The Behavioural Environment

Essays in Reflection, Application and Re-evaluation

F.W. Boal, D.N. Livingstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134987870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Placing human action and perception at the centre of the subject, this book considers the effects of mankind on the environment, drawing particularly from William Kirk's work on the behavioural environment model. Reviewing Kirk's original model in light of recent ideological debate and extensive new evidence, this collection of essays from leading names in the field shows that a behavioural approach is essential in understanding human geography and man's relationship with the ecological environment.

Part one: The behavioural environment

Chapter one: The behavioural environment: Worlds of meaning in a world of facts

Frederick W.Boal and David N.Livingstone

Historians and philosophers ordinarily interrogate the past in rather different ways. For historians, we might say, the objective is to find out about what happened in the past; the philosopher’s task, by contrast, is to make the best use of past discourses to shed light on contemporary problems. In the history and philosophy of geography these different aims have too often been confused. And the result is that many histories of the discipline are presentist in taste and Whiggish in tone; that is to say, they depict geography’s history as a story leading inexorably to present-day orthodoxy, suppressing themes that lack contemporary respectability and ignoring those blind alleys that putatively deviate from the ‘proper’ course of historical development. Such histories amount to little more than propaganda for some particular orthodoxy and it is no surprise that there are just about as many presentist histories of geography as there are definitions of the subject.

To appreciate the pitfalls of history written backwards, written indeed to legitimate partisanship, does not however invalidate the philosophical task of seeking answers to contemporary problems through probing the riches of a discipline’s intellectual heritage. Just as philosophers still find it profitable to reread Aristotle or Descartes in their perennial attempt to figure out how things are, so geographers should not apologize for making the best use of their own traditions for similar purposes. To sacralize modernity (the ‘only-what’s- published-today-counts’ syndrome) is no less ensnaring than to mutilate history. To be sure, scrutinizing the past for philosophical ends can too easily result in attributing false motives to earlier writers. Distortion, or indeed manipulation, of this sort is clearly to be avoided. But that danger should never blind us to the value of looking to our intellectual dowry for the resources to grapple with the present and the future. By fitting on the garments of the past, trimming here,

enlarging there, we may find the wherewithal to make significant contributions to contemporary needs.

It is in the spirit of philosophical scrutiny, therefore, that we approach the notion of the behavioural environment in modern geography: for embedded in that concept are a number of crucial philosophical issues that confront contemporary human geography, questions like the relationship between society and environment, mind and world, realism and anti-realism, culture and nature, structure and agency. Certainly, the philosophical concerns of today’s geography are far from identical with those of the 1950s and 1960s when the idea of a ‘behavioural environment’ first began to receive an airing in the discipline. However, the articulation of the notion of the behavioural environment, and the sorts of problem it was designed to meet, are related, albeit mostly by family resemblance, to key conceptual questions on geography’s present-day philosophical horizon.

Nature, humanity, and geographical explanation

The very juxtaposition of the components in the label ‘human geography’ taken in literal simplicity as humankind and earth-description, conceals a profound quandary that lies at the heart of geographical enquiry-namely, how we are to conceive of the relationship between the human and natural worlds. For R.J. Chorley, writing in 1973, the development of geography remained ‘bound up with one of the basic philosophical problems which preoccupied the medieval world, namely to what extent is it proper to regard Man as a part of Nature or as standing apart from it?’¹ In the West, very broadly speaking, two different answers have been offered-two perspectives or pictures about humanity and the world. The first has been available since ancient times; the second is a more recent creation, emerging clearly during the Enlightenment. For convenience we might label these ‘Naturalism’ and ‘Humanism’ respectively, and it is no surprise that these are chief among the explanatory accounts that are still with us. Accordingly a word about each is in order.²

