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their own work/discipline, without thinking of talking to geographers, perhaps because,
despite
National Geographic
, they don't really think geographers exist. Think of the areas 'lost'
to the discipline. First, in medicine, epidemiology, ever since one specifi c London water pipe
caused the Victorian era typhoid epidemic and a doctor (at least a spatially conscious one) put
things together and looked at the distribution of the disease. In architecture and landscape
design, the brilliant book
Design with Nature
by the late Ian McHarg (1967) is as geographic a
commentary on the consequences of a disregard for the environment and the importance of
location as one could fi nd, but architects continue to mis-design and mis-locate structures. In
engineering/computer science, the near loss of 'Geographic' in Geographic Information
Systems to Spatial Information Systems was a close-run thing. In insurance and risk manage-
ment, there was a reluctance to contemplate environmental and locational factors such as
fl oodplains and landslip and erosion zones until relatively recently. Perhaps worst of all is the
loss of potential leadership in climate change/global warming to politicians such as Al Gore.
Why has this happened? Perhaps because geographers have not shouted loud and long enough
that they know more about the world in general than anyone else and they are the ones that
can integrate the physical and human world better than anyone else because of their training
and innate interests. But if geographers ignore the spatial element in their writing, the current
situation serves us right, just as it serves the discipline no good.
So what has been done? Have geographers set up Geographic Research Centres? Not in
general - there are Centres for the Study of Mobility, or Environmental Change, but not with
the words Geography or Geographical in the title, perhaps because Geography is not 'sexy'
enough for university administrators or research funding agencies. As geographers move
further and further away from their core reason for existence, the more vulnerable and irrel-
evant geography becomes as a fundamental basic discipline. Thus geography is an easy target
for departmental mergers, either with geology to Earth Sciences, or other sciences to
Environmental Studies, or other social sciences to Human Sciences. As such, the discipline
suffers and, perhaps because of that, people go from Geography to Business, or to other
departments in which their skills, or at least their publication and grant award records are
recognised as relevant for government research assessment processes.
The post-disciplinary argument does not hold water in this regard. While granting agen-
cies might make noises in support of interdisciplinary research, and institutes and centres
claim such a state, deep down most grant application referees and academics in general are
disciplinary focused, and inertia and survival techniques will keep many departments in
existence, as perhaps they should. If we lose disciplinarity, we lose our
raison d'être
and become
generic academics. That may suit some personal agendas but it does not suit the disciplines
and in the long run will probably not suit the individuals whose academic existence then
becomes dependent on the goodwill of administrators and convincing others that they have
something unique (but not a discipline) to offer.
When I was contemplating returning to the UK in the 1990s, despite a reasonable reputa-
tion and a fair record of grants and publications, plus administrative experience as chair of a
department, I was under no illusion that I would get a chair in a geography department in the
UK. Nor do I think that if I had stayed in the UK, it would have been very likely that I would
have risen to Professor, or at least perhaps not until the last decade and then only in a 'new'
university. I do not say that in a derogatory sense about the 'new' universities but it is a refl ec-
tion more on the introvert but insecure and, at the same time, somewhat arrogant attitude of
most geography departments in older universities. I think I am betraying no personal secrets
when I note geographers such as Douglas Pearce in New Zealand and Peter Murphy in
Canada who left well-established positions in strong geography departments and moved over
