Rediscovering Geography New Relevance for Science and Society (1997) / Chapter Skim
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5 Geography's Contributions to Scientific Understanding
5 Geography's Contributions to Scientific Understanding
Pages 70-108
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From page 70... ...
The chapter then provides examples of how such thinking can be used to address important scientific and societal issues. These illustrations are followed by a similarly brief and selective discussion of spatial representation.
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From page 71... ...
As another example, flows of materials, energy, and ideas across places have powerful impacts on human uses of the environment, and such impacts can mask basic understanding of contemporary environmental change. The sixteenth 1The English economist and mathematician Thomas R
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From page 72... ...
Witness, for instance, the rise of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, and the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change Programme. Geography is contributing signifi
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From page 73... ...
For example, after a long history of asserting that geographic clusters of prosperity are temporary aberrations, economists now recognize that the evolving characteristics of places make such inequalities the rule rather than the exception (Arthur, 1988; Krugman, 19911. Geographers have gone beyond economic mechanisms to examine the role of political and social processes in constructing local "governance structures" that promote economic dynamism (Storper and Walker, 19891.
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From page 74... ...
That is, where people live is thought to be of minor impor tance. Geographic research, however, has established the importance of "the fluid, constantly reworked local political cultures of particular places" (Agnew, 1992, p.
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From page 75... ...
Geography's experience with integration in place also has been fruitful in providing insights to issues of interest to science at large, as illustrated by the following examples of complexity and nonlinearity and central tendency and variation. Geographic research on integration in place is also important to scientific understanding of important societal issues.
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From page 76... ...
It also shows how economic restructuring, such as the shift from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, can create "bifurcation" of settlement systems with new nodes of growth in some regions and dissipation of growth in others (Borchert, 1967, 1987; Conzen, 1975; Dunn, 1980; Pred, 1981~. Theoretical research has identified how the complexity of spatial economic dynamics reflects disequilibrating contradictions and social conflicts, resulting in periodic attempts by the private sector" and the state to overcome emerging conflicts and crises through spatial restructuring (Harvey, 1982; Sheppard and Barnes, 1990~.
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From page 77... ...
Example: Environmental Change Scientific concerns about environmental change have increased markedly in the past few decades. Geographers have made important contributions to the understanding of such changes through their research on human-induced climate change, ecosystem dynamics and biodiversity, and earth surface processes.
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GEOGRAPHY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING 79 ~ Ci~of Los Angeles tUm~k An' .. ~ ~~4 ~ , ~ :::: :- Asian ;.
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One of the most pressing issues for global and regional environmental change is ecosystem change, including the loss of biodiversity (USGCRP, 19941. Geogra
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From page 81... ...
GEOGRAPHY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING 81 phy has a long tradition of studying landscapes, particularly the impacts of physical and human processes on landscapes and their ecosystems. For example, geographers study the distributions of plant and animal species and how these distributions are shaped by local and regional environmental conditions including human activity and by human-influenced migration and selection (Saner, 1988~.
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From page 83... ...
In their focus on Earth surface processes, geographers are paying increased attention to the nature of change itself, and the transitions between different change states. There also is increasing interest in the flows of energy and mass through and across the Earth surface system as an avenue to understanding the underlying structure of environmental change.
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From page 85... ...
GEOGRAPHY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING S5 Abandoned/ ~[ Fatiow I:: :::::::: ~ a :::::~::~ ~ ~ ~ b ..' C ~",~ Use 0 25~, ..~ 0 10°?
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From page 86... ...
Geography's Subject Matter Studies of interdependencies between places are well represented in geography's literatures. For example, for more than a generation, geography has been a leader in improving quantitative models that help to explain, predict, and optimize spatial interactions.
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From page 87... ...
This research addresses spatial interactions of individuals at the microlevel and interregional flows at the macrolevel. At the microlevel, geographers have observed that patterns of spatial interaction differ by socioeconomic class and gender (Hanson, 1986)
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- 3. 17% FIGURE 5.5 Purchases and sales of a sample of Washington State firms from (top)
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From page 89... ...
to its use in a range of applications and interpretations (Jones and Casetti, 1992~. Research by geographers and regional scientists has shown how to derive spatial interaction models based on either traditional information theory or optimal decision-making theory.
