Geography’s value extends beyond the substantive and analytical contributions it makes to research, policy-making, and planning. The subject also has a fundamentally important role to play in creating an informed, engaged, enriched populace. Some students who pursue advanced geographical study end up teaching in primary or secondary schools, or in universities. Others draw on the ideas, perspectives, and skills they learn as students of geography to reach broader audiences. Yet others simply find that studying geography makes them more aware of their place in the world, more alive to its complexity, and more curious about other people and places. No matter how it is accomplished, geographical education is vitally important, for exposure to geography and associated ways of thinking can open people’s eyes to the richness and diversity of the wider world, contribute to the development of an informed citizenry, and provide insights into present conditions and future possibilities.
Consider what is lost if geography is not part of the educational mix. Students may never be encouraged to develop even a basic understanding of how the world is organized environmentally, politically, and culturally. They may never be encouraged to think of the landscape as a window into human and physical processes. They may never be challenged to think about how the spatial organization and material character of the places where they live are similar to, or different from, other places. They may never gain much insight into the potentials and limitations of increasingly ubiquitous geospatial technologies (GPS, GIS, internet mapping applications, remote sensing). They may never learn to think about how maps can be used to convey, or distort, information. And they may never be asked to think about the deep interconnections between nature and society – or have the opportunity to develop the intellectual tools to understand or challenge political claims or policy proposals related to the environment.
To be sure, appreciating what geography has to offer requires moving beyond a shallow place-name-based conception of the subject that remains distressingly common among the general public – and even in the political arena, where geography’s concerns with difference and diversity introduce complexities that are sometimes deliberately pushed to the side. Making a compelling case for the importance of geographical education is not hard, however, given the subject’s potential to promote awareness of the wider world, enhance people’s lives, strengthen civil society and policy-making, and facilitate understanding and use of increasingly prevalent geospatial technologies.
In our present hyper-connected era, most people know something about other places. Yet how much is known is open to serious question. From a geographical perspective, the most visible edge of the problem can be seen in stories of people assuming that Africa is a country, thinking that Thai people come from Taiwan, or not knowing the Andes are in South America. A well-publicized 2006 National Geographic–Roper survey in the United States revealed that only one in ten 18- to 24-year-olds could place Afghanistan correctly on a world map, and nearly half thought Sudan was located in Asia.1 (Sadly, respondents from the United Kingdom and Canada did not do much better, even though geography occupies a more prominent place in the curriculum in those countries.) Even the oft-quoted statement (of unknown origin) that “war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” is not holding up. In the same survey 63 percent of young Americans could not find Iraq on a map despite the fact that the United States had invaded the country three years earlier and Iraq was still in the news on a daily basis.
There is something self-evidently amiss when a significant percentage of the population in countries with the global reach of a United States or a United Kingdom has little grasp of basic locational facts. Indeed, it is impossible even to begin to have a serious discussion about what is happening in the world without some basic place-name knowledge. Yet reducing the geographical ignorance problem down to location facts risks reinforcing the simplistic place-name view of the subject noted earlier. Indeed, knowing location facts may be less important to global geographical awareness than knowing that more Muslims live in Indonesia than in any other country, that Amazonia plays host to the greatest biodiversity on Earth, that the European Union is the United States’ largest trade partner, that warmer water can make hurricanes more intense, that melting ice sheets raise sea levels, that when it is summer in South Africa it is winter in Europe, or that there are few ethnically homogeneous countries (to mention just a few examples).
The handful of geographical fundamentals listed above might appear to be little more than trivia, but they are just as important to understanding the human and environmental context in which humanity is embedded as knowing basic historical facts is to making sense of the evolution of the human story. Having no appreciation of Earth’s environmental, social, political, and cultural make-up in our interconnected age is like living in a bedroom on the ground floor of a house without any sense of the overall size and shape of the structure, what the rooms upstairs are like, or how they are arranged relative to one another. Some grounding in geographical patterns and processes, in short, is critical to making sense of the planet we occupy and to putting developments and events into context.
