Week 2 Readings

All of these articles opened my eyes a bit to how geography is more than studying between lines drawn on a map. Geography is multifaceted and vast, with everything from forests, to the way we eat, to how we define those map lines, and even to where the prettiest girls are located!

I greatly appreciate Zelinsky’s study, which very perceptively documents and categorizes the culture of an area, providing quantitative values to qualitative features. While reading this article, I couldn’t help but be astounded at how much on-site research he must have done to come up with his conclusions, and I still can’t imagine how he could possibly cover all that area with firsthand observation! This must have taken years of travel and documentation, even when considering his extensive library research and such. I agree with Pierce Lewis that Wilbur deserves to be an icon for this very reason; the breadth of this work is astounding. Ketchell, too, seems to deserve such praise for his tireless hands-on approach to geography and other problems he perceived. This is a lesson for me, since I generally pick topics to write about for which I can easily find answers in the library or on the internet. I should be more willing to put foot to pavement.

In particular, I was especially taken aback when Zelinsky said, “There are places where the line could be literally marked on the ground, so sudden is the transition.” How could there be such little mingling of the cultures in such close proximity of each other? I wonder how much of what he is describing has been lost or transformed because of the surging abundance of television and movies and the diminishing of segregation since he wrote it.

I think “Regions on the mind does not equal regions of the mind” by John Agnew is convolutedly written to torment its readers. I know he had grand intentions, and I did pull out some interesting and important ideas, but overall, the substance is lost in its transmission. I didn’t agree, or perhaps I just didn’t understand, when he wrote, “with the weakening of the binary east/west with the end of the cold war a much more fragmented world geography is in the ascendancy.” It sounded as if he were blaming all the fragmented world geography on the fall of communism as if the world was not an agglomeration before its fall. I believe that the world’s geography has always been fragmented and “a multiform world of diaspora, displacement, movement and flows” as he puts it. Lumping cultures and countries into one political system (i.e. communism) didn’t demolish that.

The three book reviews and The Professional Geographer highlight man’s interaction with and effect on the physical environment as they are dealt with in the respective books. In particular, they highlight the balance between man needing the earth’s resources (and thereby consuming them) and preserving them. “Deforesting” says, “Conflicts between conservation and local access have a familiar ring today, though the actors are wildlife biologists rather than nobles, and the setting is largely in the tropics,” and “Traces” mentions, “the persistent coupling of the utilitarian with the rational in Western thinking.” I believe this is a crucial matter for geographers to take in hand, as populations grow and consume, in the hope of finding solutions that bring balance between preserving the environment and providing for the humans living in it. Organizations like the Sierra Club, although well-meaning, are creating and implementing agendas that ignore the needs of the people. On the other side, and thankfully, attitudes like those “castigated” by Mumford, “that the earth’s wealth exists solely for the economic man” are on the decrease compared to previous centuries. “Obsessed with Nutrition” shows how one author is providing one such practical solution, albeit a drop in the figurative bucket. How can such a balance be found? Perhaps through the geographer’s perceptive eye…if as effective and perceptive and thorough as Wilbur’s!