Sights such as this sign at a wilderness or other protected area are common throughout the world. But protected land is a rather modern concept. Today, many different kinds of areas are protected, by different federal, state, tribal, and local government agencies, but also by nonprofit organizations such as local land trusts and international organizations such as the Nature Conservancy.
Land can be set aside, or protected, in a wide variety of ways around the world. A land trust is one way, in which a private, nonprofit organization works to conserve land by assisting in land or conservation easement acquisition, or by its stewardship of such land. In 2004, the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust, for example, saved 277 acres from potential golf course and condominium development at Waihe’e on Maui, the site of two ancient Hawaiian villages and burial grounds, where plant and animal diversity is beginning to return. Government law that establishes “eminent domain” over land is even more common.
Land Trusts
Several non-government organizations have been key in protecting land for a number of years around the world. Since its founding in 1951, the Nature Conservancy has protected more than 119 million acres of land around the world as well as thousands of miles of rivers, and it operates more than 100 marine conservation projects. The Nature Conservancy is chiefly supported financially by individuals, over one million of whom are members. Since 1972, the Trust for Public Land has been using GIS and other tools to create parks and protect land ranging from neighborhood parks to national parks. In the United Kingdom, the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty is far older, dating back to 1895; it protects a wide variety of buildings and land, from historic country houses to nature reserves such as the Lake District in England.
The setting aside of land for protection from development was a revolution in geography and society. While the setting aside of land is by no means a modern idea—indigenous communities have long guarded sacred sites, ancient royal decrees in India protected certain areas, and Europeans protected hunting areas, for example—the modern origins may be traced to a paper that John Evelyn wrote for the Royal Society in the United Kingdom in 1662. In the paper, Evelyn stressed that it was important to conserve the forests, and that to do so, the rates of depletion (by cutting trees) and replanting needed to be managed.
This protected area in Utah is a result of the movement to protect wetlands, forests, grasslands, deserts, and other areas of natural beauty. This movement has altered land use and biodiversity and continues to be controversial, reflecting the attitudes of people towards the environment. (Joseph Kerski)
Dr. Hugh Cleghorn in the United Kingdom was instrumental in setting up the first permanent conservation programs, in India and other British colonies during the 1860s. In the United States in the 19th century, author Henry David Thoreau advocated that people should become intimately close with nature, as he had done, and these ideas, as well as those of Brandis, Schlich, and Schenck, were influential in the policies established by Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. But land protection gained much ground at the beginning of the 20th century, when three things occurred. First, it was becoming evident to the general public that the “modern era” had dawned. With the beginning of global trade, human-induced change of the landscape was now affecting more than just localities; it affected whole regions and even the world, and therefore a rethinking of how “modern people” should behave was afoot. Public consciousness began to change: The Industrial Revolution, while providing much benefit to society over the prior 150 years, was also taking its toll on water, air, and land resources. Second, U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists argued that existing conservation policies were not strong enough; the government needed to take a more active role to protect and conserve natural resources. By then, the U.S. National Park Service had already begun with the setting aside of the first park—Yellowstone—in 1872. Roosevelt, Muir, and his allies not only advocated that the government should set aside more land as national parks and monuments, but they also promoted federal construction of dams to irrigate small farms, created the U.S. Forest Service, and advanced land protection in the public consciousness as something that “advanced societies” should consider as their duty. Third, conservationists promoted a particular kind of preservation; for example, Aldo Leopold promoted the idea of wilderness, not as a hunting or recreational ground but as an area for a healthy biotic community. He did so in the face of rampant road building and recreational demands on public lands, weaving in ethics, science, and personal responsibility to maintain diversity in wildlife management. For Leopold, conservation was “a state of harmony between men and land” (Leopold 1949).
