Environmental Systems — Patterns, Processes and Evolution

Abstract

It is easy to assume that we all know what systems are and how they work, as first-year students continually point out. In practice there are usually three ideas which new university students bring with them from the sixth form:

• 1. Things of interest are usually interconnected, and the key to understanding is to simplify this web of relationships (a system), and to distinguish it from things which are not of direct interest or importance.

• 2. A system can be understood by looking at the parts and the relationships between them, either intuitively (as a set of boxes and arrows) or statistically (as a set of correlations between the attributes of the parts of the system) or as an input—throughput—output cascade of energy, mass, money, information, etc.

• 3. A knowledge of the structure and operation (in a budgetary sense) provides some basis for improved understanding of past and present environmental conditions and future environmental management. Viewed in the perspective of twenty years, this is in a very real sense a great achievement, indicating that students are able to deal with geographical problems at a level of generality and abstraction which was not even dreamed of by their teachers in the mid-sixties. Coupled with the realisation of the need to attach reliable numerical quantities to rates, masses, correlations and other measures of systems under investigation, this period represents a real scientific revolution in geography, both human and physical. The progress achieved so far must not be lost.