What are the important concepts in physical geography?

The three themes developed as central to the history of physical geography are not independent. The quest for universality in explanation has been driven by the need to explain landscapes and their changes. Likewise, identification of the changing or stable nature of the physical environment has been aided by increasingly complex empirical information. The search for universality can be viewed in terms of both an overarching theory as well as an integrated method for analysing the physical environment. Huxley’s Physiography (1877) is viewed by Stoddart (1975) as an important exercise in forming an integrated approach to the subject matter of the physical environment. Stoddart sees Huxley’s approach as being in a direct lineage from the conception of the physical environment of Kant and Humboldt nearly a century before. Physiography starts at the micro-scale, with the familiar, and works outwards to the macro-scale and unfamiliar. In so doing, Huxley develops an explanatory framework that begins with identifying and classifying causes at the local level and then working from these familiar, or, as he would have it, ‘commonsense’ illustrations to the wider picture. Cause-and-effect relationships are built from individual experience, emphasizing the empirical over the theoretical, but applied to increasingly larger spatial and temporal scales. The local is then viewed as part of this wider context and understanding of the local requires this wider context.