Czy istnieją granice kompetencyjne badań megasystemu środowiska przez geografów?

Degórski, Marek

Czy istnieją granice kompetencyjne badań megasystemu środowiska przez geografów?

Abstract

Celem artykułu jest próba krytycznego spojrzenia na zakres kompetencji badań geograficznych wynikających z ich podstaw merytorycznych w kontekście szeroko rozumianych badań dotyczących funkcjonowania oraz struktury przestrzeni geograficznej, jak i wzajemnych interakcyjnych zależności pomiędzy poszczególnymi komponentami megasystemu środowiska geograficznego, zarówno w jego części przyrodniczej, jak i społeczno-gospodarczej. Podjęta zostanie również próba udzielenia odpowiedzi na pytanie, czy istnieją granice kompetencyjne dla geografów w kontekście badań środowiska i jakie mogą być przyczyny ich występowania w czasie zmieniających się paradygmatów badawczych.

The paper attempts to look critically at the scope of geographical research competencies resulting from their substantive basis, in the context of widely understood studies and analyzes on the functioning and structure of the geographical space, as well as mutual interactive relationships between individual components of the environmental megasystem, concerning both its parts: the natural and socio-economic one. There will be also an attempt to answer, whether there are limits of competences of geographers in the context of environmental studies and what may be the cause of their occurrence during the time of changing research paradigms. Evaluation of the role of geography in cognition, interpretation and prediction of selected processes and phenomena occurring in environmental mega-system and of the scope of competencies of geographical studies and geographers themselves, conducted in the paper showed that there are substantial grounds to formulate the following statements: − among many scientific disciplines studying the components of the geographical environment and their inter-relationships, a special place falls to geography, which results from the dichotomous nature of the cognition of the environmental mega-system, enabling its conciliatory or holistic perception, − geography is characterized by high flexibility of scientific cognition of interdependencies between the environmental system and anthropogenic system, in terms of the subject of the research (its empirical openness) as well as of the applied research models, including dynamic models, − omnidirectional nature of geographical research performed in the spatial and functional analysis of the environmental mega-system enables geographers its comprehensive cognition on many levels of the organization of space, − multi-specialization of geographers, with reference to many related scientific disciplines, does not generate any limits of cognition neither of the objects, attributes and processes nor phenomena occurring in the environmental mega-system, − geographical studies performed by specialists of various sub-disciplines of geography allow the compilation of their knowledge, which causes that geography as a scientific discipline is also of substantive competencies for extensive functional and spatial analysis of the environmental mega-system, − an inherent feature of the methodology of geographical research is the possibility of using different scale of spatial analysis, which enables the generalization of the results of the phenomena occurring at the local level to the global one and the other way round – creating local solutions on the basis of phenomena occurring on a global scale, which allows presenting the results of interdependences between the human and the environment in a diverse range of spatial scale (multi-scaling).