NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.
This report has been reviewed by a group other than the authors according to procedures approved by a Report Review Committee consisting of members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine.
Support for this study was provided by the Association of American Geographers, Environmental Systems Research Institute, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. SBR-9319015/R), U.S. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Rediscovering Geography: New Relevance for Science and Society is avallable from the National Academy Press, 2101 Constitution Ave., NW, Box 285, Washington, DC 20055 (1-800-624-6242; http://www.nap.edu).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rediscovering geography : new relevance for science and society / Rediscovering Geography Committee, Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, Commission on Geosciences, Environment, and Resources, National Research Council.
Cover art by Y. David Chung and James Lee.
The cover art represents the transformation from the traditional view of geography as a fact-based discipline to the one focused on the concerns of society and the scientific enterprise at large. The top image of an historical sea chart represents geography's long history and its roots in the discovery of facts about places. The middle image of a landscape and the bottom image of a crowded city scene represent the subject matter of modern geography: the environment and human society. The arrows represent geography's concerns with place and the flows of processes and phenomena between places. The dynamic globe represents the tools and techniques that have been developed by geographers and that are now being used in science, education, business, and government: geographic information systems, spatial analysis, and geographic visualization.
The crowded city scene is a detall from Mr. Chung's mural "Metropolitan Scene."
Y. David Chung is a graduate of the Corcoran School of Art and has exhibited widely throughout the country, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Copyright 1997 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
REDISCOVERING GEOGRAPHY COMMITTEE
THOMAS J. WILBANKS, Chair, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee
ROBERT McC. ADAMS, Smithsonian Institution, Emeritus, Basalt, Colorado
MARTHA E. CHURCH, Hood College, Emerita, Frederick, Maryland
WILLIAM A.V. CLARK, University of California, Los Angeles
ANTHONY R. DE SOUZA, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos
PATRICIA P. GILMARTIN, University of South Carolina, Columbia
WILLIAM L. GRAF, Arizona State University, Tempe
JAMES W. HARRINGTON, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
SALLY P. HORN, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
ROBERT W. KATES, Independent Scholar, Trenton, Maine
ALAN MACEACHREN, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park
ALEXANDER B. MURPHY, University of Oregon, Eugene
GERARD RUSHTON, University of Iowa, Iowa City
ERIC S. SHEPPARD, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
BILLIE LEE TURNER II, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts
CORT J. WILLMOTT, University of Delaware, Newark
Staff
KEVIN D. CROWLEY, Study Director
JENNIFER T. ESTEP, Administrative Assistant
SHELLEY A. MYERS, Project Assistant
BOARD ON EARTH SCIENCES AND RESOURCES
COMMISSION ON GEOSCIENCES, ENVIRONMENT,
AND RESOURCES
The discipline of geography has been undergoing a renaissance in the United States during the past decade. Geography's research focus on the study of human society and the environment through the perspectives of place, space, and scale is finding increased relevance in fields ranging from ecology to economics. At the same time, many of its research tools and analytical methods have moved from the research laboratory into the mainstream of science and business. Geography is undergoing a rebirth in education as well—it has become an organizing framework for presenting a wide variety of classroom subjects. It is recognized as an important subject in American schools, and enrollments in geography programs in American colleges and universities are increasing sharply to meet demands from employers for geographically literate students.
Rediscovering Geography: New Relevance for Science and Society is the first comprehensive assessment of geography in the United States in almost 30 years. It provides a broad overview of the discipline and shows how its perspectives and tools are being used by educators, business people, researchers, and policymakers to address a wide range of scientific problems and societal needs. It also provides recommendations for strengthening the discipline's intellectual and institutional foundations to meet growing demands for geography-based knowledge, education, and expertise. The report illustrates that good science and societally relevant science need not be mutually exclusive endeavors, and it enables us to see clearly the societal benefits of scientific research.
The National Research Council very much appreciates the support this study received from the Association of American Geographers, the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Bruce Alberts
Chairman
National Research Council
Any academic discipline is a means, not an end. It is a means for such intellectual ends as learning, knowing, and understanding. It is a means for such social ends as progress and problem solving. It is a means for such individual ends as opportunity and fulfillment. Sometimes, we get so caught up in a search for paradigms that perpetuate our disciplinary identities that we forget why it is that we are supported to do the jobs that we do. But we can expect to be reminded in coming years that, just as the U.S. federal government is rethinking functional subdivisions that date back many generations in preparing for a new century with limited resources, the academic world will also be rethinking how it is subdivided and whether new approaches might be better for reaching our collective ends.