The idea of government-protected areas spread from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the late 19th century to most countries in the world during the 20th century. Setting aside land for protection was a fundamental part of the environmental and conservation movement, a political, environmental, and social phenomenon that remains important today (see Environmental Movement). In the latter part of the 20th century, efforts were made to extend these concepts beyond national borders to an international consensus on the standards and terminology of land protection. Some of today’s international efforts are focused on the need for corridors, or zones, of protection, arguing that they are more effective than isolated pockets of protected areas. Others are focused on protecting a certain percentage of each major biome: Delegates at the 1992 Fourth World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas recommended that “protected areas cover at least 10% of each biome by the year 2000.”
Globally, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the highest levels of protection are Level I (Strict Nature Reserves and Wilderness Areas) and Level II (National Parks). The protected areas of the United States receive varying layers of protection—ranging from only hiking allowed in some areas to allowing grazing or even energy extraction on other lands. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the United States had a total of 6,770 federally designated protected areas around 2010, covering over one million square miles (2.6 million square kilometers), representing 12 percent of the country’s total land area and representing 10 percent of the world’s protected land area. In addition, the United States had a total of 787 National Marine Protected Areas, covering an additional 242,410 square miles (627,830 square kilometers), or 67 percent of the total marine area of the United States. Globally, Antarctica and Central America contain the highest percentage of protected land on the planet.
Federal-level protected areas in the United States are managed by a variety of agencies, the best-known being the National Park Service (NPS), part of the U.S. Department of the Interior. In 2016, the NPS celebrated its 100th anniversary with a citizen-science project called BioBlitz, where thousands of park visitors collected observations about plant and animal species and mapped them (see Citizen Science). Additional areas are managed by the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management (responsible for over 40 percent of all U.S. federal public land), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and others. These areas include national parks, monuments, preserves, seashores, lakeshores, forests, grasslands, marine sanctuaries, recreation areas, trails, wild and scenic rivers, wilderness areas, estuarine research reserves, and wildlife areas. State and local governments maintain their own park systems. Some of these, such as New York’s Adirondack Park, are similar to the national parks of England and Wales in that small towns exist within the borders of the parks; but other areas are designated as “forever wild.” Wood-Tikchik State Park in Alaska is larger than many national parks, at 1.6 million acres (650,000 hectares). Even city parks may be quite large, such as South Mountain Park in Phoenix, Arizona, at 25 square miles (65 square kilometers).
Protected areas have been instrumental in protecting bird species, indigenous cultures, biodiversity of plants and animals, migration routes, water quality, carbon stocks, rainforests, wetlands, and much more. Protected areas have cultural and health benefits as well: As the global population continues to urbanize, parks serve as an increasingly critical connection between city dwellers and the landscape, such as Central Park in New York City, at 1.31 square miles (3.41 square kilometers).
Land continues to be set aside; recently in the United States, for example, new national parks were designated in 2015, including Valles Caldera in New Mexico and Tule Springs Fossil Beds, Nevada, bringing the total number of national park units to 405. The National Landscape Conservation System was established in 2000 for lands considered to be the “crown jewels of the American West,” with the mission to “conserve, protect, and restore these nationally significant landscapes that have outstanding cultural, ecological, and scientific values for the benefit of current and future generations.” This mission statement describes many conservation efforts worldwide.
Land protection continues to be a major force in teaching, research, and public perception of political, cultural, and physical geography. Geographers have contributed to land protection efforts and in turn use protected land for studying soils, water chemistry, ecosystems, and the cultural aspects of conservation. Much work in land protection adheres to three core principles. First, human activity damages key components of the environment. Second, humans have a civic duty to protect the environment and improve conditions for future generations. Third, scientific methods need to be applied to land protection efforts to ensure that this mission is carried out. Land protection also remains controversial: Space required for housing, hunting grounds, and agriculture increasingly competes with conservation efforts. The Fertile Land Protection Movement, for example, is a response by Indian farmers to their land being seized by the state. Another contentious issue is the management of wildfires, an essential and natural part of the ecological cycle of many biomes, including forests and grasslands. As more people live near national forest lands and use them for recreational purposes, should wildfires be contained, or should they be allowed to burn? Firefighting accounts for nearly half of the U.S. Forest Service budget, consumes natural resources, and risks the lives of the firefighters, but it has also saved lives and property of those in the paths of fires.
