Historical geography and the concept of the behavioural environment

The modern study of geography was born of three main disciplinesthat of the great naturalist travellers studying at a time when Lamarckian 'needs' were being added to Darwinian 'Natural selection'; that of the political economists whose interests lay in the physical basis of political units and power; and that of those historians who were dissatisfied with a History which wandered on a formless earth. From such a birth the geographers of to-day have come into an inheritance at once rich but of an exceedingly complex nature and as specialisation has increased the problem of maintaining some centralising theme or purpose has become increasingly difficult. There appear to be as many geographies as geographers. The frontiers of study are being extended constantly into new realms and as with the expansion of the Roman Empire voices are raised from time to time asking for a halt to be made and a territorial demarcation drawn. However, almost invariably the debate on definition assumes the problem to be one of material content and resolves itself into a struggle for priority among certain groups of phenomena natural and human. A solution along these lines appears to be inherently impossible for on the one hand to maintain that all facts are geographical facts is tantamount to saying that no facts are geographical facts, while on the other to delimit a group of facts and refer them peculiarly to a geographical science seems equally absurd. A coconut palm is a fact in many realms of study. A true distinction can be made only when one thinks in terms of significance or values. The coconut palm acquires some additional character as it stands in the field ofobservation of the economist, the botanist, the geographer, or the peasant farmer in whose gardenland it is growing. This acquired character depends not so much on the act of observation as on the different modes of thought, levels of experience and sets of values implicit in the various perceptions. Thus the following discussion attempts to focus attention on function and methodology rather than on content, on the processes of geographical thought rather than on its material bases.