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value of each note is determined not simply by its individual qualities but also by
the other notes and its position among them. Any change in one note affects the
scale as a whole, and vice-versa; the scale is more than the sum of its parts, and
this 'gestalt' can be perceived in the way certain scales provoke spontaneous cultural
associations. Howitt's metaphor is suggestive, even if exactly how musical scales
might elucidate human and environmental processes remains unclear. He argues
that 'scale is better understood dialectically than hierarchically' (Howitt, 1998, p.
52). Ecologists rarely employ such terminology, but the underlying point strongly
resembles the idea of emergent properties or panarchy: shifting scales results in
qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, change.
Scale in the Discipline of Human Geography
Scale has a rather different genealogy in human geography, although the underlying
methodological and theoretical issues converge with those elsewhere in the discipline
and in ecology. As in the physical sciences, social science disciplines have divided
and defi ned themselves - intentionally or unwittingly - by scale (as size, both opera-
tional and observational): psychology studies individuals; anthropology villages,
clans or tribes; sociology neighborhoods or cities; political science governments and
states, etc. Each discipline could thus take its own scale more or less for granted.
(The separation of micro- from macroeconomics is the exception that proves the
rule.) As Gibson et al. (2000, p. 221) observe: 'Overt choices of particular scales to
identify specifi c patterns are generally taken more consciously in the natural sciences
than in the social sciences'. Human geography, with its diversity of subdisciplines
and methods, could not so easily avoid the issue, but many topics had operational
and thus observational scales that seemed obvious and could therefore remain
implicit. In recent decades, however, the economic, political and cultural dynamics
of globalisation have called into question the scales of previous human geographic
research.
A typical classifi cation of human geographical scales includes the body; the
household; the neighborhood; the city; the metropolitan area; the province or state;
the nation-state; the continent; and the earth as a whole (Sheppard and McMaster,
2004, p. 4). (The region is another oft-employed geographical scale, albeit one
whose position in this classifi cation is variable. . . .) By the preceding analysis, this
is simply a list of levels; the implied nested hierarchy resembles the way ecologists
conventionally imagined organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems and
biomes. If one questions the stability of these categories, however - how they are
produced, reproduced or transformed - or if one asks how multiple levels interact,
then the issue of scale as relation is raised. This is how 'the scale question' in human
geography has emerged.
For political ecology in particular, and environmental geography more generally,
one might trace recent debates about scale to Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfi eld's
landmark topic,
Land Degradation and Society,
which addressed problems of align-
ing observational and operational scales and working across scales (1987, pp. 64-
74). '[I]t is very evident that we must take care to defi ne the scale at which we are
working if the social causes and consequences of degradation are to be described
adequately'.
But the scale question in critical human geography also has its roots in political
economy: an article by Peter Taylor (1982) that defi ned the local, national and
