"Geographers," writes AAG Executive Director Ronald F. Abler in the April, 2001 AAG Newsletter, "would benefit greatly if they cultivated an ability to speak to the public about the big picture in plain language." His comment was a reaction to an opening-session talk given by journalist John N. Wilford at the 2002 New York City AAG Meeting a few weeks earlier under the title "A Science Writer's View of Geography."
Wilford, a Science Correspondent for the New York Times, covers archeology, astronomy, paleontology, and the space program as well as geography, and his contributions appear regularly (though, in the case of geography, infrequently) in the Science Times section of the newspaper. In his prepared remarks, Wilford said that geographers have done a poor job of speaking the popular language, of conveying in simple and direct terms what is important about their work, and he made several recommendations to remedy this. He also argued that geography lacks a big-picture focus. In other sciences, he said, the big-picture elements are clear: the age and accelerating expansion of the universe, the formation of galaxies, the nature of extrasolar planets; "but I don't know what the comparable questions are in geography." As a result, comparatively little geography appears in the popular press. According to Wilford, journalists already have plenty to write about, and geographers have to persuade journalists that there are some "good stories" in geography. Otherwise, they will turn to more sure-fire "stories" about Mars or the Maya.
Why does geographic research get relatively little exposure of the kind Wilford and his colleagues provide? Is it, he asked, because geography is too fragmented for anyone to speak with authority on its big picture? In fact, is there a big picture at all? He wondered if geographers are actually "discouraged from thinking and speaking out in the popular language." Wilford reported that he is not aware of a single person in geography with some fluency in the popular language. He cited the late Peter Gould as someone who did, but "without some Goulds, how is geography to be understood by the public?"
Predictably, Wilford's comments aroused strong reactions. Abler's informal survey suggested that "the majority thought impressions of geography were ill-informed and his advice arrogant and unhelpful." Perhaps one-fourth of those he consulted, however, felt that Wilford had been perceptive about the discipline and correct in his recommendations. A key question, of course, is the extent to which the kind of "story" exposure Wilford and his colleagues provide for the sciences is helpful to the enterprise those sciences represent. Probably a similar majority would answer that the link is unproven and that the required "popularization" of the discipline devalues rather than bolsters it. In any case, an additional factor comes into play. What Wilford did not say is that science writers, like other media correspondents, compete with each other for space in their newspapers. Those "sure-fire stories" about Mars or the Maya have a better chance of surviving the editor's scalpel than something more mundane. They also enhance their authors' prospects of getting into print.
As an academic who probably would have voted with that critical majority years ago, I learned some hard lessons in another medium that occasionally disseminates popularized science, network television. Drafting the first of several hundred scripts as Geography Editor for ABC-TV, in some ways the ultimate effort to "speak to the public in plain language," I was advised to highlight the so-called "wow factor" in every "story" I proposed. That, I was told, is the never-ending quest of the television correspondent working in this arena: if I could not make the viewer exclaim in wonder about some geographic topic, I would lose my place on the schedule to someone talking about (you guessed it) Mars or the Maya. Until then, I had never realized that the science-related segments we see on television are the survivors in a competition for air time measured in minutes and seconds. Nor had I been aware that many excellent segments in all kinds of fields, failing the "wow factor," are never screened.
During my seven years with ABC-TV most of the geography segments I wrote appeared on "Good Morning America," which had an average audience of about four million (around four times the daily circulation of the New York Times). Over that period I received nearly 3,000 letters from viewers ranging from college-bound high-school students seeking advice on geography as a potential major to corporate executives lamenting their staff's geographic illiteracy. But the flow of that correspondence, carefully monitored by ABC, left no doubt: when a segment touched upon a big-picture topic, the numbers waxed; when I tried to use a current-events story to highlight a more routine geographic notion, they waned- as in the case of the hype surrounding the arrival in Texas of the African "killer bee," which I attempted to frame in a spatial-diffusion context. My producers, preferring the former, raised the same question Wilford did: just what are geography's big pictures?
Geographers don't send probes to Mars or open Mayan tombs, but their big-picture view of the world has set the agenda for research in momentous directions ranging from continental drift (yes, Alfred Wegener was a physical geographer) to environmental potency in human affairs (Ellsworth Huntington got it wrong, but he asked the right questions). Some of those early directions led parts of the discipline astray, not only in the case of "environmental determinism" but also in geopolitics, producing a period of caution during which other disciplines, not similarly burdened, pursued those issues. One result is that a good deal of "big-issue" geography is today being written by non-geographers. Wilford professed himself to be much taken by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, "the best book on geography in recent years." A tour de force indeed, but the weakest link in its multidisciplinary chain is the geographic.
Indeed, the non-geographers who are filling the gap Wilford accurately identifies are doing geography no favors, either in the professional arena or the public one. Harvard history professor David Landes begins his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (a big-picture issue for sure) with an attack in geography as a discipline, and then proceeds to commit the very intellectual offenses that did so much damage to geography in the first half of the twentieth century. Jeffrey D. Sachs, a Harvard economics professor, in a paper titled "The Geography of Economic Development" discovers that "virtually all of the rich countries of the world are outside the tropics, and virtually all of the poor countries are in them . . . climate, then, accounts for a quite significant proportion of the cross-national and cross-regional disparities of world income." Between them, Landes and Sachs do prove that Harvard University badly needs a Geography Department, but they also evince the risks of speaking "to the public in plain language."
Today's big picture tends to emerge incrementally, but Wilford is undoubtedly right in suggesting that geographers make their case more effectively than they are doing. Peter Gould, for all his virtues, saw geography as exclusively a social science; not one Geographer at Work is a physical geographer. Yet the biggest of the big pictures lies at the interface between physical (environmental) and human (social) geography, where population issues and climate change converge.
REFERENCES
Abler, R. F. 2001. From the Meridian - Wilford's Science Writer's View of Geography. AAG Newsletter, 36(4):1.
Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel. New York: Norton.
Gould, P. R. 1985. The Geographer at Work. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Landes, 0. S. 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton.
Sachs, J. D. 2000. The Geography of Economic Development. The United States Naval War
College: Jerome E. Levy Occasional Paper in Economic Geography and World Order, No. 1. The quotation is from p. 9.
Wilford, J. N. 2001. A Science Writer's View of Geography. Opening Session, AAG Meeting, New York.
