Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
During his 1988 campaign for the White House, George H. W. Bush often said he wanted to be known
as the “education president.” But as one Washington wit said in the midst of the Gulf War in 1991, “We
didn't realize he was going to teach us geography.”
If nothing else, the world certainly did get a thorough geography lesson during Desert Storm, as nightly
newscasts and special bulletins from the front lines in Kuwait showed detailed maps of the Middle East
and the Persian Gulf. With a daily diet of military press briefings by a host of generals and air marshals,
names and places once familiar only from a distant past of childhood fairy tales or Sunday school Bible
lessons suddenly became household words: Baghdad, Arabia, Jerusalem.
The global village never seemed so small. And people around the world who never gave much thought
to maps—except when they needed to find their way to a vacation spot or to puzzle out the mysteries of
the New York City subway system—were looking at world maps with new eyes, even as those maps were
being redrawn.
All at once, Americans, along with the rest of the world, were contemplating geography, perhaps for the
first time since leaving elementary school. Unfortunately, for most of those people, the word
geography
conjures up images of musty textbooks, or being forced to memorize the names of capitals, or elementary
school assignments in which you pasted a cotton ball on maps of Alabama and Mississippi, a copper penny
on Utah, and a grain of rice on China to show the chief products of these locations.
But now geography—or thinking “geographically”—has been thrust upon us. We can no longer afford
the blissful ignorance of thinking of the world in the terms of the famous
New Yorker
poster by artist Saul
Steinberg in which New York fills the foreground while the rest of America and the world beyond appear
as insignificant bumps on the horizon.
The irony of this modern inability to think geographically—or sheer disinterest—is that it is so far re-
moved from the thinking of the past. From the earliest moments of human history, people have had to think
geographically in order to survive and for the world to progress as it has. It was that ability to observe
the world and make reasoned conclusions about the earth and the universe itself that began the march of
science.
Geographic Voices
Aristotle (384-322
BC
)
Furthermore, the sphericity of the Earth is proved by the evidence of our senses, for otherwise
lunar eclipses would not take such forms; for whereas in the monthly phases of the moon the seg-
ments are of all sorts—straight, gibbous, and crescent—in eclipses, the dividing line is always roun-
ded. Consequently, if the eclipse is due to the interposition of the Earth, the rounded line results
from its spherical shape.
Who “Invented” Geography?
Imagine this. You've been shipwrecked and washed up on a desert island, a modern-day Robinson Crusoe.
A selective amnesia has erased any memory of dates, places, seasons, or time. You have no watch, no
maps, and no recollection of where you were when your ship went down.
How long would it take you to figure out the time of day? The season? The month? The approximate
date? You notice that the water comes way up onto your beach and then goes back out later in the day. Why
does it do that? As you lay back in your tropical paradise and looked at the night sky, could you distinguish
among those pinpoints of light that moved through the heavens?