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Geography is the study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on
Earth. The word derives from the Greek words gê ("the Earth") and graphein ("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. 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.
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 built on and maintained the Greek and Roman learnings. Following
the journeys of Marco Polo, interest in geography spread throughout Europe. During the Renaissance and into the
16th and 17th
centuries the great voyages of exploration revived a desire for solid theoretical foundations and accurate detail. The
Geographia
Generalis by Bernhardus Varenius and Gerardus
Mercator's world map are prime examples.
By the 18th century, geography had become recognized as a discrete
discipline and became part of a typical university curriculum. 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.
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 characteristics of people and cultures are due to the influence of the 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
Human geography
The human, or political/cultural, branch of 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 (including geopolitics),
social geography (including urban geography), feminist 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 1950's crisis in Geography which nearly destroyed it as an academic discipline.
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, transportation and communication, human geography, population
distribution, landscape ecology and environmental quality
External Links
See also
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