Nature - autonomous learning

60 the ‘nature’ of geographyin the Western world, the environmental impacts of rapid populationgrowth, mass industry, commercial agriculture and urbanisation werestarting to become apparent. The first modern cases of resource overexploitationcame to light, and it became clear that in some societies thecausal arrows linking people and environment ran from the formerto the latter, not vice versa. Quite why geography in this period did notcapitalise on the ‘human impact’ theme is hard to explain.Aside from a fewisolated studies – such as Jacks’ and Whyte’s (1939) Rape of the Earth andCumberland’s (1947) research into soil erosion – it was barely evident inpre-1950s geography. Perhaps the intellectual impact of evolutionarythinking was so large that there was simply no space for ideas abouthumanity’s domination of the physical environment.Even so, a number of geographers chose to emphasise geography’s‘bridging’ function well into the 1930s. But as the intellectual weaknesses,not to mention the sometimes crude moralising, of environmentaldeterminism became evident, these geographers looked for other waysof thinking about human–environment relationships. In Britain, whereenvironmental determinism was never as strong as it had been in the USA,regional geographers produced a steady stream of monographs that wererich on detail about physical and human landscapes but which avoidedgrand pronouncements about the causal connections between the two.Among these geographers were Darryl Foord, Percy Roxby and H.C. Darby.In the USA, the President of the AAG – Harlan Barrows (1923) – talkedabout geography as the study of ‘human ecology’ (a term coined by Chicagogeographer J.P. Goode in 1907). Influenced by Clements’s ecology andthe ideas of Ernst Haeckel (with whom the term ‘ecology’ is originallyassociated), Barrows saw different societies as adjusting, adapting andmodifying themselves in relation to their environmental conditions.This was not environmental determinism but, rather, an open-mindedcommitment to studying the two-way (dialectical) connections betweena conditioning physical world and responsive human societies.The human side of the dialectic that interested Barrows was the concernof an American geographer arguably as influential in his own country’sdiscipline as W.M. Davis had been earlier in the century: namely, Carl Sauer.Sauer, a Berkeley geographer, was greatly influenced by the antideterminismof anthropologists Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber. For him physicalgeography played ‘an important role in providing the background to humanactivities’ (Unwin 1992: 97). But he resisted the idea that these activities