Physical Geography is a way of looking at the world. It is an approach to thinking about our environment. It is a mindset, an intellectual and practical standpoint, a point of view. It is a framework for explaining the Earth's surface, predicting how it might change, and controlling or managing that change. It is a toolkit for answering questions about the world around us.
Physical Geography focuses on connections between different parts of the global system at a range of scales as a way of explaining how things work on the Earth's surface. Every feature or process is connected to a range of others, so in order to understand our environment we have to draw together a range of different types of evidence. For example, to understand the behaviour of a river and predict whether flooding or erosion might occur calls for us to understand much more than just hydrology: the Physical Geographer will recognise the importance of tying together evidence from hydrology, geomorphology, biology, climatology, and other fields. The Physical Geographer will also recognise that the properties of a river in any one location depend not only on the characteristics of that particular site, but on regional and global processes. For example, whether the stream in your back garden floods next year depends both on what is going on locally right there in the channel and also on natural and human processes operating far outside your local area, including how your local and regional environment responds to long-term global climate change. The Physical Geographer looks for these connections between phenomena at different scales and from different areas of study.
The Physical Geographer looks for clues embedded within the spatial distribution of phenomena and in spatial variation over time. This is the core of all Geography. The Physical Geographer will use tools from many different subject areas: Geology, Hydrology, Biology, Chemistry, Ecology, Climatology and any others that are appropriate to the question being asked. The Physical Geographer is able to unite ideas from different disciplines, to combine evidence from different sources and to see the relevance of information or approaches that others might not consider. The Physical Geographer has to keep an open mind and think on the move. The Physical Geographer has to see the little picture and the big picture at the same time and realise that local features can be controlled the big global system of which they a part, but that the big global system, in turn, has to be understood in terms of all its local components. The Physical Geographer brings the skills and expertise of Geography to questions about the physical environment.
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