Growing geographical awareness can also play an important role in raising expectations of what the public has the right to expect from media reports and policy statements addressing developments around the world. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict that broke out in Ukraine in early 2014, few commentaries offered significant insights into relevant historical or ethno-territorial circumstances. One exception was a New York Times International story, which was accompanied by the map shown in plate 8. That map, assembled by a graphics editor with a significant geographical background (Derek Watkins), offered a set of telling insights into the divisions wracking the country: the east–west split between native-Ukrainian-speaking areas and those dominated by native Russian speakers, the relationship between that split and the election that put the pro-Russian leader Victor Yanukovych in power, and Ukraine’s situation in relation to other countries. In the absence of a general population that is able to appreciate the kinds of insights that come from such a map, and has the ability to understand and interpret it, the incentive to produce such cartographic products will disappear. A geographically educated populace, then, has a role to play in fighting the slide toward increasingly superficial assessments of complex developments around the planet.2
Exposure to geography can also serve to arouse interest in, and curiosity about, other peoples, places, and landscapes. There are countless stories of children’s imaginations being stirred after looking at an atlas or reading a geographical portrait of another place. As these children’s eyes are opened to geographical differences in environment, culture, society, and economy, many come to develop a growing appreciation for the planet’s diversity and an expanding grasp of their place in the larger mix. They want to know more, and they begin to understand how and why the world looks different when viewed from elsewhere.
It is difficult to overstate the value of expanding geographical curiosity. Not only does it encourage individuals to fill out their mental pictures of Earth’s physical and human building blocks; it also heightens their appreciation of difference while reducing their tendency to embrace problematic stereotypes about other people and places. It gives them the tools to think about how the world looks when viewed from elsewhere. And it sensitizes them to the resiliency and fragility of communities and environments.
Knowing about something is a prerequisite to caring about it. If the Amazon or Afghanistan means nothing, how can we expect people to be concerned about deforestation in the former or endemic conflict in the latter? Most of the world’s peoples are deeply entangled with other parts of the globe in their daily lives – from the food they eat and the clothes they wear to the sites they access on their computers to the very air they breathe. Giving form and substance to peoples and places in other parts of the world makes it harder to view them as if they were video-game depictions – devoid of natural and built wonders or thoughtful, interesting, flesh-and-blood people. Against this backdrop, geographical awareness is more than a luxury; it is essential to living thoughtful, caring, responsible lives.
Exposure to geography has personal significance as well; it has the potential to connect people more closely with their surroundings and give greater meaning to their lives. Throughout the world, a growing number of people are spending more and more time on their cell phones, working and amusing themselves on their computers, playing video games, and streaming videos. Some of these can promote awareness and understanding of the wider world, but a brilliant Gary Varvel cartoon speaks to the downside: after being taken outdoors, a young boy declares, “Oh, I’ve seen this level on my video games.”3 The technological revolution of the past few decades has come at the expense of direct experience with the tangible environment and face-to-face contact with other people. We are only beginning to understand the consequences of these developments, but there is already growing evidence of their negative effects: dampened sensitivity to the look and smell of the environment, reduced adventurousness, and greater loneliness and depression.
Where, in today’s educational world, does a student find encouragement to climb a tree, look around, and wonder about the planet and its place in the universe? Where is the stimulus to marvel at the mix of plants growing in a nearby meadow, to poke around back streets and alleys, to explore beyond the usual tourist sites during a vacation, to wade into a stream, to look out the window of an airplane instead of immediately closing the shade, or to spend time in a neighborhood or place that challenges ingrained comfort zones? To be sure, some people will always be driven to do these things, but the available evidence suggests that their numbers are declining.4
Geographical education alone cannot reverse this trend, but it can have a salutary effect. Many geography courses devote considerable attention to what the landscape can tell us about physical and human processes, and some incorporate field trips aimed at heightening students’ observational skills and enhancing their appreciation of the character of the material environment. Introducing students to cartography, GIS, and remote sensing courses can encourage thinking about, and explorations of, physical and human patterns. Studying physical geography can stimulate interest in, and understanding of, everything from why there is wind to the forces that shape the topography of a place. Explorations of human geographical topics can foster curiosity about cultural patterns, the organization of cities, and the landscape impacts of economic and social processes. Coursework emphasizing human–environment relations can promote awareness of matters ranging from how environmental attitudes influence land-use decisions to the causes and potential consequences of building in flood zones. Geographical studies of far-away regions can spark interest in other places and prompt students to see for themselves what life is like elsewhere.
