radical geography

part two: the history of the discipline

What is geography?

• When did people start studying geography as a distinct subject? What's the state of the discipline now? What shape does it take?

• Geography is characteristically difficult to define.

• Geographers look at the world spatially.• Basically, most things can be studied

geographically.

the evolution of geography

• a few millennia ago, geography (like any field) was basically about discovery: think Erasthothenes discovering the Earth was round & calculating the circumference, Chinese fleets charting coasts, etc.

• during the Middle Ages, Islamic scholars like Ibn Battuta travelled & charted the world

the evolution of geography

• after the Renaissance geography(in the West) generally became about exploration & cartography

• in Europe, German, French, and British schools of geography that emerged reflected /supported / justified expansionism, colonialism, Nazism: think lebensraum, the idea that states needed living-room or breathing-room

environmental determinism

“Virtually all of the rich countries of the world are outside the tropics, and virtually all of the poor countries are within them ... climate, then, accounts for quite a significant proportion of the cross-national and cross-regional disparities of world income.”

What do you think about this statement?

environmental determinism

• The aforementioned statement was made by Jeffrey Sachs in a 2000 lecture

• idea of environmental determinism: that people's behavior / traits are linked to their environment.

• This idea came under serious criticism, because people made racist hypotheses out of it (e.g. "people who live in the tropics are lazy"); it still continues to be a problematic idea to this day.

• Yet environment does shape people in some ways.

modern geography

Geography is divided into physical geography and human geography.

Physical geography is stuff like geomorphology (the evolution of landscape), biogeography, climate, etc., but we won't discuss that here.

Within human geography we have . . . . .• economic geography • political geography • cultural geography (language geography, religion geography...) • development geography • health geography • historical geography • urban geography

geography in the U.S.A.

Why is the state of geography education so poor in this country?

What can be done to improve it?