Geography 140
Introduction to Physical Geography
Lecture: The Four Traditions of Geography
Geographers do not share a common vision of their own discipline
There may be as many definitions of geography as there are geographers
The field is so very diverse that geographers in one subfield may find it easier
to communicate with scholars in a different discipline than with people on
some other end of the geographical discipline (e.g., geomorphologists with
geologists and GIS people with computer science people and cultural
geographers and anthropologists)
There is often a sense among many geographers that the centrifugal forces within
geography may overwhelm the uniting forces and pull the field apart
So, every so often, someone starts the debate all over again, the quest to find
a defensible core to keep the field together, the old "...but is it
geography?" argument
One of these episodes back in the 1960s resulted in Wm. Pattison's article, "The
Four Traditions of Geography." This lecture is based on his grouping of
the various camps in geography, though it incorporates a lot of other
information from the history of geographic thought.
You can read the original at http://www.ncge.org/publications/journal/classic/.
The Human-Environment Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of the inter-relationships between
nature and society
One of the oldest traditions in geography
This is the tradition that marked geography as the first academic discipline
to concern itself with the quality of the natural environment and how humans
affect it.
The first person to appreciate the influence of human activity in
shaping the character of a landscape was George Perkins Marsh, who
published a book in 1864, called Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography
as Modified by Human Action
This book presented an an analysis of how humans can be as much of a force
shaping landscapes as such natural forces as volcanoes, rivers, glaciers,
and ocean waves.
This book was quite revolutionary in its time for this (then) startling
assertion and all the evidence he put together critically evaluating
humans as "disturbing agents."
It founded the human-environment approach to geography, long before anyone
else worried much about what our careless activities might cost our
planet and, ultimately, ourselves. It wasn't that he wanted us to
stop "taming Nature" so much as he wanted us to consider all aspects of
planned activities for their larger and longer-term impact.
You can learn more about this remarkably prescient individual at
http://www.clarku.edu/departments/marsh/about/
Another very important classic work is a volume edited by William L. Thomas, Carl Sauer,
Marston Bates, and Lewis Mumford (three geographers and a zoölogist) in 1956:
Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.
This book, with 53 articles, evaluated the past development of the human impact
on the earth, from subsistence and commercial economies to the Industrial
Revolution and the urbanization of the planet.
It then examined the physical processes by which the human impact is
transmitted to the planet and explores how we can go about
studying these processes.
The third section of the book took up the future of the human-environment
dynamic, addressing such questions as population growth, limits to
growth, and how humans can begin to transform themselves and their
physical impacts on the earth.
This came out in 1956 and helped launch the revival of the American
environmental movement in the 1960s.
That said, the human-environment tradition was also the source of one of geography's
greatest embarrassments: environmental determinism, sometimes called
geographical determinism
A variant of Social Darwinism: the appropriation of Darwin's theory of
natural selection for use directly on human societies, usually for
racist or imperialist apologia
The idea that the natural environment, especially climate, creates natural
selective conditions that either bring out the best in humans and
create "superior" cultures or the worst in people and create
"inferior" cultures
This was an example of premature theorization:
Science normally proceeds from an early era of descriptive empiricism,
gradually building up and testing generalizations, and eventually
producing theories that have survived repeated tests and are
widely accepted
Social Darwinism simply grabbed a theory from the biosciences and
applied it to social phenomena without the lengthy process of
testing and theory construction for social data
Environmental determinism was very popular around the turn of the century,
dominating American geography until about the 1920s
It increasingly came under fire to the point of discrediting:
The "ideal" climate reflected the climate producing a given author's
culture: British authors leaned to the West Coast marine climate;
Americans favored the four season humid continental climate; and the
ancient Greeks thought their Mediterranean climate (their Temperate
Zone) was the ideal
Sequent occupance: the serial occupance of a given landscape by different
cultures who create wildly different landscapes in the same
environment through time (e.g., California)
Geography retreated from environmental determinism and, indeed, much of
geography shied away from theory, period, since its first foray into it
proved so disastrous
Until very recently, an off-hand comment about the weather making you feel
blue would elicit a smart-aleck response from other geographers to the
effect you must be an environmental determinist (the ne plus
ultra of geographical epithets)
The human-environment tradition redefined itself as the study of human
impact ON Nature rather than the other way around:
It basically stood environmental determinism on its head
The Thomas et al. book, Man's Role in Changing the Face
of the Earth was very important in getting geography back
on the original track laid out by George Perkins Marsh
This created an ecological sensibility in geography that was
helped recruit a lot of geographers (including me) in
the late 1960s and 1970s and again with the resurgence in
interest in the environment going on now.
The human-environment tradition in geography is relaxing its inhibitions about
theorizing the impact of Nature on society, perhaps propelled by the
successes of Gilbert White in establishing geography as one of the dominant
disciplines in the study of natural hazards: This is the specific area in
which I do most of my work, as a hazards geographer.
