I think geography, it's just fantastic to do it
down here because so many of the things
that you're talking about is sort of here,
so it's just... it's just brilliant to just
get out and see these things;
that's why the field trip's so good.
We're pretty much walking around
the local landscape to see how
we as humans have an impact on our surroundings and how
culturally we are changed by what goes on around us.
Cornwall gives us a unique opportunity to study
er the environment in one of the most
stunning landscapes that the UK has to offer,
and also look at the impact of human beings
on that landscape, as Cornwall has a lot of
post-industrial areas such as
the tin mine we're now sat at.
It's so different from where my home place is.
I live in Hong Kong where it's um
buildings everywhere.
Well one of the fascinating things
about this landscape is that
it actually has very elaborate and
well-developed connections, I think, with
the rest of the world because
it was in Cornwall where a lot of the
technologies were developed that allowed
mining to then become successful in
places like Chile and
on western um United States and so
when I look at this landscape I see the
remnants of Cornish mining which go back
thousands of years, but I also see
the way that they influenced mining
in the rest of the world.
A lot of what we're doing is not necessarily straight down the line physical or straight down the line human geography,
it sort of... it all really blends in, that's what's nice about this course.
Sort of the mix of human and physical has been really interesting; 
it's not just been focused on one.
Cornwall is a great landscape for physical geography.
To bring the students out here means we
can take a whole
really long time scale of looking at
things, from deep geological time right through to
present and into the future, and what we can
do is look at how landscapes changed, we can
see some dynamics of landscape as on the beach or
on the cliff lines, we can look at
landscapes that are under threat
which need looking at. In order to
do that properly you need to understand
the past and how effectively, if we want
to continue to use this landscape,
we can keep it by looking at what's
likely to happen with global change in the future
and how people value the landscape and
how there's a sort of interdisciplinary
link between the human side, the physical side, trying to look at
the overall landscape rather than just the physical
side of it, the human side of it as separate components.
It's really good to put stuff that we've been
taught in lectures into context.
Cornwall presents a number of very interesting
case studies. Think about how
societies evolved overtime and place,
and how in particular through our relationships to our working
environments we have changed the
landscape around us.
We use Cornwall as a natural laboratory to
allow students to begin to
test out ideas that they've
developed through their degree course,
to explore concepts relevant to their
natural environment
and to modern issues of climate change
and biodiversity.
That's part of the fun of Geography,
is getting out and seeing places.
