Isms and Schisms: Healing the Rift between the Nature-Society and Space-Society Traditions in Human Geography

Abstract

In laying out the ground rules for the presidential plenary session in Fort Worth, Larry Brown set the hurdles high. Our assignment was to consider-in the context of our own careers-continuity, change, discourse, and challenges (both to and from geography). He asked us, moreover, to frame our reflections on continuity and change within the time bounds of our own experiences in geography, which in my case is thirty years (I began graduate school in 1967) or thirty-six if I go back to my first geography course in college. My first reaction was that of the rebellious student: I wanted to change the assignment-to replace with conversation. For one thing, this would signal that, besides the current academic meaning of discourse as constructed knowledge, discourse has long served as another word for conversation.1 In addition, conveniently converts the title to four C's (continuity, change, conversation, and challenges), and furthermore, why not conversation among and between discourses, about which more anon. To me, the most striking contemporary example of change and continuity within our discipline is that the two central traditions in human geography-what we call now nature-society and space society-seem to be converging again after decades of separation. Focusing on this convergence, I shall sketch out how nature-society and space-society became separated, how they developed during their years apart, why I believe they are coming together now, why it matters that they are converging, and, in that context, what challenges-including that of conversation-to and from geography this convergence holds. I find opportunities like this to take stock and reflect quite humbling; the opportunity itself seems to call attention to advancing age, and then immediately forces one to confront the limits of one's experience and knowledge despite the many years of practicing geography. Such invitations almost invariably call forth a hybrid memoir-sermon. My perspective here is personal, with goals limited to providing the schematic of an argument and to encouraging conversations to continue. My first geography course, world regional geography, was in1961 at Middlebury College. The professor, Rowland Illick, was a teacher who inspired many to consider themselves geographers, whether they went on to earn their livings as pilots, camp directors, businesspeople, or geography teachers. He began the very first class by asking one of the women in the class to come up to the front of the room, and, using her as an example, he showed us the many ways in which our lives were linked to distant places. What had she had for breakfast? Bread? Cereal? Where did the wheat come from? Why Kansas? How about the orange juice? Where did the cotton in her shirt come from? Why Egypt? How about her lipstick?2 And so on. Thirty-six years ago, people were not routinely talking about the global economy, nor were they talking much about active learning in the classroom. Rowland introduced students to both. One thing they were talking about in geography classrooms then, Middlebury's included, was the connection between the physical environment (nature) and the human environment (society). The geography I learned as an undergraduate was pretty much the standard of the time; it was what we'd call now good oldfashioned regional geography with a fair dollop of environmental determinism. You had to understand the physical environment (we didn't much