Many Americans have difficulty finding the United States on a map, let alone pinpointing Bulgaria or Vanuatu or putting a finger on Barcelona, site of the Olympic Games.
Although interest in geography-at least map geography-is growing in this country, maps are just one part of a wide-ranging discipline that goes beyond memorizing state capitals.
Geography encompasses everything, from the breakup of countries to the eruption of a volcano in the Philippines. Quick! Point to the Philippines on a globe.
The breakup of the former Soviet Union and the splintering of Yugoslavia will keep mapmakers scrambling to draw new borders. The ash spewn into the atmosphere by Mt. Pinatubo`s eruption is credited with giving us a cooler summer, a headache to farmers.
Geography education has fallen through the academic cracks at such universities as Harvard, Northwestern, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago and Pittsburgh, which abolished their departments.
”None has provided a reasonable explanation as to why, except to save money,” writes George J. Demko, a professor of geography and director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Social Sciences at Dartmouth College. He formerly worked in the State Department.
Demko is the author of a newly published book, ”Why in the World,” a readable paperback written with Jerome Agel and Eugene Boe (Anchor Books, $10). Demko and his collaborators make the breadth of the subject
understandable. Take, for example, several of the book`s illustrations:
One map charts the major narcotics cultivation areas and trafficking routes in the Western Hemisphere. Another shows how the prevailing winds flow from the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine into southern, western and northern Europe, which tipped off European monitors to the world`s worst nuclear accident in 1986.
In discussing time and space, essentials of geography, Demko uses the Suez and Panama canals as examples. The construction of the 105-mile-long, sea level Suez Canal in 1869 brought Europe and the Asian subcontinent 5,800 miles closer. The 40-mile-long Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, eliminated an 8,000-mile voyage around South America`s Cape Horn.
”Geography,” writes Demko, ”is far more than an inventory of burdensome information that benumbs the memory without conferring an understanding of the never-ending drama of the interaction of man and planet Earth-the world of incessant change. The year 1991 saw nothing less than an epochal upheaval that will rank as one of the greatest events of the 20th Century: the world`s largest country and its Communist Party disintegrated. No one is prescient enough to predict what will happen to the late Soviet empire and its beleaguered 280 million people.”
Real-world geography is the art and science of location, or place, Demko says. ”It is about spatial patterns and spatial processes” such as AIDS, refugees, acid rain, El Nino, ocean dumping, cultural censorship, droughts and famines. By spatial, Demko means things related or connected to space, so everything has spatial meaning. In discussing the spread of AIDS, for example, Demko explains how medical geographers tracked the spread.
”Confining knowledge of geography to certain circumscribed areas of factual knowledge is like restricting mathematics to adding, multiplying, subtracting and dividing,” Demko continues. ”It is like trying to gain a facility with language by memorizing the dictionary. … The world is just too competitive, just too dangerous to be a blur of memorized places, names and stats.”
While Demko writes about the more complex aspects of geography, he stresses the need for all geography skills. He favors the National Geographic Society`s efforts to foster the study of geography and its sponsorship of a national geography bee.
”One wishes that the winners (of the competition) would use their generous prizes to pursue an education in true geography,” skills that would help them to map the origin and likely spread of the next plague.
”It is indeed disturbing when a student, or any of us, for that matter, cannot locate the major countries and cities on a map of the world,” Demko writes. ”But to a geographer, it is more vexing that most Americans, even our well-educated citizens, do not know the purpose and function of geography,”
he notes.
” `Where is this place?` `Where is that place?` the questions usually go. A good atlas can answer such questions readily. Rarely are the questions the essential `Why is it there?` or even, `How is it connected physically, socially and intellectually with its neighbors?` Does relative ignorance stem from our physical isolation from Europe and Asia and cultural isolation from even our immediate neighbors, Canada and Latin America?”
Besides raising consciousness about geography, ”Why in the World”
provides readers with information about the formation of the Earth, earthquake fault lines and a lot of basics in a chapter entitled ”Home Sweet Home.”
Here you`ll find a lot of geography stats about Earth`s total area
(196,940,400 square miles), tillable soil (6 percent) and thickness of the crust (6 miles).
Another chapter discusses ”People Without Space: Territory and Conflict.” In it, Demko cites existing conflicts over sacred and historical territory, such as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Or conflicts that are ignored by countries that leave people such as the Kurds living in five countries but without any sovereign space of their own.
The final chapter sums up our world: ”Intimations of the Future:
Profiles of 173 Countries-and Counting.”
Puzzled about geography? ”Why in the World” will put you in touch with the world.
