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Laws, Contingencies, Irreversible Divergence, and Physical Geography*

Abstract Four critical challenges for physical geography are examined here: deterioration of common cores of knowledge associated with increasing intellectual niche specialization; the need for conceptual thinking and problem-framing to catch up with measurement and analysis technology; and the need to explicitly incorporate human decision making in analysis of earth surface systems. The future calls for physical geography to embrace and confront the creative tension between nomothetic and interpretive science, and to fruitfully and explicitly integrate these approaches.