Geography is the scientific study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on
Earth. The word derives from the Greek words γη or γεια ("Earth") and
γραφειν ("to write," as in "to describe").
Geography is also the title of various historical books on this subject, notably the Geographia by Klaudios Ptolemaios (2nd century).
Geography is much more than cartography, the study of maps, nor is it the study of 'capes and bays'. It not only investigates what is where on the Earth, but also why
it's there and not somewhere else, sometimes referred to as "location in space." It studies this whether the cause is natural or
human. It also studies the consequences of those differences.
As William Hughes - who taught the geography of the Holy Lands to divinity students at King's College London - put it in an address in 1863: "Mere place names are not geography.
To know by heart a whole gazeteer full of them would not, in itself, constitute anyone a geographer. Geography has higher aims
than this: it seeks to classify phenomena (alike of the natural and of the politcal world insofar as it treats of the latter) to
compare, to generalise, to ascend from effects to causes and in doing so to trace out the great laws of nature and to mark their
influence upon man. In a word, geography is a science, a thing not of mere names, but of argument and reason, of cause and
effect."
History of geography
The Greeks are the first known culture to actively explore geography
as a science and philosophy, with
major contributors including Thales of Miletus, Herodotus, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Aristotle, Dicaearchus of Messana, Strabo, and Ptolemy. Mapping by the Romans as they explored new lands
added new techniques. One technique was the periplus, a description of the ports
and landfalls a coastwise sailor would find along a coastline; two early examples that have survived are the periplus of the
Carthaginian Hanno the Navigator and a Periplus of the
Erythraean sea, which describes the coastlines of the Red Sea and the Persian gulf.
During the Middle Ages, Arabs such
as Idrisi, Ibn Battuta, and
Ibn Khaldun maintained the Greek and Roman techniques and developed new
ones.
Following the journeys of Marco Polo, interest in geography spread
throughout Europe. The great voyages of exploration in 16th and 17th centuries revived a desire for both
accurate geographic detail, and more solid theoretical foundations. The Geographia Generalis by Bernhardus Varenius and
Gerardus Mercator's world map are prime examples of the new breed
of scientific geography.
By the 18th century, geography had become recognized as a discrete
discipline and became part of a typical university curriculum in Europe (especially Paris and Berlin), although not the in the United Kingdom
where geography was generally taught as a sub-discipline of other subjects.
One of the great works of this time was Kosmos: a sketch of a physical description of the Universe, by Alexander von Humboldt, the first volume of which was published
in 1845. Such was the power of this work that Dr Mary Somerville, of Cambridge University intended to scrap publication of her own
Physical Geography on reading Kosmos. Von Humboldt himself persuaded her to publish (after the publisher sent him a
copy).
Over the past two centuries the quantity of knowledge and the number of tools has exploded. There are strong links between
geography and the sciences of geology and botany, as well as economics, sociology and demographics.
The Royal Geographical Society was founded
in England in 1830, although the United Kingdom
did not get its first full Chair of geography until 1917. The first real geographical
intellect to emerge in United Kingdom geography was Halford John Mackinder, appointed reader at Oxford University in 1887.
The National Geographic Society was
founded in the USA in 1888 and began publication of the
National Geographic magazine which became and continues to be a great popularizer of geographic information. The society
has long supported geographic research and education.
In the West during the 20th century, the discipline of geography went
through four major phases: environmental
determinism, regional geography, the quantitative
revolution, and critical geography.
Environmental determinism is the theory that a peoples physical, mental and moral habits are directly due to the influence of
their natural environment. Prominent environmental
determinists included Carl Ritter, Ellen Churchill
Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington. Popular hypotheses
included "heat makes inhabitants of the tropics lazy" and "frequent changes in barometric pressure make inhabitants of temperate
latitudes more intellectually agile." Environmental determinist geographers attempted to make the study of such influences
scientific. Around the 1930s, this school of thought was widely repudiated as lacking any basis and being prone to (often
bigoted) generalizations. Environmental determinism remains an embarrassment to many contemporary geographers, and leads to
skepticism among many of them of claims of environmental influence on culture (such as the theories of Jared Diamond).
