The Discipline of Geography
What is geography about?
What is geography about?
“Geography is a discipline concerned with understanding the spatial dimensions of environmental and social processes.” Gilbert F. White, Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change (2002).
“May a preselective bent toward geography be recognized before it asserts itself as deliberate election? The first, let me say most primitive and persistent trait, is liking maps and thinking by means of them. We are empty handed without them in lecture room, in study, in the field. Show me a geographer who does not need them constantly and want them about him, and I shall have my doubts as to whether he has made the right choice of life.” (Sauer 1956, 288-289)
1482 German map, still based on 2nd century AD work of Ptolemy
1640 German map
The European Age of Discovery
VICTORY The Norwegian party pitched a tent as near to the actual pole as they could calculate. December 14, 1911
Alexander Von Humboldt
1802
Humboldt’s (1807) illustration,
“Geography of plants in tropical countries: an image of nature on the Andes”
Voyage of HMS Beagle
1831-1836
Founding of Geographical Societies
1874 Prussian government establishes a chair in geography at every university
1887 First reader in Geography appointed at Oxford University in the United Kingdom
George Perkins Marsh
1801-1882
There are parts of Asia Minor, of Greece, even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the Earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the Moon… The Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant.
G.P. Marsh, Man and Nature (1864)
Friedrich Ratzel
1844-1904
Ellen Churchill Semple
1863-1932
“The northern peoples of Europe are energetic, provident, serious, thoughtful rather than emotional, cautious rather than impulsive. The southerners of the subtropical Mediterranean basin are easy-going, improvident except under pressing necessity, gay, emotional, imaginative, all qualities which among negroes of the equatorial belt degenerate into grave racial faults.” Influences of Geographical Environment, 1911: 620.
Environmental
Determinism
Possibilism
Paul Vidal la Blache
1845-1918
“However, John Glenn’s first footsteps on the moon show that there is still potential for traditional exploration; and perhaps, in this sense, space may indeed prove to be the ‘final frontier’.”
John A. Mathews and David T. Herbert (2008) Geography: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 20.
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