Was Fenneman Right About Regional Geography?

W illia m K . C ro w ley Sonoma State University I n THOSE COURSES that look at the development and evolution of geographic thought over the course of the twentieth century, the instructor usually attempts to guide the student through a series of periods marked by distinct approaches to the discipline. These vogue approaches occur in all disciplines, and academics have labeled them variously “currents of thought” or “paradigms,” and today we speak of “metatheories.” Each time a new approach begins to dominate discipline discussion, the participants find need to belittle the pre­ ceding wave in order to secure standing for the latest formulation of how to do geography. In the past hundred years we have seen trends labeled physical geography, environmental determinism, regional geography, the “Berkeley School,” spatial science, and in the past 30 years a seemingly endless number of “isms” (behavioralism, human­ ism, marxism, post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, realism, etc.) that future scholars will perhaps label the “Ismization” of geography. But geographers, lacking wooden stakes and mirrors, never seem to completely eliminate the “old way,” which, like Dracula, rolls out of its coffin and creeps out in the darkness to exas­ perate the pundits of the moment. The longest reigning twentieth-century vogue has been regional geography. Each succeeding current, or contemporary parallel cur­ rent, has variously pronounced its uselessness, its lack of academic rigor, its role in isolating geography from other disciplines, or its death. Yet in the late 1980s we began to hear cries of a “new” re­ gional geography, or a “reconstructed” regional geography, and discussions of these approaches continued into the 1990s. Regional geography is not dead yet. Why? In what follows I will try to trace where regional geography yet manifests itself and what I see as some Was Fenneman Right About Regional Geography? 176 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 61 • 1999 of the survival traits characteristic of regional geography that have kept it afloat. In doing so I am not making any kind of statement about its worthiness nor its shallowness, nor do I wish to enter the debate about what regional geography should be. I simply want to explore with you where and why I think it is still around and con­ sider briefly where it may be headed. Fenneman Makes the Call In the first true clarion call for regional geography, Nevin Fenneman may have described for us one of the keys to its survival. In his presidential address to the Association of American Geogra­ phers, entitled “The Circumference of Geography,” Fenneman, a physical geographer, made a clever argument for regional geogra­ phy as the core of geography (Fenneman 1919).1Others, including William Morris Davis, a few years earlier had preached the worth of regional geography. In 1911 Davis wrote that “In regional descrip­ tion, the climax of geographical work is reached...” (cited in Hartshorne 1981, p. 145), and he restated his view of the importance of regional geography in 1915, indicating that “Pure regional geog­ raphy is the final object of a geographer’s efforts” (cited in Hartshorne 1981, p. 146). But Fenneman dedicated his address to showing how it was the stuffing of the discipline. In his now oft-reprinted diagram, he demonstrated how thematic areas were satellites to the central focus, which was regional geography. Cleverly employing metaphor and analogy, he argued that others can try to kill regional geography, try to take over its domains, but like the good Dracula, it will always reappear. It will always reappear, he argued, because we need it. It is what we use to synthesize what we know. He asked, “Suppose geog­ raphy were dead, what would be left?,” and then showed how seemingly “all its tangible effects would be claimed by relatives and the estate could be settled up.” “Would the decedent stay dead?” Fenneman did not think so and believed that a demand would arise for the synthesis provided by geography. “There is not one chance in President’s Plenary Session: Revisiting Regional Geography 177 a hundred that ten years would go by without a conscious craving, and an attempt to meet the craving, for a comprehensive view of the areal unit” (Fenneman 1919, pp. 4-6). The...