In some countries around the world, particularly developing countries, national parks agencies have limited financial resources available to them to manage protected areas. Some lands are often referred to as “paper parks”—they only exist on paper (maps) and not in reality. At the other end of the spectrum exists a dilemma: Overly rigid protection laws and policies might be in direct conflict with the livelihoods of local people. These people, for example, may be denied access to agricultural land, animals, or fuelwood that may be the basis of their livelihoods. Thus, recent attention has focused on some mechanisms of funding and financing land protection that aim to more equitably distribute the costs that are associated with creating and maintaining protected areas. Local communities’ economic needs and interests are being recognized as important to the design and management of protected areas.
Land protection efforts, which alter land use, biodiversity, and other aspects of the physical and cultural geography of the world, are controversial, display a wide variety of land uses, and reflect the attitudes of people toward the environment.
See also: Citizen Science; Environmental Movement
Egan, Timothy. 2010. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America. Boston: Mariner Books.
Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books.
Protected Planet. 2015. Online interface for the World Database on Protected Areas. http://www.protectedplanet.net/about.
Soutullo, A. 2010. “Extent of the Global Network of Terrestrial Protected Areas.” Conservation Biology 24 (2): 362–363.
Terborgh, John. 2004. Requiem for Nature. Washington, DC: Shearwater Books.
Consider the last time you gave someone directions to your house: “Turn left at the library; my house is the third one on the left, across the street from the school.” Terms such as “left” and “across from” refer to relative locations. Now consider your street address. While this provides a unique, absolute location on the planet, how would you reference a location that was not on a street? Further compounding the problem is that street addresses are not very precise and street addressing systems vary widely across the planet. An addressing system that could be used everywhere on the planet therefore had to be devised. This system could be used a pinpoint the foundation for the cornerstone of a new school or for the location of fiber-optic cable under a lake, to refer to certain trees that carry pine beetles in a forest, or for millions of other things, phenomena, and events on the planet. Not only did the addressing system have to cover the planet; of equal importance, it had to be agreed upon by everyone on the planet.
A coordinate system provides a logical way of assigning a set of numbers to a location in space. For example, every point in the Cartesian coordinate system can be described by its X and its Y locations relative to the two axes. Extending such a coordinate system to the entire planet, the Equator became a logical location for the X axis, positions north and south of it would be referred to as latitude in the northern or southern hemisphere. The Y axis, by contrast, could have been placed anywhere on the planet, but to be useful, people had to agree on its location.
In the third century BCE, Eratosthenes first proposed a system of latitude and longitude to be the basis for a map of the world. It was actually Hipparchus who became the first person to use this system to refer to unique places on Earth.
Latitude and longitude are more than numbers—they are angles, and they are measured in degrees. The ancient Babylonians and Greco-Egyptian thinker and geographer Ptolemy set forth the concept of a full circle having 360° (degrees) of arc. An angle, from the Latin word angulus, meaning “corner,” is formed by two rays sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex. The magnitude of the angle is the “amount of rotation” that separates the two rays. This can be measured as the length of circular arc swept out when one ray is rotated about the vertex to coincide with the other.
Line marking 40 degrees north latitude in Boulder, Colorado. Creating a system for recording positions on the Earth—latitude and longitude—was a revolution in geography. (Joseph Kerski)
The way that latitude (phi ϕ, the Greek F) is measured at some point P on the surface is to imagine a horizontal board that cuts the Earth in half at the Equator. The point O is at the very center, or core, of the Earth. To determine the latitude of some point P on the surface, a radius is drawn from the center to the point on the surface. The angle of that point relative to the board running through the Equator is the latitude. If the angle is above the surface, the latitude is positive; if it is below the surface, the latitude is negative.
Longitude (lambda λ, the Greek L) is also measured as an angle. Imagine a vertical board that cuts the Earth in half at the prime meridian. To determine the longitude of a point P on the surface, a radius is drawn from the board to that point. The angle of that point relative to the board running through the prime meridian is the longitude. Thus, longitude is the angle between a plane containing the prime meridian and a plane containing the North Pole, the South Pole, and the location in question. Longitude is given in positive units as one moves east into the eastern hemisphere, and in negative units as one moves west into the western hemisphere.