In such a time of reflection and change, this report is about geography as a means rather than as an end. It is about subject matter, tools, and perspectives rather than about an academic discipline as such, directed mainly toward readers outside geography whose interest is more in what geography can offer to their concerns than in how geography thinks of itself.
The reason for carrying out this assessment at this particular time is a well-documented growing perception (external to geography as a discipline) that geography is useful, perhaps even necessary, in meedng certain societal needs. As a result, many parties concerned about the ends of academic science have been asking more from the information, techniques, and perspectives associated with geography than the nation's scientific and educational systems are delivering; and the gap between demand and supply may be widening. The most salient aspect of this demand is in education reform, especially in grades K- 12, where geography education is indeed expanding rapidly. An expansion in classroom instruction without a strong foundation in knowledge and skills, however, does not serve the ends of education well; and it is important to balance this one kind of response to external demands with an assessment of the knowledge base that undergirds it.
More generally, in fact, it makes sense to start seeking answers to the geography demand-supply gap by getting better informed about what geography as a scientific discipline is and does, both to understand the place of the disciplinary infrastructure in meeting broader needs and to understand some of the dimensions of the still inchoate questions arising externally. Furthermore, in struggling with relationships between transdisciplinary ends and disciplinary means, in this case where geography is concerned, the broader scientific and societal communities can advance the process of reconsidering the relevance of conventional academic disciplines as we all look toward the future.
With these objectives in mind, the Rediscovering Geography Committee was established in 1993 to perform a comprehensive assessment of the discipline of geography in the United States. The assessment is intended to convey to a wide range of readers, especially scientists and decision makers who are not geographers, the substance of geography as a subject—which is generally not well understood beyond a relatively small group of professional practitioners—and to identify ways to make the discipline more relevant to science, education, and decision making.
In performing its assessment the committee held five meetings during a period of about 12 months to gather information, debate the issues, and develop this report. The committee made a special effort to communicate with the geography community during the study and to solicit the advice of individual geographers. To this end, the committee published notices in the monthly newsletter of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), held special sessions at the 1994 and 1995 AAG annual meetings, and met with several groups of geographers who indicated concerns about the committee's deliberations. Although many geographers provided valuable input to our assessment, this report is a consensus document of the committee, and the committee is solely responsible for its content, conclusions, and recommendations.
On behalf of the committee, I would like to recognize the efforts of many individuals and organizations who contributed to the successful completion of this report. First of all, the committee would never have come into existence without the leadership of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geographical Union, and especially Melvin Marcus, its chair through 1992, who first identified the need for this reassessment given the mounting scientific and societal demands on geography as a discipline. Mel, Bill Turner, and Tony de Souza contributed to developing the project concept, and Reds Wolman, Julian Wolpert, and Ron Abler were instrumental in refining it and obtaining approval for the study to be carried out under the auspices of the National Research Council.
The committee's effort would not have been possible without generous financial support from a variety of agencies and organizations interested in both geography's ends and means. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Association of American Geographers, the Environmental Systems Research Institute, the National Geographic Society, an initial grant for planning purposes from the Governing Board of the National Research Council, the Anthropological and Geographic Sciences Program of the National Science Foundation, the Decennial Census Program of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics of the U.S. Department of Transportation, the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Mapping Division of the U.S. Geological Survey.
The committee also expresses its gratitude to the many geographers who provided advice and materials for the report, too numerous to list, to several colleagues who provided informal reviews of early drafts of selected chapters (Ron Abler, Brian Berry, Michael Dear, Rodney Erickson, Susan Hanson, and Joel Morrison), and to the anonymous reviewers enlisted by the National Research Council. We were assisted by the AAG Employment Forecasting Committee—Pat Gober (Chair), Amy Glasmeier, James Goodman, David Plane, Howard Stafford, and Joseph Wood—who, at the request of the committee and with the support of the AAG, produced materials on the employment trends in geography that appear in Appendix A. We are grateful to the AAG for its permission to include copies of journal articles by that committee in the appendix.
