Stable and Unstable Environments — the Example of the Temperate Zone

Abstract

It is the physical geography of the temperate zone that is likely to seem the most familiar to most readers of this book. In this zone members of literate and scientific societies, reading in English, have both their everyday experiences to go on, and the records of some centuries of analysing their environments to help them. Assuming a comfortable familiarity can, however, lead to some quite startling misunderstandings and difficulties in novel or changing situations. In the last twenty years we have begun to appreciate much more fully how temperate environments are themselves changing, especially because of the extension works and side effects of those very urban societies that have themselves fostered our modern understanding of ‘environment’. In the longer term, it is now seen that in mid-latitudes climatic changes have been more dramatic and prevalent than previously thought, involving conditions sometimes very far from temperate. Recent studies have also produced new knowledge at an accelerated rate, sometimes involving radical new perspectives which resulted both from theoretical advances and from new research methods using the latest technology. It can be appreciated, too, that restricted levels of information have also been imposed through limitations of travel and linguistic capability, a noteworthy disability from which many ‘western’ geographers have suffered with respect to eastern Asia. Altogether and for most of us, the last few decades have shown that the temperate environment is truly a stranger place than we knew, with the sobering after-thought that our improved understanding of this intricate but distinctive zone still does not of itself qualify us to pronounce on world environments in general.