Table Of ContentFirst published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
This electronic edition published in 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84317-940-5 in ePub format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-939-9 in Mobipocket format
ISBN: 978-1-84317-476-9 in hardback print format
Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2010
Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions
that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Illustrations by David Woodroffe
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Caroline Taggart
Introduction
THE PHYSICAL WORLD
Rivers
Coasts
Tectonics
Climate and Weather
Global Issues
THE HUMAN WORLD
World Population
Settlement
Industry and Energy
Tourism
Development
Afterword
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
FOREWORD
When the original version of I Used to Know That was published two years
ago, I spent a very jolly couple of days in a small BBC studio in central
London. With headphones over my ears and a microphone in front of me, I
talked to people on radio stations all over the country about the book: why I
had written it, what they liked about it and what brought back hideous
memories.
To my surprise, the hideous memories were what excited people most. Top
of the list – and this bit wasn’t a surprise – was maths. One listener said that
just looking at the letters a + b = c on the page had brought him out in a cold
sweat, even though he no longer had any idea why. Another radio station
carried out a series of interviews in the street asking people, among other
things, if they knew who Pythagoras was. ‘Oh yes,’ said one man, ‘he’s to do
with triangles and angles and all that malarkey.’
I thought that was wonderful: ‘all that malarkey’ summed up perfectly the
way many of my generation were taught. We had to learn it (whatever ‘it’
was); we were never really told why; and, once exams were over, unless we
went on to be engineers or historians or something, we never thought about it
again. But it lingered somewhere at the back of our minds, which may be
why I Used to Know That touched a chord.
However, covering five major subjects and including a catch-all chapter
called General Studies meant that a single small volume couldn’t hope to deal
with anything in much depth. This is where the individual titles in this series
come in: if I Used to Know That reminded us of things that we learnt once,
these books will expand on them, explain why they were important and even,
in the case of geography, update us on theories that have been dismissed,
developed or expanded upon since we went to school. If you enjoy this one,
look out for I Used to Know That: English, Maths, History and General
Science as well.
The teaching of geography has changed beyond recognition over the last
few decades. I was of what Will Williams calls the ‘capes and bays’
generation: we learned the names of places and the heights of mountains, but
it never crossed anyone’s mind to take us out of doors to stroll along a beach
or wade through a river, to see for ourselves how these things actually
worked. And certainly no one ever persuaded me that geography was
fascinating because it was all around me, an unavoidable and ever-changing
part of my daily life – and the daily life of everyone else in the world.
Will Williams brings the subject alive principally by showing just how
wide-ranging it is. Everything from volcanic eruptions to ecotourism, climate
change to models for the development of settlements is here – and it is all
geography! As Will says, this is a holistic discipline, encompassing science,
economics and sociology, not to mention the geographical sub-disciplines of
geology, geomorphology, tectonics and others too numerous to mention.
Even if you are young enough to have been taught the theory of how
landscape has changed over time, or the economic and social importance of
population growth, you are sure to find new insights in this book; if you
never got further than memorizing the lengths of the Nile, the Amazon and
the Congo, it will be a revelation.
In other words, whether it is a trip down memory lane or a voyage of
discovery or as a helpmeet for future quizzes, I Used to Know That:
Geography has something to offer anyone with an interest in the workings of
this planet and the people who live on it. And if that sounds like a sweeping
claim – well, that’s geography for you.
CAROLINE TAGGART
LONDON, 2010
INTRODUCTION
When you took off for the annual ‘Family Summer Holiday’, it would be
your father who would navigate: navigate and drive. You and your sibling(s)
would fight in the back of the car and your mother took sole responsibility for
‘The Map’. This meant that when you needed a detour or (whisper it) got
lost, it was Mum who would be unfairly to blame. Not that Dad ever looked
at the map, he preferred the method of learning the roads and the sequence of
settlements en route. Nowadays folks just plug in the destination location, set
the satnav and off they go, hopefully avoiding low bridges and dead ends.
This vignette encapsulates the role of geography in our lives and
unfortunately demonstrates the limits of its reach into many people’s lives.
Avoiding all of the talk about how the world of work has changed and how
we have all become more isolated from people in our own communities: just
think of the maps! Be it Lewis and Clark in the USA, Flinders across
Australia or Livingstone in Africa, the great explorers didn’t set out to create
maps for us to then downgrade them in the face of technology.
Maps are where most people first encounter geography and though satnav
demonstrates the limits of people’s engagement now, maps have made a
pretty spectacular comeback. Modern geographers go nuts over ‘geographical
information systems’ (GIS) and you too may, probably unwittingly, have
become a geographer at least once in your working day. The Internet is
awash with maps, maps with data on them, maps that show you where your
friends (or at least their mobile phones) are, maps that show you when your
house will flood, maps that locate your nearest restaurant, maps in fact that
can show anything and everything. So geography is here to stay, a vital part
of all our lives.
To be a geographer in the opening decades of the twenty-first century is to
be on the one hand excited about the endless possibilities for travel, study and
fulfilment, yet on the other to be frustrated with the lack of true joined-up
thinking out there. Geography has a unique and valuable role to play in
bringing together the strands that surround complex issues and produce
clarity of focus. Nowhere can this be seen in more sharp relief than in the
debate over climate change.
Across the world we know that use of renewable resources must be a
foundation for our descendants. We know too that, locally, weather patterns
have changed over time as the climate has varied in the past. Also, we know
that carbon dioxide levels have rocketed upwards since we have helped move
carbon from its stores in the ground, up into the atmosphere. But we don’t
actually know that the climate is changing because of man. It probably is, but
it doesn’t matter. The reality is that due to dwindling supplies of fossil fuels
sometime in the future, we will have to change our reliance.
And it’s geography that plays a part in all facets of this debate, and
geographers who are perhaps uniquely placed to spot the simple coherent
pathway to explanation. Be it economic concerns over the rising price of oil,
environmental concerns over the impact of fossil fuel production and
combustion, scarcity concerns where national supplies will be cut off or
political concerns over one country’s influence on others – it doesn’t matter.
In the end we need to become more sustainable, hence we need to adapt to
renewable resources and we need geographers to bring together the disparate
fields of enquiry to provide the ideas for moving to the next stage of
development.
This issue is our modern ‘Malthusian debate’ (see here), that cornerstone
of public consciousness that yields column inches of erudite copy and its fair
share of mumbo-jumbo too. We now have the twenty-four-hour news
network and the live blogosphere to keep the debate swirling around the
world.
Who would have thought that when you were learning your US state
capitals, your longest rivers in the world and your flags of the UN you were
laying down the foundations for a subject that would become more and more
relevant as the world has grown in complexity?