Regional geography represented a reaffirmation that the proper topic of geography was space and place. Regional geographers
focused on the collection of descriptive information about places, as well as the proper methods for dividing the earth up into
regions. The philosophical basis of this field was laid out by Richard Hartshorne.
The quantitative revolution was geography's attempt to redefine itself as a science, in the wake of the revival of interest in
science following the launch of Sputnik. Quantitative revolutionaries, often referred to as "space cadets," declared that the
purpose of geography was to test general laws about the spatial arrangement of phenomena. They adopted the philosophy of positivism from the natural sciences and turned to mathematics—especially statistics—as a way of
proving hypotheses. The quantitative revolution laid the groundwork for the development of geographic information systems.
Though positivist and post-positivist approaches remain important in geography, critical geography arose as a critique of
positivism. The first strain of critical geography to emerge was humanist geography. Drawing on the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology, humanist geographers (such as Yi-Fu Tuan) focused on people's sense of, and relationship with,
places. More influential was Marxist geography, which applied the social theories of Karl Marx and his followers to geographic phenomena. David Harvey and Richard Peet are well-known Marxist
geographers. Feminist geography is, as the name suggests, the use of ideas from feminism in geographic contexts. The most recent strain of critical geography is postmodernist geography, which
employs the ideas of postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists to explore the social construction of spatial relations.
Methods
Spatial interrelationships are key to this synoptic science, and it uses maps as a key tool. Classical cartography has been joined by the more modern approach to geographical analysis,
computer-based geographic information
systems (GIS).
Geographers use four interrelated approaches:
- Systematic - Groups geographical knowledge into categories that can be explored globally
- Regional - Examines systematic relationships between categories for a specific region or location on the planet.
- Descriptive - Simply specifies the locations of features and populations.
- Analytical - Asks why we find features and populations in a specific geographic area.
Branches
Physical geography
This branch focuses on Geography as an Earth science, making use of
biology to understand global flora and fauna patterns, and mathematics and physics to understand the motion of the earth and
relationship with other bodies in the solar system. It also includes
landscape ecology and environmental geography.
Related Topics: atmosphere -- archipelago -- continent -- desert -- island -- landform
-- ocean -- sea -- river -- lake -- ecology --
climate -- soil -- geomorphology -- biogeography - Timeline of geography, paleontology -- palaeogeography -- hydrology
Human geography
Human geography, including economic, political and cultural geography, also called anthropogeography,
focuses on the social science, non-physical aspects of the way the
world is arranged. It examines how humans adapt themselves to the land and to other people, and in macroscopic transformations
they enact on the world. It can be divided into the following broad categories: economic geography, political geography, social geography
(including urban geography), cultural geography, feminist geography,
strategic geography and military geography.
Related Topics: Countries of the world -- country -- nation -- state -- personal union -- province -- county -- city --
municipality
Human-environment geography
During the time of environmental determinism, geography was defined not as the study of spatial relationships, but as the
study of how humans and the natural environment interact. Though environmental determinism has died out, there remains a strong
tradition of geographers addressing the relationships between people and nature. There are two main subfields of
human-environment geography: cultural and political ecology (CAPE), and risk-hazards research.
Cultural and political ecology
Cultural ecology grew out of the work of Carl Sauer in geography and a
similar school of thought in anthropology. It examined how human societies
adapt themselves to the natural environment. Sustainability science has
been one important outgrowth of this tradition. Political ecology arose when some geographers used aspects of critical geography to look at
relations of power and how they affect people's use of the environment. For example, an influential study by Michael Watts argued that famines in the Sahel are caused by the changes in the region's political and economic system as a result of
colonialism and the spread of capitalism..
