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IS GEOGRAPHY THE NEW HISTORY?

Geography is "no longer a neutral subject," writes Robert Butler in his latest Going Green column. Climate change has made it "the new history", both more dynamic and more frightening ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Winter 2009

Not long ago, the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane was on radio discussing his latest book “The Wild Places”. Halfway through, Macfarlane, a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and lecturer in English, admitted rather candidly to his studio audience that he would rather like to be in the Cambridge geography department, as that was where things were really happening.

I studied English as a student and could never have imagined wanting to switch to geography, but now I know exact­ly what Macfarlane meant. To the schoolchildren of the 1970s, geography seemed safe and slightly dull. We would learn about a well-established physical process, such as longshore drift—which picks up and deposits sediment along a shoreline—and we would be able to see this in action, for instance, at Orford Ness in Suffolk. Here, the storm waves throw flint over the crest of the beach, where it escapes the ordinary movements of the waves, and over hundreds of years a spit has developed. This spit is now ten miles long, providing a setting for a bird reserve, well known for its little terns and herring gulls.

Longshore drift, like alluvial plains or glacial retreat, was one of those processes that appeared easily explicable in terms of Ordnance Survey maps, cross-sections and colour diagrams. Geography gave the sense that although the world was changing, it was doing so in a slow, orderly, even picturesque way.

When Miss Prism leaves Cecily on her own for a few minutes in “The Importance of Being Earnest” she instructs Cecily to read her “Political Economy”, saying, “The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit.” As Miss Prism explains, “It is somewhat too sensational.” It would have been a stretch for Miss Prism to have come up with a chapter in Cecily’s geography book that her pupil needed to omit.

But that has changed. It is getting harder and harder in conversation to raise one or other of the most basic subjects in geography—agriculture, glaciation, rivers and population—without a flicker of panic crossing the other person’s face. You are no longer talking about a neutral subject. At any moment you might be about to discuss water salinity in Bangladesh, or the acidification of the ocean, or desertification in sub-Saharan Africa. Whatever aspect of geography it is that you start with threatens to segue into a discussion on the most polarising topic there is: climate change. Miss Prism would be quick to notice that geography is no longer a polite subject for meal time.

Something similar has happened to atlases. They were once placid, unhurried publications with additional information on the colours of national flags. Now atlases are freighted with maps showing cities that are likely to be submerged if the Arctic melts, or projected population growth, or the relative size of countries in terms of CO2 emissions, or areas where water scarcity will be most intense and resource wars most likely to break out. An atlas is beginning to look like a long-term forecast—history before it happens.

It would be easy to imagine a parallel world in which the BBC News opened with the weather forecast, updating us on heatwaves, hurricanes and monsoons, and then the environment editor took over with some analysis about how this impacts on hunger, resource wars and migration, before finally handing over to the political editor—for some light relief—as he or she stands in front of No 10 Downing Street and explains the latest twists in the expenses scandal. There would be some logic to this. If the ocean conveyor belt slowed down, MPs might then find their moats and duck houses freeze over.

BBC News still maintains a rather 19th-century perspective on what’s happening in the world, seeing politics as a clash between opposing views that might be resolved through elections, summits and peace processes. With this approach, the environment gets sectioned off as a subject of its own, when in fact history shows that the resilience of a civilisation often depends on the way it treats its own environment. The big factors that will determine our lives over the next 50 years are likely to be things we have very little control over. As the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon has said, you can negotiate with Iran. You can’t negotiate with nature.

Visitors to the British Museum’s Moctezuma exhibition are being vividly reminded what happens when you put too much strain on the ecosystem. The city of Teotihuacán had a population of 200,000 in the seventh century AD and then, quite suddenly, it collapsed. The historian Tom Holland, author of “Millennium”, came away from the exhibition shivering with “a sense of unexpected kinship”. The Aztecs had lost touch with some basic geographical facts and their needs had outstripped the natural resources that were available. “Are we in the West,” he asks, “the Aztecs of our time?” It’s one reason why the geography department has become the most compelling one on the campus. Geography is the new history. We’re living it now.

(Robert Butler, a theatre critic turned green blogger at the Ashden Directory, writes the Going Green column in Intelligent Life. His last column was on whether to fly or not.)

Illustration: James Fryer