Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 85in Figure 2.1 is the fact that as the decades wore on more and more geographerschose not to study this relationship, preferring instead to becomespecialist human or physical researchers and teachers.Physical geography: pure and applied nature knowledgeWhile human geography was being de-naturalised, and the human–environment tradition was leaning to the people side of the human–environment relationship, physical geography continued the trendtowards specialisation, case-study research, application of the scientificmethod, and the search for (and application of ) empirically testable laws,theories and models. Geomorphology remained by far the largest subfield,within which various branches began to take definite shape (coastalgeomorphology, glacial geomorphology, periglacial geomorphology etc.).A particular preoccupation with process–form relationships became evident(and endures to this day).This preoccupation had been inspired by keypublications like Schumm and Lichty’s (1965) paper on different spatiotemporalscales of analysis and Leopold, Wolman and Miller’s (1964)pioneering Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology. In addition, new technologies likeremote sensing and personal computing enabled physical geographersto measure and monitor the environment more extensively than everbefore.The upshot was a stream of significant specialist publications aboutdifferent aspects of the physical environment.These publications were both‘pure’ and ‘applied’ in nature, the latter providing a physical counterbalanceto the human emphasis of 1970s hazards analysis and TWPE. For example,in the subfields of hydrology and fluvial geomorphology there was Gregoryand Walling’s (1973) Drainage Basin: Process and Form and Fluvial Processes inInstrumented Catchments (1974), plus Man’s Impact on the Hydrological Cycle in theUK (Hollis 1979) and Burt and Walling’s (1984) Catchment Experiments in FluvialGeomorphology. In these and other publications physical geographers evinceda faith that the environmental knowledge they were producing was realistic:that is, a faith that it could ultimately ‘reflect’ nature as in a mirror so longas rigorous investigative procedures were used.What’s more, this environmentalknowledge continued to separate statements of fact about thenon-human world, from statements of value (moral or aesthetic).This is not to say that physical geographers in this period all becamespecialists at the expense of any shared perspective on how the physicalenvironment is structured across space and through time.As I noted earlier,