The Equator is 0° latitude. Because the angle between the North Pole and the Equator is a right angle (90°), the North Pole is 90° North latitude. Similarly, the South Pole is 90° South latitude, or -90°. One half of the way from the Equator to the Pole is 45° latitude. The prime meridian is 0° longitude. One quarter of the way around the world is 90° east or west, depending on which way one travels. On the opposite side of the Earth is 180° East longitude, which is the same as 180°, West longitude. The maximum latitude for any point is 90°, while 180°, is the maximum longitude. For further precision, each degree is divided into 60 minutes, and each minute is divided into 60 seconds. Another advantage of the prime meridian running through Greenwich was that the line on the opposite side of the world passed largely through water. It thus became a convenient place for the International Date Line, thus solving the date problem. The International Date Line does take a few jogs around the Aleutian, Kiribati, and Tonga island chains to keep everyone there happily on the same day.
Lines of latitude aren’t really lines; rather, they are circles of different sizes. The largest circle is at the Equator, at 0° latitude. The circles shrink to a single point at the poles. When mapped on a globe or on certain types of map projections, such as Mercator, latitude lines are parallel, so sometimes they are called “parallels.” With the exception of the Equator, a circle of latitude is not the shortest distance between two points lying on it. Rather, the great circle route is the shortest distance. This is why an airplane flying from a European to a North American city on the same latitude will fly farther north, such as over Greenland, along a great circle, to reach its destination. A great circle is a line that divides the sphere into two equal hemispheres.
Lines of longitude are also circles, but unlike latitude, these circles are all the same size. Each circle crosses the Equator and extends from pole to pole, like the segment boundaries on a peeled orange. All lines of longitude are also known as meridians, from the Latin meri, a variation of medius which denotes “middle,” and diem, meaning “day.” The word once meant “noon,” and times of the day before noon were known as “ante meridian” (AM), while times after it were “post meridian” (PM). All meridians are great circles, divide the globe into two equal hemispheres, and are numbered starting with the prime meridian.
As has been written elsewhere in this book, it took a while for time to become standardized and agreed upon (see Time). Similarly, it took several centuries for people to agree on how absolute location should be referenced. Just as different places used their own local times, different countries used their own Y axis, which worked out fine before the world became more interconnected through international commerce. For years, many American maps referenced a line running through the White House in Washington, D.C., for their “prime meridian”; French maps referenced line running through Paris; other countries had their own systems. But as the 19th century neared its end, something had to change. Finally, in October 1884, at the request of U.S. president Chester Arthur, delegates from 25 nations were invited to the International Meridian Conference to agree upon one prime meridian for the world. By a 22 to 1 vote, delegates agreed that it would run through the main telescope at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, east of London, England. Absolute locations on the Earth would be measured as “longitude” from this meridian.
As discussed elsewhere in this book, determining latitude and longitude—especially longitude—was a vexing problem for centuries (see Harrison, John). Once equipment had been developed to accurately determine both, global exploration and commerce boomed. But before that, people had to agree upon a global addressing system—latitude and longitude—which in itself was a revolutionary moment. Other coordinate systems exist, such as the Universal Transverse Mercator grid, the U.S. State Plane Coordinate System, and hundreds of national grids, but the system of latitude and longitude came first and is still the most widely used. In fact, it is difficult to imagine geography—and to imagine our world—without latitude and longitude. Indeed, for a discipline so tied to the where question, it is essential to have a system to refer to locations. The modern science of geodesy is dependent on coordinate systems (see Surveying).
Once location can be determined, then other essentials of geography, such as mapping and analyzing patterns, relationships, and trends, became possible. Furthermore, energy, water, transportation, and many other interconnected systems constructed over the past century became possible because of mapping and surveying techniques, which were all based on the ability to precisely measure latitude and longitude. Indeed, the functioning of modern geographic information systems (see Geographic Information Systems) would not be possible without the global addressing of latitude and longitude. With GPS and other technologies, we have the capability of measuring objects on, under, and over the surface of the Earth to fractions of a degree—indeed, in some cases, to fractions of a second. More and more objects, events, and phenomena on Earth are able to be located, part of the Internet of Things, which has already revolutionized geography.
