What human geography studies

Geography has two main branches. Physical geography studies the physical environment: landforms, climate, soils, water, plants and animals. Human geography studies how that physical environment relates to the human world: how people live in, use and change the places around them.

For a long time, geography was split into opposing pairs (this is called dualism): should it make general laws (nomothetic) or describe particular places (idiographic)? Should it study whole regions or single topics across the world (regional or systematic)? Should physical and human geography even be separate?

The book's answer: nature and humans are inseparable, and should be studied together, as a whole (holistically). Geographers even describe the earth with words from the human body: we speak of the 'eye' of a storm, the 'mouth' of a river, the 'snout' of a glacier, or of roads as the 'arteries of circulation' of a country.

Three classic definitions:

• Friedrich Ratzel: human geography is the synthetic study of the relationship between human societies and the earth's surface (synthesis means putting things together).
• Ellen Semple: it studies the changing relationship between unresting humans and the unstable earth: the relationship is dynamic.
• Paul Vidal de la Blache: it offers a new way of understanding how the earth and humans affect each other, through the laws that govern our planet and the living things on it.

In short, human geography studies the earth as the home of humankind, and studies it whole.