Abstract
One of the advantages of being retired is the time available for leisured and in-depth reading. This is frequently coupled with another attribute of old age; namely, the ability to close out the immediate, and to revisit, sometimes in vivid colour, more youthful times.
Most recently, I have been luxuriating in Andrea Wulf’s (2015) The Invention of Nature, her outstanding analytical biography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), founding father of physical geography (Figure 1). Wulf’s second subtitle, The Lost Hero of Science, underscores today’s deracination from both the deepest roots of our subject and the German scholarship which was so seminal in its development. 1 It is surely one of the tragedies of the two world wars that they severed the long-standing natural relationship between English and German scholarship. In many ways, we have become intellectually stunted like the Rev. Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), whose life’s work, The key to all mythologies, was doomed from the start because he could not read German, the language of the leading writers in his field.
Photograph of Alexander von Humboldt in old age, c.1857. Salt print, 11.8 x 9.5 cm. Verlag von L. Haase & Co., Berlin.
Such a deracination was not the case when I was a callow undergraduate during the mid-1960s in the Department of Geography at University College London (UCL). Nor was it likely to be in a department run by such key figures in the history of geography as Henry Clifford Darby (1909–1992) and Eric H Brown, who retired in 1989.
Can you imagine today ensuring that your first-year undergraduates all imbibe The Nature of Geography: A critical survey of current thought in the light of the past, a still-unmatched magisterial analysis of the origins of geographical thought by Richard Hartshorne (1939; with corrections 1961)? My own battered copy is scarred with frequent underlinings, numbered paragraphs and marginalia, rather regrettably in both pencil and ink. Reading Wulf’s life of Humboldt instantly brought it all back to me, but especially the fact that one of the earliest lecture series in physical geography ever given was by that most influential of German philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), at the University of Königsberg, then in Prussia, now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
Kant’s series was entitled Physische Geographie, and, over a 40-year period, he taught the class no fewer than 48 times. As Hartshorne notes (1939/1961: 38), it was the most popular of his courses.
Above all, however, in his wider philosophical writings, Kant takes up a position between rationalism and empiricism. The laws of nature exist only because our mind interprets them. Kant sees us caught between two worlds, the world of the Ding an sich (‘the-thing-in-itself’) and the world of our perception (‘the-thing-as-it-appears-to-us’). As Wulf (2015: 35) observes, this transcendental position means that ‘We impose…order on nature, and not nature on us’. Hence there is no one physical geography, only many ‘physical geographies’, each a mirror of the time and place in which it was conceived.
Kant’s philosophy had a profound influence on the young Humboldt, who absorbed it through lengthy discussions with the most famous thinkers of his day, above all Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805). What a ferment of intellect must have arisen in Schiller’s newly-bought Garden House, just beyond the city walls of Jena, where they met for drink and debate. It was out of these lively encounters that Humboldt would develop his ideas of system and of how knowledge is possible. He would later display a bust of the great philosopher in his study.
We thus privilege any one approach to the physical world at our peril, for, as we open a fresh window on ‘reality’, we tend to close others, so that, overall, the sum of knowledge is not necessarily progressed in any one given generation. As I came to the end of my undergraduate days in 1966, such a paradigm shift was well underway, the ‘debunked’ geomorphology of William Morris Davis (1850–1934), for example, being brutally swept aside for the brave new exciting ‘engineering’ world of river measurement and management. Nobody now cared whether a river was ‘old’ or ‘young’, whether a landscape feature represented this past geological event or that; what mattered were the formulae of flow and flood, and relevance for today.
Yet, even then, I was sceptical of such an arrogant, all-encompassing change. Surely, the approaches were mere attempts to answer different questions about the same earth phenomena and only ‘the-thing-as-it-appears-to-us’ had changed, not ‘the-thing-in-itself’? What I was experiencing as an occasionally bemused student was simply a different perception, granted one suitably ‘scientific’ for a thrusting, quantitative, pop-driven age.
But, of course, Davis’ ‘geographical cycle’ had itself been just as era-related, deriving its reasoning from an intellectual period completely dominated by the radical evolutionary ethos of Charles Darwin and On the Origin of Species (1859), an era in which the concept of change through time was absolutely central. For a student then, everything would have been about the evolution of phenomena, from river valleys to Friedrich Ratzel’s state as an ‘organism’ attached to the land.