See also: Geographic Information Systems (GIS); Global Positioning Systems (GPS); Harrison, John; Internet of Things; Surveying; Time
Maling, D. H. 1992. Coordinate Systems and Map Projections. New York: Pergamon Press.
Palmer, Allen W. 2002. “Negotiation and Resistance in Global Networks: The 1884 International Meridian Conference. Mass Communication and Society 5 (1): 7–24.
Windows to the Universe (National Earth Science Teachers Association). “Latitude and Longitude.” http://www.windows2universe.org/geography/latitude_longitude.html.
The names Lewis and Clark have been so synonymous with exploration, particularly in American history, that their appearance in this book should come as no surprise. But their expedition to the Pacific Northwest in the United States revolutionized geography for several reasons.
First, while this book makes it clear that national governments had been sponsoring expeditions for centuries (see Magellan, Ferdinand), the Lewis and Clark expedition was the first official expedition sponsored by the United States and one of the first modern national government-sponsored expeditions specifically focused on geographic discovery. Latitude and longitude were dutifully recorded with each observation, and the connections between climate, weather, landforms, hydrology, biomes, and people were carefully observed, though it would be a while before the information was disseminated. One difficulty in dissemination came when Lewis rather mysteriously apparently killed himself in 1809 while turning their raw notes and maps into publishable scientific accounts. Clark, who had by this time been named governor of the Missouri Territory and partner in the Missouri Fur Company, was instrumental in finishing the maps and notes. He also made arrangements for the freedom of his slave York, who had participated as a full member of the expedition. In 1814, a publisher in Philadelphia published a two-volume journal entitled History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, which became the definitive guide for travelers for many years to come.
One of the expedition’s missions was to carry out linguistic and ethnological studies of the Native Americans. The Americans who read the accounts of the expedition began to understand the number, diversity, language, and customs of Native Americans. They also learned about the topography, rivers, biology (including flora and fauna), ecoregions, and climate of the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Coast. They also now knew how far it was to the Pacific Ocean, at least via the Missouri River. The lands now part of their own country now seemed much less mysterious. For the Native Americans, the Lewis and Clark expedition marked the end of the way of life they had known for centuries.
Arlene Diane Blum
Arlene Diane Blum (born 1945) received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in biophysical chemistry, and she also worked in the field of environmental health. Like Lewis and Clark and others described in this book, in the spirit of exploration and education, she led the first all-female climb of Denali in 1970 and the second American ascent of Mount Everest in 1976. She researched how flame-retardants in children’s pajamas were toxic, and her studies led to a ban on the chemical that was used to make them. She also founded the Green Science Policy Institute in 2008 for facilitating the responsible use of chemicals to protect human and ecological health.
Second, Lewis and Clark did not discover a “northwest passage” (a sea route to the Pacific), nor did they start immediate overland immigration to the West Coast, but the human impacts from the expedition were numerous and far-reaching. Their work was the starting point for a tidal wave of trade, settlement, and immigration in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest, and on to Alaska. Their extensive notes about how suitable the land was for farming and ranching, and what types of crops would grow, began the government-sponsored homesteading according to how Jefferson envisioned dividing up the land (see Northwest Ordinance Act). Their notes about river systems and where mineral deposits were located would spur other government-sponsored surveys, such as those from Pike in 1806, Long in 1819, Fremont in 1842, Hayden in 1871, and Wheeler from 1869 to 1872. The expedition also led to the eventual formation of the U.S. Geological Survey and land management agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service (see Hayden, Powell, and Wheeler Surveys; see National Mapping Agencies). Lewis and Clark’s appreciation of landscapes and places led to the conservation movement that took root later in the century, including the first protection of lands in national parks, and their influence even reached into the 20th century with the environmental movement (see Environmental Movement; see Land Protection).
