Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 59also gained an early impetus. In the first case, the ideas of Fredric Clements(1916) pioneered the classification of vegetative communities and theiranalysis in terms of succession, climax and dynamic equilibrium with thesurrounding environment. Meanwhile, the American C.F. Marbut (1935)translated the path-breaking work of Russian soil taxonomists and analystsfor English-speaking geographers. Marbut then went on to publish his ownwork on US soils. In the second case, the research of Norwegian scientistslike J. Bjerkness in the 1920s showed that it was possible to classify anddescribe the life history of distinct air masses and weather systems.One of the obvious gains of this sort of specialised geography was thatit held out the prospect of physical geographers becoming environmentalexperts. It not only circumvented the ‘jack-of-all-trades’ problem associatedwith the regional and human–environment conceptions of geography.It also promised to offer fairly precise descriptions and explanationsrather than the often vague, woolly, impressionistic analyses offered bythe likes of Semple. However, there were two obstacles to the developmentof physical geography at this time. First, many of the early geomorphologists,biogeographers and climate geographers worked in non-geographydepartments, in part because there were still few geography departmentsin existence. Second, the risk of vacating the ‘middle ground’ occupied byregional and human–environment geographers was that geography becamevulnerable to assimilation by cognate disciplines. For all the flaws of theevolutionary approach to nature–society relations, a study of these relationsallowed geography to claim a distinctive place within academia. But onceDavis and others began to ‘ruptur[e] . . . the newly stitched sutures’(Livingstone 1992: 210) holding geography together, there was the riskthat physical and a yet-to-be-created human geography could not surviveon their own.Strangely, early twentieth-century geography failed to champion a themethat was both topical and that might have offered a preferable way ofexamining human–environment relations when compared with evolutionismin general and environmental determinism in particular. It was thetheme of what a later book by geographers, in its title, called ‘man’s rolein changing the face of the earth’ (Thomas 1956).This theme had alreadybeen broached by George Perkins Marsh in his book of 1864. In the UnitedStates, it was a theme at the heart of the new ‘conservationist’ and‘preservationist’ movements associated with John Muir and Gifford Pinchotthat emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. Here, as elsewhere