and drink, the vehicles we use for transportation, even the clothing we wear all come
to us from “out there.” A failure to appreciate this diminishes us both intellectually
and culturally.
There are, of course, other reasons that Americans are not as aware of geogra-
phy as they should be. For a considerable time, several decades at least, geography
as an independent subject almost disappeared from the curricula of American
schools. Exactly why and how this happened is a matter of some discussion and
debate among geographers, but the effect was to fold the study of geography into
the study of history, civics, or some other discipline, where in fact it often was
ignored, or at least minimized in importance. This coincided with a decline in
the field at the university level starting in the 1940s and extending into the
1980s, when colleges and universities, some of which had traditionally supported
quite vigorous programs in geography, collapsed those programs and departments
into other related disciplines.
Fortunately, this trend abated in the late 1980s, and since that time, due to the
efforts of the professional organizations in the field, scholars and teachers at all
levels and many legislators and policymakers, geography has experienced an aca-
demic resurrection of sorts. Occasionally today an unenlightened administrator
will question the need for geography in his or her curricula, but these incidents
have become relatively rare. However, the need for information and understanding
of the way the world is organized and functions is so compelling to most that it is
no longer a matter of whether geography should be studied, but rather a question
of how to motivate students to learn as much geography as possible, and why this
is important to their future success.
The discipline of geography is distinguished by its emphasis on observation and
analysis in a spatial context. Any phenomenon that is expressed through the
dimension of space, therefore, may be and probably has been examined by a geo-
grapher. Yet there are new areas of study emerging every day for scholars, making
the study of geography quite broad and inclusive. The result is that geographers
typically have close ties to many other fields of inquiry, not only in the social sci-
ences, but in the humanities and natural sciences as well. In addition, many geo-
graphers specialize in one or more of the techniques that are used when analyzing
geographical data or information. In recent years these have become quite sophis-
ticated, using computer data bases containing layers of spatial information to con-
duct quite complex studies of multiple phenomena. In general, geographers may
be placed in one of two categories: physical geography or human geography.
Physical geographers concentrate on “natural” patterns—the distribution of veg-
etation, landforms, climate types, etc., while human geographers are concerned
with systems and distributions created by human activity. The latter may include
religions and languages, economic systems, the spatial expression of politicalxviii Introduction