The Regional Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of areal differentiation
Implied tasks: the definition and description of regions in order to
differentiate them from other regions and areas
Implied function of a geographer: to become a walking encyclopaedia about
everything going on in a given area (example in class: what you'd need to
know to be a regional geographer of California)
The regional tradition was perhaps the dominant one in American geography from
about the 1920s to about the mid-1950s
To a certain extent, this reflected the real-world concern with sorting out
boundaries between countries (cultural regions) after the two World
Wars
It also expressed the great movement in geography away from theory in the
wake of the environmental determinism debacle: the regional tradition
is nothing if not atheoretical and descriptive in character
Some parallels were drawn between geography and the-then atheoretical
discipline of history, saying that, while history organized facts
chronologically, geography organized facts chorologically, that is,
across space or regionally (Richard Hartshorne particularly expounded
this argument)
This tradition died a sudden death as a research tradition in the mid-1950s, in
the form of the single Annals article published in 1953 by a German
working-class self-taught scholar, Fred Schaefer, entitled, "Exceptionalism
in geography: A methodological examination" (in the Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 43:226-249.
He argued that the regional tradition in geography was unscientific in the
sense that it encouraged dilettantism, the general dabbling and
patching together of knowledge created by others
The key function of science is the construction and testing of new
knowledge
To be in a position to create and test new knowledge requires
specialization, and the regional tradition eschews that kind of
concentration
He argued that the regional tradition implied the study of inherently
unique or exceptional objects, regions, and science is about the
construction of generalizations that cover groups of objects
He then pointed out that the object of such geographical study, the region,
is an inherently unspecifiable thing
All of us can construct different boundaries to any region, such as
the Great Central Valley (e.g., fluvially, structurally, and
politically) and justify our choices logically, and there's no
way universally to choose one set of boundaries over another
In other words, by pursuing the region as the object of study,
regional geographers were like mediaeval scholastics who wasted
time debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin
While this tradition died out as a research tradition, American culture went
overboard, as usual, and, over a couple of decades, removed it from the K-
12 teaching curriculum, essentially tossing the baby out with the bathwater
The result is an entire generation of geographically illiterate Americans
This is kind of like imagining tossing arithmetic out of the K-12 school
curriculum because the research frontier in mathematics is in
topology, not in multiplication tables
The regional tradition is making something of a comeback now
It is being incorporated in the K-12 curriculum again, as one of the 18
national geographic standards
There is even some research ferment in the form of theorizing local
responses to global economic processes, with an acceptance of the
fuzziness of the region concept (a lot of this reflects post-
modernists' and deconstructionists' attacks on the epistemological
validity of science in the first place)
Yours truly has also found an interesting application of the whole
regional geography approach: I taught the geography of Mars here
in Spring 2007: https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/mars/
The Spatial Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of the spatial distributions of
particular phenomena
This tradition encourages the kind of specialization that can get you to the
research frontier in a particular topic
In other words, it supports the scientists' job of producing and testing new
knowledge, which is why this tradition is particularly attractive to the
"Joe Science" types in geography
The particular spatial distributions can be strictly human phenomena (e.g.,
languages, religions, even the microscale spacing of people in a room or
elevator depending on their cultural norms), strictly natural phenomena
(e.g., the distribution of a particular species of Ceanothus plant,
of a vegetation association, of earthquake epicenters, of the depositional
landforms created by a retreating glacier), or some sort of relationship
between society and nature (e.g., potential deaths to earthquake hazard as
a reflection of seismology and architectural forms and socioeconomic
processes allocating particular kinds of people to particular places and
architectures)
So, in other words, you don't have to learn about everything else in a
region: just the distribution of the particular thing you're
interested in understanding
You also are not expected to relate society and nature if you're not
interested in that dynamic and yet still consider yourself a
geographer
Since the focus of this tradition is the spatiality of particular phenomena, it
has developed a huge arsenal of quantitative spatial analytic techniques,
including GIS: this is the most computerized, mathematical, and "high-
tech" tradition in the discipline. Some of the geospatial technologies:
Geographical Information Systems/Science or GIS refers to systems of
computers, software, and databases that allow you to analyze the
relationships among all kinds of things as long as they can be mapped.
Imagine the world in all its complexity. You can create a map layer
of, say, topography or slopes (mountains, hills, valleys). Think of it
as a transparent layer, like on an overhead. Then, you could have
another layer, say, geological rock types. And another of soil types.
And another of hydrology (e.g., rivers, springs, lakes, ocean). And
land ownership (i.e., parcels owned by private individuals, or the
government, or conservancies). And another of roads. And another of
construction (e.g., buildings). And you could add laters by the dozens
or hundreds. You could then have the GIS analyze all of these (think
of overlaying them, one on top of another) and tell you which exact
locations satisfy criteria, such as, "where are all the places that
are within 500 feet of a river, on heavy clay soil, flat with slopes
less than 1%, that are held by private owners, and which are for
sale?" This might identify parcels that a land conservance might be
looking for to save a particular kind of riparian habitat. To learn
more about GIS and what they can do, check out this informational page:
http://www.gis.com/whatisgis/index.html
Geographical Positioning System or GPS: This is a system of 24 satellites
that beam a unique signal to Earth, which is picked up by a GPS receiver.
