Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 99research arguably tilted slightly in the latter’s favour.According to Gardner(1996), this reflected a growth in the ‘environment industry’ after the EarthSummit and, particularly, the field of environmental management. Issuessuch as desertification, water pollution, soil erosion and de-forestationincreasingly made it onto physical geographers’ research and teachingagendas (see Gregory 2000: ch. 7). These geographers often sought toaid environmental managers by pinpointing the physical changes causedby certain human actions (e.g. Burt et al. 1993). Second, at a more philosophicallevel, physical geography moved away from the ‘steady-state’ and‘dynamic-equilibrium’ assumptions that had underpinned much 1970sand 1980s research. Instead, physical geographers began to appreciatethat the environment is complex, often disorderly, and even chaotic inits operations. As Barbara Kennedy (1979) presciently noted in the late1970s, physical geographers are confronted with a ‘naughty world’ (seealso Kennedy 1994).This change in ontological assumptions was partlyinspired by wider shifts in scientific thinking, notably the rise of transcendentalrealism (discussed earlier), as well as complexity and chaostheory (Phillips 1999).Third, the rise of Quaternary studies and a newemphasis on ‘global environmental change’ meant that the study ofenvironmental systems at large spatial and/or temporal scales underwenta revival. In a sense, physical geography’s Davisian origins as what Simpson(1963) called a ‘historical science’ were rediscovered, providing a counterbalanceto the small-scale, process-form studies that had been so popularfrom the late 1950s.This meant that its credentials as an idiographic subjectwere reasserted, not at the expense of a nomothetic approach but as arecognition that general laws and processes can have non-general (unique)outcomes (as critical realists argue).Meanwhile, the human–environment tradition of research continuedto be divided between a ‘managerialist’ and a more radical arm. Thelatter was represented by TWPE and post-Hewitt hazards analysis, bothof which continued to focus on the human dimensions of the human–environment relationship.TWPE moved into a ‘second phase’ (Peet andWatts 1996) wherein research focused even more on the social and culturalaspects of human usage of the environment (see Braun 2004: 159–63).These two fields of radical human–environment research were alsocomplemented by the rise of five others. First, there were ‘environmentalinjustice’ studies, which examined how and why marginal social groupssuffer a disproportionate burden of pollution or noxious facilities (e.g.