Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 57ReflectionsClearly, the question of nature was absolutely central to the founding ofgeography as an academic discipline. Indeed, it’s fair to say that geographywas, in its origins, very much a naturalistic subject. By this I mean two things:first, that ‘natural’ phenomena were principal objects of analysis and,second, that these objects were used in explanations of the ‘non-natural’dimensions of life (like culture). So not only was nature a prime focusof geographical research, it was also granted prime causal importancein explaining various other geographic phenomena.There were, if you like,‘two natures’ central to geography at this time: a ‘first nature’ (theenvironment) which imposed itself upon ‘human nature’ (body and mind)more or less restrictively depending on the humans in question. In turn,both elements of nature were seen to have a causal influence on how society,culture and economy were organised among different human groups.Yet, for all its centrality, it seems to me that nature was also a doubleedgedsword for the early geographers. On the one hand, these geographersused the topic of nature to establish the distinctiveness of their perspectiveon the world.They were not, to be sure, the only ones studying nature(non-human and human). And so their way of marking out academicterritory was to stress their holistic and integrative focus on the particularrelationships between particular natural environments and particular formsof human nature (physical and psychological) and society. On the otherside, though, this holistic and integrative perspective was arguablyat the heart of geography’s intellectual weaknesses. In the first place, it meantthat the geographers’ research agenda was overwhelmingly large. Tomake good on the Mackinder–Davis–Herbertson vision, geographers wouldnot only have to know an awful lot about everything from soils andvegetation to industry and culture.They would also need to understand howall these things interacted in a causal sense. Second, it rapidly became clearthat both human–environment and regional geographers preferreddescription, metaphor and speculation over well-justified explanation intheir written works.The sheer scale of their intellectual projects meant thatthey were generally unable to specify the exact causal connections betweenpeople and environment.Their work was, often, more in the impressionistmode of humanities subjects like English and art history. Geographers werethus arguably sandwiched between a rock and a hard place.As the specialistdisciplines appropriated more and more intellectual territory, geography