Its quite a good to know that what you learnt in your teenage is something going to help entirely in your graduate environment. I have been raised in such a manner that I cannot accept things which are on facade and wanting to be accepted, without knowing the proximity that lies underneath in any field, perspective, or case study scenarios.
As I see, Geography has been prestigious field. Looking to this distinctive field from an entire overlapping angle is something not common today. Ironically, today its modification lies in no category. Normally modification seems to enhance the working capability of field and matching the standards with contemporary aeon. Geography is comparative and complex, its complex because it influence is unlined. There is no ending edge. And, its comparative because of it overlaps with plenty. However, Its a subject which has something of everything. Limiting its vastness is a vague approach. As a student of this subject, I wouldn’t be in that snare.
To peel back the layers, I still remain totally tightlipped when I read how a single fruit ( Banana) and its geographic conditions for its plantation can change the entire socio-political conditions of the country. Guatemala’s 19th century history is the geographic history which can make us aware about the whole philosophy of geography: ‘where is what’ and ‘why it is there’. Entire books could be written on the last 150 years of banana trade in Guatemala and they can be like geographic thrillers. But there are always more questions. Like, if we focus on environment part of the human-environment interactions, what’s the environmental impact of these large plantations? And this is just. about the Guatemala what about the other countries where bananas. grow- Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic. What’s story associated with their banana exports and plantations. We just looked at the geography of bananas, but we could have done the same thing for chocolates, Or the valleys of Venice and how it shaped the city. Or Solomon Islands of far east area. Geography is the factoid and the story that surrounds it. Currently, I see no such modification in the subject. GIS technicalities are somehow good but its not all Geography. Its just a tiny part of it.
Today, bringing needless technicalities in the subject which is as vast as it mean to be, is something digging trench in an area where horses will never reach. What post quantitative revolution did in geography is something familiar to what pharaohs did in Egypt. I considered its modification is falsified because we have renounced the Idiographic Geography. Considering the fact that history is not everything, but it is a starting point; history is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are but, more importantly, what they must be.
Clearly, the world is complicated but in geography we try to look at the big picture-the confluence of space, place and the human environment interactions and how they overlapped to bring us that far into the story. The earth has so many stories and geography is here to tell them. We must unearth the cognition of idiographic geography, renouncing it would lean us into into statistical paradigm: a puzzling thread where thinking and observance is halted by the facts of figures. The truth is, we are here dig to more than figures and quantitative approaches.