Finally, the committee and I thank the staff of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Research Council for its help in obtaining financial support for the study, facilitating the meedngs, and working closely with the committee to produce this report. In the early stages we were ably assisted by Bruce Hanshaw and Shelley Myers. In the latter stages of committee meetings and throughout the period of report preparation, we benefited from the superb administrative assistance of Jenny Estep, who was a model of professionalism, productivity, and grace under pressure. Most profoundly, we are indebted to Kevin Crowley, the study director. Kevin went far beyond the call of duty in contributing to the report intellectually as well as administratively, in improving its communication to audiences external to geography, and in caring about the quality of both the process and the product. We on the committee consider him a colleague and a friend in the fullest sense—and an honorary geographer who sometimes helped us to see things in our own messages that we ourselves had missed. His conscientious, diligent, and thoughtful participation reflects great credit on the National Research Council.
Thanks to you all, and my personal thanks to a fine committee who very quickiy overcame differences in subdisciplinary acculturation and personal self-interest to join together so effectively in a common enterprise. Every individual member made a significant contribution, and I believe that all of us were enriched by the opportunity to work together with such distinguished colleagues and interesting people. None of us is entirely happy with every detail that emerged from the consensus process, but the overall orientation of the report represents a unanimous judgment, and the report itself speaks for a strong consensus among a disparate group of strong-minded individualists, all of them experts in some part of geography's intellectual territory. We trust that our assessment will serve as a stimulus for a continuing discussion of the ends and means of geography, together with strategies for strengthening their connections, because we certainly do not consider it the last word.
Thomas J. Wilbanks, Chair
Rediscovering Geography Committee
In the past decade, concerns about "geographic illiteracy" have been the catalyst for a new focus on geography in the United States. Recent calls to "do something" about geographic illiteracy in this country can be traced to concerns about U.S. competitiveness in the global economy, combined with surveys that documented an astonishing degree of ignorance in the United States about the rest of the world. There is a growing public recognition that our national well-being is related to global markets and international political developments, to the continued prominence of environmental issues in social discourse, and to the emergence of computer and telecommunications technologies that emphasize graphic images such as maps and other spatial diagrams—all of which are associated in the public's mind with geography.
One result of this increased attention is a rediscovery of the importance of geography education in the United States. Geography is identified as a core subject for American schools, on a par with science and mathematics, in a series of recent policy statements and legislative proposals for national education reform. These include the report of the Charlottesville, Virginia, Summit convened by the 50 state governors and President Bush in October 1989; education reform plans of both the Bush and the Clinton administrations; and Goals 2000: The Educate America Act, passed by Congress in March 1994.
Geography has also been rediscovered by students. In the period 1986/1987 to 1993/1994, the number of undergraduate majors in geography grew by an estimated 47 percent nationwide and by 60 percent in Ph.D.-granting departments. Between 1985 and 1991, graduate program enrollments in geography grew by 33.4 percent, compared with a 15.3 percent increase in the social sciences and a 5.4 percent decrease in the environmental sciences.
This process of rediscovery has been mirrored in the research community as well. Research at the frontiers of fields as diverse as planning, economics, finance, social theory, epidemiology, anthropology, ecology, environmental history, conservation biology, and international relations has highlighted the importance of geographic perspectives. In particular, the importance of spatial perspectives—through such notions as place and scale—is being recognized in many fields, extending the influence of geography well beyond its relatively small group of professional practitioners.
The increased use of perspectives, knowledge, and techniques associated with a relatively small academic discipline raises several questions for the scientific community. Most directly, what is geography, and how does it connect with broad concerns of society and science? If geography is to play a more prominent role in education and decision making, do its scientific foundations need to be strengthened in order to support its expanded responsibilities?
With these questions in mind, the National Research Council established the Rediscovering Geography Committee to perform a comprehensive assessment of geography in the United States. The objectives of this assessment are:
1. to identify critical issues and constraints for the discipline of geography,
2. to clarify priorities for teaching and research,
3. to link developments in geography as a science with national needs for geography education,
4. to increase the appreciation of geography within the scientific community, and
5. to communicate with the international scientific community about future directions of the discipline in the United States.
