Dear all, Not particularly critical, but quite interesting anyway. Sorry if you've already had this. cheers, alan hudson ========================T h e a r t i c l e========================== THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTS & IDEAS (p.A15) Saturday, 21 March 1998 An Old Rationale for Disparities Returns to Favor By PATRICIA COHEN Pick up a geography textbook from the first half of this century and you can discover a simple, rule-of-thumb explanation for the varying fates of the human race: the weather. "As a rule, people do their best thinking and planning, their minds are most alert and inventive, and they have the best judgment when the thermometer out of doors falls toward freezing at night and rises toward 50 degrees or 55 degrees by day," declares Ellsworth Huntington in "Principles of Human Geography." "In an invigorating climate" -- like that of Europe and the northern United States -- "it may also be easier to be honest and sober and self-controlled than in a more enervating one." Such pronouncements ultimately made geographers seem like phrenologists who pondered the size of bumps on a person's skull. Most serious scholars shunted geography aside and forgot it. Yet after decades of neglect, geography is being rediscovered. The study of how location affects the way people live is not only drawing in new students, but it is also attracting the attention of scholars in other fields. Historians, economists and political scientists are using it to explain everything from why some nations are rich and others poor, to why Brazil and Nigeria are rising as regional powers, to why Africa produces so many superior distance runners. It's as if New York City real-estate agents were suddenly given the job of explaining some of the globe's most elusive questions and chorused "Location, location, location." The geographic renaissance, propelled in part by new advances in science and computers, is significant, scholars say, because it is generating a new intellectual dialogue. "It is a wonderful bridge among disciplines," David Landes, professor emeritus of history and economics at Harvard University, said in an interview. "It compels people to put together ideas they might not otherwise." Most unexpected, however, is that the very field that had a racialist taint is now being used to knock down theories that define achievement in racial terms. Geography, once employed to justify colonialism and the innate superiority of whites, is brought in to undermine works like "The Bell Curve," which argues that racial differences in intelligence are inherited and linked to differences in performance and economic success. The gradual eclipse of geography began 50 years ago when Harvard University eliminated its geography department. The decision had less to do with discomfort over screwball theories (which weren't necessarily seen at the time as screwball) than with academic infighting and weak teaching. "Geography is not a university subject," declared James Conant, who was then the president of Harvard.. In the next decades, other universities followed Harvard's lead: Stanford, Yale, the University of Michigan, Columbia, the University of Chicago. According to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the 1987 meeting of the Association of American Geographers, department chairmen organized a seminar "to find out what they could do to avoid finding their departments on a university hit list." Saul Cohen, a political geographer and former president of the geographers' association, says: "Very few people were exposed to geography who went to college after the 1960s. What they knew about geography goes back a half-century." French historians like Fernand Braudel and other members of the Annales school did look at geography, climate and land use. But in the United States, said Landes, geography was "a kind of outcast among intellectual disciplines." He continued: "More than any other field I can think of, geography was wiped out kind of quietly. I can't think of another discipline that suffered this sort of erasure." Geography was fine if you worked at Rand McNally or played Jeopardy. (Moroni. What is the capital of Comoros?) But when American scholars tackled persistent questions like why industrialization first took root in Europe instead of China or India, geography was played down. "If you look at most works on global development," Landes says, "there is very little on geography." That has been changing. Jared Diamond, a physiologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, combines epidemiology, sociology, zoology, anthropology and botany to conclude that geography is the key to the pace and timing of economic development. In his book "Guns, Germs and Steel" (W.W. Norton, 1997,) he goes back 13,000 years to explain how food production is the starting point for success. Because farming communities produce more food and domesticate animals, they can feed nonfood producers like professional soldiers, bureaucrats, writers and craftsmen. Diamond argues that the east-west axis of the Eurasian land mass created similar growing conditions along a shared latitude and enabled one of the first domesticated crops, einkorn wheat, to spread relatively quickly from the Fertile Crescent to Europe; more than twice as fast, for example, as corn and beans spread from Mexico northward to what would become the eastern United States. The fact that there were few ecological barriers like mountains also made it much easier for livestock and, eventually, writing, the