Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 51challenged then-dominant views that God had created the earth just a fewthousand years ago and also questioned the belief that there was a ‘divinepurpose’ undergirding the natural world. Inspired by this non-theologicalinterpretation of earth history, Davis saw a niche for the study of presentdayphysical environments. His own particular obsession was with visiblelandforms (especially those of the eastern USA).Through field observation,Davis pioneered ‘denudation chronology’ which envisaged initial geologicaluplift, the action of fluvial erosion over time (process) upon the underlyinggeology (structure), producing a physical landscape describable in termsof its stage of development (youth, maturity, or old age). For Davis, theend point of a ‘normal cycle of erosion’ was a fluvially eroded base-level(a peneplain). He went on to modify his theory and extended it to marine,arid and other environments.Davis’s influence on American geography was profound and yet strangelydouble-edged. On the one side, his writings as a geomorphologist gavean impetus to the development of physical geography as a distinct field ofstudy. On the other side, this tendency to sever the study of environmentfrom the study of society was counteracted in his teaching. Some of Davis’sstudents at Harvard went on to aggressively stress the study of human–environment relations as geography’s raison d’être. As we’ll see below, theydid in deed what Davis only did in word.Andrew John Herbertson (1865–1915)Herbertson, like Mackinder, had a broad intellectual training in the sciencesof nature and of ‘man’. He was recruited to Oxford by Mackinder in 1899,the year his influential book Man and His Work was published. Despite itstitle, this was not written in the George Perkins Marsh mould. Rather,it stressed the influence of the physical environment on human societies(not vice versa). Like Mackinder, Herbertson regarded an understandingof the non-human world as an essential component in comprehendinghow societies evolve. However, unlike Mackinder, Herberton accentedgeography’s role as the study of regions. In his agenda-setting essay ‘The majornatural regions’ (1905), Herbertson viewed the world as a physiographicpatchwork, each piece of which possessed a ‘unity of configuration, climateand vegetation’ (1905: 309). For him, geography’s role was not to explorehuman–environment relations in general but, rather, their unfolding inspecific regional complexes.As one of Herbertson’s famous admirers later