de Blij, Harm. Why Geography Matters--Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism.

• Author: Broad, David B.
• Position: Book review

de Blij, Harm. Why Geography Matters--Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, the Rise of China, and Global Terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 (originally published in hardcover in 2005). 320 pages. Paper, $16.95.

The importance of geography as a frame for viewing the universe of human experience and as an academic discipline is being rediscovered. This work makes the relevance of geographical viewing and thinking about the world come into compelling focus. The three challenges referred to in the title are brought into that focus by comparisons to how earlier crises have been created and met. These include pre-historical crises of climate change and sky-darkening volcanic eruptions as well as more recent catastrophes such as Vietnam and Iraq. The prehistoric climate events almost ended Homo sapiens' tentative evolutionary beginnings. Vietnam made Americans re-think the role of the United States in the world, and Iraq has shown them that they have more re-thinking to do.

De Blij recaps some of modern academe's best and worst practices concerning support of geographic education. Harvard offers no geography. Georgetown requires a one-credit "Map of the Modern World" course of all freshmen. He then cites several examples of why geography education is needed, noting that governments make misleading representations of borders, and political agendas often marginalize what is known about peoples, nations, and regions. Ignorance of both physical and cultural geography was at the heart of the U.S. blunder into Vietnam. Maps produced by the Iraq government in 1990 clearly labeled Kuwait as the nineteenth province of Iraq. In 1986, a book, Physical Geography of China, published in Beijing, clearly labeled as part of China what is currently the Indian State of Arunachal Pradesh. On the walls of classrooms in many Islamic societies today hang maps of the Islamic world which consist of every region that was ever under Islamic rule. As a "moderate" Muslim teacher told de Blij, "I remind myself daily of the humiliation we have suffered and the lands and peoples of God we have lost.... [T]his map is our inspiration, our minimum demand on the world" (p. 161).

Two chapters are wholly devoted to describing climate change in the context of geologic eras, periods, and epochs. Within that context, we are experiencing an approximately 50,000,000 year cooling, or glaciation. In the recent geological time since the waning of the Little Ice...