In its essentials naturalism goes back to figures like Epicurus and Democritus and finds purposeful expression in Lucretius’s De Rerum. The basic idea is that the best way to understand ourselves and what seems to be distinctive about us is ultimately in terms of our community with non-human nature. We are part of nature, and no more; and everything about us can be reduced to material constituents. To be sure, the ways in which this outlook manifests itself are complex and diverse. In our time the perspective is broadly evolutionary: the human condition is entirely explicable in terms of random genetic mutation. Altruism, for instance, is to be understood as nothing but a strategy for safeguarding the genotype; loyalty, it would seem, is no less genetically coded for than ear lobes. In an earlier day, and still in some quarters today, mechanistic metaphors were more commonly resorted to than the organic analogy, and were often construed deterministically. Here, human beings are conceived of as just sophisticated machines, their brains cybernetic, their behaviour mechanistic. As for method, the implication is usually taken to be that the way in which the world of nature is to be studied is precisely the same for humankind: there is one scientific method universally applicable, whether to molecules or microbes, culture or class.

The ‘humanist’ alternative is quite different. It tends to place emphasis on the human subject as, in some deep and important way, responsible for the structure and nature of the world. This view goes under a number of different labels: ‘idealism’ is one, ‘Enlightenment humanism’ another, ‘anti-realism’ a different, and perhaps better designation. By and large we can trace the roots of this vision to the writings of Immanuel Kant. According to him the external world owes its very structure to what we might call the noetic activity of persons. The idea is that the human mind imposes its own structures on the world; space and time, causality, number, and so on-these are not to be found in the world as such, but are conferred on it by mind. Of course it might be difficult to think of any sort of thing existing that did not have at least some of these very properties, and if so then in a real sense there would be no entities in the world if it were not for the structuring activity of persons like us. At any rate if there truly is something out there it is a numinous shadowy world bearing no relationship to how we conceive of it. Since Kant, vast stretches of modern philosophy have remained staunchly anti-realist in impulse: much European continental thought continues the tradition, the Wittgensteinians reveal it in their version of linguistic anti-realism, and in the United States it has been vigorously restated by pragmatists like Richard Rorty. The idea is simply that by virtue of our activities-linguistic, cognitive, theoretical, or whatever-we are the creators of the world.

Needless to say, these two broad strands of thought are far from homogeneous in expression. Moreover, while they are in fact largely antithetical they are to be found in every conceivable sort of combination. This is due, at least in part, to some of the difficulties that each of them faces independently. For some the problem with naturalism is that it vastly underestimates the role of human beings in the scheme of things, whereas humanism vastly overestimates it. Certainly there are many other philosophical queries that each need to address, but for our purposes these two problems seem relevant, particularly when they manifest themselves in the form of reductionism on the one hand, and relativism on the other. The former is essentially a naturalistic strategy by which observed behaviour on any particular level can be reduced to, or explained by, the processes of a more basic layer; hence there are attempts to reduce the social to the biological, the biological to the chemical, the chemical to the atomic. Moreover, within any particular layer reductionism is also at work: at the sociological level, for example, human behaviour has often been accounted for in terms of sociological programming, behaviouristic stimulus-response mechanisms, or economic conditions.

In geography the self-same spirit has found expression. The resort to environmental determinism in its various colours to account for human spatial behaviour is a notable instance: here history is reduced to nature. The more fundamentalist varieties of Marxist geography which reduce social life to economic base are similarly inspired. Indeed, when these Marxists account for the flourishing of environmental determinism as nothing but the expression of ideological interests they are substituting one form of reductionism for another. And there are other manifestations too: the explanation of aggression in terms of biological territorialism, the development of gravity models within the context of a geographically honed social physics, or the creation of ‘rational economic man’. All these, to one degree or another, display the naturalistic impulse towards reductionism. The suppression of human agency that these fatalistic programmes engage has, of course, been the subject of numerous critiques that need not be rehearsed here. We need only recall that all these ideas have a social history embodying particular ideological allegiances and that they have invariably resorted to ‘nature’ or to some ‘natural law’ as the legitimating source of their socio-political agenda.³

