Essay on the Geography of United States | Geography

In this essay we will discuss about the evolution of geography in the United States.

If tradition is to be believed, then it can be said that the heritage of geographical studies and teaching was established by Thomas Jefferson in the late eighteenth century. He made important contribution to the study of geography in the United States of America.

Count Buffon’s conception of the occupied space in America sparked off a dispute which led Jefferson to visit Buffon in Paris to protest at such a conception. However, Buffon agreed to recognise his error. It was this misconception of the occupied space in America that motivated Jefferson to publish his geographical study Notes on the State of Virginia in 1787.

The expedition of 1803-1806 to explore the Missouri river and its tributaries and to find the best route to the headwaters of the Columbia River and thence to the Pacific Ocean was organised under Jefferson’s official patronage who directed Lewis and Clark to prepare a systematic record of observations concerning the nature of the country and its inhabitants.

Thomas Jefferson asked them to prepare a specific report on the genre de vie of the Indian, and also to provide information about the ecological condition of the regions to be explored. This marked the beginning of an era of an exploratory geography in the United States.

Exploratory Geography:

An ecological viewpoint of traditional nature seemed to have been developed by George Parkins Marsh. Marsh, who had never studied geography as such, developed a novel approach to the study of the relations of man to the land: he turned attention to man’s effect on nature, to the modifications of the organic and inorganic parts of the habitat that resulted from human action.

This conception of Marsh was, by and large, based on Buffon’s paradigm of ‘man’s destructive use of land’. He believed in induction from observation rather than deduction from theory, and his great work ‘Man and Nature’ (1864) was based on his observations of the damage done by human action in Turkey.

He had been working on the theme of the modification of nature by human action long before he left for Turkey. He warned against interference with the spontaneous arrangement of the organic and inorganic world.

About Marsh’s book Glacken writes, ‘the technical ideas of the nineteenth century scholars converge with the seventeenth century conception of nature as a divinely designed balance and harmony, and they sought the restoration of disturbed harmonies.’ Marsh’s plea for conservation was not really effectively heard until the twentieth century.

Glacken again writes, ‘Our greatest debt to him is that he studied the technical works of European foresters, meteorologists, agronomists, drainage engineers and hydrologists, botanists and plant geographers and scientific travellers and for the first time placed the results of their investigations where they belonged in the forefront of human history’.

Matthew Fontaine Maury is credited with his generalised model of atmospheric circulation, prepared in 1850. He was a naval officer and collected data on the winds and currents of the ocean. With the help of this data, he sought to develop a generalised picture of the surface winds of the Earth by identifying the prevailing winds and eliminating the temporary and local interruptions.

He also devised new instruments for sounding ocean depths and was, therefore, able to produce the first map of the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Maury also supported the idea of an open polar sea, and explained his belief in the existence of such an open sea at great length. He believed that the warm Gulf Stream flowed under colder surface water and emerged again at the surface in the vicinity of the pole.

However, much of his creativeness was sabotaged by Joseph Henry, director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington who was trying to set up a network of weather reporting stations in the United States and Canada for the study of storms.

Maury seems to have established the tradition of the climatic studies in the United States. Apart from climatic studies and generalisation, based on the availability of weather records and data, the US scholars also continued to concentrate on exploratory geography by organising large-scale surveys of the western territories.

During 1867 and 1868, John Wesley Powell travelled to the Rocky Mountains and climbed Pikes Peak and Longs Peak. In 1869, he sailed down the Green River and the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. In 1871, he carried out the second canyon trip, and reported on the Indian customs and language. He saw for the first time how a river could cut down through a mountain that was being raised up across its course. He coined the term ‘antecedent river’ for such a river.

He also contradicted the hypothesis of Charles Lyell about the evolution of landforms in the western part of the United States which, to him, appeared to be the result of the action of the running water. Powell also developed the concept of the base-level—that there is a base-level below which rivers cannot cut a level determined by the surface of the body of water into which a stream flows. Later, this base-level concept was taken up by W. M. Davis.

It is interesting to note that a man, not trained in geographic tradition, could offer such an explanation which seemed to have given a professional touch to geographical heritage in the United States. It was in 1878 that Grove Karl Gilbert, who was recruited by George M. Wheeler, but preferred to work with Powell, developed his famous ‘concept of grade’, i.e. the equilibrium reached between slope, volume of water, velocity of flow and load of detritus. Thus, Powell and Gilbert set forth new paradigm in physical geography.

Powell also had an ecological viewpoint and his observations led him to believe that the only way to maintain the flow of water from the mountains to the bordering lowlands was to preserve the forest cover. He warned that the clearing of the forests on the watersheds would bring ecological disaster. In 1880, he became the second director of the US Geological Survey, and remained at the post till 1894. His monograph on the arid lands was a landmark in the contemporary tradition of physical geography.

