Nature - autonomous learning

the ‘nature’ of geography 71The topically specific, empirically based and policy-relevant researchof these geographers – whatever its other merits – did not providemuch of a bridge between geography’s two fast-growing halves during the1950s and 1960s. For others in the discipline something more encompassingwas needed to hold geography together – not a causal theory, likeevolutionism, but something still concrete enough to act as a glue.Thatsomething was systems theory. Systems theory was more a useful analyticalvocabulary for studying all sorts of different things than a theory in the normalsense of that term. It had diverse origins outside geography in Tansley’s‘ecosystems’ thinking and von Bertalanffy’s general systems thinking.In geography, Chorley and Kennedy’s (1971) Physical Geography: A SystemsApproach was the first programmatic statement.Although this book presentedsystems theory as a way of bringing physical geography’s growing subfieldstogether, it had a wider relevance. Systems, Chorley and Kennedyshowed, comprised elements, relationships between elements (simpleor complex), and inputs and outputs (of energy and matter, for instance).They showed that systems concepts like ‘homeostasis’, ‘negative feedback’and ‘positive feedback’ could be applied to all manner of topics.And they usefully distinguished different types of system (open, closed,cascading, process-response and so on). In relation to human– environmentrelations, people could be seen as one element of often-complex systemswhere human and physical component interacted in patterned ways withidentifiable consequences (see Bennett and Chorley 1978).In a sense, systems theory offered the sort of integrative promiseevolutionary theory had decades before – but minus the spurious causalclaims and replete with a scientific-sounding vocabulary. Strangely, it neverreally caught on in the discipline as a whole – despite some useful empiricalwork by Bernard Nietschmann (1973), among others. Instead, it becamethe framework of choice within the physical geographic community (andis still prevalent in that community today, see Gregory 2000: ch. 4; Inkpen2004: ch. 6). But even if systems thinking had caught on in geography asa whole, the fact that it was really a nomenclature – a descriptive device thatoffered a common conceptual language for human and physical geographyalike – meant that its precise operationalisation was always going todiffer from geographer to geographer.At best, systems theory would havebeen a weak glue holding geography’s emergent siblings together.The tragedy, of course, is that geography’s failure to prevent a progressivesplit between human and physical geography came at a time when the