If the naturalistic ethos is typically implicated in reductionist modes of thought and action, then the humanist alternative frequently espouses some form of relativism. The argument here regularly runs along lines something like this. If the world is somehow structured by the cognizing of human beings, then it may be that different humans construct it in different ways. The lived world, or Lebenswelt as it is often styled, of one individual or group may bear no relationship to that of another-and a fortiori to the world itself. Indeed, the moral is often drawn that even if these worlds-the internal and external, so to speak-did match up, we would not be able to know that they did. The very idea of comparing one system of beliefs with unconceptualized reality just simply makes no sense. The underlying conviction at work here is that the whole idea of truth, of things being some way, is an illusion. Instead, truth is taken to be relative to knowers, relative because the languages, for example, that human beings use constitute the way the world is. Language-users are, therefore, world-makers. And herein lies the fundamental reason why the anti-realist notion of truth entails the thesis that the world is actually constituted by humans. If there is no correspondence between our words and things in the world-say, ducks or drumlins-these entities would not exist if it were not for us and our conceptualizing activities. To be sure there might be some undifferentiated Protean stuff ‘out there’, but, as anti-realists often enough tell us, that is hardly a world worth saving.⁴

Within geography this relativist impulse has taken a number of forms in recent years. Under the rubric of subjectivism, for example, geographers have variously turned to idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, or linguistic philosophy in their search for a means of reinstating the human subject at the centre of the geographical stage. In all of these the subjective world of lived experience takes precedence to one degree or another. In some cases it takes the form of an appeal for the study of perceptions and human states of consciousness as of fundamental importance in human geography; in others the concern is to incorporate within geography emotional responses, not just cognitive ones, to environment and milieu; in still others there is the much grander claim that geographers need to transcend the normal limits of language and model their writing on figures like James Joyce because truth cannot be expressed in conventional linguistic forms.

There are, of course, many implications to be drawn from these programmatic statements of geographical anti-realism, but one of the most significant is the call for new ways of thinking about meaning, reference, and truth. One of the underlying reasons for this is the simple if awesome claim that the terms we use simply do not refer to existing entities in the world. Our language may help us to cope better with circumstances; but there is no cognitive fit between the world and our talk about it. The implications are enormous. We can give up the need to find direct empirical connection between terms and objects in the world; we can view knowledge not as presenting the world in some correct way, but as just helping us to get along in it, or to change it. Truth, to repeat, has nothing to do with accurately representing, or, as Rorty has it, mirroring reality; it is just, according to Rose, ‘what we are well advised, given our present beliefs, to assert’. The purpose of geography, then, is not to tell us about how the world ‘really’ is: it tells us nothing about regions or landscapes or economic structures or human agency, for these are mere linguistic fictions; it is just the search for ‘the right vocabulary, the right jargon, the best discourse in which to pursue the kinds of account which help us in the most basic sense, decide what to do’.⁵ Colossal!

What are we to make of this radically pragmatic conception of truth and meaning? To be sure, we have no methodical or agreed way of settling disagreements about claims to knowledge or about warrants for making assertions; but why should that lead us to the radically anti-realist conclusion that there is no truth to be had? For the relativist, what it boils down to is this: truth is just what our peers will let us get away with saying. Truth is nothing more than what a scholar’s circle will let her claim as warranting assertion, given the standard procedures of that community. This means that if I assertively claim that ‘the duck is on the lake’, the truth of my claim depends, not upon how things are in the world, but upon whether or not my peers will agree that I am using language acceptably. Surely there are problems with such a way of proceeding. For one thing, schemes of this sort run the risk of self-referential incoherence. If our peers will not let us get away with saying that ‘truth is just what our peers will let us get away with saying’, then the claim is not true. Why? Because it is what they will allow that passes as truth. This means that if the original claim is true, then it is not true!⁶ Besides, if the claim is that there are no privileged discourses that, so to speak, cut the world at its joints, then the anti-realist one is not privileged either, and has no cognitive claim to be telling us any truth. Out and out relativist schemes of this sort always run the risk of relativizing themselves. Of course this is not to advocate any sort of naïve realism about our knowledge of the world. There may well be difficulties in sustaining a realist account of, say, quarks or social classes; but it is hard to see why we should let these cases lead to the conclusion that all claims to knowledge are similarly problematic.

