1.1: A Short History of Geography

Geography is sometimes called the “mother of all disciplines” because it has been around for so long. Although the discipline has undergone major changes in the last few decades, most people still have very old-fashioned ideas about geography. Those old-fashioned ideas still dominate much K-12 instruction in Geography and are partly a result of the tumultuous history of Geography.

Ancient Greek and Chinese scholars wrote massive “geographies” that defined the discipline for centuries. Until the 1800s, most “geographers” spent much of their time writing highly descriptive or idiographic narratives about various regions of the world. Descriptive geographies are interesting for those who have a healthy intellectual curiosity about the people, places, and cultures of the world, and descriptive geographies proved immeasurably valuable to imperialists, colonizers, and military planners. Unfortunately, in the context of schooling, descriptive geographies often tend to degenerate into an encyclopedic list of facts about a region or location.

Environmental Determinism

As the methodologies of science, and indeed social science, evolved during the 19th century, the production of mere descriptions of regions and locations fell short of what geographers (and others) thought worthy of true scholarship. Some geographers tried to make the discipline more scientific by seeking to identify and describe causal connections between group behaviors and local environmental conditions. In other words, they sought to understand the cause-and-effect relationship between culture and the physical environment. This type of geography became known as environmental determinism. Environmental determinists sought to demonstrate how local conditions like climate, topography and soil characteristics were key determinants, or causes, behind the evolution of local or regional cultural practices. Perhaps not surprisingly, many environmental determinist scholars found that their culture group (i.e. Europeans) were products of ideal environmental conditions. Environmental determinists argued that the most advanced societies developed where favorable environmental conditions existed, i.e. North America, Europe. According to their logic, locations that were too hot, too cold, too rainy, too dry, etc., produced inferior societies and inferior people. For example, Ellen Churchill Semple wrote in 1911, "among mountain as among desert peoples, robbery tends to become a virtue; environment dictates their ethical code". The bigotry implicit and explicit in environmental determinism is clearer today than it was 100 years ago. Despite an inability to prove scientifically their theories, a few geographers, like Semple and Ellsworth Huntington commanded large audiences in the early 20^th century.

Figure 1-2: Map - An environmental determinist's map of "health and human energy" based on climatic predictors. Very high scores were assigned to mid-latitude climates (Europe, US) low scores to tropical and equatorial climates.

Source: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia.

Although many academic geographers forcefully rejected the ideas and concepts advanced by environmental determinists, it wasn’t really until World War II that a solid majority of people understood the horrifying implications that this brand of pseudo-scientific scholarship had upon the eugenics movement and the evolution of Fascism. Geography’s deep involvement with Environmental Determinism tainted the reputation of the discipline for decades.

Paradigm Wars – 1950-1990

The reaction to Environmental Determinism by a significant number of geographers was to turn away from scientific methods so ill-used by the Environmental Determinists. Some called for a return to the descriptive or ideographic geography of the past. Today, this type of geography is largely represented by an approach known as regional geography, and it remains the dominant version of geography taught at the K-12 level. Done well, regional geography can be an exciting and intellectually stimulating exercise capable of providing a pathway to understanding the unique dynamics within regions, why various locations on earth differ from other places, and why many places have similarities. Unfortunately, regional geography in classroom settings often degrades into a “forced march” of endless memorization of facts about far-off locations. Most K-12 school curricula and many introductory college courses fall into this trap. Students in regional style courses often learn little about why places have become unique because poorly designed curricula fail to focus student attention on the processes driving the creation or evolution of regions. The dominance of the regional approach has generated the false, but the popular perception of geography as trivia, especially in America. In Europe, geography did not fall into that trap.

By the 1960s, Geography Departments were facing elimination from many college campuses. As a result, many geographers began adopting legitimate scientific methodologies via spatial statistics during a period known today as the quantitative revolution, a major paradigm shift that continues to accelerate today, especially among users of Geographic Information Systems (GIS –see below). Today, most geographers seek to discover generalizable patterns, or even laws, that describe or govern society. This is the nomothetic approach. Coupled with accompanying revolutions in our ability to collect, store, manipulate and analyze spatial data, geographers today are engaged in complex, high-tech research on a wide array of pressing issues often using so-called “big data”.

Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating rapidly in the 1990s, geographers also occupied leading rolesin a thrilling expansion of spatially informed theoretical approaches attempting to explain how the world works. Important, economic, political and cultural theorists emerged from among the ranks of geography departments in the UK and the US, playing important roles in an overall flowering of critical geography, during a period known as the cultural turn within geography. Many geographers today focus squarely on the complex, often subtle, mechanics that regulate the production and maintenance of knowledge itself, which is in some ways the final frontier of social science. Critical geographers work to uncover how and why societies and individuals believe what they do, and how those beliefs are manufactured, manipulated, distorted, maintained, subverted, appropriated or eliminated.

Today, geography is a very vibrant discipline offering to the uninitiated, a surprising number of avenues to understand the world, as well as multiple pathways to high-paying jobs in the public and private sectors. Geographers make a difference in the world.