Risk-hazards research
Research on hazards began with the work of geographer Gilbert F. White, who sought to understand why people live in disaster-prone floodplains.
Since then, the hazards field has expanded to become a multidisciplinary field examining both natural hazards (such as earthquakes) and technological hazards (such as nuclear reactor meltdowns). Geographers studying hazards are interested in both the dynamics of the hazard
event and how people and societies deal with it.
Historical geography
This branch seeks to determine how cultural features of the multifarious societies across the planet evolved and came into
being. Study of the landscape is one of many key foci in this field - much can be
deduced about earlier societies from their impact on their local environment and surroundings.
- What's in a name? Historical geography and the Berkeley School
"Historical Geography" can indeed refer to the reciprocal effects of geography and history on each other. But in the United
States, it has a more specialized meaning: This is the name given by Carl
Ortwin Sauer of the University of California, Berkeley to his program of reorganizing cultural geography
(some say all geography) along regional lines, beginning in the first decades of the 20th Century.
To Sauer, a landscape and the cultures in it could only be understood if all of its influences through history were taken into
account: Physical, cultural, economic, political, environmental. Sauer stressed regional
specialization as the only means of gaining expertise on regions of the world.
Sauer's philosophy was the principal shaper of American geographic thought in the mid-20th century. Regional specialists
remain in academic geography departments to this day. But many geographers feel that it harmed the discipline in the long run:
Too much effort was spent on data collection and classification, and too little on analysis and explanation. Studies became more
and more area specific as later geographers struggled to find places to make names for themselves. This probably led in turn to
the 1950s
crisis in Geography which nearly destroyed it as an academic discipline.
Geographic Information Science
The science behind Geographic Information
Systems (GIS).
Geographic techniques
- Cartography studies the representation of the Earth's surface with
abstract symbols. It can be said, without much controversy, that cartography is the seed from which the larger field of Geography
grew. Most geographers will cite a childhood fascination with maps as an early sign they would end up in the field. Although
other subdisciplines of geography rely on maps for presenting their analyses, the actual making of maps is abstract enough to be
regarded separately.
Cartography has grown from a collection of drafting techniques into an actual science. Cartographers must learn cognitive psychology and ergonomics to understand which symbols
convey information about the Earth most effectively, and behavioral psychology to induce the readers of their maps to act on the information. They must learn
geodesy and fairly advanced mathematics to understand how the shape of the Earth affects the distortion of map symbols projected onto a
flat surface for viewing.
- Geographic Information Systems
deals with the storage of information about the Earth for automatic retrieval by a computer, in an accurate manner appropriate to
the information's purpose. In addition to all of the other subdisciplines of geography, GIS specialists must understand computer science and database
systems. GIS has so revolutionized the field of cartography that nearly all mapmaking is now done with the assistance of some
form of GIS software.
- Geographic quantitative methods deal with numerical methods peculiar to (or at least most commonly found in)
geography. In addition to spatial analyses, you are likely to find things like cluster analysis, discriminant analysis, and non-parametric statistical tests in geographic studies.
Related fields
Urban and regional planning
Urban planning and regional planning use the science of geography to assist in determining how to develop (or not develop)
the land to meet particular criteria, such as safety, beauty, economic opportunities, the preservation of the built or natural
heritage, etcetera. The planning of towns, cities and rural areas may be seen as applied geography although it also draws heavily
upon the arts, the sciences and lessons of history. Some of the issues facing planning are considered briefly under the headings
of rural exodus, urban
exodus and Smart Growth.
Regional science
In the 1950s the regional
science movement arose, led by Walter Isard to provide a more quantitative and analytical base to geographical questions, in contrast to the
more qualitative tendencies of traditional geography programs. Regional Science comprises the body of knowledge in which the
spatial dimension plays a fundamental role, such as regional economics, resource
management, location
theory, urban and regional planning, transport and communication, human
geography, population distribution, landscape
ecology, and environmental quality.
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