The ‘new’ geographical tradition in the United States in the nineteenth century was further enriched by two European geographers, Agassiz and Guyot. Jean Louis Rodalphe Agassiz, a Swiss scholar, was appointed Professor of Natural History at Harvard in 1848.

He developed the hypothesis of universal glaciation which had a profound effect on the young scientists of the USA. He turned attention of his younger colleagues to the study of glaciers and the effects of glacial actions in producing distinctive kinds of mountain landforms.

Another European geographer was Arnold Guyot who was appointed professor of physical geography and geology at the College of New Jersey (Princeton), and there he remained from 1854 to 1880. Guyot was an ardent supporter of the Ritterian tradition of teleological geography, which he attempted to establish in the United States. He remained unshaken by the philosophical revolution and the biological paradigm set forth by Charles Darwin.

When Guyot retired in 1880, the very philosophical foundation of ‘new geography’ he taught was outdated and it had been largely discredited because of the shift in emphasis on the method of natural science, or to the hypothetic- deductive method that sought ‘prime causes by deduction’.

The teleological explanation was replaced by the mechanical explanation, and the Darwinian paradigm became the ruling paradigm in the United States. However, William Libbey, who succeeded Arnold Guyot as professor of physical geography, carried forward the tradition of Guyot in his studies of oceanography, especially of the relationship between the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current.

Shaler was influenced by the Swiss scholar, Agassiz, especially his conception of a universal glaciation. Shaler learnt much from Agassiz about the observation of landforms and developed the habit of seeing man and his works as part of the landscape.

Shaler attempted to elaborate the concept of man’s role in changing the face of the Earth, which Count Buffon in the eighteenth century and George Perkins Marsh in the middle of the nineteenth century had developed. Shaler transmitted to Davis a vision of the Earth as the resource base on which the human habitats were dependent.

He is often regarded as a geologist by training, but was a geographer by instinct in that he was always conscious of studying the Earth as the home of humankind. Shaler’s was a positive view of geography that is reflected in his book Nature and Man in America published in 1893.

Development of Professional Geography:

The new’ geography in the United States, as founded by Marsh, Maury, Powell, Gilbert, Agassiz and Guyot, attempted to establish the tradition of field survey, with greater emphasis on induction from observations rather than deduction from theory.

The year 1880 is a watershed in the history of American geographical scholarship because it marked the beginning of professionalism in the discipline, leading to the development of academic geography and making the subject a permanent independent university discipline.

The pioneer, who introduced professionalism in geography, was the geologist William Moris Davis, who was appointed instructor of physical geography in the Department of Geology at Harvard in 1878. He set forth the early paradigm for geographical study and helped in establishing some of the professional institutions.

Davis was much influenced by the Harvard geologist; Nathaniel S. Shaler. Davis is believed to have acquired the habit of careful observation and logical argument from N. S. Shaler, when he was working with him as an assistant.

W. M. Davis pioneered ‘professionalism’ in the US geography. He helped in the establishment of some professional institutions. It was due to his effort that geography acquired an independent status as a discipline. It was usually associated with geology, but soon independent departments for geography were created in a number of universities, notable among them were Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Pennsylvania. These centres became the chief sources of the geographical ideas which were evolved in the scholarly competitive discussions from 1904 to 1914.

Davis was appointed assistant professor of physical geography in 1885 at Harvard and later promoted as professor. In 1889, he was named the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology at Harvard, and he occupied the chair until his retirement in 1912. He was one of the founders of the Association of American Geographers in 1904.

He recognised that if geography was to become established as a professional field, it would be necessary to organise a professional society in which members could present their ideas. He was a visiting professor at the University of Berlin in 1909, and also at the Sorbornne from 1911 to 1912, and learned much about the methodological debates which were going on in Germany and France.

He learned three distinctive habits of thought from Shaler:

(a) Habit of careful field observation and making use of it in logical and impersonal argument;

(b) Habit of seeing man and his works as part of the landscape, not separate from it; and

(c) Clear appreciation of the importance of processes of change in explaining the varied features associated on the face of the Earth.

Davis was influenced by the Darwinian theme of change through time, and he took evolution as his inspiration in the idea of the geographical cycle. In his first paper (published in 1884) on the development of landforms, Davis referred to a ‘cycle of life’, and used such terms as birth, youth, adolescence, maturity, old age, second childhood, infantile features, and struggle to emphasise the analogy of an organism undergoing a sequence of changes in form through time.

The concept of the cycle of erosion was first formulated in 1884, and in 1899 it was presented in a revised form. Davis appeared to be indebted to Powell and Gilbert, because his model of the cycle of erosion included in it the base-level concept and the concept of graded profile.

Davis preferred to use the word ‘the geographical cycle’ in place of the cycle of erosion. This was in the nature of a model, an ideal representation of the development of landforms that would take place during the erosion by the rivers of a newly uplifted portion of the Earth.

