Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Geographical Society of London (RGS) was one such example, and even nowadays the
RGS is a major sponsor of expeditions which are reported in its publication—
The
Geographical Journal
. The theme of exploration remains significant in tourism
geography, particularly as the images of places conveyed by explorers in the metropolitan
regions has served to create destination images that remain to the present day. For
example, the 'discovery' of the Pacific by Europeans was the crucial point for the
imaging of the Pacific as a romantic paradise (Douglas and Douglas 1996).
Environmental determinism and possibilism
Environmental determinism and possibilism were two competing approaches which,
according to Johnston (1991), were early attempts at generalisation in the modern period.
These approaches sought explanations rather than just descriptions of patterns of human
occupation on the earth. The underlying assumption was that human activity was
controlled by the elements in the physical environment within which it was located.
Environmental determinism can be dated to the research by Darwin and
On the Origin of
Species
(published in 1859), where ideas on evolution were used by an American
geographer William Morris Davies to develop the model of land form development. The
nineteenth century also saw a number of geographers become protagonists of
environmental determinism, especially the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-
1904), and the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple (1863-1932), whose topic
Influences of Geographic Environment
(1891) stated that 'man is the product of the
earth's surface'.
The response to determinism was the counter-thesis possibilism. French geographers
presented arguments to show that people perceive a range of alternative uses to which the
environment could be put. This was, in part, determined by their own cultural traditions
and predispositions. The debate on possibilism and determinism continued into the 1960s
and has had some influence on tourism geography because of the extent to which
concepts such as place, cultural landscape and heritage underlie much debate about
tourism's impacts. Arguably some elements of environmental determinism are to be
found in some of the discussions on the role of climate on tourism behaviour (Paul 1972;
Adams 1973; Mieczkowski 1985; de Freitas 1990, 2003) and the potential impact of
climate change (Wall et al. 1986; Wall and Badke 1994; Agnew and Viner 2001; Hall
and Higham 2005).
The region
Ideas of the region and regional geography dominated British and American geography
until the 1950s, based on the principle that generalisations and explanations were best
derived from an areal approach. Johnston (1991) points to the role of Herbertson (1905)
in dividing the earth into natural regions and the attempt to examine areas at a smaller
scale to identify particular characteristics. In North America, the influence of Richard
Hartshorne's ongoing research established the focus of geography as a concern for areal
differentiation so that the principal purpose of geographical scholarship is synthesis, an
integration of relevant characteristics to provide a total description of a place as a
powerful focus for the discipline which remained a feature of many school, college and
