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after noting that 'scholarly positions on scale are divergent in the extreme', conclude
that the concept is fundamentally fl awed and should be banished from human
geography altogether. A review paper in the journal
Ecological Economics
confi rms
the diagnosis but prescribes the opposite cure: 'Now, scale issues are found at the
center of methodological discussions in both physical and human geography', the
authors observe, but 'common defi nitions do not exist for scale - even within dis-
ciplines - and especially in the social sciences' (Gibson et al., 2000, pp. 226, 236).
Nonetheless, they issue an unequivocal call: 'The challenge of global environmental
change requires that both the physical and social sciences be included in its study.
If researchers are to generate accurate analyses of environmental change, the fi rst
step, we believe, is to push beyond the present cacophony and construct a common
understanding of issues related to scale' (p. 237).
The problem with scale derives in large part from a surfeit of meanings and uses.
The word occupies nearly four pages of the original
Oxford English Dictionary,
and a search of the BIOSIS database fi nds the term in more than 85,000 abstracts
since 1990. Richard Howitt (1998; 2003) discerns three 'aspects' or 'facets' of scale:
as size, level, and relation. The fi rst two are relatively well understood, he argues;
they predominate in non-technical, quotidian contexts, and even in academic writ-
ings scale is usually a simple descriptor, not a concept. But it is only as relation that
scale assumes the importance ascribed to it in recent decades, and the apparent
clarity of the fi rst two meanings has made understanding the third much more dif-
fi cult. Confl ating scale and level may be convenient and non-problematic when
neither term is the focus of inquiry, but collapsing the two risks evacuating scale of
conceptual importance altogether. In short, distinguishing scale as relation from its
more casual or colloquial meanings is necessary if its signifi cance for environmental
geography is to be clarifi ed, let alone realised.
In what follows, I fi rst review the various uses and meanings of scale in geo-
graphy, including 'the scale question' in human geography. Scale as size, level, and
relation are not mutually exclusive - indeed, they build on and presuppose one
another - but they are analytically distinct; many, if not all, of the debates about
scale in recent human geography can be traced to confl ation among these meanings.
I then examine the emergence of scale in ecology, in order to clarify why it is con-
sidered of such overriding importance to our understanding of ecosystems and
environmental problems. For ecologists, scale is intrinsically spatio-temporal, playing
a key role in the critique of equilibrium models and assumptions that has gathered
momentum over the past three decades. The conclusion develops a framework for
theorising scale to advance research in environmental geography.
The edited volume
Scale and Geographic Inquiry
provides a valuable overview
of geographical scale. In their introductory essay, the editors note that 'different
concepts of scale are employed in geography's various subdisciplines', but that
'there has been little attempt to integrate across these subdisciplinary perspectives'
(Sheppard and McMaster, 2004, p. 2f.). A brief summary of scale's various mean-
ings in geography is therefore warranted. It is useful to organise them into the three
facets of size, level and relation.
Scale as Size
In this fi rst and simplest sense, scale refers to measurements expressed in terms of
standardised units. 'Space and time are not scales until they are divided into seg-