He postulated that after the upheaval no further up- or-down movements would occur, and that during the resulting cycle there would be no essential change of climate. To him, the geographical cycle refers to a period, during which a newly uplifted landmass is reduced to its base-level, or developed into a low featureless plain called the peneplane.

The development of landforms proceeds through three stages—youth, maturity and old age. The whole cycle may begin again with uplift, resulting in rejuvenation. The low mountains that stand above the general level of a peneplane, Davis called them ‘monadrocks’. To him, the landscape is the function of structure, process and stage.

Davis also applied the evolutionary concept to the ideal sequence of forms in mountain regions sculptured by glacier, in islands bordered by coral reefs, and in a limestone region with solution caverns. However, he insisted that his ideal sequence was not to be considered as rigid, but rather that it could provide a theoretical framework in reference to which actually observed landforms could be described.

This is what he called the ‘explanatory description of landforms’. He realised clearly that there would be an infinite variety of disturbances to the ideal sequence because almost every region observed in specific detail would constitute a special case.

Throughout his working life, Davis emphasised the theme of orderliness and development through time, which he termed evolution; but it is perhaps significant that he took his illustrations not from the species or the population, but from the individual.

So successful was Davis in promoting this view that in his hands, geomorphology became more the study of the origin of landforms than of landforms themselves, and was thus readily channeled into the restricted field of denudation chronology.

His geomorphology was deductive, time-oriented, and imbued with mechanistic notions of causation, deriving its uniformitarianism from Lyell and its theme of change through time at least partly from a simplified view of evolution. The geographical cycle of Davis provides a scientific procedure for describing the landscape phenomena in relation to their development over time.

Chorley (1962, 282-300) has studied the Davisian model of landscape development within the framework of the general systems theory. The Davisian model of geographical cycle, leading- to the landscape development, contains certain elements of closed system thinking—including, for example, the idea that upliftment provides initially a given amount of potential energy and that, as degradation proceeds, the energy of the system decreases until at the stage of peneplanation there is a minimum amount of free energy as a result of the levelling down of topographic differences.

The Davisian peneplain, therefore, may be considered as logically homologous to the condition of maximum entropy, general energy properties being more or less uniformly, distributed throughout the system with the potential energy approaching zero. The positive change of entropy and connected negative change of free energy implies the irreversibility of events within closed systems.

This again bears striking similarities to the general operation of the geomorphic cycle of Davis. In closed system, there is the inherent characteristic that the initial system conditions, particularly the energy condition, are sufficient to determine its ultimate equilibrium condition. This inevitability of closed system thinking is very much associated with the view of geomorphic change held by Davis.

Challenge to the Davisian Model:

The so-called Davisian system of ‘explanatory description of landforms’ was subject to bitter criticism by certain German geographers in the years following his lectures in Berlin. Alfred Hettner, Walther Penck and Siegfried Passarge challenged the accountability and validity of the concept of geographical cycle. Hettner’s criticisms first appeared in 1911 and his major attack appeared in his book published in 1921. Walther Penck’s criticisms appeared in his posthumous work edited by Abrecht Penck.

Hettner criticised the Davisian model as being an arbitrary scheme. It neglected other contributory local factors operating in an area, such as weathering, variations in structure and lithology, and climatic factors.

These factors not only account for climatic change during the cycle of erosion, but also account for differences in the combination of the processes of erosion and deposition in different milieus of the world. The Davisian concept is applicable only to the humid areas in Europe and Germany.

The German scholars made extensive scientific observations of landforms in the arid regions of the Earth. They claimed that the development of landforms through the operation of the wind and rain and weathering, and the resultant processes of erosion and deposition, vary in different climates and with changes in climate in one and the same area. The soil and vegetation cover have repercussions on surface changes.

Hettner and Passarge rejected the generalised system that was deductively applied so as to portray, on this limited explanatory base, the surface of an area. They argued that the geographic problem was to characterise landforms in their locally repetitive forms and to explain them in terms of all the forces operating on them.

Davis did not study the landforms as they occurred in reality, but defined and explained them deductively within the framework of a theoretical system which, it was argued, contained fundamental errors. Hettner found the Davisian model too rigid and too specific to fit real world conditions as they exist under unique situation, and also found them to be too misleading.

Passarge also criticised the method of explanatory description of Davis, and insisted on a purely empirical treatment of the landform base. But Davis pointed out that Passarge’s model would create numerous inconsistencies.

For Davis, the natural history of landforms was the core of geographical work to which other elements of landscape could be related; for Passarge the goal was the treatment of landscape, including the many elements of diverse origin associated with areas in which the landforms were basic, but not necessarily important.

As early as 1912, Passarge had emphasised the description of the present landforms as functioning factors in the region (or landscape). Lecturing at the Sarbornne, Davis stated that ‘if it proves very difficult to work out the development of the landforms, so that, in the problems of the past one loses sight of the landscape, the geographer will go better to describe the land simply with the help of the older orographic presentation’.

