Oregon Geographic Alliance Meeting Eugene, Oregon
March 29, 1988
Geographic Fundamentals
Every time I am ask to speak I have a good excuse to give some special thought to some ideas that have been of concern to me. The concern that came to me when Joe Searl asked me to talk tonight was “What is it about Geography that I find so integrative and allows me to feel whole about whatever I apply it to?” I started out with the five major geographic themes that GENIP identified as being essential to all levels of geographic education: Location; place; relationships within places; movement among places; and regions. I like these five themes because they (in slightly different words) have formed the basis of most of what attracted me to Geography and what I have tried to teach my students these last 25 years or so. But as usual with the way I think, I had to see these as the parts of something larger: GEOGRAPHY. And then the question became what is the context that is geography which is made up of the five parts identified by the Geographic educators. (Everything has parts and all parts have a context that give them form. Geography is made up of five parts and is those parts context.)
Well after trying and rejecting as unsatisfactory several versions of what I might talk about, I realized that what unifies these themes (and geography–and history as well) is the concept of an event. An event is “that which occupies a restricted portion of four dimensional space time.” It is also an occurrence to which we attach some importance. The reason I can use this term or concept is that it combines location in space and time with an humanly important happening. And Geography and History (whether natural or human) are made up of events. The five themes of geography simply specify the way in which we look at events.
- The first theme–location on the surface of the earth simply answers the perennial question of “where.” It is shown to be important by our use of roadmaps; of Greenwich Mean time and the International Dateline; or of our concern for positions such as at the end of the valley or at the junction of the McKenzie and the Willamette River. Location is simply a way of identifying an event–a way of stopping time and space so that we may consider it further.
Geographic sites–another term for locations–are largely determined by the scale of human mobility. The scale at which we geographers are most interested is not that of the ant or the house at one extreme or of the stars and outer space at the other, but that of the ends of our journeys or daily movements–locations at which we humans stop to perform our basic activities. We identify particular physical features–buildings, towns, farms, mountains, rivers, or more abstractly, longitude and latitude or in relation to astronomical bodies. The location is a description of a stopping point which we consider the site of an important event.
How do I get a fundamental sense of location? I make a map of my life pathways at various scales. Lifelong it reaches back to at least my grandparents and parents and to their important stopping points–to Scotland, to Kansas, to Missouri and Nevada, to Gilliam and Sherman Counties Oregon and to Montavilla, Mt. Tabor in Portland. And in my own younger life to Corvallis, to Berkeley, Eugene and Vermont. In the local shorter timescale my geographic mobility is from home to university to store to Pacific Nautilus to the Flea Market to the bike path to the Glenwood Cafe to the L and L Market with more occasional paths to the mountains, to Portland, to the coast, to Seattle, to San Francisco, and even more unusual journeys to Europe, to Africa, or to some vacation spot, to some conference site (and within each of those journeys there resides other eventful stopping sites.) I recommend mapping some of these journeys to see how location is important to you. It shows you how geographic location limits as well as expands the number and character of events that you can experience.
Another sense of location comes to me when I map or think about the pathways of events that come together to form a place. Imagine a town–Eugene–and think of how you can locate it in space: Latitude and Longitude; in relation to specific landforms; in relation to particular buildings or structures (on Highway 99 at the Willamette River or on I-5 118 miles south of Portland); or institutions (the site of the Unversity of Oregon); or of people ( the
concentrated population cluster in the southern Willamette valley) etc. Here I consider the site simply as a reference point for relating the occurrence of many events.
2. The second geographic theme–Place–is the site at which many significant events occur. Remember that events are happenings located in 4 dimmensions–3 of space and 1 of time. I view places as the environments of humans. Each human scribes an unique pathway (series of locations of events) along which he or she crosses an infinite number of other pathways. All of these other pathways have their own links to the past and to other places and they will lead to the future and yet other places. Thus the identity of the location where many pathways cross is important. These identified crossings are what I call places. But the metaphor of a pathway is used to connote the linking of one place with another along the pathway. In other words, places are situated in relation to other places. Places are not simply locations but are situated in a web of pathways and are linked to other chains of events. The old geographic term for this idea is situation.
