Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 209ACTIVITY 4.3Imagine you are standing on top of a high mountain on a clear day,looking out at surrounding peaks and valleys. From your high perch youcan see exposed rock, various patches of vegetation (including forest),water courses and glaciers. You wish to explain why the natural landscapeyou see before you has acquired the topographical characteristics it has.Is this landscape a natural kind? It certainly contains natural kinds (e.g.specific kinds of rock, specific species of flora and fauna etc.). But can yoube sure that, when aggregated, these natural kinds comprise another onethat exists at a larger scale (the landscape scale)? Is it not possible thatyou are arbitrarily drawing boundaries around what you see, treating it asa discrete landscape when in fact there is nothing ‘natural’ about theboundaries at all?If this Activity has left you floundering, then it’s because there’s muchuncertainty about whether physical geographers study natural kinds – anuncertainty that increases the larger the spatio-temporal scale of analysis.Some believe that field sciences like physical geography do not studynatural kinds but, rather, the relationships between natural kinds. On this view,physical geography in effect contrives its subject matter (see pp. 217–8when I discuss the issue of ‘closure’ and ‘nominal kinds’) because suchthings as rivers, forest ecosystems and climate are composite phenomenathat are ‘ontologically fuzzy’ – they only exist by virtue of their morefundamental constituents (see Figure 4.6). However, a counterview, linkedto the idea of emergence, is that it is the relationships between natural kindsthat generate new effects irreducible to those kinds. On this view, physicalgeographers do study ‘real’ environmental phenomena because thesephenomena are ‘greater than the sum of their parts’ (see Keylock 2003;Rhoads and Thorn 1996).Third, physical geographers are increasingly questioning whetherthe biophysical world operates in a regular, consistent, and deterministicway. For several decades the presumption has been that there is an enduringorder inherent to bio-, hydro-, litho-, cryo-, pedo- and atmospheric systems.During the 1950s and 1960s, so-called ‘functional’ studies soughtto identify the character and causes of regular spatial patterns within the