Nature - autonomous learning

62 the ‘nature’ of geographydiplomatic and military. Mackinder saw the irregular geography of land,sea and resources as the flashpoint for inter-state struggles over survival andprosperity (see Mackinder 1902). In a related vein, the Briton GeorgeChisholm and the American J. Russell Smith also looked at how the unevenquality and quantity of natural-resource endowments across spaceinfluenced the geography of economic activity. Chisholm’s multi-editionHandbook of Commercial Geography (first published in 1889) and Smith’s Industrialand Commercial Geography (1913) both showed how different societieshad built different industries on a variable resource base.Yet, despite theseefforts, as late as 1948 Isaiah Bowman – a leading light of his disciplinarygeneration and remembered today for his writings on geopolitics – toldSmith that human geography could never be an independent arm ofgeography (Smith 1987: 162). Sauer’s influential research seemed only toconfirm this because it insisted on linking the study of cultural attitudes andpractices to quotidian modifications of natural landscapes.Nature in geography and the nature of geographyLet me summarise. On the eve of the Second World War, anglophonegeography comprised four main strands of research and teaching, thefirst and last of which were overshadowed by the other two. There wasa nascent physical geography, dominated by geomorphology, whichwas more evident in the USA than elsewhere. Second, there was regionalgeography, increasingly distancing itself from environmental determinism,especially in Britain.Third, there was a continuing tradition of human–environment geography, also fast ridding itself of determinist baggage,and increasingly subsumed within the regionalist tradition. In Sauer’s rendition,this kind of geography subtly reversed the causal arrows so thatthe emphasis was on human agency and less on ‘natural necessity’.Thischange of emphasis showed how suspicious of making causal links fromenvironment to‘human nature’ and society many geographers had becomeby 1939. Finally, there was the very tentative emergence of human geographystudied in relative (but not absolute) isolation from environmentalissues.It seems to me that, almost half a century after the discipline was firstprofessionalised, nature remained central to geography’s identity – but alsoto its internal problems and its persistently precarious status withinacademia. Its centrality to geography’s identity should be clear enough from