This lecture room is a place–not merely a location of an event–because it is filled with chains of events of all of us as well as of the events that create the physical phenomena found here–the conditioned air temperature and the sometimes uncomfortable hardness of the seats. Eugene is a place because here major events of the woodproducts industries, of the University, of the railroad, airport, and highways that situate it in relation to other places all come together with the chains of events of thousands of people, living, dead, present or far away but with associations to this location. Places are situations of potential events as well as of existing chains of events; anticipation as well as memory create places. Imagined events may be as important as physical occurrences in creating places.
3. The third theme–Relationships within places–refers, in my jargon, to “natural environmental relationships.” It deals with the conjunction of events at any one period of time. The essence of natural environmental relations is to understand that all of the events that are occurring at any place are not only tied to other places (situated in relation to other locations) but are going on at many different time scales. Let me elaborate.
The Physical World of matter and energy (or the world of physics and chemistry) is one that we often think follows definite laws–not merely statistical probabilities. Some of the lawful changes (which are but a form of event) occur slowly, others fast, some over a long period of time and others over a short period of time. Geographers are usually concerned with those events that happen in the time frame of human awareness and memory–those most obvious to normal human perception. For example weather, or climate, or longer term changes in atmospheric pattern. Or of water movement in a stream, or as part of the hydrologic cycle, or of long term delays in that cycle such as the formation of millenia-long lasting ice caps. We might also well concern ourselves with the nitrogen or carbon cycles at scales from fertilizer application that bring about physical changes in soils to that involved with the build up of Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The physical places of greatest concern are where physical changes are most active and have greatest consequences for life. Where land and sea meet. Where air and land and water abut one another. where solar insolation is most active. Where the shape and motion of the earth bring about the potential for chemical and physical reactions.
Geographers are also concerned with other types of natural events, especially of the living world. Here the laws are not absolute but depend upon information which Bateson defines as differences that make a difference. Life (or as Bateson says-Mind) “describes something that can receive information and can, through the self-regulation or self-correction made possible by circular trains of causation, maintain the truth of certain proposi8tions about itself. These two provide the rudiments of identity–unlike the stone, the mind we are describing is an it.” The it is the individual (cell, person, ecosystem, Gaia) and the context of all individuals nested like boxes within boxes. The events of mind (life) depend on information not impacts or forces or chemical reactions. And because these events of life or mind are conditioned by differences they are often described in terms of probabilities, not laws.
Geographers are concerned with individual “its” called ecosystems made up of plant or animal communities or soil communities not with the ecosystems of eyelashes or the cells or organs of a human body. As geographers we use the ideas of plant succession, of vegetation history, or evolution as the chains of events based on important differences within a place. Note well that I emphasize the different time dimensions of these interests of geographers in looking at a place.
Of course humans respond to and create relationships within places by their very animal presence. They are part of life or mind. How do humans link with other natural events? How do they link with physical events and biological events all of which have their own speed and rate of happening? How do the human responses in turn alter the course of the physical and biological events which conjoin at the same place as they. This is the environmental determinism relationships that geographers now shy away from so very carefully however much they form the bases for wild speculation or of careful medical and pharmaceutical study.
