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Geography Matters

October 1, 2005 Saturday

LENGTH: 1000 words

HEADLINE: Geography matters

BYLINE: Bill Steigerwald

BODY:

Nobody knows how to explain the importance of geographic literacy to citizens and leaders of the United States better than Harm de Blij, a Dutch-born author, professor and TV personality.

De Blij (pronounced duh Blay) says the short definition of geography is the study "of the way things are laid out, spatially." But as the NBC News "geography analyst" explains in his 30th book, "Why Geography Matters," geography is much more than memorizing mountain ranges and estuaries.

It's about presidents fully knowing the culture of countries like Iraq (before they decide to invade them). And it's about global-warming hysterics learning what all freshmen geography students learn -- that Mother Earth has been in an Ice Age for 35 million years and our current balmy spell soon will come to an icy end no matter how much carbon we humans spew into the air.

I talked to the professor of geography at Michigan State University Wednesday by phone from his home on Cape Cod, a piece of land projecting into the waters off Massachusetts.

Q: Can you give us a quick synopsis of the book "Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America: Climate Change, The Rise of China, and Global Terrorism"?

A: The objective of the book is this: We are geographically not illiterate, but inadequately schooled. As a result of this, we are very good at history and we're very good at looking at the way the world operates systemically, but we don't know very much about the way the world is laid out. As a result of that, we make foreign policy mistakes.

Vietnam was one. If Robert McNamara had taken one course in human geography or cultural geography before he sent the country in that direction, he might have done it differently. But there is no geography taught at Harvard or, for that matter, at Yale, where as you know President Bush got his education. I am convinced that we would not have engaged in the Iraq intervention if we had known the geography better. So my concern is that the geographic literacy and foreign policy priorities and risks are linked. And the less literate our leaders are in geography, the more dangerous it is for the country.

Q: We're being told over and over by the mainstream media and scientists as well that global warming is a real problem for earthlings. Yet you say we need to prepare for a quick climate change that will be a precipitous cooling. What's that all about?

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A: We are living in an Ice Age -- which consists of long cold spells interrupted by short warm spells. This is something that every student in introductory geography learns all over the world. It started about 30 or 35 million years ago. It's been going on. It's been getting colder. Approximately, 30 million years ago, the Antarctic ice sheet began to form; 20 million years ago glaciers began to form in high mountains even in the tropical areas; 10 million years ago the Arctic Ocean froze over. About 1.8 million years ago, we began a sequence of events that is still going on, which is as follows: It is very cold for 100,000 years in a row -- never, of course, continuously cold, but up and down. Then it gets very warm, very quickly, and for about an average of 10,000 to 12,000 years it is about as warm as it is today. Then that ends with a precipitous cooling, and it is cold for another 100,000 years.

Just 18,000 years ago, ice sheets hundreds of feet high covered all of North America down to the Ohio River. All that melted when global warming started. It melted in a matter of a few thousand years. It was some dramatic event: Huge slabs of ice the size of the Canadian province of Quebec would slide into the ocean, raise the sea level, cool the water, change local climate. The coastal plains, along which we humans had been migrating, got inundated. It must have been an incredibly dramatic time.

Then about 7,000 years ago, it was warm like it is now and it has been that warm ever since. We are now at the point that the period of global warming like the one that got rid of the glaciers the last time has been going on for about 15,000 years. We are already well into the autumn of our warm spell. So even though we worry about global warming, I am saying that what we are likely to experience is an increasing number of extremes and then a collapse of the system and a return to glacial conditions. It's happened for 2 million years and it's going to happen again, whether or not we do to the atmosphere what we are doing. Nature will overpower our pollution of the atmosphere.

Q: What's your official position on global warming?

A: That it is existing, that it is happening, but that it will not go on indefinitely.

Q: And what should we or our government do about it?

A: Obviously, we need to reduce our impact on the atmosphere, not just here in the United States, but in the rest of the world. I was disappointed that the Clinton administration did not see a way to endorse the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto may not have been adequate. In fact, if you look at it, it is in some ways undoable. In other ways, it allows other countries to continue polluting while we inhibit our industries. But the fact is, as a political gesture, as a gesture of international cooperation and concern, we should have signed it and tried to live with it -- but we're not. That's one thing the government should do.

Q: What's this big deal about global warming? Other scientists must know what you know ... that Earth is in a short warm period now and that we'll return to long cold periods, right?

A: Absolutely. I have been accused by colleagues of being immoral for misleading the public. There is no doubt that global warming is happening. I have no doubt that there is a combination of natural warming of a kind we've had 18 times over the past 1.8 million years, plus some measure of human causation. But the fact of the matter is, even if we continue on as we are, nature will say to this planet, "It is time to go back to the norm," which is glaciation, and it will happen no matter what we do.

LOAD-DATE: October 1, 2005