Geography by any other name

Geography by any other name

The science of geography has a written and map-based history in European civilizations since the days of the Greek writers Eratosthenes, Strabo, and Plato. Even before this, ancient Egyptians included strip maps in coffins to guide souls to their final resting place, and Chinese "geographers" produced scroll maps that identified routes and landmarks between cities. In later centuries, Portuguese navigators such as Diaz and Da Gama produced charts to record land-based features on their exploratory trips to South Africa and India. Marco Polo kept a rigorous record of physical environments and human landscapes and cultures on his trips to China. Explorers of central Africa (e.g., Livingston, Stanley) were funded by the British Royal Geographical Society. Medieval navigators produced Portolan charts based on triangulation methods that were the precursors of modern cartography. The geography of North America unfolded in the diaries of de Soto, Lewis and Clark, and Hendrick Hudson. In this century, geographers have rediscovered the earth from images generated remotely by satellites and space stations. For 3000 years at least, then, geography has been a respected practicing and practical science.

Today, many disciplines from the physical, life, behavioral, and (particularly) social sciences (most of which are "Johnny-come-latelies" in the scientific community) disparage geography as nothing more than a declarative knowledge base-a filing cabinet full of useless facts about geographic features and human production systems that continually become outdated. While it may be argued that, throughout much of its history, geographical science appeared to be primarily descriptive, what many critics and scoffers fail to realize is that geography was practiced as an inductive science requiring extensive empirical verification of its hypotheses (e.g., about "the Great South Land"-Australia-or that one could get to the East by sailing west ([Columbus]).

Generalizations were possible only after collecting factual evidence from many different places (hence the "exploration" base of the discipline). Spatial relations embedded in the huge data sets needed to encompass these environments were not obvious and had to be "teased out"-as by making thematic maps and visually comparing them. For example, it was not until the 19th century that enough data were collected for Köppen to put forward a classification of the world's climates. Without the expertise to discover these relations (codified by geographers as spatial distributions, spatial patterns, shapes, networks, hierarchies, spatial clusters, regions, adjacencies, and spatial associations, among others), other social sciences-such as economics, political science, and sociology-routinely ignored or assumed away spatial variations in the location of human and physical phenomena and the spatial interactions between them, thus working in the most abstract and unreal of all worlds-the spaceless society.

By so doing, however, these sciences were quick to take advantage of the power ofdeductivereasoning and used it to create powerful normative theories-theories of ideal states articulating how things "should" be, "ceterus paribus" (i.e., "all other things being equal"). In most cases, "all other things" meant the environment and its endless variations, assumed to be universally uniform. What a ridiculous assumption in all but abstract, unreal worlds.

It was perhaps the lack of this deductive theoretical power that most differentiated inductive geographers from other deductive scientists and prompted a change for the worse in geography's image. This change was not universal, being concentrated largely in the USA. Geography in the rest of the world retains its position among the core disciplines and is taught at all levels from K-16.

In the USA, decades ago, many state curricula committees dropped geography as a separate subject, usually replacing it with history-dominated "social studies." But the past two decades have seen a positive response to efforts by the Association of American Geographers (AAG), the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), the American Geographical Society (AGS), and (perhaps the most effective of all) the National Geographic Society (NGS) to get geography back into school curricula. The Geography Standards-Geography for Life Project has identified fundamental concepts and relations of geographic science; the College Board has just instituted (Fall 2000) an Advanced Placement test in Human Geography; and 52 State Geography Alliances, with 130,000 teacher members, are working to restore the place of geography in school curricula.

A goal of these activities is to positively change the outdated image of geography as a useless storehouse of dated environmental facts, replacing it with an image of geography as an innovative, technical, and theoretically inspired discipline. These efforts have laid the groundwork for the cascading of geographic knowledge and understanding needed so much by workforce participants in the 21st century's age of information technology.