In addressing these issues, this report focuses on broad national and global themes in science and society, geography's potential as a perspective and a body of knowledge to help address these themes, and constraints on geography's capability as an academic discipline to respond. As examples, it draws mainly on experience from within geography as a discipline, although valuable geographic work is done outside the discipline as well, because the committee was comprised very largely of professional geographers. Where possible, however, the examples are selected to illustrate the interconnectedness between disciplines that characterizes so much geographic investigation and facilitates the flow of ideas, concepts, and techniques across disciplinary boundaries.
THE PERSPECTIVES, SUBJECT MATTER, AND
TECHNIQUES OF GEOGRAPHY
To most Americans, geography is about place names. Concerns about geo graphic ignorance usually focus on people's inability to locate cities, countries, and rivers on a world map, and geographic instruction is often equated with conveying information about remote parts of the world. From this perspective it may be a surprise to some that the discipline of geography has a great deal to say about many of the critical issues facing society in the late twentieth century.
Geographers are engaged in valuable research and teaching on matters ranging from environmental change to social conflict (see Chapter 2). The value of these activities derives from the discipline's focus on the evolving character and organization of the Earth's surface; on the ways in which interactions of physical and human phenomena in space combine to create regions with distinctive natural and (or) social characteristics, or places; and on the influences those places have on a wide range of natural and human events and processes. Such concerns are not simply exercises in expanding the encyclopedic knowledge of faraway places; they go to the heart of some of the most urgent questions before decision makers today.
A central tenet of geography is that "location matters" for understanding a wide variety of processes and phenomena. Indeed, geography's focus on location provides a cross-cutting way of looking at processes and phenomena that other disciplines tend to treat in isolation. Geographers focus on "real-world" relationships and dependencies among the phenomena and processes that give character to a place. Geographers also seek to understand relationships among places: for example, the flows of peoples, goods, and ideas that reinforce differentiation or enhance similarities. In other words, geographers study both the "vertical" integration of characteristics that define place and the "horizontal" connections between places. Geographers also focus on the importance of scale (in both space and time) in these relationships. The study of these relationships has enabled geographers to pay attention to complexities of places and processes that are frequently treated in the abstract, if at all, by other disciplines.
Geography's perspectives are supported by a body of distinctive techniques for observation, such as field exploration, remote sensing, and spatial sampling, and for the analysis and display of geographic data, such as cartography, visualization, spatial statistics, and geographic information systems (GISs; see Chapter 4). These techniques are shared with other disciplines, but geography has contributed fundamentally to their development and improved application.
The traditional tool in geography for the display of spatially referenced information is the map. To many, the term "map" connotes a fixed, two-dimensional paper product containing point, line, and areal data. During the past generation, however, advances in data collection, storage, analysis, and display have made this traditional view obsolete. The modern map is a dynamic and multidimensional product that exists in digital form, opening up new areas of research and application for geographic investigation. This research has led to the development of GISs, which, along with techniques for geographic visualization and methods of spatial analysis, facilitate an increasingly complex and contextual understanding of the world. Current research in GISs is expanding the technique to incorporate more advanced geographic concepts and analysis methods.
GEOGRAPHY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCIENTIFIC
UNDERSTANDING AND DECISION MAKING
Geography offers significant insights into some of the major questions facing both the pure and applied sciences. In addition, as society itself is recognizing, many of the major questions facing society at the local, national, and international scales have very important geographic dimensions.
Geography's traditional interest in integrating phenomena and processes in particular places, for example, has a new relevance in science today, in connection with the search for what some have called a "science of complexity." In its explorations as a science of flows, geography has been a leader in understanding spatial interactions, a subject of broad interest to both science and society. Moreover, geography's long-standing concern with interdependencies among scales is relevant to discussions across the body of science of relationships between microscale (small or local) and macroscale (large or global) phenomena and processes (see Chapter 5).
Geographic perspectives and techniques have found important applications in decision making in both the private and the public sectors, especially as global economic and environmental issues and modern information technologies have grown in importance. Geographers have made significant contributions to decision making at local, regional, and global scales for a wide variety of issues—for example, management of hazards, understanding global environmental and economic changes and their interactions with local changes, and developing effective business strategies (see Chapter 6).