As is the case with several other expeditions described in this book (e.g., see Magellan, Ferdinand), political geography was instrumental in bringing about this expedition. On April 30, 1803, U.S. president Thomas Jefferson negotiated a treaty with France’s Napoleon Bonaparte by which France turned over its claims to the western part of the Mississippi River basin to the United States for $15 million. Planning ahead, Jefferson had already (in January 1803) requested funds from the U.S. Congress to send an exploring party to find an overland route to the Pacific Ocean. One of Lewis and Clark’s missions was to make contacts with the Native Americans to shift trade and allegiance away from competing Spanish, French, British, and Russian interests in the area and toward the United States.
Lewis, a neighbor of Jefferson in Virginia who had experience in the West, was chosen by Jefferson to lead the expedition. Once chosen, Lewis left for Philadelphia to study botany and astronomy, and with Jefferson’s approval, he invited his friend William Clark, a cartographer, to be co-leader. Their instructions were to find “the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purposes of commerce.” Lewis left Philadelphia in July 1803 for Pittsburgh and then floated down the Ohio River to Louisville, where he was joined by Clark and his African American servant York. The expedition spent the winter of 1803–1804 on the east bank of the Mississippi River, in American territory. On March 9, 1804, Lewis was an official witness to the transfer of Upper Louisiana from Spain to France and then, on the following day, of the same territory from France to the United States. They took with them War Department cartographer Nicholas King’s map of North America west of the Mississippi from 1803. This map represented an attempt to summarize all available topographic information about the region.
The expedition set out on May 14, 1804, with forty-five men in three boats. They used the sextant and compass (see Compass; Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices) to mark their positions. In late July, a little beyond the mouth of the Platte River, they met members of the Oto and Missouri tribes and informed them that their territory had been taken over by the United States. In August the expedition’s only death occurred when Sergeant Floyd died suddenly of a “bilious colic'” and was buried on a bluff near Sioux City, Iowa. The party met with the Omaha tribe and with various bands of Sioux. They were threatened only once, near present-day Pierre, South Dakota, but a confrontation was avoided. By the end of October, they had traveled an average of 14.5 kilometers per day and had reached the cluster of Mandan villages near Bismarck, North Dakota, and built a small stockade named Fort Mandan. The Americans spent five months there, visited by traders and Native Americans. One of the visitors was Toussaint Charbonneau, a French fur trader with a Native American wife named Sacajawea, a member of the Shoshoni tribe from what is now Idaho. She gave birth to a baby boy, Pompey, on February 11, 1805. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau and his wife as interpreters and guides. Clark later adopted Pompey, or Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, and paid for his education. Jean had an adventurous life as a trapper, miner, scout, and military officer, including six years in Europe with a German prince and a term as mayor in Mission San Luis Rey de Francia near present-day Oceanside, California.
After 13 men headed back to St. Louis, the rest of the expedition set out on April 7, 1805, the day Clark wrote, “I could not but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life” (Jackson 1962). It took a month to portage around Great Falls, Montana. On August 12, Lewis reached the source of the Missouri and crossed over the Continental Divide to the source of the Lemhi River, a tributary of the Columbia. The next day Lewis met a group of Shoshoni and took their chief and some of the warriors back to meet with Clark and the rest of the expedition, whereupon Sacajawea recognized them as her own people. In fact, the chief was her brother. The Lemhi River was unnavigable, forcing the explorers to continue on land, with the chief agreeing to accompany them partway as guide. Traveling over the mountains required 50 days to cover 482 kilometers, but they finally found Lolo Pass and descended the mountains into the valley of the Clearwater River on September 20, in the territory of the Nez Perce.
