that the waythey studied their respective subject matters began to alter. As I’ll explainin this section, the ontological differences between people and the non-humanworld became the foundation upon which geography’s two halves beganto travel in different directions.At the same time, as I’ll also explain, severalhuman–environment geographers began to de-emphasise the ‘naturalness’of the environmental side of the relationship that interested them.