4. The fourth theme–movement among places or communication–is probably more important to geographers. Symbolic communication creates distinctive cultural environments in which humans play out most of the events they identify as important., These cultural communications –language, artifacts, and other symbols–link one human event with another. Some cultural events are nearly instantaneous as in conversation where the words disappear as fast as they are uttered. Others depend on the crossing of events of different duration as when the process of reading is quick but the writing and its preservation in a book is much longer lasting–Shakespeare’s plays are long lasting events or chains of events but their performance is a short term event. All have a relation to other humans and are tied to place. Geographers are more concerned with the institutions and artifacts that are at a larger scale and which are more lasting. These persistent institutions and artifacts have location–indeed maybe the nucleus of what we call a place–and are where many individual human pathways of events come together, thus becoming significant cultural environments. They are the places where special human communications or movements are concentrated. They become linked to other places through movement or flow of information–special humanly created pathways for the rapid flow of signals which trigger events. They form the more important situational webs in which humans see themselves caught. Society, religion, culture, economics, politics are the humanly created institutions through which humans funnel their pathways of events. The artifacts of these institutions (the buildings, monuments, roads, fields, factories, dams, etc.) create lasting symbols and physical realities for influencing human and other pathways of events. The artifact of a destroyed tropical rainforest or of a clear-cut Douglas fir forest channels physical events such as heat transfer and soil particle movement as well as the events of making lumber of paper and the economic institutions of Eugene.
5. And the last theme is that of region. Regions are sites or locations in which linked events (situations) tend to repeat themselves over longer periods of time. The regions of most concern to geographers are regions identified with human institutions. Nevertheless, the regions geographers usually speak about with most assurance are physical regions or biological regions, probably because they are more persistent than regions based on human institutions. They are not more basic, merely easier to identify. The regions of modern America are hard to keep up with. We used to have the corn belt and the Mid West but they change with time and the art of the geographic description. We use to talk of the industrial core of America and draw a line around it. Now it’s the Rust belt and we know what happens to rusting metal. What is the fate of the sun belt even if we can find a good current definition of it? Regions come and go, that is they are related to purpose and to time. It is extremely difficult to compare physical and cultural regions because the time scales of the two are usually vastly different.
In conclusion, This may all sound very abstract; But I hope it is useful in thinking geographically. First consider the description of an event and then of how geographers think of events in terms of the five themes.
- Think of location or site. What is the end of the pathway of events? How can you describe an end (or beginning) Point? Locations are descriptions of stopping places.
- Think of a place as suspended in a network of pathways. The pathways are made up of events in 3 dimensional space and in time. Each place is situated or is linked to someplace else and its importance may be judged by those links or its situation. How is a place located in relationship to something that you think is important to that places existence? (how can Eugene get situated in a better way to capitalize on foreign trade, to attract industry, to keep the air shed of the Willamette Valley free of wood smoke or car exhaust?)
- Think of the linkages of events within a place–what I call natural environment. Or think of environment with every event being the environment of other events. The Physical environment follows the laws of physics and chemistry and at its own rates and speeds. What is the hydrologic cycle? What is climate change?
The biological environment or world of linked events of life or mind (and of which human animals are a part), follows its own physiology, metabolisms , and evolutions based on the events of information–differences that make a difference or coded versions of events that preceeded them. Its events are not predetermined but depend on choices and the changes in infromation that occur within specific contexts. Its events have their own time scales, inextricably part of events of the physical world and now greatly altered by human cultural events. How do ecosystems work? How do soils form? How does plant succession proceed? These are the questions geographers ask about environmental relationships or timing of events within places.
- Think of the cultural environment the home of ideas and artifacts that are based on cultural symbols. The linkage of events by symbols has allowed the connection of distant times, places, and peoples to occur. Human institutions and major built forms form the more stable cultural environments that human geogrphers try to map in time and space. These institutions are so important in how they limit as well as facilitate the events of individual pathways–human, physical and biological. And in our cultural environment, it is technology and control over symbolic information that has given humans command over the remodelling of matter and energy as well as other events of nature that has demanded the attention of modern geographers. And last
- Think of how you can describe the events that come together in what you think a significant way. This will make you both a historian (either natural or human) and a geographer. You will have to think in terms of both regions and of periods of time.
Remember an event has the dimensions of both time and space. to think of events and their linkages is a good perspective bringing history and geography to the classroom. Through speaking and thinking in terms of events, we can integrate the five fundamental themes of geography.