Ontography:

W. M. Davis is credited with the term ‘ontography’ to denote ‘the organic half of geography’—a conception he took to a large extent from Ritter and which had to be contrasted with and derived from physiography.

He points out:

‘In its present modern phase, geography is essentially concerned with the rational correlation of the items that fall under its two parts – on the one hand, the items of inorganic conditions that constitute the physical environment of living forms, and on the other hand, the items of organic response made by living forms to their environment. Thus understood, geography is concerned with the combination of physiography and ontography—that is, with the correlation between inorganic environment and organic response’.

Davis began to seek an even larger conceptual structure for geography. He attempted to seek cause and effect generalisation, ‘usually between some elements of inorganic control and some elements of organic response’.

He pointed out – ‘Any statement is of geographical quality if it contains a reasonable relation between some inorganic element of the Earth on which we live, acting as a control, and some element of the existence or growth or behaviour or distribution of the Earth’s organic inhabitants serving as a response. There is, indeed, in this idea of a causal or explanatory relationship the most definite, if not the only unifying, principle that I can find in geography’. The positivist approach appeared to be explicit in Davis’ ontography, as it concerned itself with factual content or empirical questions.

The Darwinian idea of natural selection and adaptation formed the basis of statement regarding environmental determinism by Davis (1906), who identified the core of geography as the relationship between the physical environment (as the control) and human behaviour (the response).

Davis was one of the greatest geographers of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, whose works had already influenced the European scientific thought, totally in Germany and France. He set forth a tradition which continued to dominate the American geographic scholarship for several decades.

His ontography almost remained unchallenged in America and outside. His ontography paradigm, which was subject to criticism in the earlier period, developed into a major paradigm in the 1960s when major emphasis was attached to the ecosystem as a geographic principle and method.

He had a number of colleagues and friends at Harvard who became his followers and carried forward his ideas and tradition to different parts of the country and outside. The Davisian tradition of physical geography was carried forward by Douglas W. Curtis F. Marbut and Robert Dec Ward. Johnston made significant contributions to the evolution of shorelines.

Marbut applied the Davisian paradigm in his soil studies, and classified soils as young or mature. He is credited with the English translation of Dokuchaiev’s major work on the zonal soils of the world. Ward taught climatology at Harvard for 40 years, and became the president of the Association of American geographers in 1917. In 1908, he published his book on the effect of different kinds of climate on human life. Thereafter most of his efforts were directed to the organisation of material or regional climatology.

Environmental Determinism and Possibilism:

These competing paradigms appear to have had greater impact on the contemporary school of American geography. Davis was an ardent supporter of the paradigm of determinism, while Isaiah Bowman championed the cause of the paradigm of possibilism. Mark Jefferson spoke in favour of ‘indeterminism’ which, epistemologically, formed a part of the possibilist philosophy.

Ideas of natural selection and adaptation formed the basis of statements regarding environmental determinism that tended to identify the relationship between physical environment as the control, and human behaviour, the response. Davis’ ontography belonged to this category of the paradigm of determinism.

Delimitation of Regions and Regional Geography:

In the early years of the twentieth century, a group of American geographers, trained in the Davisian tradition, were attracted by the British approach to the delimitation of regions. Many concluded that the highest expression of geographic research was regional geography. The tradition of delimitation of regions, in fact, started long back when John Wesley Powell in 1896 divided the country into physiographic regions.

He divided the nation’s territory into 16 regions, some with several sub-divisions. Davis also prepared a similar map in 1899. But the professional touch to the approach of delimitation of regions began with W. L. G. Joergin 1914. It was he who used the term ‘natural regions’ which he defined as ‘any portion of the Earth’s surface whose physical, conditions are homogeneous’.

Joerg’s concept of natural region was highly acclaimed in the United States. N. M. Fenneman also published a study of physiographic divisions of the United States in 1914. His map incorporated such features which were not found on the 21 maps that Joerg compared. However, the map of the physiographic regions with a detailed statement of the characteristic of each region was published in 1916 and included a folded map on the scale of 1/7,000,000.

C. R. Dryer moved a step further when he incorporated into his scheme the concept of physical control and human response with a view to attempt at drawing of regions. He proposed that the best way to identify natural regions is to measure the economic functions of each. Economic activities fit into these regions, and a study of the economic activities provides the best guide to the delimitation of natural regions. He called these regions as ‘natural economic regions’.

For some little more than one-and-a-half decade since 1915, the American geographers were involved in different kinds of studies, other than regional studies. The ideas and methods of regional geography reappeared a little later in the United States in the late 1930s.

Like environmental determinism and possibilism, the regional study too was an attempt at generalisation, but at generalisation without structured explanation, and thus of a different type from the increasingly discredited law-making attempts of the previous paradigm. In the late 1930s, two non-geographers published a major survey of American regionalism.