STRENGTHENING GEOGRAPHY'S FOUNDATIONS
The ability of geographers to respond to the growing demand for its skills and perspectives is limited by several realities (see Chapter 7). Despite three decades of growth in the number of professional geographers, the geography community remains small relative to most other natural and social science disciplines. Few colleges and universities have large geography departments, and many institutions of higher learning have no geography programs at all, including some of the nation's leading universities. This situation is extraordinary by world standards because geography is a core subject in most universities in Europe and East Asia. Additionally, women and minorities are underrepresented in senior academic and professional positions relative to their numbers in the general population, and, at present, few minorities are entering the field. This small human and programmatic base will make it difficult for the discipline to respond effectively to increased demands for attention—demands that are likely to increase still further in the years ahead, especially in education.
Realizing geography's potential requires more than addressing the problems presented by the discipline's small size and limited diversity, however. In several critical subject areas, geography's intellectual foundations need to be strengthened to ensure that its contributions to science and society are solidly grounded. The discipline needs to strengthen its understanding of complex systems;1 interactions between scales; interactions between society and nature; and geographic learning, including the effectiveness of interactive learning tools on geographic education. At least as important, the appreciation and use of geography by nongeographers need to be fostered, so that the capacity to make use of the discipline's perspectives, knowledge, and techniques grows along with the capacity of the discipline to supply them. This includes enhancing the geographic competency of the general population and fostering better geographic training in colleges and universities.
Filling these gaps will require external support of types and at levels beyond those that have been characteristic in the past, in a setting where conventional sources of support will be constrained by external circumstances. Looking toward the next century, it seems clear that realizing geography's potentials will require innovative new partnerships between provider and user, supported and supporter, one science and another, and basic research and applications of knowledge.
If geography as a discipline can be a pathfinder in developing and fulfilling such partnerships, it can play a significant role in realizing its potential, without depending entirely on external action. But in doing so the discipline faces its own internal challenges. In order to respond to external demands and to gain additional external support, the discipline needs to place increased emphasis on such traditional strengths as integration in place, field observation, and foreign field research, as well as geography education as a challenge for research and practice. It also needs to promote more professional interactions with other scientific disciplines and with users of geographic knowledge in government and business at all levels. And it needs to enhance not only its diversity as a discipline but also its appreciation for diversity.
The Rediscovering Geography Committee has concluded that a number of internal and external actions are needed to strengthen the discipline and thereby increase its contributions to science and society in the United States in the coming decades. Chapter 8 lists the full set of conclusions. The committee's 11 recommendations are divided into three categories oriented toward the external audiences of this report, including one recommendation about the process of implementing the previous 10:
To improve geographic understanding:
1. Increased research attention should be given to certain core methodological and conceptual issues in geography that are especially relevant to society's concerns.
2. More emphasis should be placed on priority-driven, cross-cutting projects.
3. Increased emphasis should be given to research that improves the understanding of geographic literacy, learning, and problem solving and the roles of geographic information in education and decision making, including interactive learning strategies and spatial decision support systems.
To improve geographic literacy:
4. Geography education standards and other guidelines for improved geography education in the schools should be examined to identify subjects where geography's current knowledge base needs strengthening.
5. A significant national program should be established to improve the geographic competence of the U.S. general population as well as of leaders in business, government, and nongovernmental interest groups at all levels.
6. Linkages should be strengthened between academic geography and users of its research.
To strengthen geographic institutions:
7. A high priority should be placed on increasing professional interactions between geographers and colleagues in other sciences.
8. A specific effort should be made to identify and address disparities between the growing demands on geography as a subject and the current capabilities of geography to respond as a scientific discipline.
9. A specific effort should be made to identify and examine needs and opportunities for professional geography to focus its research and teaching on certain specific problems or niches, given limitations on the human and financial resources of the discipline.
10. University and college administrators should alter reward structures for academic geographers to encourage, recognize, and reinforce certain categories of professional activity that are sometimes underrated.
To encourage implementation of these recommendations:
11. Geographic and related organizations—especially the Association of American Geographers, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, and the National Research Council—should work together to develop and execute a plan to implement the recommendations in this report.