Geoscience Reference
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underlying terms of the human-nature dualism are held intact within physical geog-
raphy so long as human activity is understood as something 'unnatural'. Indeed,
the language of 'modifi ed' landscape is telling in this regard, since it places
human
modifi cation in a class of its own (after all, every landscape is modifi ed by the
organisms that live in it, although the scale of effects varies dramatically).
One place where physical geography's dualist ontology has begun to erode is in
the work of hydrologists and geomorphologists. In part this has resulted from a
growing understanding that these sciences actively
order
the world, such that knowl-
edge of physical landscapes is invariably bound up with the world of the observer
(see Church, 1996;
Beven, 2002). But it has also followed from a growing recogni-
tion that at least today
human
processes are in many respects the most important
ones to understand in order to grasp the development and evolution of specifi c phys-
ical systems. Likewise, the growing focus on
urban
environments by climatologists,
biogeographers and hydrologists has led to more integrative work, where urban
ecologies are studied as complex systems in their own right, without the implicit
dualism inherent in the language of 'human impact'. Such studies, however, are still
a minor strand within physical geography. Indeed, within an otherwise excellent dis-
cussion of key philosophical questions in physical geography, including a number of
epistemological questions fi rst raised by human geographers, Rob Inkpen (2005,
p. 144)
devotes only one paragraph on the last pages of his volume to the possibility
of a post-dualist ontology, noting that 'the interpenetration of the physical and
human means that it is diffi cult to justify that processes of environmental change are
purely physical or that social structures rely solely upon human processes'.
Human geographers, on the other hand, have for some time debated a set of
explicitly ontological questions about the relation between humans and nature, and
over the past three decades this has given rise to a diverse literature. We might
suggest several reasons for this. On the one hand, the fl ourishing of such work can
be seen as a reaction to the fact that the discipline was surprisingly unprepared to
respond to, and analyse, the environmental effects of industrial society as these
effects were articulated in public discourse in the 1970s. The 'spatial science'
approach, for instance, with its isotropic planes and rational economic actors, had
for the most part dispensed with nonhuman nature entirely, and offered very little
in the way of a conceptual framework through which to understand human-
environment relations. Society might be reduced to law-like behaviour, even mod-
elled after physics, but in no way was the actual
physical
world to be part of this!
Even with the emergence of radical theoretical alternatives, the physical world
was often ignored, as Margaret Fitzsimmons pointed out in a key 1989 essay. On
the other hand, those human geographers who did
attend to questions of the
environment tended to focus most of their attention on rural landscapes, or, in the
case of many cultural ecologists, 'pre-modern' cultures. This resulted in theories of
cultural adaptation to environmental conditions that were not well suited to the
complexity of modern technological societies. When the question of the environ-
ment exploded in the 1970s and 1980s, human geographers found themselves trying
to cover a lot of ground quickly, with various attempts made to place the question
of society and nature on a fi rm analytical footing (e.g., see Harvey, 1974; Hewitt,
1983; Smith, 1984; Turner et al., 1990). This renewed emphasis on the question of
nature was given further impetus by two additional developments. The fi rst was the
strong neo-Malthusian fl avour of 1970s environmentalism, which was received with
considerable skepticism by those who worried over the misanthropic and often