The point is that geography, when taught well, has the capacity to challenge physical and mental bubbles that constrain thinking and experience. It also can enrich people’s lives, much in the way the study of philosophy, history, or literature often does. As the ancient Greeks (among others) made clear, the purpose of education is not simply to impart practical skills (though geography offers plenty of these); it is also to enhance people’s intellectual, social, and psychological well-being – to enrich their minds by fostering curiosity, awareness, and appreciation for things they might otherwise take for granted. You can walk a street and see it as nothing more than a path; alternatively, you can look around and think about how and why the landscape looks the way it does, contemplate the character of the buildings, and ponder the mix of people who are present. You can simply turn on a tap to get water, or you can reflect on where the water came from and whether current levels of water use are sustainable. You can look down a mountain valley and admire the beautiful scene, or the experience can also prompt you to think about how the valley came to be, why the mix of vegetation is different on one side as opposed to the other, and how the valley’s particular location in relation to other physical features and human patterns might have facilitated or impeded the migration of people.
Developing an understanding of and appreciation for geography helps move people to the second alternative in each of the foregoing examples. Moving to that alternative is intellectually stimulating, it can inspire inquisitiveness, and it can encourage living in a thoughtful, responsible way. Geography is thus an invitation to life-long learning – one of the principal purposes of a liberal arts education.
As the foregoing chapters have shown, geography’s perspective and analytical approach have much to contribute to the effort to confront many pressing political, social, economic, and environmental challenges. If geographical awareness is limited to a small set of sophisticated practitioners, however, the discipline’s potential contributions to the policy-making process – and to making a better world – will be seriously constrained. Producing effective policies from the types of geographical understandings outlined in this book is unlikely to happen in the absence of a broad range of scientists, government officials, public intellectuals, and others who have been exposed to the discipline and who think geographically – people who are attuned to the importance of looking to what can be learned from a consideration of spatial patterns and place-based contextual differences; the interconnections across space that affect the development of places; nature–society dynamics; and the ways in which the geographical framing of issues affects how they are conceptualized. These are precisely the types of mental habits that geography education seeks to cultivate.
The memoir written in 1995 by Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, demonstrates their importance. McNamara attributes the disaster of Vietnam in part to the US policy elite’s “profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics” of the Vietnamese people.5 The country’s deepening engagement in Vietnam in the 1960s was driven by a Cold War metaphor of falling dominoes, which made the Communist orientation of the Ho Chi Minh regime the target of attention. What if greater attention had been directed to surging nationalism in Southeast Asia in the wake of a century of European colonialism and Japanese occupation (an issue that could hardly be missed when looking at the political geography of the region)? Might there have been some reconsideration of Vietnam’s Cold War significance? Similarly, what if military strategists had been more willing to ask themselves what it was like to live in a village where grand geopolitical theories were meaningless, but where American soldiers were seen as the latest agents of death and destruction? Might there have been some reconsideration of the mission – and less surprise over the staunchness, perseverance, and tenacity of those who took up arms against soldiers they viewed as foreign invaders? No one can answer such counterfactual questions definitively, but they are suggestive of ways of thinking that geographical education encourages.
More recently we have seen tectonic shifts in the geopolitical landscape: upheavals in the Middle East and terrorism in the name of a variant of Islam, a resurgent Russia and a surging China, new attention to the Arctic in the wake of climate change, growing uncertainty about the strength of European unity, and abrupt political shifts in countries ranging from Pakistan to the Philippines. These developments are all rooted in concrete geographical circumstances, they are shaped by alliances and trading relationships that affect how individual places are connected to the rest of the world (i.e., geographical situation), and they play out against the backdrop of different views of how humanity should partition and use the surface of the planet (i.e., differences in geographical understanding). Efforts to grapple with these geopolitical shifts without the benefit of a geographical perspective – or even basic knowledge of geographical patterns – are inevitably compromised.