wheel and other inventions to spread than in the Americas or Africa, which both have a north-south axis. For example, cattle, sheep and goats, first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, stopped short for 2,000 years at the northern edge of the Serengeti Plains, with their deadly, disease-carrying tsetse flies. Meanwhile, of the 14 large mammals that have been domesticated throughout history, Eurasia had 13 of them, including sheep, goats, cows and horses, which provided meat, fertilizer, wool, leather, transport, plowing power and military assault vehicles. Domesticated animals also served as the petri dish for nasty epidemics like smallpox and measles to which Europeans over time developed immunity. So when the diseases arrived in the New World, up to 99 percent of the unexposed native populations were killed -- instead of the reverse. It wasn't virtuosity but viruses that helped paved the way for conquest. Building on Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," Landes believes that Western culture based on Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment values is the single most important reason for the West's economic success. Still, maintaining that geography is "terribly important," he titled the first chapter of his new book, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations" (W.W. Norton, 1998), "Nature's Inequalities," and he describes how a nation's geography -- its rainfall, its suitability for food production, its indigenous animals and the deadliness of its pathogens -- helps set the stage for economic success. Europe was lucky. Landes, too, argues that the temperate climate and relatively even rainfall, a gift from the Gulf Stream, allowed Europeans to grow crops all year round. In addition to the other advantages, larger and stronger animals like the European battle steed instead of the Mongolian pony provided richer fertilizer compared with the human night soil used in East Asia. James Blaut, who wrote "The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History" (Guilford Press, 1993), also takes a geographical tack, but comes to a completely different conclusion. He declares that Europeans got rich because they were closest to the Americas and able to plunder it first. In the 16th century, says Blaut, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, other maritime societies like those of "the Chinese, the Indians, and the East Africans were at the same level of development, but the Europeans were much, much closer to the New World." Through a combination of looting and mining, the amount of gold and silver in circulation probably doubled between the years 1500 and 1600, says Blaut, and Europe got it all free. That tremendous windfall meant that the emerging middle class could buy off the ruling land-owning powers, enabling capitalism to take root and allowing the Europeans to outcompete Asia and East Africa. A shorter commute made all the difference. Geography's sudden comeback is the result, in part, of technological advances. Sophisticated mapping computers -- known as geographical information systems -- have generated new research areas for freshly minted geographers and raised the discipline's profile. A report last year by the National Research Council estimated that the number of undergraduate geography majors increased by 47 percent between 1986 and 1994. At the same time, advances in molecular biology, radiocarbon dating and archaeology provide new information about where cultivated crops, domesticated animals and diseases originated and where they spread. And economists are exploring statistical correlations between such things as poverty and distance from the equator. Geography also complements the turn to interdisciplinary studies that is catching on at universities across the country. As Blaut says, "Geography is the integrating field par excellence." Another trend has also coincided with geography's comeback: using genetics to explain behavior. Geography provides a new wrinkle to the nature-vs.-nurture, or biology-vs.-culture, debate. Some scholars are using geography to help provide a counterweight to what they see as a crude biological determinism implying, for example, that Europeans won out because of some inbred superiority. In his introduction, for example, Diamond offers this one-sentence summary of his 480-page book: "History followed different courses for different people because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves." At its publication, "Guns, Germs and Steel" was praised for demolishing "racist theories" of history. Historical questions aren't the only ones that have enlisted geography to balance genetic explanations. The Swedish physiologist Bengt Saltin, for example, has studied Kenyan distance runners to find why so many excel at the sport. He found they have a muscle composition similar to that of Nordic athletes who train in similar conditions, at high altitudes and in hilly regions, according to a recent article in the New Yorker. Geography may be the critical variable, not genes. With all the new attention to geography, some scholars warn against crediting it with too much. "I think there are societies in which geography is very formative and times when it's not," says the economic historian Robert Heilbroner. "I wouldn't make it a very high priority." True, geography is not destiny any more than genetics or culture is. But after years of neglect, it offers a useful reminder: Location matters. Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company