In broad outline, then, naturalism and humanism are two of the most pervasive ways by which geographers in recent decades have sought to conceptualize the relationship between the human and natural worlds. However, as we have already hinted, these ideas are to be found in various coalitions. Christianity, for example, could be seen as transcending these positions. On the one hand humanity is conceived as part of the stuff of nature, made from the dust of the ground, and therefore continuous with the rest of the natural order; but, on the other, the human species is to be regarded as bearer of the imago dei, and therein finds a dignity that raises it above the mere animal and asserts its independence and agency. Again certain versions of neo-Marxism seem perched between naturalism and humanism: for if indeed people make history, but not in conditions of their own making, then the dynamic of historical change is to be located in the interplay of structure and agency. For the Marxist, to be sure, humans are through and through part of nature; but they can take control of the world through acts of self-assertion and will-power. Whether this is a confusion or a clarification of the philosophical issues at stake cannot be adjudicated here.

It is our contention that the notion of the behavioural environment and its continued use within human geography can best be seen in the context of these fundamental philosophical questions. This is not to imply that the idea was originally conceived as contributing to the solution of problems of precisely this sort; it is even doubtful whether such issues could have been definitively articulated at that time. However, it is to suggest that the concern to integrate mind and nature, so central to the behavioural environment scheme, should remain high on the agenda of modern geographical enquiry.

The behavioural turn in human geography

The behavioural approach to geography was born essentially of the concern to identify those cognitive processes by which individuals and communities codify, react to, and recreate their environments. At least in part, the motivation was to get inside the heads of human actors in order to understand their behaviour in the world of external reality. As Harold Brookfield put it: ‘Decision-makers operating in an environment base their decisions on the environment as they perceive it, not as it is. The action resulting from their decision, on the other hand, is played out in a real environment.’⁷ Quite fundamental to this whole behavioural project, then, is the idea that a crucial distinction is to be drawn between the real world-the world as it is in and of itself, and the world as perceived-that is, the world as we humans take it to be. What are we to make of this claim?; and what are the implications to be drawn from urging an ontological bifurcation between the real and the perceived? Does an espousal of this dichotomy commit us to any particular philosophical position, or to any special methodology? Does it force on us either a positivistic or a humanistic perspective?; or is it sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of philosophical angles on the world? These are the sort of questions to be borne in mind as we reflect on the evolution of the behavioural environment theme in geography.

When William Kirk first introduced his behavioural environment schema in 1952, geography received its initiation into the relevance of Gestalt psychology for environmental knowing and human spatial behaviour. The concerns that underlay Kirk’s turning to the Gestalt theorists were precisely those that we have just been considering, namely the need to find some creative approach to the relationship between humanity and nature. As he put it:

What we need is some working hypothesis in which nature and humanity are brought under one discipline, and this can be found in the field of Gestalt Psychology. The theory of this school of thought developed from research of Max Wertheimer on stroboscopic motion and through the writing of Koffka, Köhler and others, has invaded the world of the humanities without leaving much impression on the geographical ‘bridge’ although many of its tenets find close parallels in geographical thought.⁸

The fundamental claim of the Gestalt movement, in opposition to atomism and behaviourism, was the notion of a ‘Gestalt’ as ‘es...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Behavioural Environment
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• Part one: The behavioural environment
• Part two: Reflection
• Part three: Application
• Part four: Re-evaluation