But it was Richard Hartshorne who is credited with a definitive statement of the ‘regional’ paradigm. His monograph The Nature of Geography: A Critical Survey of Current Thought in the Light of the Past (1939) published under the patronage of the Association of American Geographers, was a landmark in this direction.

Hartshorne pointed out that there was much debate among American geographers during the 1930s about the nature of their discipline. He was concerned about the tone and content of the debate and in 1938 submitted a paper in the Annals as a contribution to the philosophical discussion.

He went to Europe for field work on boundary problems, but it was interrupted by the political situation, and he concentrated on reading the works of German geographers on the nature of geography. He used this field work and his study to extend his 1938 paper, adding the subtitle to it. The result was a ‘paper’ of 491 pages which became the major philosophical and methodological contribution to the literature of geography in English then available.

To Hartshorne, the focus of geography is on areal differentiation. It is the mosaic of separate landscapes on the Earth’s surface. To him, geography is ‘a science that interprets the realities of areal differentiation of the world as they are found, not only in terms of the differences in certain things from place to place, but also in terms of the total combination of phenomena in each place, different from those at every other place’. It provides ‘accurate, orderly and rational description and interpretation of the variable character of the Earth’s surface’.

Geography seeks to acquire a complete knowledge of the areal differentiation of the world, and therefore discriminates among the phenomena that vary in different parts of the world in terms of their geographic significance, i.e. their relation to the total differentiation of areas.

‘Phenomena significant to areal differentiation have areal expression—not necessarily in terms of physical extent over the ground, but as a characteristic of an area of more or less definite extent’. The principal purpose of geography, according to this tradition, is synthesis, an integration of relevant characteristics to provide a total description of a place—a region—which is identifiable by its peculiar combination of those characteristics.

There is a close analogy between geography and history; the latter provides a synthesis for temporal sections of reality, whereas the former studies the spatial sections of the Earth’s surface of the world. Geography, therefore, studies the world, seeking to describe, and to interpret, the differences among its different parts, as seen at any one time, commonly the present time. This field it shares with no other branch of science, rather it brings together in this field part of many other sciences.

These parts, however, it does not merely add together in some convenient organisation. The heterogeneous phenomena which these other sciences study by classes are not merely mixed together in terms of physical juxtaposition in the Earth surface, but are causally interrelated in complex areal combination. Geography must integrate the materials that other sciences study separately.

Hartshorne also indicated the methodology to be used for this integrating science aimed at orderly description of the Earth’s surface. To him, the ultimate purpose of geography, the study of areal differentiation of the world; is most clearly expressed in regional geography, and so the accepted procedures were necessary for regional identification. ‘Regions are characterised by their homogeneity on prescribed characteristics, selected for their salience in highlighting areal differences’.

Two types of regions were identified – the fomal region (or uniform region) in which the whole of the area is homogeneous with regard to the phenomenon or phenomena under review, and the ‘nodal’ or ‘functional region’ in which unity is imparted by organisation around a common node, which may be the core area of a state or a town at the centre of a trade area.

‘Preparation of the materials for a regional synthesis required collection both from other sciences specialising in certain phenomena (though usually not their areal patterning) and from the topical systematic specialisms which complemented, but which were eventually subsidiary to, regional geography’.

Regional paradigm was at the forefront of the American geographic scholarship in the 1940s and systematic studies were the procedures of information for that enterprise. ‘Regional geography in the traditional sense seeks to bring together in an areal setting various matters which are treated separately in topical geography’. Urban geographers studied towns because they ‘constitute distinctive areas’, in line with the regional concept; political geographers studied the functions and structures of an area, as a region homogenous in political organisation, heterogeneous in other respects.

In defining the ‘new’ field of social geography, Watson (1953) saw it ‘as the identification of different regions of the Earth’s surface according to associations of social phenomena related to the total environment’.

Each of these topical specialisms, therefore, sought to produce its own regionalisation. It had its link with relevant systematic sciences—social geography with sociology, for example. The very differentiating factor between the two was the geographer’s focus on the region, the single- attribute region of his specialism and multi- attribute region in the synthesis of his work with that of the other to produce regional geographies.

Given this focus on the region, it is not surprising that the literature of the paradigm contained many contributions discussing the nature and delimitation of such homogeneous areas, for virtually every region was in effect a generalisation, complete homogeneity being very rare over more than a small area.

Hartshorne emphasises ‘generic principles’ and avoids mention of causal mechanisms. In the minds of many geographers, causality was still uncomfortably close to the discredited thesis of environmental determinism. Hartshorne was therefore anxious to present geography as a science concerned with the functional integration of phenomena rather than with the processes of particular kinds of phenomena.