The GPS "knows" exactly where all 24 satellites are and where they're
moving. By measuring how long a particular signal takes to get to the
receiver, the GPS can figure out exactly how far it is to each of the
satellites above the horizon. By triangulating time/distance among,
ideally, at least 4 of these satellites, the GPS can pinpoint its
location within at least a few meters (sometimes a lot better). The
GPS can be distorted by reflections from trees, cliffs, buildings, and
similar objects, but, still, it's pretty amazing and many of you may
have used GPS in your cell phones, cars, or dedicated GPS units. To
learn more: http://www.maps-gps-info.com/hw-gp-wrks.html
Remote sensing is the use of imagers and sensors to capture information at a
distance, such as from a satellite or airplane or portable unit.
Sometimes this is simply greyscale intensity readings to create a
black and white image from all the radiation in a broad swath of the
electromagnetic spectrum; sometimes it's a camera-like intensity reading
of a narrow band of radiation (maybe only four bands; maybe as many as 500);
and sometimes it's a radiation reading that is split out into separate
wavelengths, which is called spectroscopy (kind of how a prism breaks out
white light into the colors or radiation bands of the rainbow). Obviously,
you can read a lot of these images rather like a photograph showing you
what a part of the earth would look like from overhead; less obviously,
you can get a lot of information by how intensely a surface reflects or
radiates in very particular wavelengths, perhaps a sense of which part of
a forest is under attack by the pine bark beetle or where particular
chemical compounds are found in water. To learn more about remote sensing,
try surfing around the tutorial found at http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/.
Cartography is the artistic and psychological part of the geospatial techniques: It's
mapping data from remote sensing, GIS, GPS, field work, archives,
interviews, whatever, in such a way as to communicate the main trends
in the data without overwhelming the reader. If it's done properly, it
also creates an æsthetically pleasing piece of artwork. Some of the
hot trends in contemporary cartography include animation to show spatial
processes unfolding over time, interactive cartography (think: Google Maps,
Yahoo Maps, and MapQuest, which you've probably all used to get simple data
on how to get from Point A to the elusive Point B). Check out some really
impressive maps:
Google Mars
Raven Maps
Iraq war casualties
The spatial tradition is also explicitly friendly to theory-building, but its theories
pertain to the particular phenomena of interest to a spatial geographer or
to the methods used in spatial analysis, rather than the cosmic and fuzzy
theorizing of the environmental determinists
The spatial tradition rose to dominate geography, especially much of human
geography, in the wake of the Schaeffer article, and it enjoyed this
dominance from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s and remains a very healthy
and employable tradition in the field
Its dominance has been challenged since the 1970s by various radical, post-
modern, and deconstructionist approaches, many forms of which attack the
legitimacy of science itself
It remains dominant in GIS, quantitative methods, much of economic and
urban geography, and in some parts of historical geography
Its critics, however, have helped revitalize cultural geography, social
geography, historical geography, and even the regional tradition, so
geography is a hoppin' kind of place these days
The Physical Geography or Earth Science Tradition
Definition of geography: the study of Planet Earth as the home of humanity
One of the oldest approaches to geography:
Bernhardus Ernard Varen Varenius published Geographia Generalis in 1650.
He lays out a system of covering the earth's size and motions, then how
its position in the solar system affects its climates and seasons, and
then compares different parts of the earth in terms of these processes.
You will see echoes of this in this class.
Alexander von Humboldt, the famous explorer, wrote Kosmos: A Sketch of a
Physical Description of the Universe in 1845.
Mary Somerville, the writer whose works inspired the first use of the word,
"scientist," wrote Physical Geography in 1848. Von Humboldt's
and her works are probably the earliest books in "modern physical
geography."
Physical geography acknowledges the human impact on the planet to an extent not seen
in most other natural sciences, but the focus remains on the planet itself and
its physical processes
Many physical geographers suspect that geography took the wrong turn late in the
last century by starting to investigate social science questions
They may have a point in that a lot of this was driven by environmental
determinism
For them, the retreat from environmental determinism was deeper into
physical process, away from the hazards of premature speculation on
the natural impact on social evolution
A very helpful resource in physical geography is Michael Pidwirny's PhysicalGeography.net.
It is available at http://www.physicalgeography.net/.
This would be a valuable adjunct textbook for this class!
Another helpful resource is Michael Ritter's The Physical Environment, at:
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ritter/geog101/textbook/.
In the mid-1970s, I worked at JPL and there were quite a few geographers on-lab
and we used to joke that, in light of our presence in the space program
(space? that word again), that perhaps the physical geography tradition
needed to be expanded to the study of the solar system as the home
of humanity. On that "Final Frontier" note, adieu.
first placed on the web: 08/28/98
last revised: 06/03/07
© Dr. Christine M. Rodrigue