Exploring the proper relation between physical and human geography

Critical physical geography, the focus of this special issue, is a recent entrant in a long-standing conversation that has taken place in many venues, Progress in Physical Geography very much among them. From the journal’s start in 1977 (Gardiner and Gregory, 1977) through to more recent issues (Castree, 2012; Wilcock et al., 2013), the question of how, or whether, to integrate physical and human geography has been a persistent and recurring theme. I focus here on two early statements in that discussion: John Thornes’ 1981 piece arguing for a more radical approach to meteorology, and Ron Johnston’s 1983 article tackling the potential integration of physical and human geography more broadly. While Thornes’ article reads like an early call for critical physical geography (CPG), Johnston is far less sanguine about either the possibility or desirability of physical/human integration.

Presaging his later calls for a more cultural physical geography (Thornes and McGregor, 2003; Thornes, 2008), John Thornes’ 1981 article tackled the question of an alternative approach to atmospheric studies head on. Thornes argued that meteorology was dominated by a single positivist paradigm that emphasized only mathematical modeling of atmospheric circulation, thus unnecessarily restricting the field of atmospheric inquiry:

The positivist paradigm insists that a thorough knowledge of the mathematics of the atmosphere is needed before that knowledge can be usefully applied elsewhere…[but] there are many other issues that are equally important if we want to understand the atmosphere. One would never claim to be able to understand the character of a person by working out the speed at which blood was moving around their body! Hence the positivist paradigm is too restrictive. It gives us no direction as to how to apply the knowledge that its methods produce. (Thornes, 1981: 429)

Continuing the critique, Thornes retrofits Derek Gregory’s critique of positivist human geography to a physical geography context:

If we choose to retain geography’s commitment to positivism…this will involve our obscuring two major and inescapable issues of enormous practical importance…the relationship between science and society…[and] the connections between the conduct of a scientific discourse and the social conditions which make its particular processes and forms both possible and acceptable. (Thornes, 1981: 429, quoting from Gregory, 1978: 168)

What should replace positivist meteorology? Thornes raises alternative visions via provocative questions: “What other paradigms might we consider to stress the interactions between man and the atmosphere? Do such approaches as marxist meteorology, humanistic climatology, radical meteorology exist?” (Thornes, 1981: 430).

Thornes’ imagined alternatives and his repurposing of Gregory’s concerns, respectively, map with surprising directness onto the two key characteristics of CPG research: according careful attention to 1) biophysical landscapes and the power relations that have increasingly come to shape them, and 2) the politics of environmental science and the role of biophysical inquiry in promoting social and environmental justice. Thus CPG can plausibly be viewed as a response to the questions Thornes raises. Is there such thing as a “marxist” or “radical” atmospheric science? There is now (e.g. Hulme, 2014; Johnson, 2010, 2015).

Ron Johnston’s 1983 article, by contrast, stems not from concern for the intellectual trajectory of a single subfield, but for the intellectual character of Geography as a whole. His goal is to analyze whether a deep integration of physical and human geography is possible, and he addresses this through both a general discussion of the characteristics of geographic research, and a focused review of resource geography in particular. Johnston initially holds out the promise of deep integration, but he eventually concludes that it is not feasible, and that that should not worry us because such integration is neither practically not intellectually necessary.

Johnston begins by distinguishing two potential approaches for drawing physical and human geography together: bridge-building, an additive approach in which a basic understanding of one side is tacked onto a deeper understanding of the other, and integration, a deep intermixing of physical and social science in an intradisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary approach. To be truly integrative, he argues, research must span the range from the study of physical processes to the study of social processes (Johnston, 1983: 132). Johnston suggests that such deep integration is at least “potentially valuable,” but for better policy-making, not on intellectual grounds (Johnston, 1983: 132). His careful review of the disparate literatures on resource geography, however, turns up very little in the way of actually integrative work:

My conclusion from a review of the literature is that integration is largely absent, mainly because most work ignores the processes studied in either (or both) physical or human geography. Much work falls in the middle ground; it contains very little which requires a detailed understanding of physical processes and not a great deal on the processes that drive human-created mechanisms. (Johnston, 1983: 132)

Johnston then asks whether this absence is actually a problem. Is such integrative work actually needed?