This reaffirmed its commitment to the discovery of spatial associations – geography was a ‘naive science’ which looked at ‘things as they are actually arranged and related’. Such a prospectus echoed the empiricist intentions of the German School of History which sought to reconstruct the past, and this was hardly surprising in an account which relied heavily on an exegesis of the German intellectual tradition.

Although geography could now operate at a non-phenomenal level, therefore it continued to be confined to the demonstration of regularities—or ‘simple correlation’—and was not permitted to disclose causalities. This obliged systematic geography to provide clearly-defined generic principles.

Hartshorne conceded that to this extent geography had to be ‘a nomothetic science’, but its essential task remained the idiographic one of locating these principles in specific regional contexts and describing their interlocking configurations.

Schaefer-Hartshorne Debate:

The Hartshornean tradition of regional paradigm was subject to a bitter criticism in the United States itself, and it was raised by F. K. Schaefer in his paper published posthumously in 1953 in the Annals. The paper is often referred to by those who seek the origins of the ‘quantitative and theoretical revolution’. Schaefer was originally an economist; he joined the group of geographers teaching in the Economics Department of the University of Iowa after his escape from Nazi Germany.

In this paper, Schaefer attempted to criticise the exceptionalist claims made for regional geography and to present the case for geography adopting the philosophy and methods of the positivist school of science. He elaborated the nature of science, and then defined the peculiar characteristics of geography as a social science.

He argued that ‘to claim that geography was the integrating science which put together the findings of the individual systematic sciences was arrogant, and that in any case its products were somewhat lacking in … startlingly newer and deeper insights’. A science is characterised by its explanations and explanations require laws. To explain the phenomena one has described means always to recognise them as instances of laws.

In geography, the major regularities which are described refer to spatial patterns and hence geography has to be conceived as the science concerned with the formulation of the laws governing the spatial distribution of certain features on the surface of the Earth.

It is these spatial arrangements of phenomena, and not the phenomena themselves, about which geographers should be seeking to, make law-like statements. Geographical procedures would then not differ from those employed in the other sciences, both natural and social.

Observation would lead to a hypothesis—about interrelationship between two spatial patterns, for example—and the hypothesis would be tested against large number of cases, to provide the material for a law if it, were thereby verified.

Schaefer observed exceptionalism in Hartshorne’s regional geography which, according to him, claims that geography does not share the methodology of other sciences because of the peculiar nature of its subject matter—study of unique places or regions.

Using analogies from physics and economics, Schaefer argued that geography is not peculiar in its focus on unique phenomena; all sciences deal with unique events which can only be accounted for by an integration of laws from various systematic sciences, but this does not prevent the development of those laws.

It is, therefore, wrong to maintain that the geographers are distinguished among the scientists through the integration of heterogeneous phenomena which they achieve. There is nothing extraordinary about geography in that respect.

Schaefer traced the exceptionalist view in geography back to an analogy drawn by Kant between geography and history, an analogy repeated by Hettner and Hartshorne. In a rejoinder to Hettner’s argument that both history and geography deal with the unique, and thus do not apply the method of science, Schaefer argued that this is a false position, for in explaining what happened at a certain time period, historians must integrate laws of social sciences.

Time periods, like places, are undoubtedly unique assemblages of phenomena, but this does not preclude the use of laws in unravelling and explaining them. History and geography can both be sciences, for what scientists do is that they apply to each concrete situation jointly all the laws that involve the variables they have reason to believe are relevant.

The last part of Schaefer’s paper reviews some of the problems of applying his nomothetic (law- producing) philosophy to geography as a spatial, social science. He attempts to recognise, for example, the problems of experimentation and of quantification, and suggests a methodology based on cartographic correlations. A major point concerns the difference between laws produced in geography and those from other ‘maturer’ social sciences.

The former are morphological laws; the latter are process laws. In order to fully comprehend the assemblages of the phenomena described in geographer’s morphological laws, therefore, it is necessary to derive process laws from other social sciences. Geography, then, is the source of the laws on location, which may be used to differentiate the regions of the Earth’s surface.

In three of his major publications (1955, 1958 and 1959), Hartshorne expressed his reaction to Schaefer’s attack and criticism to his regional paradigm. In his paper (1955), he attempted to indicate certain inconsistencies in Schaefer’s paper, and claimed that it ignores the normal standards of critical scholarship, and in effect offers nothing more than personal opinion, thinly disguised as literary and historical analysis.

Hartshorne also pointed out that in coming to the conclusion that geography should take process laws from the systematic sciences and use them to produce morphological laws, Schaefer came very close to preaching the sort of exceptionalist claim that he sought to destroy. In his second paper, Hartshorne (1958) attacked Schaefer’s claim that Kant was the source of the exceptionalist view. In fact, both Humboldt and Hettner reached the same view- independently, although unaware of Kant’s views when they were writing.

