Geography as a Great Intellectual Melting Pot and the Preeminent Interdisciplinary Environmental Discipline

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Notes

1. As optimistic as I am, I know well that the picture is not all so tranquil and sublime. Consider the first decade of global change research as it focused on the quandary of the missing sink for carbon—it was by and large a hunt for the holy grail of changes in ecosystem metabolism. Now, ten years of underinvestment in human dimensions research has left the community unprepared for what now appears to be a land use phenomenon. The result has been a mad scramble to build a lot of unenlightened models by physical scientists who would do well to read the geographical literature and a community of geographers often sitting in the wings complaining we don't get the funding we need to do household surveys. As well, consider the $1.5B SIVAM project launched by the Brazilian government as a contract to Raytheon Company to use geospatial technologies for what they call “wide area surveillance” of the Amazon basin. And, of course, no one can ignore the powerful and ominous role for spatial location technologies in delivering troops and bombs with apparent precision, which are often precisely off-target.

2. The NSF ERE program is heavily investing in synthesis science, recognizing the crucial need to increase interdisciplinarity in its own funding profile, and in academe at large. As a member of the NSF advisory committee, I have had the opportunity to participate in many exciting and high-spirited discussions on just how to increase interdisciplinary science within the structure of a rather traditional, disciplinary-based academy. On one occasion I whispered to a fellow geographer that we could solve this problem if we all became geographers. The off-handed and rather simplistic character of my comment notwithstanding, it does, nonetheless, beg the question as to whether geography as a discipline could indeed embrace such refugees from other disciplines.