Nature

Beginnings: Geography and the Nature-sOciety Interface

Nature became central to geography's academic identity in two ways. First, scholars such as Hal-ford Mackinder, Paul Vidal de la Blache, and Friedrich Ratzel, and William Morris Davis saw the need to study nature as a whole rather than merely a set of discrete parts. Whereas subjects such as chemistry, physics, and botany focused on the investigation of select elements of the natural world, geography would study all these elements in combination (as Alexander von Humboldt had famously sought to do early in the 19th century). This view is what “physical geography” was, according to its 19th-century proponents such as Mary Somerville. In her 1849 book, Physical Geography, she defined it as a description of the Earth, the sea, and the air, the distribution of human beings, and the causes of their distribution. Second, this commitment to studying nature as an integrated, multifaceted system was accompanied by a desire to explore its two-way relationships with human societies. For Mackinder and the other early geographers, it was important that nature be studied in context, as something that forms the basis of and is affected by economic, cultural, and political practices. This investigation of “human-environment” relations could be conducted at a range of geographical scales, from the local to the global.

Clearly, geography had high ambitions in its fledging years as a university subject; it was, in terms of subject matter and scope, very much a “world discipline.” Given this fact, all four meanings of the word nature were—unsurprisingly—bound up in geography's late-19th-century identity. The first meaning (the nonhuman world) was the domain of physical geography; the second meaning (the entire physical world, including humans) featured in attempts to explain why some societies seemed to be “closer to nature” than others; the third meaning (a supervening force or power) appeared in attempts to discover what one commentator, referring to physical geography, described as comprehensive principles rather than isolated facts; and the fourth meaning (the essence of something) was apparent in the widespread belief that geography could be a science like any other, its practitioners seekers after a singular truth possessed by all animate and inanimate entities.

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