Geopolitics, Geomorphology, Environmental Determinism, Anarchist Geography, Regional Geography, Quantitative Geography, and Humanistic Geography

Geopolitics and Geomorphology

Geopolitics is the result of merging geographical knowledge with concepts of politics and warfare that span multiple parts of the world. Halford Mackinder and Friedrich Ratzel were two prominent figures tied to geopolitics. Mackinder represented the ideals of exploration, which was an older geographical school of thought, but he also concentrated on surveys and philosophy with a focus on the British Empire and how the empire could maintain its power.

Some of the developed ideas of geopolitics surmised that Europe had explored the whole world and had already divided it up among the countries of Europe, and now these countries would be left with nothing to do but struggle for power amongst each other. Ratzel, influenced by Darwinian concepts, described this as the natural expansion of one’s habitat, and that humans would continue to struggle for space until a society’s optimum extent was reached.

This struggle for space ties the field of geography to those of politics and warfare. Ratzel’s ideas have been linked to motivation for the World Wars in the 20^th century, and the Darwinian roots of those ideas also provided a foundation for many future periods of geographic thought.

Another area of geographic thought at the time was geomorphology, led by William Morris Davis. Davis viewed geography through a Darwinian lens and suggested that physical geography underwent cycles of erosion. This was the beginning of the geographical discussion of how humans fit in with their environment that would later emerge as environmental determinism.

Environmental Determinism

Environmental determinism developed out of a growing desire to categorize and understand the relationships between people and their environments. The dominant solution purposed by environmental determinism was that people and their culture are created by their environment and that by knowing the facts of an environment one an also know the facts about the humans living there.

A classical environmental determinist is David Livingstone, but other notable figures from the 20^th century include Ellen Semple, Ellsworth Huntingdon, and Griffith Taylor. Semple was influenced by Ratzel and Kant, drawing on Darwinian concepts of how the environment can contribute to the evolution of a species and how geography is present before human history.

Although environmental determinism worked to answer questions about the relationship between humans and their environment, this period of geographic thought drew many negative conclusions, such as justifying slavery based on a person’s climate, and was too limiting for describing human and cultural development, like the discussions of race and whether an entire culture was either motivated or lazy.

Anarchist Geography

Another early 20^th century school of geographic thought was situated in concepts of anarchism. Anarchism, contrary to popular belief, is not centered around desires for chaos and violence. Instead, anarchism supports small-scale community-oriented living, mutual aid among people, and removal of corruption from power.

Prior to this, geography had been viewed as useful in terms of geopolitics, and it was used by figures of authority. However, geography and anarchism became coupled as revolutions were organized in the face of social unrest and a desire for societal transformation.

Two major figures of anarchism are Elisee Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, and Kropotkin continued the pattern in geography of being influenced by Darwin, especially in the concepts of mutual aid. Anarchism was a positive step in geography for laying foundations of understanding groups of people that would later develop into regional geography.

Regional Geography

Modern geography still uses concepts of regions, so the development of regional geography was a pivotal period that improved the field of geography. Regional geography is also a broad and vague school of thought that changed and evolved over time, but essentially it focuses on grouping either physical areas or clusters of people based on some shared characteristics into theoretical “regions”. The purpose of regions is to identify that which is unique or similar between one person and another person in a different location.

Notable characters in the development of regional geography are Paul Vidal de la Blache, Richard Hartshorne, Allen Van Newkirk, and Kenneth Frampton. Vidal de la Blache was influenced by Ratzel, and he contributed to ideas of possibilism and would later contribute to humanistic geography. Hartshorne contributed discussions of ideographic and nomothetic geography, which was essential for determining how general or specific regions or the overall study of geography should be. Fred Schaefer, a critic of regional geography, supported nomothetic geography and thought that the field should be generalizable in order to be more scientific, which would be a part of the coming period of quantitative geography.

Spatial Science and Quantitative Geography

The period of support for spatial science in geography continued the rejection of ideographic geography in support of nomothetic geography, and while it was later proven that geography is a balance of the two schools of thought, this period of geography brought many positive changes and pushed for the field to be more scientific.

Following on the trends of positivism developed by Auguste Comte and the desire for results to be testable and repeatable, geography shifted toward quantitative methods and adoption of practical theories. Quantitative geography supported mathematical models and also paid attention to the importance of movement, both human and transportation, which was piloted by people such as William Bunge and Edward Ullman.

Quantitative geography even tied back into geomorphology from the early 20^th century. This was a period of huge advancement for geography, but it was not perfect. In fact, it was later determined that the complete removal of humans in lieu of data and numbers was not the best approach for answering the questions of geography, but nevertheless, it gave a significant boost to the research capabilities within the field.

Humanistic Geography

After the quantitative and spatial science period of geography, the field adopted a more human-centered approach, which was been dubbed humanistic geography, and is predicated on acknowledging that humans are complex and are very influential on each other and their environment .

John Kirkland Wright, one prominent figure of humanistic geography, noted that the environment could be better understood when humans better understood themselves and how people see the world.

Humanistic geography argued against spatial science, positivism, and quantification, but it did not completely replace spatial science. Instead, it added to the quantitative revolution of geography by acknowledging the highly influential role of humans in all aspects of geography.