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This focus on analytic approaches improved scientific understanding of local processes, but it was less successful in predicting externally induced changes in these environments.
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From page 91... ...
adopted a more holistic view that emphasized spatial patterns, connections, and long-distance impacts. Riparian habitats were seen to respond to changes in the watershed upstream, as well as to local dynamics.
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From page 92... ...
Geomorphology has also become more concerned with the spatial perspective, and geomorphic systems analysis has been expanded to incorporate location and spatial connections for measuring and mapping physical forces and stresses, hydraulic resistance, and sediment yields. The result has been greater effectiveness in predicting environmental changes at critical locations for instance, at a salmon spawning area in a river based on system-wide changes that are connected in space by slopes and channel networks.
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From page 93... ...
spatial systems with dynamic interactions may exhibit properties of path dependence, considerable sensitivity to initial conditions and external perturbations, and unpredictability over relatively short time horizons. While these insights can be linked directly to recent arguments in complexity theory, they reflect long-standing concerns in human geography, where there has been continuing criticism of the equilibrium orientation of the theories developed in the 1960s to account for the location of economic activities and settlement systems.
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From page 94... ...
Just as in the case of models of spatial interaction, however, geographers have learned that observable geometries in the social and physical worlds are dynamic in their nature and multidimensional in their explanation. Thus, geographers recognize that in order to understand such dynamic processes it is important to observe them in both time and space.
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From page 95... ...
Example: Human Health One of the best illustrations of spatial interdependence can be found in geographic research addressing the spread of infectious diseases. The spread of such diseases is a highly spatial process that can often be understood and predicted by using spatial modeling techniques (see Sidebar 5.91.
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From page 97... ...
Scale relationships are important for scientific understanding of important societal issues such as population and resources, environmental change, economic health, and conflict and cooperation, as shown in the following sections. Example: Population and Resources Perhaps no topic evokes more emotion in global change studies than the ultimate human causes of environmental change the subject of an extended scholarly and public debate.
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From page 99... ...
, is sometimes identified as the controlling process in environmental change, in part because the PAT variables tend to show the strongest associations with atmospheric carbon dioxide and forest and agricultural land cover changes. However, local case studies by geographers often point to a large range of more "socially nuanced" factors as the principal triggers of human actions that give rise to trace gas emission, deforestation, and increased cultivation (Meyer and Turner, 1992; Kasperson et al., 1995~.
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From page 101... ...
Example: Economzc Health The economic health of a locality, region, or nation depends on the interaction of processes that operate at many different scales ranging from global capital flows to local labor markets. Geographers have long been interested in this interplay of global, regional, and local processes for example, those between global economic forces and local social forces.
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From page 102... ...
Much like the fractal images of mathematics, extremes of poverty replicate themselves at spatial scales ranging from the global to the neighborhood, implying an irreducible spatial complexity to social irregularity. The heterogeneity across spatial scales reflects variations in political, institutional, and social characteristics and adaptations among places.
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From page 103... ...
SPATIAL REPRESENTATION Many of the substantive contributions by geography to science are rooted in spatial representation. The relevance of geographic research in advancing representational theory and representational tools used throughout science is clear from the widespread interest in GISs and geographic information analysis, but
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From page 104... ...
Spatial representation has become part of the everyday research experiences of a great many scientists. Much of the recent geographic research on spatial representation is focused on finding better ways to represent the dynamics of the "real world," for example, by extending fundamental concepts of spatial representation into the temporal domain.
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3. Can generalization, spatial filtering, and other geographic "operators" currently applied to spatial data be adapted to space-time data, or is a fundamentally different approach to geographic operators needed?
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From page 108... ...
Geographic research contributions to the science of spatial representation include work on the classification of geographic entities and visual representations of data reliability (see Sidebar 5.12~. Geographers are also linking cognitive and digital representations of space for example, as part of an interdisciplinary effort to understand the interaction between human spatial cognition and way finding.
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