After building canoes, the expedition arrived at the Snake River on October 10 and at the Columbia six days later, seeing the Pacific Ocean for the first time on November 7, 1805. They constructed winter headquarters at a place they named Fort Clatsop in honor of the local tribe, near the mouth of the Columbian and near present-day Astoria, Oregon. Leaving behind letters for any European traders who might travel along the coast, Lewis and Clark turned back east on March 23, 1806, splitting up for a while in the mountains and suffering some theft and hunger, but they reunited and reached the Mandan villages on August 14, 1806, where they persuaded Chief Big White to come with them back to Washington. They reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806. “We were met by all the village,” wrote Clark, “and received a hearty welcome from its inhabitants” (Jackson 1962). From there, they traveled on to Washington to report personally to the president. The geographic knowledge of the United States (and indeed, the world) would never be the same again.
The Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Coast of the United States contributed immensely to physical and cultural geographic knowledge. It had a far-reaching impact on settlement, mining, and agriculture of the entire region, and it also contributed to mapping and surveying technology, the protection of lands, and the environmental movement.
See also: Compass; Cross-Staffs, Astrolabes, and Other Devices; Environmental Movement; Hayden, Powell, and Wheeler Surveys; Land Protection; Magellan, Ferdinand; National Mapping Agencies; Northwest Ordinance Act
Bakeless, John. 1947. Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Borroughs, Raymond Darwin, ed. 1961. The Natural History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.
Dillon, Richard. 1965. Meriwether Lewis: A Biography. New York: Coward McCann.
Hawke, David Freeman. 1980. Those Tremendous Mountains: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. New York: Norton.
Jackson, Donald, ed. 1962. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Least Heat-Moon, William. 2001. River-Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America. New York: Penguin Books.,
Library of Congress. 2015. “Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis & Clark and the Revealing of America.” http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark/lewis-landc.html.
Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. 1904–1905/1959 reprint. Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 8 vols. New York: Antiquarian.
Why do the accomplishments of missionary and explorer David Livingstone merit mention among the 100 discoveries that revolutionized geography?
Livingstone didn’t “discover” Africa, of course. Africa has long been inhabited, and evidence exists that it is the birthplace of humanity and therefore is the continent inhabited for the longest time. However, most Europeans even into the 19th century knew very little about the African continent. Livingstone wasn’t the first European to be interested in exploring Africa. Yet his contributions to geographic understanding of Africa, and of social issues, were long-lasting.
Livingtone was born near Glasgow, Scotland, in 1813, and from age 10 he worked 14-hour days in a cotton mill. After becoming a doctor, he planned to travel to China, but the Opium War there in 1839 and 1840 caused him to travel to southern Africa instead. After several years there, he met a group of slave traders, whereupon he resolved that if he could open up Africa’s interior to commerce, the slave trade would decline. The letters he wrote describing his first long expedition of 1,500 miles (2,414 km) won him celebrity status in England and Scotland, where they were read with great interest. In 1858, he cut his connections with the London Missionary Society, after which his explorations were supported by the British government and the Royal Geographical Society. He was the first European to document seeing Lake Nyasa (Malawi), the upper reaches of the Zambezi and Congo rivers, and the magnificent waterfall (Mosi-oa-Tunya; “the smoke that thunders”) that he named Victoria Falls for the British queen. He traveled over 30,000 miles (48,280 km) in Africa during his lifetime, mostly on foot. He helped fuel the longstanding European obsession with finding the source of the River Nile. He was one of the first Europeans to make a transcontinental journey from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. Europeans had been repeatedly thwarted on such attempts due to their susceptibility to malaria, dysentery, and sleeping sickness, the difficulty in using oxen and horses there, and also because of the opposition of powerful tribes such as the Lunda of Mwata Kazembe and the Lozi.
