FAULT - Maphead - page 36

wouldn't want to rebel against that, to insist that geography should be something more?
Even as recently as 2002, Rick Bein's Indiana study showed that students were actually
better at identifying place-names than they were at basic map skills. In linguistic terms,
we're still teaching them the words but not the grammar and then being surprised that they
can't speak the language.
But I wonder if geographers haven't brought some of their marginalization on them-
selves by shunning maps—the only thing that laypeople know about their discipline—so
thoroughly.You'dneverbeabletoattractrespect(orstudentsorfunding)toacollegeliter-
atureprogramiftheprevailingattitude theretobookswas“Oh,thoseoldthings?Wenever
look at them anymore.” Peirce Lewis warned in 1985 that geographers were pooh-poohing
the public's love for maps and landscapes at their own peril: “ I know of no other science
worth the name that denigrates its basic data by calling them 'mere description,'” he said.
Many academic geographers entered the field because of a childhood love of maps; now
they should embrace them again, as a gateway drug if nothing else. Once a student is look-
ing at a map, you can dive into how geography explains the map: why this city is on this
river, why this canyon is deeper than that one, why the language spoken here is related to
the one spoken there—even, perhaps, why this nation is rich and that one is poor.
Media coverage of geographic illiteracy tends to take it as a self-evident article of faith
thatschoolchildrennotbeingabletofindCanadaisabiblicalsignoftheApocalypse.Amid
all the hand-wringing, one question is never asked: could the Miami pool hunk be right?
Does it really matter if someone who will probably never go to Siberia can't find it on a
map? After all, if you really need to know, you can always just look it up, right?
Well, one problem with that is the obvious one: people can look it up, but that doesn't
mean they will. We live in an increasingly interlinked world where developments an ocean
away affect our daily lives in countless ways. A collapsing Greek economy might affect
my 401(k) and delay my retirement. A Taliban cell in Pakistan might affect my personal
safety as I walk through Times Square. A volcano in Iceland might affect my plan to fly
to Paris during spring break. These aren't hand-waving hypotheticals used in chaos theory
classes,likethatdamnbutterflyinChinathat'salwaysflappingonewingandtherebycaus-
ing a Gulf Coast hurricane. They are concrete and direct. On any given day, we might hear
about a dozen of these events, each tied to a place-name. If I know where those places are,
I can synthesize and remember the events that I hear about taking place there. But without
an understanding of where those places are, they become just names that wash over me:
Iraq is someplace Out There. Afghanistan is too. Are they close to each other? Far away?
Who knows?
In the past, people would have known. During the brief Crimean War, the British public
had an insatiable appetite for maps of that region, buying them up “ until every hamlet and
foot-road in that half-desert and very unimportant corner of the world became as well-
known to us as if it had been an English county,” remembered one writer in 1863. The