Nature - autonomous learning

58 the ‘nature’ of geographywas left in the invidious position of studying everything that the other subjectscombined did. In either the human–environment or regional modes, thiswas always going to be difficult.Third, this left the option of making geography the study of the naturalenvironment alone (or at least separately from society). As we’ve seen,this was the option that Davis pursued, despite himself. It had also beenpursued before him by Somerville and also by Thomas Huxley (1877),whose book Physiography examined the connections between the biosphere,hydrosphere, lithosphere and atmosphere. This vision of geography asan earth science, because of Davis’s great influence, actually became a liveone – especially in early twentieth-century American geography. But it wasalways risky because a nascent discipline (or subdiscipline) of ‘physicalgeography’ was inevitably going to face competition (and even hostility)from geologists, plant biologists, zoologists and other specialists interestedin the non-human world.Yet, despite these various problems, geographyslowly – but nonetheless surely – prospered as a discipline in Britain,the USA, Canada,Australia and New Zealand as the nineteenth century gaveway to the twentieth.As we now turn to the second main part of our history,we’ll see that the ‘problem of nature’ present at the moment of geography’sfounding did not go away.This problem, as I’ll explain, was instrumentalin greatly altering the ‘nature of geography’ by the mid-twentieth century.EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS‘To occupy or vacate the “middle ground”?That is the question’By the 1920s, some of the tensions surrounding whether and howto incorporate nature into geography’s raison d’être were bubbling to thesurface.Those clinging to a holistic conception of geography were doubtlessdismayed by the desire of some to develop a ‘systematic’ or ‘general’geography. Inspired by Davis, many geographers who had a natural-sciencetraining eschewed the broad synthetic ambitions of the regional andhuman–environment approaches. Instead, they sought to become environmentalspecialists. Because of Davis’s prodigious output, geomorphology(the study of landforms) fast became the major branch of physicalgeography in the anglophone world (and arguably remains so to this day).However, biogeography (with soils) and climatology (with meteorology)