Moreover, both the trendy ‘new’ physical geography of the 1960s and Davis’ physical geography shared common origins in the uniformitarianism of three formidable pioneer Scottish scientists, James Hutton, John Playfair and Charles Lyell, and, in particular, in Lyell’s Principles of Geology: Being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by reference to causes now in operation (1830–1833). Nevertheless, even this shared ‘uniformitarianism’ had already been challenged and refined in the 1920s by the Viennese-born German geomorphologist, Walther Penck (1888–1923). His book, Morphological Analysis of Landforms, published posthumously in 1924 by his father, stressed that uplift and denudation worked inexorably together, although I must confess that, as a student, I toiled somewhat with his concept of ‘parallel retreat’.
Inevitably, the same intellectual patterns apply equally strongly in my own specialist area of physical geography, biogeography, an approach to nature in which Humboldt was a true pioneer. His essay, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen, which was published in 1807 and dedicated to Goethe, is a foundation study (Humboldt and Bonpland, 2009). In it, he established key principles for picturing the distribution of organisms across the world and up mountains, as well as the crucial concept of nature as a web of life. The essay was illustrated with an extraordinary hand-coloured fold-out, the Naturgemälde. Yet, fascinatingly, this crucial publication again illustrates the isolation of English scholarship from the German tradition. Although the work was issued in French in 1807, the same year as the German edition, and then in Spanish in 1809, it was never translated into English until 2009.
Likewise, German scholarship laid the foundations for more holistic thinking in biogeography. The biologist and naturalist, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (1834–1919), a correspondent of Charles Darwin, introduced the term ‘ecology’ in 1866, defining it as ‘the total science of the relationships of the organism to the surrounding environment, within which we can include in a further sense all conditions for life’ (Stott, 1984). This, in turn, lead to the synecology of Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper (1856–1901), ‘inventor’ of the tropischer Regenwald (tropical rain forest) (Stott, 2001), and the contrasting autecology of the Danish botanist, Johannes Eugenius Bülow Warming (1841–1924).
Since then biogeography has gone through a range of manifestations in both its guise as historical biogeography and its guise as ecological biogeography (Stott, 1981; Whittaker, 2015). There have been: the 1935 ecosystem concept of the English botanist, Sir Arthur George Tansley (1871–1955), equilibrium and non-equilibrium interpretations, the island biogeographers, the fundamentalist panbiogeographers, the crusading cladistic biogeographers and many others.
Yet, as Kant showed us, all these encapsulate the world as they have perceived it, never ‘the-thing-in-itself’, which remains beyond our grasp, an impossible dream. Nevertheless, in the end, this limitation may be our salvation, protecting us from falling for the Faustian Pact of achieving ‘all knowledge’ – ‘Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt Im Innersten zusammenhält’ (Goethe’s Faust, lines 382–383 2 ; Stott and Murcott, 2012). As a teacher, one of my greatest tests was to demonstrate to students that ‘ecosystems’ do not exist and that they are merely one relatively recent way of viewing the world, in particular the manner in which energy and mass flow through nature.
Growing older, therefore, I have come to value the sheer diversity – indeed the biodiversity – of physical geography. I can now unashamedly recall with delight the excitement I felt when, on my very first undergraduate field excursion, Eric Brown pointed out to us the 650-foot Calabrian marine-cut platform. It was an enthralling thought that an ancient sea had left its mark on the high landscape of today. Even now, as I drive down the Darenth Valley in Kent where I live, I have a moment of Proustian recall when I see that little dink in the coppiced woodland on the dip slope of the North Downs. Once again I relearn that change is all, and that such fatuous ideas as a ‘stable climate’ and a ‘stable world’ are the oxymorons of oxymorons. But I also revelled in the ‘new’ physical geography being taught to my daughters in the 1980s, when I helped, often totally ineffectually, with projects measuring everything there was to measure in the River Darent itself. I flowed with the times.
Where then does this leave us; whither progress in physical geography? First, I hope that we can regain the Kantian sense of physical geography as a philosophy of the world as we perceive it, acknowledging at the same time that we shall never know it in its entirety, that we shall never completely grasp ‘the-thing-in-itself’.
Second, it would be splendid if the multifarious branches of physical geography could recognise their marked limitations, and acknowledge that they are part of a greater whole. Above all, we must be humble, and come to understand that the ‘physical geographies’ of today are often no more valid than those of the past. Indeed, they may become so narrow and narcissistic that they preclude any genuine approach to the world, to ‘the-thing-in-itself’.
Third, it would be intellectually rewarding if all studies relating to the great realm of physical geography were to include a Course 101 on the men and women of the past, on the Humboldts, on the founding giants of our subject, so many of whom were German.
Finally, my own regret is that I shall not see the ‘physical geographies’ of the future in a digital and virtual world way beyond my meagre imaginings. But, above all, we must regain a Humboldtian sense of wonder about our world, while recognising that we will only see it through our own distorting vision.