David Livingstone's extensive and amazing 19th century explorations not only helped develop the map of Africa, but led to health advances, changes in attitudes and policies about slavery, and increased cultural and physical geographical knowledge about Africa. (The Illustrated London News Picture Library)
How did Livingstone manage it? He traveled lightly, and his personality was such that he was able to persuade tribal leaders that he was not a threat to them. He made great progress in learning several African languages, which helped immensely, as he required the help of Africans to accomplish his goals. He became close friends with many Africans and traveled extensively with them. He faced physical barriers, such as the Cahora Bassa rapids on the River Zambezi, and other types of challenges, such as a lack of funding when his Zambezi expedition was abandoned. He also faced extreme personal difficulty, beginning with being mauled by a lion during his first years there, which permanently injured his left arm. Difficulties persisted right up to his last expedition, the goal of which was to discover the source of the Nile. After his supplies were stolen, he was forced to rely on slave traders, whose work he despised, for aid and transportation. While they gave him food, the local people forced him to eat in a roped-off area while they watched him for entertainment. Livingstone’s most famous quote, “I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward,” epitomizes his tenacity (Livingstone 1912). He lost all contact with the rest of the world for six years, prompting the New York Herald newspaper in 1869 to send Henry Morton Stanley to find him. When he finally did find Livingstone, he reportedly uttered the famous phrase, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” Refusing to leave his beloved Africa, Livingstone died on this last expedition.
Livingtone’s accomplishments included the spread of the knowledge of the cultural and physical geography of Africa in all of its variety—languages, customs, crops, landforms, rivers, climate, vegetation, wildlife, and much more. While some of Livingstone’s observations of local customs were ethnocentric, and while his efforts helped in part to fuel European imperialism in Africa, the historian David McCullough cautions against judging historical figures from our modern viewpoint. Livingstone’s writings made it clear that Africa included many fertile areas with sufficient rainfall for agriculture and contained skilled farmers, craftsmen, and traders. Livingstone also had a deep commitment to ending slavery. His legacy is intertwined in the complexities and issues, benefits and harm, that imperialism brought Africa, but his work did help to open up central Africa to missionaries who helped initiate European-style education and health care for Africans. Rather than colonial rule, he envisioned the land dotted with settlements of dedicated Christian Europeans, living among the native people in order to teach them how to live without slavery. He was part of a movement that helped change the national British mindset from the notion of a divine right to rule “lesser races” to more ethical ideas in foreign policy. His belief in Africans helped advance feelings that, during the 20th century, helped in some ways foster the forces of African nationalism and independence.
Livingstone’s fame stemmed from many levels, including his work as a Protestant missionary, his “rags to riches” story and connection to working-class people, and his status as a scientific investigator, explorer, and anti-slavery crusader. He was one of the first to make the link between malaria and mosquitos, and he was one of the first to administer quinine in safe doses for malaria, tropical ulcer, and scurvy. After his death in 1873 in Zambia, his heart was buried in Africa and his body brought back to be interred in Westminster Abbey in London.
Like others described in this book, Livingstone traveled extensively and paid close attention to and worked with local people (see Lewis and Clark; Marco Polo). Livingstone’s 19th-century explorations not only helped fill in the map of Africa but also led to health advances, changes in attitudes and policies about slavery, and a vast increase in cultural and physical geography knowledge about Africa.
See also: Lewis and Clark; Marco Polo
Jane Goodall
Like David Livingstone, British anthropologist Jane Goodall (born 1934) has had a lifelong interest in Africa, particularly the harmonious coexistence of people and animals on that continent. Her research has focused on the social lives and habitat of chimpanzees. Since 1960, at the age of 26, she has spent most of her time in Tanzania, and like other geographers, she has been an advocate of habitat preservation and the protection of land. Her Roots & Shoots global environmental and humanitarian youth program has attracted 150,000 members in more than 130 countries. Her institute includes 19 offices around the world, focusing on conservation and development programs in Africa, and much of their research is grounded in geography. In 2002, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.
Livingstone, David. 1912. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. London: J. Murray.
Ross, Andrew. 2002. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume? Andrew Ross Reconsiders the Reputation—Both Contemporary and Historical—of the Scottish Missionary and Explorer.” History Today 52 (7): 21.
Rotberg, Robert I., ed. 1970. Africa and Its Explorers: Motives, Methods, and Impact, vol. 47. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Schlager, Neil, and Josh Schlager, eds. 2001. “David Livingstone Traverses the African Continent,” in Science and Its Times, vol. 5. Detroit: Gale.
Seaver, George. 1957. David Livingstone: His Life and Letters. London: Butterworth Press.
Simmons, Jack. 1955. Livingstone and Africa. London: Hodder & Stoughton.