Place formation and axioms for reading the natural landscape

Abstract

Nine axioms for interpreting landscapes from a geoscience perspective are presented, and illustrated via a case study. The axioms are the self-evident portions of several key theoretical frameworks: multiple causality; the law–place–history triad; individualism; evolution space; selection principles; and place as historically contingent process. Reading of natural landscapes is approached from a perspective of place formation. Six of the axioms relate to processes or phenomena: (1) spatial structuring and differentiation processes occur due to fluxes of mass, energy, and information; (2) some structures and patterns associated with those fluxes are preferentially preserved and enhanced; (3) coalescence occurs as structuring and selection solidify portions of space into zones (places) that are internally defined or linked by mass or energy fluxes or other functional relationships, and/or characterized by distinctive internal similarity of traits; (4) landscapes have unique, individualistic aspects, but development is bounded by an evolution space defined by applicable laws and available energy, matter, and space resources; (5) mutual adjustments occur between process and form (pattern, structure), and among environmental archetypes, historical imprinting, and environmental transformations; and (6) place formation is canalized (constrained) between clock-resetting events. The other three axioms recognize that Earth surface systems are always changing or subject to change; that some place formation processes are reversible; and that all the relevant phenomena may manifest across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The axioms are applied to a study of soil landscape evolution in central Kentucky, USA.

The Morphology of Prometheus, Literary Geography and the Geoethical Project

“…Jonathan D. Phillips notes that geoscientists are beginning to recognize that these "landscape interpretation" methods employed by literary, cultural and humanistic geographers can provide geoscientists with a "critical skill" and are becoming a "necessity" for "understanding Earth surface systems" [63]. Indeed, geoscientists are now starting to pay renewed and increased attention to the "historical and geographical contingency" of various physical landscapes and natural phenomena as revealed in literary, cultural and critical texts [63].…”

“…Jonathan D. Phillips notes that geoscientists are beginning to recognize that these "landscape interpretation" methods employed by literary, cultural and humanistic geographers can provide geoscientists with a "critical skill" and are becoming a "necessity" for "understanding Earth surface systems" [63]. Indeed, geoscientists are now starting to pay renewed and increased attention to the "historical and geographical contingency" of various physical landscapes and natural phenomena as revealed in literary, cultural and critical texts [63]. In light of this, the sharing and exchange of idiographic and nomothetic perspectives between scholars in the arts, humanities and geosciences must be encouraged to forge a geoethical dialectic that fuses the poetic and the positivistic into transcendent ontologies and epistemologies.…”

Biophysical questions: Relating Marxism to physical geography

“…One is the concept of thresholds, which basically demonstrates the usefulness of thinking in terms of transformations of quantity into quality without using Engels’ terminology. Another is Phillips’ (2018: 703) recent formulation of axioms for interpreting soil landscapes, which largely overlap with and could be further refined through the explicit political commitments expressed in the Marxist interpretive guidelines discussed in Levins and Lewontin (see above).…”

Disciplinary chasm: questions on identification and mending

“…It is not surprising to see physical geography embracing the natural science view of time, including the value of general laws, even when change lies right in the focus of research. For instance, Phillips (2018) studied the variability in environmental transformations, recognizing the changing nature of Earth systems, but he mainly emphasized the laws governing any evolution of landscapes. An older and more subtle form of the conception on permanence and lack of change was the idea that "balance" is the natural state of environmental systems: the latter are expected to last unchanged indefinitely, unless external disturbances intervene, producing transformations.…”