Hartshorne’s most bitter rebuttal of Schaefer’s criticism was published in his monograph entitled Perspective on the Nature of Geography (1959), in which he defined geography as that discipline which ‘seeks to describe and interpret the variable character from place to place of the Earth as the world of man’.

He considered that human and natural factors do not have to be identified separately—any prior insistence on this was a function of the arguments of environmental determinists. He said that a division into human and physical geography is unfortunate, because it limits the range of possible integration in the study of reality. He made an important distinction between ‘expository’ description and ‘explanatory’ description.

‘Geography is primarily concerned to describe the variable character of areas as formed by existing features in interrelationships … explanatory description of features in the past must be kept subordinate to the primary purpose’.

Thus, ‘historical geography should be the expository description of the historical present but the purpose of such dips into the past is not to trace developments or seek origins but to facilitate comprehension of the present’.

On the question of ‘dichotomy between systematic and regional geography’, Hartshorne accepted that studies of interrelationships could be arranged along a continuum, from those which analyse the most elementary complexes in areal variation over the world to those which analyse the most complex integration in areal variation within small areas.

The former are called topical studies and the latter are regional studies. Whereas every truly geographical study involves the use of both the topical and the regional approach, there is no argument that one is superior to the other (1959, 120-21).

On the question raised by Schaefer, ‘Does geography seek to formulate scientific laws or to describe individual cases?’

Hartshorne replied in the negative and pointed out following difficulties in establishing such laws through geographical investigation:

(a) scientific laws must be based on large number of cases, but geographers study complex integrations in unique places;

(b) scientific laws can be best established in laboratory experiments which allow only a few independent variable to vary, but such work is impossible in geography;

(c) interpretation requires skills in the systematic sciences which are beyond the capacity of geographers; and

(d) scientific laws suggest some kind of determinism, but this is inappropriate to the human motivations which are in part the causes of landscape variation.

For these reasons the search for laws is irrelevant to geography.

Hartshorne upheld the Hettnerian tradition of geography as a chorological science with history as a chronological science. This is valid because it describes the way in which geographers have worked, on both topical and regional subjects, with reference to interrelationships and integrations within areas. Hartshorne’s was a positive view of geography – geography is what geographers have made it. Schaefer’s was a normative theory of what geography should be, irrespective of what it had been.

By the 1950s, especially in the United States, disillusionment with the empiricist philosophy of the regional paradigm appeared to have developed, which was followed by a gradual dominance of the topical specialism. As a result, a full revolution was launched with the presentation and ultimate acceptance of a new paradigm.

Systematic Geography:

There is no doubt, that within about a decade of the publication of Schaefer’s paper, most geographers had adopted at least part of his paradigm, with growing concern for quantification and law-making. The younger geographers in the United States in the 1950s had a choice before them whether to accept the regional paradigm or to search for quantification and law-making. It is pointed out that most geographers opted for geography as a law-seeking science.

During the 1950s, systematic studies became much more important in the research and teaching of American geographers. The growing popularity of topical specialisms is revealed in the review chapters in James and Jones’ edited work American Geography: Inventory and Prospect (1954) and also in the Journal Literature of the 1950s.

Very few of the investigations reported were aimed at the generation of laws in any sense; indeed some could almost be categorised under the exploration paradigm in that major purpose seemed to be the provision of new factual material.

Schaefer, Ullman and Ackerman were the precursors of this new paradigm of systematic geography in the United States. However, most of the methodological changes and discussions in systematic studies in geography during the 1950s occurred at Iowa, Wisconsin and Washington.

At Iowa, it was Harold McCarty and his associates who made considerable contributions to the methodological aspects of the systematic studies in geography. Their intent was to establish the degree of correspondence between two or more geographical patterns, akin to the morphological laws of accordance discussed by Schaefer. It is interesting to note that though Schaefer was at Iowa until his death in 1953, he is not referred to by McCarty and his associates in their works.

McCarty attempted to give the morphological laws a definite theoretical shape. The purpose of theory is to provide explanations and he recognised two types of explanations. The first is based on a search for the causes of observed locational pattern and the second type focuses on association.

Such laws of association are built up in a series of stages:

(a) Statement of the problem and of the necessary operational definitions;

(b) Measurement of the phenomena (with attendant problem of sampling in time and space); and

(c) Statement of the findings in tabular or graphical form.

Thus, geography, in its search for morphological laws, is to a considerable extent, a consumer of the laws of other disciplines. These laws may be theoretically rather than empirically derived. The method that McCarty attempted to develop, with its focus on the testing of simple hypothesis derived either from observation or from theoretical deduction, became the model for much research in the ensuing decades.

Earlier pioneers in the department of geography at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, were John Weaver who used multiple correlation and regression to identify the influences of climatic variables on barley yields (1943), and J. W. Alexander & G. A. Zahorchak who focussed on the measurement of population pattern (1943).

