What is Geography?
Many, if not most, of the problems we face have strong geographic overtones. Where will we put another several million people in the United States in the next decade? Where will we find the resources to feed, clothe, house, and educate these new Americans, much less the three billion additional neighbors they will acquire within the next 30 years? Where will the levels of population, and human attrition become more serious? Why does the mortality rate from civilization's most common killers - heart disease and cancer - demonstrate notable correlation with geographic factors? These are the kinds of questions for which people are going to need answers. These are also some of the questions modern geographers are already addressing.
Geography is the study of the relationship of events in space in the same sense that history is the study of the relationship of events in time. The first question geographers ask is "Where are things located?" but even more important is their concern with "Why are they located where they are?" While the answer to the former is largely descriptive, the answer to the latter is analytical. The modern geographer is concerned primarily with interpreting and explaining the occurrence, distribution, and interrelationships of physical and cultural patterns according to the attributes of location, extent, and density. As the analysis is continued over time it assumes a fourth dimension - succession. The constantly changing physical and human landscapes on the earth's surface challenge the geographer to provide continuing interpretations of all parts of the world from the spatial point of view.
Because of the breadth of its focus, geography is both a natural science and a social science. In other words, it forms an interdisciplinary bridge. To be sure, individual geographers tend to emphasize differing aspects of the spatial world. Some specialize in physical geography by devoting their study to such patterns as climate, vegetation, soils, and landforms, while others concentrate on patterns resulting from human activities and characteristics. Among the latter, economic, social and political geographers investigate such problems as agricultural land use, settlement patterns, boundary disputes, the trade areas of cities, cultural diffusion, the incidence of pollution and the perception of environment. Though most geographic studies address contemporary patterns, an important branch of the discipline - historical geography - looks backward into time to reconstruct the geographies of the past. Likewise, a growing number of geographers are projecting the techniques of spatial analysis ahead in time, assisting in the planning of the cities and regions that will constitute the geography and geographic problems of the future. Other geographers specialize in the representation of geographic phenomena; cartographers and specialists in geographic information systems and remote sensing are also found in geography departments.
