Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 63the discussion above, even after the excesses of environmental determinismhad been tempered. Geography was less of a naturalistic subject by the1930s than it had been some decades before, but it was still highlypreoccupied with nature as an object of analysis and a causal force in itsown right. As for the discipline’s internal problems, they revolved aroundhow best to study nature, just as they had fifty years before.Three problemsloomed large. First, the declining popularity of evolutionary thinkingwithin geography was both a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, it tookdiscussions of human nature out of most geographers’ purview and, asnoted above, it tempered the crude causal statements and moral judgementsoften characteristic of determinist discourse. Discussions of humanpsychology were being revolutionised by Sigmund Freud’s ideas and, as thediscipline of human biology grew larger, it became clear that geographershad little of substance to say about the human mind and body. On thedownside, though, the loss of an overarching theory tying people andenvironment together was a costly one. It left geographers without acoherent conception of causality that would ‘bridge’ the social and naturalsciences. It also meant that they increasingly became empiricists: that is,compilers of facts and describers of natural and human landscapes.This wasespecially evident in the numerous regional monographs that became prewargeographers’ stock-in-trade.At their worst, these monographs simplylisted the various human and physical characteristics of a region in chapterafter chapter. At their best, they offered a creative interpretation of whatmade a region unique. Fleure’s (1926) Wales and Her People was typical of thegenre. In elegant prose, Fleure evoked the ‘spirit’ of Wales – that peculiarcombination of Celtic history,Anglo-Saxon invasion and rugged, maritimeenvironment. His book was more an exercise in interpretative, impressionistanalysis than scientific rigour.Regional monographs also encapsulated geography’s second internalproblem – one that again was intimately connected to the question ofnature. As the mid-twentieth century approached it was clear that geographerssimply studied too much.The problem bequeathed by geography’sfounders simply wouldn’t go away. Despite the attempts of some, like Sauerand Davis, to focus on one ‘side’ of the people–environment dialectic,geography was still saddled with a hopelessly broad subject matter.This reinforced the above-mentioned empiricism of the discipline. If,by the 1930s, geography was the ‘integrative’ subject Mackinder andHerbertson had wanted it to be, then it was largely in the descriptive sense