Is it necessary for the study of resource analysis that practitioners should be trained in both physical and human geography, and that they should be able to merge the two sets of knowledge? Or is it sufficient for bridges to be built, to develop awareness (in a typical multidisciplinary sense) without integration (which is provided in interdisciplinary work)? Do physical geographers need to know why and how human beings do what they do? Do human geographers need to know how the environment reacts to stimuli; or is it sufficient that the study of resources be conducted with only a general awareness of either the physical or social processes, by specialists concentrating in either physical or human geography? (Johnston, 1983: 140)

His answer is an emphatic “No” on both practical and intellectual grounds. He argues first that asking individual scholars to work integratively is unfair because, “very few people can handle such and large and diverse fields, let alone integrate them” (Johnston, 1983: 140). Thus, “however desirable it may be in theory, in reality it is unattainable” (Johnston, 1983: 141). Successful integration may be at least somewhat feasible in teams, but Johnston doesn’t seem to put much stock in this as a pathway to integration: “Working together, the social and physical scientist may achieve some integration, and their natural curiosity may extend this, but such a goal is not a necessary condition for work in either” (Johnston, 1983: 141).

Further, integration is intellectually and politically unnecessary:

[D]oes the manager need to know why a certain action will produce a particular response…or only that it will? Do the demographer and the population demographer need to know why the pill and the IUD are effective contraceptive devices, or only that they are? I rather doubt that any need to know why. (Johnston, 1983: 141)

Instead of deep integration, he argues, the far more superficial work of bridge-building is all we need (Johnston, 1983: 141).

Johnston’s position is unequivocal: nothing like a CPG is necessary or even desirable given the institutional, environmental, and practical conditions of the early 1980s. But what if both Geography and its political-economic and ecological context had changed over the three decades since Johnston wrote? What if today integrative research was feasible and intellectually and politically necessary? I would argue that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic “Yes,” and that an approach along the lines of CPG is both doable and necessary. I tackle each of these claims in turn.

It is possible that there were no deeply cross-trained individual geographers in 1983, though I doubt that. Certainly they exist today (e.g. biogeographer and political ecologist Matt Turner, or pedologist and critical social scientist Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro). Further, individual “super-scientists” are not the only path to integrative research. As Johnston himself acknowledged, however unenthusiastically, deeply integrative work can be done by teams. The challenge, as scholars of interdisciplinary research routinely note (Hall et al., 2012; Ramadier, 2004), is to make team research integrative rather than additive, but clearly it can be done.

The question of whether integrative work has intellectual and practical utility remains. Johnston argues that it does not, but he himself points us towards the intellectual rationale for such synthesis in the first part of his article when he underlines the importance of understanding how the particular processes we study are shaped by other processes:

[H]uman and physical geographers have retained an interest in the outputs of the processes being studied. This raises a common problem. The processes identified…operate in conditions influenced by other processes and by pre-existing forms; these are configurational elements. In seeking to account for particular outputs, therefore, they must work out how the immanent processes (the laws of physics and chemistry; the dynamics of a mode of production) interact within a given configuration to create a phenomenon or phenomenon-complex of geographical interest. (Johnston, 1983:129)

It seems likely that Johnston was separating out physical and human “configurational” elements here, with the laws of physics and chemistry of relevance only to physical geographers, and the dynamics of a particular mode of production important only to human geographers. And yet, in the years since Johnston wrote this piece much has changed in the world, and in our understanding of it. Regardless of your view of the Anthropocene concept, its rapid and extensive take-up points to something important: human social and economic relations are increasingly important drivers of environmental processes. Physical geography research that does not substantively tackle human forces risks losing its explanatory power. Thus the core argument of CPG could paraphrase Johnston: our research needs to incorporate both the laws of physics and the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production.