A. H. Robinson (1961) later on attempted to combine these two interests in his research works, whose main interests were in cartography and cartographic correlations. His concern was to develop statistical methods of map comparison, and he paid particular attention to the problems of representing areal data by points and of using correlation methods in the comparison of isarithm maps.

The pioneers of the systematic tradition in geography of the Schaeferian heritage in the University of Washington, Seattle, were W. L. Garrison and his associates, and E. L. Ullman who moved to Seattle in 1951. A large group of graduate students worked with Garrison, and some of them became leaders in the new methodology during the subsequent decades. The group was benefited from a visit to Seattle by the Swedish geographer Torsten Hagerstrand, who was developing methods of generalising spatial patterns and processes.

The dominant thrust of the works of Garrison and associates involved the derivation from other systematic sciences of relevant normative theories, mathematical methods and statistical procedures with which to develop morphological laws. They had catholic interest in urban and economic geography, and also in regional planning.

In one of his articles, ‘Spatial Structure of the Economy’, published in the Annals in 1959, Garrison urged upon the geographers that to advance their locational analysis and theories they would have to depend much on the works of economists, because their works are specifically devoted to the question ‘what determines the spatial arrangement of economic activity’? Garrison also worked on the possible application of the mathematical procedures of linear programming, which produce the optimal solutions to problems of resource allocation in constrained situation.

In this, he illustrated how the procedures of neoclassical economic analysis could be adopted in order to investigate ideal solutions to the problems of where to locate economic activities and how to organise flows of goods. Garrison and his team undertook an empirical work with a planning orientation on the impact of highway developments on land-use and other spatial patterns.

One of the outstanding associates of Garrison was W. Bunge, whose Theoretical Geography published in 1962 established the scientific credential of geography, and contradicted the Hartshornean paradigm of regional geography.

In the book, he claimed that Hartshorne confused uniqueness and singularity. He also contested Hartshorne’s claim that geography cannot formulate laws because of its paucity of cases and argued in favour of even more general laws.

He countered the argument that geographical phenomena are not predictable with the claim that science does not strife for complete accuracy, but compromises its accuracy for generality. He also favoured the application of descriptive mathematics in preference to cartography as a more precise language. The rest of the book is devoted to the aspects of the substantive content of the science of geography beginning with ‘a general theory of movement’ and then a chapter on ‘central place theory’.

B. J. L. Berry and M. E Dacey, two other distinguished associates of Garrison, also made significant contributions to the field of systematic studies in geography. Berry’s work (1967) has always had a very strong empirical and utilitarian base, whereas Dacey (1973) continued to work on the mathematical representation of spatial, especially point, patterns. In total, the work of this group of scholars influenced the research and teaching of a whole generation of human geographers throughout the world, and has undoubtedly been the most significant in the development of the first post-regional paradigm.

Quite distinct and different from any of the above three, was the publication of an article by J. Q. Stewart (1956), an astronomer at Princeton University, in which he developed the ‘concept of social physics’. He observed certain regularities in various aspects of population distribution, regularities which were akin to the laws of physics, such as a tendency for the number of students attending a particular university to decline with increasing distance of their residences from its campus.

From these observations, he developed the concept that ‘the dimensions of society are analogous to the physical dimension and include numbers of people, distance, and time. Social physics deals with observations, processes and relations in these terms’.

One of his associates was William Warntz (959) who worked on the investigation of distance as one of the basic dimensions of society. The wide range of empirical regularities which Stewart and Warntz observed was used to develop the concept of macro geography.

It was not until the publication of D. Harvey’s Explanation in Geography in 1969 that the conceptual revolution in the new scientific geography initiated by Schaefer remained inconclusive. A key concept that Harvey developed in the philosophy is that laws must be proved through objective procedures, and not accepted simply because they seem plausible.

A valid law must predict certain patterns in the world, so that having developed an idea about those patterns; the researcher must formulate them into a testable hypothesis, a proposition whose truth or falsity is capable of being asserted.

Current geography in the United States is characterised by three distinct approaches, each with a separate epistemology or theory of knowledge:

(1) First, there is the ‘positivist philosophy, with belief in the objectivity of scientific description (empiricism) and analysis of the world, its goal of formulating laws about that world, and its assumption that explanation can be derived by studying the outcomes of the laws. It believes that the laws of spatial organisation can be revealed by analysing spatial pattern.

(2) Second, there are ‘the humanistic philosophies’ based on a belief that men live in subjective worlds of their own creation, within which they act as free agents.

(3) Finally, there are the ‘structuralist’ or ‘realist’ philosophies which argue that explanation for observed pattern cannot be discovered in the analysis of those patterns themselves, but only by the development of theories of the underlying processes that generate the conditions within which human agents can create those patterns.

Foremost within this group is Marxism which argues that the processes are themselves changing—and can be altered by concerted political action so that no laws of spatial organisation are possible.