Human Geography: Nature and Scope — Class 12 Geography

Human geography studies the relationship between the physical or natural environment and the socio-cultural environment that people create through mutual interaction. Because nature and human life are inseparable, the old split between physical and human geography is treated as artificial; the discipline is integrative, empirical and practical. Scholars such as Ratzel, Ellen Semple and Vidal de la Blache defined human geography by stressing synthesis, the changing relationship between people and the earth, and a new understanding of interrelationships. The key to this relationship is technology, which reflects a society's level of cultural development and loosens the grip of the environment. Early thinkers held environmental determinism, in which a low-technology, naturalised human simply obeyed nature. Later possibilism argued that humans use the opportunities nature offers, humanising the landscape with farms, cities, ports and routes. Griffith Taylor proposed a middle path, neo-determinism or stop-and-go determinism, in which people can develop only within limits that nature permits — like obeying traffic signals. Human geography has many sub-fields including social, cultural, political, population, settlement, economic and urban geography, each interfacing with sister social sciences. Its approaches evolved through exploration and description, regional analysis, areal differentiation, spatial organisation (the quantitative revolution) and humanistic, radical and behavioural schools.