It follows that geographical literacy should not be thought of as a matter of importance solely for the governmental, policy, and scientific elite. A robust civil society depends on an informed, engaged general populace. In the absence of some grasp of the workings of the climate system and the major biophysical changes unfolding on Earth’s surface, people are in a poor position to assess the validity of claims that a cold snap provides evidence that the climate is not warming. Without some awareness of North Korea’s geographical situation in relation to its neighbors, it is impossible to assess the potential consequences of military and economic responses to the aggressive stance taken by the country’s leaders. Widespread geographical ignorance means there is no check on misleading statements by public figures, the media, bloggers, and self-proclaimed pundits. (Think of the claims that attribute job losses in certain sectors to environmental regulations or immigrants, with no mention of competition from other places or consideration of how mechanization and transportation innovations have altered where and how goods are produced.)
Geographical education can make another signal contribution in the public arena. It can serve to promote mutual understanding. This claim might seem problematic given that geography once served the interests of colonial powers seeking to exert and maintain control over distant lands. In its modern guise, however, geography education invites consideration of what it means to see the world through the lens of those living in different places. That way of thinking makes it harder to vilify other people and places – a critical first step to conflict avoidance.
The last few decades have played host to a technological revolution with deep geographical foundations. Most obviously, the use of GIS has become increasingly ubiquitous as a tool facilitating land-use planning, landscape architecture and building design, environmental assessment and management, the deployment of emergency services, spatially grounded academic research, and much more. GPS and online mapping sites such as Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth have fundamentally changed the way people obtain directions and find their way to their destinations. Other online mapping applications make it possible for anyone with a computer to contribute geographical information to databases (so-called “Volunteered Geographic Information,” or VGI6) – an activity that is helping to flesh out understandings of on-the-ground circumstances in remote places.
These developments point to another compelling justification for broad-based geographical education: it can help prepare people to understand the advantages and limitations of the geospatially infused technological environment of the twentyfirst century. To start with GIS, given its burgeoning use, the job opportunities for individuals with skills in this area are great; it is thus not surprising that they are taught in many programs other than geography. Yet the quality and utility of a GIS analysis are determined by the types of spatial data chosen for the analysis, the judgments made about the weight to be given to each data layer, and decisions about the resolution of the data that go into each layer. Under the circumstances, the outputs of GIS analysis are not simply representations of the “real world”; they are (as discussed in chapter 2) the product of ideas and judgments that need to be constantly examined and assessed.
Thinking constructively and critically about GIS – its advantages and limitations – requires a good understanding of spatial data and analysis, a critical perspective on spatial frameworks, and a sensitivity to the ways in which choice of scale can influence analytical outcomes. These are all hallmarks of a good geographical education. They can, of course, be taught outside the formal geography curriculum, but they rarely receive the same degree of attention and emphasis. GIS analyses typically result in maps that can facilitate understanding of processes and options. Unfortunately, many such maps are difficult to interpret and are visually unappealing. In the hands of people with training in cartography and map design (long-standing core components of the geography curriculum), however, they can be tremendously useful, even influential.
Plate 9 is a map offering a clear, evocative picture of wildlife corridors in Wyoming. Coming out of a collaboration between geographers and wildlife biologists, the map draws attention to areas that are critical to the long-term health and survival of an important species. The map has been widely circulated and it was featured in a high-profile video produced in conjunction with the Wyoming Wildlife Initiative.7 The map raised awareness of the importance of protecting wildlife corridors in the American West and it likely helped to lay the groundwork for one of the few pro-environment policies to come out of the early years of the Donald Trump administration in the United States: an Interior Department order calling for the study and preservation of habitat and migration corridors in Western states for big-game animals.8 The order specifically calls for wildlife protection strategies that build on prior state migration initiatives, and the Wyoming initiative, backed by visualizations such as the one shown in plate 9, was the most visible and far-reaching of these. GIS practitioners who understand how to produce effective geographical visualizations are in a much better position to have this kind of influence.