The point of this column is to renew your acquaintance with geography as a necessary science in the 21st century. Along with a great deal of public ignorance of basic geographic facts (listen to the amazing answers given to geography questions onJeopardyandSo You Want To Be a Millionairefor abundant evidence of this ignorance), there is still a reluctance to admit the worth of an education in geography, and as much reluctance to publicly admit that geographers contribute in leading ways to solving national and local problems concerning human and physical environments.

Today, the largest specialty areas of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) include GIS, Computer Cartography and Computer Graphics, Remote Sensing and Image Processing, and Urban Geography. Specialty groups also focus on Geomorphology, Ecology, Biogeography, Climatology, Water Resources, Hazards and Risk, Transportation, Mathematical Models, Cultural Geography, Cognitive and Behavioral Geography, and many other systematic and regional specializations (see Table 1).

Table 11999 AAG Topical and Areal Proficiencies and Specialty Group MembershipThe AAG Membership for 1999 totaled 6,527. In 1998 the membership total was 6,910. The following numbers of members have claimed these topical and areal proficiencies and memberships in AAG Specialty Groups

Despite this richness of experiences, many people know little of geography and are reluctant to give geographers credit for their academic, social, political, environmental, and technical contributions. For example, in the AugustNewsletterof the AAG, Director Ron Abler emphasized this point by referring to the continued reluctance of the book review editor of theChronicle of Higher Educationto identify authors as geographers (preferring to hide their identities under labels such as "environmental science") and the lack of recognition by David Mellicoff inSciencethat the current chair and two other members of the Landsat 7 Science Team were geographers from the University of Maryland, Boston University, and Michigan State University.

This reluctance to use the term "geographer" to describe a scientist trained in a 3000-year-old academic profession seems unexplainable-and untenable. Geographers today are immersed in many physical, biotic, life, behavioral, and social science problem solving scenarios. In my last column I gave examples of recent projects initiated by geographers, ranging from studies of the ecological effects of removing many of the nation's dams to building a nationally accessible Digital Map and Imagery Library. Other examples include: the exploration of distant learning techniques for K-12 education; exploration of human behavior in virtual environments; optimizing flows through different transportation networks (air; road; rail; pipeline); developing vulnerability science; using satellite imagery to revise global maps; evaluating the effects of near-shore ocean pollution; examining the effects of hurricanes on human occupancy of contact areas; and using mental maps to identify most likely areas of criminal activity.

Geographers bring their unique spatial viewpoints to bear on these problems, adding dimensions of understanding that go beyond that offered by other individual sciences. Geographers presentan integrated scientific viewof problems and provide solutions that both complement and go beyond single science solutions. If-as is being touted at the highest levels of government, business, and academia-"integrated science" is the way of the future, then today's geography stands as a viable model for the way such integration can be pursued.

But we need more than acceptance as a model. Geography as a core science contributing to general knowledge must again be acknowledged. No longer should trained geographers have to search for jobs under titles such as "environmental specialist," "spatial or regional economist," "social statistician," "earth system scientists," or "information scientist," and the like-although geographersarequalified to hold any of the posts. And geography salaries, even in the academic domain, are on average in the upper half of the salary range (see Table 2).

Table 2

Geographers can address problems in each of these areas, where they can use modern geography theory and methods to solve problems. And let's get rid of both the abysmal geographic ignorance of the general population and the career specialists in business and government who know little if anything of the world in which they live and work. A series of recent TV interviews in Sydney, Australia (on a magnificent harbor on the country's east coast at a southern latitude about equal to that of San Francisco, for those who don't know where it is located) reported conversations with US tourists there to attend the Olympic events. One tourist asked where she could catch the daily ferry to Portugal; a male asked if his hotel had a ski lift to the snowfields (Sydney is located about 120 miles from ski slopes); another was surprised that so many people spoke English.

My message-on behalf of the geography discipline-is that, in the USA, geography must be restored to its rightful place among core academic subjects, and that geography is a profession that holds great employment possibilities in the future, as spatialized information becomes the essence of a Digital World. For more information about this re-emerging science, check out the AAG web site at www.aag.org or e-mail me at [email protected].

Reginald G. GolledgeProfessor of Geography, UCSBPast President, AAG

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