Kenneth C. Davis - Dont Know Much About Geography: Revised and Updated Edition

To my parents,

Evelyn and Richard Davis,

who gave me good directions.

Geography is a representation of the whole known world together with the phenomena which are contained therein.

In Geography one must contemplate the extent of the entire Earth, as well as its shape, and its position under the heavens... the length of its days and nights, the stars which are fixed overhead, the stars which move above the horizon, and the stars which never rise above the horizon at all....

It is the great and exquisite accomplishment of mathematics to show all these things to human intelligence.

P TOLEMY

G EOGRAPHIA

No two countries that both had McDonalds had ever fought a war against each other since each got its McDonalds. (Border skirmishes and civil wars dont count since McDonalds usually served both sides.)... The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention... When a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a network of McDonalds it became a McDonalds country. And people in McDonalds countries didnt like to fight wars anymore.

T HOMAS L. F RIEDMAN

T HE W ORLD I S F LAT ( 2007 )

What kind of world is likely if we take no deliberate action?

What kind of world do we want?

What kind of world is possible if we act effectively?

W ILLIAM H OOKE

WWW.LIVINGONTHEREALWORLD.ORG

Contents

O kay. They always tell you to lead with the headline. So here goes.

BREAKING NEWS: Theyve added an ocean.

Say what?

Thats right. There are five oceans now where there used to be only four. Or, at least, so says the IHO (no, not IHOP). The International Hydrographic Organization is a multinational, intergovernmental group that oversees issues of navigation and charting and other oceanic matters. Based in MonacoI know; tough job, but somebodys gotta do itthe IHO decided a few years ago that there is a Southern Ocean, or as some call it, an Antarctic Ocean. As readers of the original book would know, this is not a brand new idea. I discussed the subject of the Southern Ocean in the first edition of the book. But now its more official.

This neo-ocean extends up from Antarctica and would count as the worlds fourth largest oceanif it counted. This is in addition to the four we were supposed to learn back in the fifth grade. (The Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic, in size order, just in case you were absent or just bored that day.)

Now you may also have heard that Pluto was downgraded from planetary to dwarf planet status. Theres still some dispute about that one, too, but it did get plenty of media attention.

But coming up with a new ocean! You would think that would have made the front pages.

But this Earth- (or ocean-) shaking news hasnt exactly taken the world by storm. Many people and reference books, including the Time Almanac 2012 , do not seem to know about this extra ocean. Or not everyone recognizes its existence. The Rodney Dangerfield of oceansit gets no respect.

It must also be said that there is in fact only one oceanthe great single body of interconnected water that covers much of the earths surface and is only occasionally broken up by the little plots of land called continents and islands.

And that is one reason why geography can be so confusing, as I wrote in this book when it was originally published. Geography, from the Greek meaning to describe the earth, is sometimes as much art as science and some terms are less easily defined. Seas can be lakes. Jungles can be rain forests. And continents can be islands.

In the two decades since this book was first written, the earth hasnt changed much. Oh sure, along with that new ocean, weve added millions of people to the head countwith billions more expected to arrive on board Spaceship Earth over the next few decades. Some of the borders have changed; countries have broken apartlike Czechoslovakia, which peacefully split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in January 1993. Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and erosion continue to reshape the earths features. And the global temperature continues to climb.

When this book first appeared, America had just ended a war against Iraq led by President Bush. Now in 2012, America has just ended a war against Iraq begun by President Bush. Of course, different wars, different presidents Bush, and very different outcomes.

So while some things stay the same, there have been enormous changes in the world in twenty years. And this book has been updated and revised with new questions to reflect these essential changes:

• The role of the Internet and other technology in transforming global life ( What was the Arab Spring?)
• The rise of China, India and other former developing nations as world economic powers amid the globalization of commerce ( What can you build with BRICS? Does the World Bank have ATMs?)
• The question of sustainability in a world that is growing, as author Thomas Friedman succinctly put it, hot, flat, and crowded
• The debate over climate change and evolutionary science and the related question of how science has become a partisan political issueparticularly in the United States ( Is all the talk of global warming just a lot of hot air?)

As I wrote in the original Introduction to this book, geography is not just about memorizing place names and state capitals or knowing how to read maps. It is about understanding our place in the world and who our neighbors are. It is about understanding the links between places and events. My goal was to get people to think geographicallyto look at the world with the great sense of curiosity that some of the ancient thinkers possessedand attempt to figure out the world. That was the beginning of science. Which raises the most serious point of this book.

During the past twenty years, America has witnessed a concerted assault on science. While some of those attacks come from the fact that we learn new things about medicine, space, and biology all the timeand yes, we know that science and scientists can be wrongmuch of the assault has come from people with very specific agendas. Those agendas can be motivated by profit, political ideology, religious belief, or faith in what has been called junk science.

But the serious threat to good science and, more importantly, science education is a dangerous thing, especially in a world that will increasingly demand complex technological and scientific answers to its pantheon of problems. I have tried to address some of these hot-button issues, especially climate change and evolution, very directly.

As I write this, a 2012 Gallup survey showed that 46 percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at some time within the last ten thousand years.

That ruling by a Republican administration-appointed judge dismantled the ID argument. Yet the issueand the fundamental belief attacking evolutionary science behind ithas not gone away.

It is my hope that this book will shed more light than heat about geography and its wonders.

Looking back at the changes over the past two decades, both historically and technologically, it is difficult to imagine writing about the world twenty years from now. But geography helps by showing us where we have been and, maybe, where we are going.

Now, about those oceans: When the question How many oceans are there? comes up and the multiple-choice answers are:

a. One

b. Four

c. Five

d. All of the above

Now you know. Go with D.

W ay back in elementary school, I had a social studies teacher Ill call Mrs. McNally. One day, in the middle of a geography lesson, Mrs. McNally lost it. Things started to fall apart for her when she pulled down one of those wonderful window-shade maps we had in grade school.