GEOGRAPHY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
IAN DOUGLAS University of Manchester
The central core of geography is the study of the earth as a habitat for all living beings, the examination of that space has been adapted and modified by different groups of human beings and the inter¬ actions between those groups, or indi¬ viduals and their natural, altered or built surroundings. The geographical view of these relationships has essentially to be a systems approach in which a change to, or action by, one component of the system produces an adjustment in all the others. The adjustments can take place in any direction, subject to the laws of gravity and entropy, with natural events, such as volcanic eruptions affecting people, or people-made changes, such as motor-vehicle emissions, affecting the natural environment.
One of the unhappy episodes in the growth of the discipline, certainly in English-speaking countries, was the deve¬ lopment of an obsession with the influ¬ ence of the environment on people which became known as determinism (Martin, 1951 ; Montefiore and Williams, 1955). Even though the debate about deter¬ minism has subsequently been described as “little more than a semantic exercise”
(D. Gregory, 1981) it had a profound, far-reaching effect on how geographers dealt with people-environment rela¬ tionships, resulting in an excessive preoccupation with avoiding attributing any significant role to nature and environmental processes in human affairs, use of the land and location of activity over the earth’s surface.
Many people working in geography became attracted to looking at human and social phenomena and the spread of socio-economic activity in space. These concerns saw the early stages of develop¬ ment, in the 1950s, of urban geography and rural geography. The new urban geography was concerned with the distribution of economic activities in space and with related social phenomena. It rested on, and further developed, economic location models and the notions of the urban hierarchy founded in the 1930s.
By in the 1960s, Anglo-Saxon geo¬ graphers were trying to escape from the study of regional geography and endea¬ vouring to use modern statistical methods and the ideas of systems analysis and
B
G.A n° 10
1" S. 1992