Turning to GPS and online mapping platforms, no year goes by without stories of people following routes on platforms such as Google Maps, only to find themselves stuck, lost, or worse. There’s the story from the United Kingdom of the Leicestershire woman who was driving to a christening some years ago and, after blindly following the prompt of her GPS, headed down a winding track and was swamped by a rising river. She managed to extricate herself from her expensive Mercedes, but her £96,000 automobile was lost.9 On a more mundane level, the tendency blindly to follow Google Maps can lead an unsuspecting London cyclist pedaling east-to-west on a wet evening to head down a narrow, poorly lit, often congested towpath because that route is highlighted owing to its attractiveness to tourists on pleasant weekend afternoons.
In the absence of geographical education, it is easy to think of maps simply as depictions of the truth rather than as representations of temporally specific information that are subject to mistakes, just like any other human-produced information product. Maps of various kinds are, hearteningly, much more prevalent than they were a generation ago because they are much easier to produce and manipulate in a computer environment. Yet their very ubiquity raises the stakes for geography education. Film studies programs sprang up when producing and watching films became more common. Computer studies programs blossomed in the wake of the personal computer revolution. With maps now so much more a part of daily life, there is clearly an imperative to generate more widespread appreciation for cartography – not only for its value in facilitating communication, but also for its role in sensitizing people to the choices and biases that go into map making (as discussed in chapter 2).
Geography education can also counter one of the downsides of the widespread current practice of using GPS to move around cities, towns, and the countryside. While useful, GPS focus attention solely on a route and not on the overall organization of the landscape and the place of a route within it. Most GPS outputs show nothing about topography and they reveal nothing about where a given destination may be situated in relation to other places of possible interest. They thus discourage consideration of the surrounding context.10 For all their geographical specificity, they can work against geographical understanding. Exposure to geography promotes awareness of these limitations and encourages efforts to overcome them (pulling out an old-fashioned road map, consulting an atlas, zooming out in an online environment, etc.).
In the wake of the development of online mapping platforms such as Wikimapia.org, MapAction.org, and OpenStreetMap.org, more and more non-professionals are contributing geographical information (VGI) that is filling important gaps in our understanding. Such efforts are already having a significant impact on disaster relief (helping emergency responders know where to go in the aftermath of earthquakes), humanitarian aid (providing information about refugee patterns of movement and places where aid packages are particularly needed), and public health monitoring (facilitating fast reporting of the precise location of disease outbreaks). The more people are exposed to geography and geospatial technologies, the more they are likely to want to contribute further to these kinds of efforts.
Despite these potentials of geospatial technologies, they also raise significant privacy questions. Most people with access to computer technology and credit cards leave a rich trail of geocoded information that allows government agencies and marketing firms to build vast databases of personal information. People can be tracked without their knowledge, they can be targets of advertising for unwanted products, and compromising information about their activity patterns can be used against them. Coming to grips with the consequences of this state of affairs – and designing encryption protocols that can reduce the risks of abuse – will require a better understanding of where the most significant threats to human privacy are found, and how geospatial technologies can be configured to protect sensitive information. Once again, the importance of geography education looms large, as it will take a range of people steeped in geographical ways of thinking and the workings of geospatial technologies to confront these issues.
Education serves many purposes, including imparting knowledge and skills that are needed to move society forward, enabling students to adapt to a world that will change during the course of their lifetimes, and bringing more meaning to people’s lives. Geography has important contributions to make to all of these ends. It offers people critical insights into the organization and character of the world around them, and it allows individuals to understand technologies that are affecting their lives. Geography yields insights that can help students of the discipline understand the changes unfolding around them and learn how to use tools for assessing and adapting to those changes. Moreover, it opens people’s eyes and minds to the richness and wonder of the surrounding world; it heightens awareness of – and by extension concern for – distinctive places and environments; and it fosters curiosity that is rewarding in its own right. Geography is, in short, a key to making sense of our increasingly connected, crowded, environmentally fragile, and rapidly changing world.