Nature - autonomous learning

22 strange naturesis accurately captured in the name used to describe them: that is, thephysical environment (our first definition of nature). But if this was all therewas to their approach to nature it would be little different to any numberof other environmental researchers and teachers. It’s important, then, toadd that environmental geographers look at the environment (i) in relationto specific human interpretations and uses of it and (ii) in an integrative,interconnected way. In other words, they do not do ‘pure environmentalresearch’ nor are they normally specialists in the topical sense. Rather, theylook at how everything from peoples’ perceptions of environmental hazardsthrough to land-use practices through to the physical behaviour of, say, atornado, combine in particular times and places with more or less disastrousor benign consequences.This sort of ‘human-environment’ research tracesa lineage back to George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) and iscontinued today by the likes of Bill Adams (a British geographer) and BillieLee Turner II (an American geographer). Some environmental geographersapproach things more from the physical side (like Andrew Goudie, awell-known arid-lands specialist), while others look more at the humandimensions (like Tim O’Riordan and Susan Cutter, who are both interestedin environmental management).What they share, though, is a commitmentto examining the reciprocal relations between societies and theirenvironments. If environmental geographers are ‘specialists’ at all it is eitherregionally (in terms of where they undertake their research) or becausethey are expert about a particular natural hazard or natural resource. Forthe most part, these geographers combine a broad intellectual training witha detailed grasp of how social and physical processes intertwine.While mostof them look at present-day issues, not a few take a longer historicalperspective.Other geographers, by contrast, prefer to study the physical and humanworlds alone in either contemporary or historical contexts. For reasonsto be explained in the next chapter, anglophone geography has becomesomething of a ‘divided discipline’.The benefits of this are that geographershave been able to specialise rather than be the ‘jacks of all trades’ thatenvironmental geographers are sometimes seen to be. Physical geographyis, these days, comprised of the following subfields: geomorphology,hydrology, climatology (with meteorology) and biogeography (with soils).Quaternary studies is, increasingly, considered to be a fifth specialism (seeFigure 1.3). Overall, physical geography is a ‘field discipline’ or ‘earthscience’ that routinely undertakes ‘pure environmental research’ and a fair