Nature - autonomous learning

the dis/unity of geography 213‘nature’ discussed in Chapter 1: that is, nature as a ‘inherent force’.The debate is over what form that ‘inherent force’ takes: order(equilibrium) or disorder (chaos, complexity). A good discussionof the equilibrium idea in physical geography can be found in Inkpen(2004: ch. 7).Finally, related to the debate over complexity and divergence is one aboutthe balance of general and particular factors in explaining environmentalphenomena.As a field discipline, physical geography studies both ‘immanent’processes and ‘configurational’ factors (Simpson 1963). In otherwords, it examines processes that might be general and universal (like thosespecified by the laws of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics). But it alsoexamines how these processes operate ‘on the ground’ both together andin conjunction with phenomena they are responsible for (like landformsor weather systems).As part of what Massey (1999) calls its ‘physics envy’,physical geography has arguably long been fixated on identifying thegeneral processes giving rise to specific environmental phenomena –a fixation going back to the ‘spatial science revolution’ of the 1950s and1960s (see Chapter 2). Recently, though, the balance has swung moretowards a concern with the importance of the configurational.The argumenthas been that so-called ‘universal’ processes cannot be abstractedfrom the specific circumstances in which they operate.That is, the ‘initialconditions’ in which a general process unfolds are seen to have a profoundinfluence on the effects of that process in the landscape. For instance, thefunctional studies of fluvial geomorphologists typically showed a lot of‘scatter’ or ‘noise’ that was not explained by the general theories, modelsand laws deployed. However, from the 1980s, this scatter was not seen as‘deviant’ but as important in its own right as an index of the specificity(even uniqueness) of the phenomenon under investigation.Thus reachscalestudies were replaced by smaller-scale, in-depth investigations ofspecific river bends, rapids, confluences, and the like.These investigationssuggested that the biophysical world is more differentiated than physicalgeographers had supposed. General processes (like gravity and energyconservation) were shown to have different effects in different times andplaces – particularly at the small scale, where the specifics of river bed or