On the First Law of Geography: A Reply

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Notes

1. Arbia's second law of geography reads “Everything is related to everything else, but things observed at a coarse spatial resolution are more related than things observed at a finer resolution.” This suggests that aggregation has a smoothing effect, as is well known (see Tobler 1969, 1990). My second law of geography asserts that “the phenomenon external to [a geographic] area of interest affects what goes on in the inside; a sufficiently common occurrence as to warrant being called the second law of geography.” This is comparable to the need for “boundary conditions” in many physical problems. It alsorelates, perhaps inversely, to Foucault's (1979) emphasis on “confinement.”

2. Giddens (1984) also comments extensively on the relationbetween geography and sociology. Concerning distance, he states (p. 363), “Distance in space is apparently easy to comprehend and to cope with conceptually” [sic]. He goes on to say, “human beings do make their own geography.” He finds great value in the concept of regionalization (p. xxv), but eschews the idea of laws in the social sciences (pp. xxxii–xxxiv).

3. The attribution of this statement to Chief Seattle has beenquestioned. It is likely a myth. See J. L. Clark (1986), “Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech,”Prologue, Spring 18(1). Also: http://www.jalcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html and http://www.webcom.com/duane/seattle.html

4. This phrase, “the law of unexpected consequences,” is quite common—as can be seen by entering it into Google on the Internet—and apparently, quite well understood, though theorigin is unclear. The distinguished historian H. Wayne Morgan, for example, uses it in his 1998 Brewster lecture inGreenville without his feeling any need for justification orelaboration.

5. An anonymous reviewer suggested looking at a book by R. A. Fisher (1935). I did this and found the following on page 66: “the widely verified fact that patches in close proximity are commonly more alike, as judged by the yield of crops, than those which are further apart.”