The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Physical geography is something of an intel-

lectual chimera, whose role, relations and def-

inition have changed as the nature and focus

of the geographical enterprise itself have

shifted. Throughout its modern history, phys-

ical geography has been implicated in most of

the central debates within geography but,

arguably, prospered from none. From formal

beginnings in the early Victorian age through

to the period between the two world wars, a

credible case can be made that physical geog-

raphy was geography. Physical geographers

were part of the disciplinary elite, and geo-

graphical education and research necessarily

began with the physical foundations of the

Earth environment, as deployed in and across

natural (geographical) regions. Somewhere in

the inter-war period, all this changed.

Geography was recast as a subject with an

essential duality of character. For the greater

part of the twentieth century, debates con-

cerning either the curse or the virtue of this

duality underscored geographical reflection,

while in terms of geographical endeavour, it

was physical geography that repeatedly lost

its place as trend-setter in the changing geo-

graphical tradition. By the later twentieth cen-

tury, geography had become an amorphous

and disconnected enterprise, whose concerns

were less with disciplinary identity, and

more with following humanistic approaches.

In what became a postmodern and post-

paradigmatic world, multiple and contested

viewpoints were new virtues, but intellectual

largesse was not bestowed on physical geog-

raphy, which was represented as the manifest-

ation of an unyieldingly, restrictive and

unwelcome positivism. In the new millen-

nium, physical geography may, however, be

on the verge of renaissance. Having fought

something of a quiet rearguard action within

the discipline, it may yet be revived from with-

out: first, as a new class of environmental

issues demand a new kind of scientific

approach; and, second, as Earth systems sci-

ence – physical geography by another name

and from other places – moves in to meet

this need.

Earlier nineteenth-century works provided

apparently firm foundations for the contem-

porary discipline. For example:

Physical geography is a description of the

earth, the sea, and the air, with their inhab-

itants animal and vegetable, of the distribu-

tion of these organized beings, and the

causes of their distribution. (Somerville,

1849, p. 1)

Physical geography was thus a broad, inclusive

body of knowledge, embracing the work of the

great natural scholars such as Alexander von

Humbolt and Charles Darwin, and claiming

an intellectual heritage as Immanuel Kant’s

‘propaedentic of natural knowledge’ (Huxley,

1877). Its project was that of geography as a

whole. Its scope and its holism, however,

became problems as early modern science

sought sophistication and institutional organ-

ization (see Livingstone, 1992), and as more

and more about a wide class of natural phe-

nomena became both known and knowable

(Dickinson and Howarth, 1933). Physical

geography provided an elegant underpinning

of classificatory schemes:

Few sciences offer better opportunities than

physical geography for studying large units

and grouping their various phenomena.

(Emerson, 1909, p. vii)

Its virtues were repeatedly extolled in general

education, and in support of emergent envir-

onmentalism (Marsh, 1965 [1864]). It was

less secure, however, as a coherent intellectual

enterprise, particularly asexplanationof phe-

nomena became the goals of science. Arnold

Guyot, drawing a distinction between anat-

omy (description) and physiology (explan-

ation) demanded that:

Physical geography ... ought to be, not

only the description of our earth, but the

physical science of the globe, or the science

of the ... present lifeof the globe in reference

to their connection and their mutual depend-

ence. (Guyot, 1850, p. 3)

Here, then, were the seeds of a basic dilemma

withinphysical geography, which provided the

backdrop for the later schism within geog-

raphy as a whole. Physical geography, in

search of both scientific prowess and academic

distinction, had somehow either to narrow its

focus (and risk trespass on established fields –

particularly geology), or make ambitious claim

to unoccupied territory (which, as the century

progressed, could draw on post-Darwinian

biology). Its response, in the shorter term,

was physiography – another pervasive term

with tortuous associations – and in the longer

term, a dalliance with environmental deter-

minism and its nemesis, human ecology.

In some incarnations, physiography was

physical geography in all its aspects:

Physiography is a description of the sub-

stance, form, arrangement and changes of

all the real things of Nature in their relation

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PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY