what is geography

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Contents 目录

Introduction引言1
Why What is Geography?为什么地理是什么？5

Chapter One    To Know the World: Order and Power  第一章要了解世界：秩序与权力         7

Introduction 引言    7

Ordering the World    世界秩序    8

Modern Geography: The World of Trade and Nations 现代地理学：贸易和国家的世界 20

Knowing Others: Geography as the Modern Dilemma 认识他人：作为现代困境的地理     24

Conclusion   结论   28

Chapter Two    To Know the World: People and Nature     第二章认识世界：人与自然     30

Introduction引言     30

People&#8596;Nature    人<---->自然      32

The Systems of Nature    自然系统 47

Conclusion          结论     52

Chapter Three    Geographical Obsessions:Urbanisation and Mobility     第三章地理困扰:城市化与流动性  54

Introduction      引言     54

Presenting the City      展示城市  55

Urban Critics  城市的批评者(城市评论家 ) 62

Mobilities        情感     69

Conclusion      结论    78


Chapter Four    Doing Geography  第四章做地理80

Introduction         引言     80  

To Explore探究探索  81

To Connect连接87

To Map绘图(地图）91

To Engage参与95

Geography, Children and Freedom: A Plea 地理、儿童和自由：辩护99

Chapter Five    Institutionalising Geography  第五章地理制度化 101

Introduction         引言   101   

Specialist Institutions 专业机构 102

Geography’s Popular Institutions 地理学的流行机构 114

Conclusion 结论  118


What is Geography?什么是地理？ 121
Notes 词条 123

Bibliography索引 140
Index 153

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Introduction

We are all explorers. Even as tiny children we search out the limits of our world. A few years on, our imagination stretches further: fin&#65534;gers batting at a giddy plastic globe … a spinning top, gaudy with colour, representing perhaps the most ambitious idea possible, the world.


Geography is a fundamental fascination. It is also a core compo&#65534;nent of a good education. Yet a lot of people are not too sure what it is. They stumble over the question ‘What is geography?’ Perhaps they are worried by the scale and the implications of the obvious answer. For geography is about the world. To study geography is to
study the world, both near and far.


This book introduces geography as one of humanity’s big ideas. Geography is not just another academic specialism. Indeed, in an age when knowledge is fragmented into thousands of disciplines, geogra&#65534;phy can seem like a throwback. Its horizons are just too wide.

After examining the way geology, climatology, ecology, environmental science and a number of human sciences evolved from geography,the historian Peter Bowler suggests that ‘Geography is a classic example of a subject that can disappear as a separate entity, each of its functions siphoned off by a new specialisation’.1

But geography has not disappeared. Over the last 100 years its death has been predicted, even announced, many times. But it refuses to die. It seems that the desire for splintering the world into a kaleido&#65534;scope of intellectual shards also has its limits. More than this: that cer&#65534;tain forms of knowledge familiar to people thousands of years ago (for geography is no spring chicken) still mean something to people today.
Indeed, the need for world knowledge – for environmental knowledge, for international knowledge, for knowledge of the places and people beyond the parochial patch called home – could hardly be more press&#65534;ing, more contemporary.

Figure 1 shows geography’s area of study and its symbol. The world is geography’s logo. It rolls around the letterheads of countless geographical societies, magazines and departmental websites. Admittedly, it is not usually as pretty as the world seen in this photo&#65534;graph. This image was photographed at a distance of 45,000 kilometres from earth by an astronaut aboard Apollo 17 on 7th December 1972. Soon named ‘the Blue Marble’, this is a picture at once beautiful and impressive yet disconcerting in its pocketsize neatness. Set against that inky, infinite surround, we are reminded of the fragility and unity of our world. NASA archivist Mike Gentry calls it ‘the most widely dis&#65534;tributed image in human history’.2 It is the first and still the only time the whole earth had been photographed by a human eyewitness, for we have never since travelled such a distance.

Our world. It is an idea that provokes another: that our personal histories only make sense against the backdrop of six billion other per&#65534;sonal histories, that our fates are intertwined. The Blue Marble is a portrait of a modern, interdependent, geographical consciousness.

The phrase ‘personal histories’ reminds us that geography has a twin. History and geography have much in common. Both are ancient but also contemporary. Both address seemingly limitless territory yet remain lodged in our imaginations; hard to grasp but indispensable.
Immanuel Kant identified geography and history as the two basic forms of human knowledge, the one addressing things and events in space, the other things and events in time; the one reaching out, the other drilling down.3 History, like geography, seems to be all-inclusive, endless in depth and range. It is intellectually omnivorous. But this does not allow us to dismiss history as incoherent. We know that history is about the past and we know that the past matters. In What is History? E. H. Carr argued that people living in different times have thought about the utility and nature of history in different ways.
‘When we attempt to answer the question “What is history?” ’, Carr explained, ‘our answer, consciously or  unconsciously, reflects our own position in time’.4 Those with a geographical bent of mind will want to add, ‘and our position in the world’. But this is only to broaden Carr’s point, which is to insist that, even though history is universally understood to be about the past, what people mean when they say ‘history’ is enormously variable.


Figure 1 View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. Original caption.Courtesy of NASA


Something similar can be said of geography. Across thousands of years and in many different communities world knowledge has been sought and created. But at particular times and in particular places, this project has taken on a particular shape and has been expressed in a particular language. For much of human history what we now call ‘geographical knowledge’ was determined by the  demands of human survival, of the maintenance of bare life.
Information on the immediate landscape, as well as of what might surround it, may have been meagre but it was essential. With the development of more complex societies geographical consciousness became more elaborate. And a recurrent theme began to emerge, namely that the world has a centre (unsurprisingly, this ‘centre’ was often the same place where the ‘geography’ was being imag&#65534;ined) and a more dangerous, somewhat  strange, though perhaps enticingly exotic, periphery. It is not an unfamiliar model today. If we accept that the last few hundred years have been witness to the ‘Westernisation of the world’,5 then we are also likely to see the planet in terms of centres and peripheries.


Industrial modernity shaped geography in its own image. The kind of questions increasingly associated with geography reflected this dominance. These questions turned on two interconnected themes: environmental and international change. More specifically, it is towards geography that people have turned when seeking answers to
the questions, ‘How and why has the environment altered?’ and ‘How and why do nations differ?’ These  questions, transformed into images, are postered across school rooms the world over. They are also well represented within television schedules and in the print media. The modern geographical agenda thrives on global diversity, on a boldly asserted cosmopolitanism. But it also asserts ‘challenges’ and ‘prob&#65534;lems’ as central to the geography student’s vocabulary. Indeed, to contemporary ears, the words ‘environmental’ and  ‘international’ can seem a little bare without that pervasive suffix, ‘crisis’.
It seems that the desire and need for knowledge of the world is a basic human attribute, yet the content and form of these desires and needs are changeable. Something else that is changeable is geography’s audience. For much of the time since Eratosthenes (275–194 BC) coined the Greek word ‘geo-graphy’, or ‘earth writing’, over 2,200 years ago, written geographies were produced for and by a small elite.
Their authors assumed that ordinary people had narrower horizons; that their interests were local and insular. Today, huge swaths of the earth’s population have ready access to, and an apparent eagerness for information about places, peoples and events that are thousands of miles from where they live. Many millions see   international travel and international awareness as normal parts of ordinary lives. Tales of exotic destinations once had an aura of rarity and were often preceded by a low bow from a diplomat returning to court. Today they
have become so common as to be banal. Stories of journeys to far&#65534;flung destinations are told anywhere and by anyone. We are all, more or less, plugged into our planet. Its availability and accessibility have created a mass cosmopolitanism. Our wired-up, footloose, travel&#65534;bugged world is stage to expanding and mutating forms of global geographical awareness.

But as we imagine a world so easily spanned we also sense its vul&#65534;nerability. Geography can still talk to us in the primal language of sur&#65534;vival. To discuss environmental crisis may seem a distant, rather dry exercise. But what is being discussed is survival. International knowl&#65534;edge can appear a globetrotter’s luxury. But our era is one of world wars and worldwide conflicts between opponents with the power to destroy the planet. International knowledge too is about survival. Talk of crisis is often overblown. But no other era has experienced the kind
of pressures on the environment that we have been witness to over the past century. And in no other period have ordinary people become con&#65534;scious of global conflict in the way we have today. It is a unique and terrible kind of wisdom: we know we can destroy the world.

Why What is Geography?

There are many introductions to geography. Lots of academic overviews, lots of school textbooks. For the most part they offer summations of recent scholarship by academic geographers (if they are university books) or recent key topics in environmental or inter&#65534;national change (if they are school textbooks). What they do not tell us is what geography is. To do that you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. Geography has an interesting institutional history (see Chapter 5). But if its story is confined to only one insti&#65534;tutional form then it appears both random and disconnected. This much is obvious if one looks at contemporary academic geography.
It covers everything from queer theory to quaternary science. Merely collating this vast body of activity will never lead to a plausible explanation of what geography is.

And we do need to know what geography is. Students do, journalists do, politicians do. Because they do not know. And because many of us have the nagging sense that it matters, that our world needs this kind of knowledge. I’ve taught geography in the university sector for many years now. Again and again students have asked me ‘So, what is geography?’. Colleagues too, more wearily. For years I’ve batted the question away. ‘Whatever geographers make it’ was my glib response.

To be honest even asking the question seemed vaguely wrong: like calling the police round to spoil the  atmosphere of a care-free, interdisciplinary party. But as the issues that are so central to geographyissues of environmental and global crisis – have become ever more pressing, the luxury of evasion has become harder to afford. In an era in which geographical questions are the central questions of the day we need to know what geography is.

This little book is for anyone who wants an answer to the question posed in its title. It is a personal statement.6 And it is full of contentious arguments. It explains what I think geography is. But I like to think it is more than that. This book recognises geography as a characteristically human enterprise. Geography is an attempt to
find and impose order on a seemingly chaotic world; an attempt that is simultaneously modern and pre-modern, ancient and contemporary. The following chapters introduce us to this extraordinary ambition. Geography  spans both the human and the natural sciences (Chapters 1 and 2); its obsessions mirror our urbanising, mobile
world (Chapter 3); and its methods reflect the challenges of acquiring environmental and international  knowledge (Chapter 4). Finally, Chapter 5 shows that geography has many institutional forms but, somehow, constantly escapes and defies them. No institutional cage is quite big enough for a desire to know the world.

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(自己英语能力不逮，故借助在线翻译（http://www.xingyun.org.cn/thread-69332-1-1.html）靠机器翻译管中窥豹。）

Introduction

We are all explorers. Even as tiny children we search out the limits of our world. A few years on, our imagination stretches further: fin- gers batting at a giddy plastic globe … a spinning top, gaudy with colour, representing perhaps the most ambitious idea possible, the world.
我们都是探险家。 即使作为小孩子，我们也在寻找我们世界的极限。 几年后，我们的想象力进一步延伸：手指在一个令人眼花缭乱的塑料地球仪上敲击……一个色彩艳丽的陀螺，代表着可能是世界上最雄心勃勃的想法。

Geography is a fundamental fascination. It is also a core compo- nent of a good education. Yet a lot of people are not too sure what it is. They stumble over the question ‘What is geography?’ Perhaps they are worried by the scale and the implications of the obvious answer. For geography is about the world. To study geography is to study the world, both near and far.
地理是一种基本的魅力。它也是良好教育的核心组成部分。然而，很多人不太确定它是什么。他们在“什么是地理?”也许他们担心的是这个显而易见的答案的规模和含义。因为地理学是关于世界的。学地理就是研究世界，既有近的，也有远的

This book introduces geography as one of humanity’s big ideas. Geography is not just another academic specialism. Indeed, in an age when knowledge is fragmented into thousands of disciplines, geography  can  seem  like  a  throwback.  Its  horizons  are just  too  wide. After examining the way geology, climatology, ecology, environmental science and a number of human sciences evolved from geography, the historian Peter Bowler suggests that ‘Geography is a classic example of a subject that can disappear as a separate entity, each of its functions siphoned off by a new specialisation’.1
这本书介绍了作为人类伟大思想之一的地理学。地理不仅仅是另一个学术专业。事实上，在一个知识被分割成数千个学科的时代，地理学看起来像是一种倒退。它的视野太宽了。在考察了地质学、气候学、生态学、环境科学和许多人文科学从地理学演变而来的方式后，历史学家彼得·鲍尔（Peter Bowler）指出，“地理学是一个经典的例子，一门学科可以作为一个单独的实体消失，它的每一项功能都被一个新的专业化吸走。”。

But geography has not disappeared. Over the last  100 years its death has been predicted, even announced, many times. But it refuses to die. It seems that the desire for splintering the world into a kaleido- scope of intellectual shards also has its limits. More than this: that cer- tain forms of knowledge familiar to people thousands of years ago (for geography is no spring chicken) still mean something to people today. Indeed, the need for world knowledge – for environmental knowledge, for international knowledge, for knowledge of the places and people beyond the parochial patch called home – could hardly be more pressing, more contemporary.
但地理并没有消失。在过去的100年里，人们多次预言，甚至宣布它的死亡。但它拒绝死亡。看来，把世界分裂成一个万花筒——智力碎片的范围——的欲望也有它的限度。更重要的是，几千年前人们熟悉的某些知识形式(因为地理已经不再年轻)对今天的人们仍然有意义。事实上，对世界知识的需求——对环境知识、国际知识、对被称为家的狭隘领域之外的地方和人的知识的需求——几乎没有比这更紧迫、更现代的了。

Figure 1 shows geography’s area of study and its symbol. The world is  geography’s  logo.  It  rolls  around  the  letterheads  of  countless geographical   societies,   magazines   and   departmental  websites. Admittedly, it is not usually as pretty as the world seen in this photo- graph. This image was photographed at a distance of 45,000 kilometres from earth by an astronaut aboard Apollo 17 on 7th December 1972. Soon named ‘the Blue Marble’, this is a picture at once beautiful and impressive yet disconcerting in its pocketsize neatness. Set against that inky, infinite surround, we are reminded of the fragility and unity of our world. NASA archivist Mike Gentry calls it ‘the most widely dis- tributed image in human history’.2 It is the first and still the only time the whole earth had been photographed by a human eyewitness, for we have never since travelled such a distance.
图1显示了地理学的研究领域及其象征。世界是地理学的标志。它围绕着无数地理学会、杂志和部门网站的信笺。诚然，它通常不像这张照片中的世界那么美丽。这张照片是1972年12月7日阿波罗17号上的一名宇航员在距离地球45000公里的地方拍摄的。这张照片很快被命名为“蓝色大理石”，这张照片既美丽又令人印象深刻，但口袋大小的整洁却令人不安。在这黑暗、无限的包围下，我们想起了我们这个世界的脆弱和统一。美国宇航局档案管理员迈克·金特里（Mike Gentry）称之为“人类历史上分布最广的图像”。2这是第一次，也是迄今为止唯一一次由人类目击证人拍摄整个地球的照片，因为我们从没有走过这么远的距离。

Our world. It is an idea that provokes another: that our personal histories only make sense against the backdrop of six billion other per- sonal histories, that our fates are intertwined. The Blue Marble is a portrait of a modern, interdependent, geographical consciousness.
我们的世界，这种想法激起了另一种观点：我们的个人历史只有在60亿其他历史的背景下才有意义，我们的命运是交织在一起的。蓝色大理石是现代、相互依存的地理意识的写照。

The phrase ‘personal histories’ reminds us that geography has a twin. History and geography have much in common. Both are ancient but also contemporary. Both address seemingly limitless territory yet remain lodged in our imaginations; hard to grasp but indispensable. Immanuel Kant identified geography and history as the two basic forms of human knowledge, the one addressing things and events in space, the other things and events in time; the one reaching out, the other drilling down.3 History, like geography, seems to be all-inclusive, endless in depth and range. It is intellectually omnivorous. But this does not allow us to dismiss history as incoherent. We know that history is about the past and we know that the past matters. In What is History? E. H. Carr argued that people living in different times have thought about the utility and nature of history in different ways. ‘When we attempt to answer the question “What is history?” ’, Carr explained, ‘our answer, consciously or unconsciously, reflects our own position in time’.4  Those with a geographical bent of mind will want to add, ‘and our position in the world’. But this is only to broaden Carr’s point, which is to insist that, even though history is  universally understood to be about the past, what people mean when they say ‘history’ is enormously variable.
“个人历史”一词提醒我们地理有一对孪生兄弟。历史和地理有许多共同之处。两者都是古代的，但也都是当代的。两者都涉及看似无限的领域，但仍停留在我们的想象中；很难掌握，但不可或缺。伊曼纽尔·康德将地理和历史确定为人类知识的两种基本形式，一种是处理空间中的事物和事件，另一种是处理时间中的事物和事件；历史，就像地理一样，似乎包罗万象，在深度和广度上都是无穷无尽的。它在智力上是杂食性的。但这并不允许我们将历史视为不连贯。我们知道历史是关于过去的，我们知道过去很重要。什么是历史？EH卡尔认为，生活在不同时代的人们以不同的方式思考历史的效用和性质卡尔解释说，当我们试图回答“什么是历史？”这个问题时，“我们的回答，无论是有意识还是无意识，都反映了我们自己在时间上的立场。”那些有地理倾向的人会想补充一句，“以及我们在世界上的地位”。但这只是为了扩大卡尔的观点，即坚持认为，尽管人们普遍认为历史是关于过去的，但人们所说的“历史”的含义却千变万化。

Figure 1    View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. This translunar coast photograph extends from the Mediterranean Sea    area to the Antarctica south polar ice cap. Original caption.Courtesy of NASA
图1阿波罗17号宇航员向月球行进时看到的地球视图。这张半透明海岸照片从地中海地区延伸到南极洲南极冰盖。原始说明。由NASA提供


Something similar can be said of geography. Across thousands of years and in many different communities world knowledge has been sought and created. But at particular times and in particular places, this project has taken on a particular shape and has been expressed in a particular language. 地理也可以说是类似的。数千年来，在许多不同的社区，人们一直在寻求和创造世界知识。但在特定的时间和特定的地点，这个项目呈现出特定的形式，并用特定的语言表达出来。
For much of human history what we now call ‘geographical knowledge’ was determined by the demands  of  human  survival,  of  the  maintenance  of  bare  life. Information on the immediate landscape, as well as of what might surround it, may have been meagre but it was essential.
在人类历史的大部分时间里，我们现在所说的“地理知识”是由人类生存的需要决定的，是由维持赤裸裸的（原始的？）生命的需要决定的。关于眼前景观以及它周围可能发生的事情的信息可能很少，但这是必不可少的。
With the development of more complex societies geographical consciousness became more elaborate. And a recurrent theme began to emerge, namely that the world has a centre (unsurprisingly, this ‘centre’ was often the same place where the ‘geography’ was being imag- ined) and a more dangerous, somewhat strange, though perhaps enticingly exotic, periphery. It is not an unfamiliar model today. If we accept that the last few hundred years have been witness to the ‘Westernisation of the world’,5  then we are also likely to see the planet in terms of centres and peripheries.
随着越来越复杂的社会的发展，地理意识变得越来越复杂。一个反复出现的主题开始浮现，即世界有一个中心（毫不奇怪，这个“中心”经常是“地理”被想象的同一个地方）和一个更危险、有点奇怪、但可能具有诱人异国情调的边缘。这在今天已经不是一个陌生的模式了。如果我们接受过去几百年是“世界西化”的见证，5那么我们也可能从中心和外围看到地球。

Industrial modernity shaped geography in its own image. The kind of questions increasingly associated with geography reflected this dominance. These questions turned on two interconnected themes: environmental  and  international  change.  More  specifically,  it  is towards geography that people have turned when seeking answers to the questions, ‘How and why has the environment altered?’ and ‘How and why do nations differ?’ These questions, transformed into images, are postered across school rooms the world over. 工业现代化以其自身的形象塑造了地理学。越来越多地与地理相关的问题反映了这种优势。这些问题涉及两个相互关联的主题：环境和国际变化。更具体地说，人们在寻找“环境如何以及为什么发生了变化”和“国家如何以及为什么不同”等问题的答案时，转向了地理。这些问题被转化为图像，张贴在世界各地的教室中。
They are also well represented within television schedules and in the print media. The modern geographical agenda thrives on global diversity, on a boldly asserted cosmopolitanism. But it also asserts ‘challenges’ and ‘prob- lems’ as central to the geography student’s vocabulary. Indeed, to contemporary ears, the words ‘environmental’ and ‘international’ can seem a little bare without that pervasive suffix, ‘crisis’.
它们在电视节目安排和印刷媒体中也得到了很好的体现。现代地理议程以全球多样性为基础，以大胆主张的世界主义为基础。但它也断言“挑战”和“问题”是地理专业学生词汇的核心。的确，在当代人看来，如果没有“危机”这个无处不在的后缀，“环境”和“国际”这两个词可能会显得有些光秃秃的。

It seems that the desire and need for knowledge of the world is a basic human attribute, yet the content and form of these desires and needs are changeable. Something else that is changeable is geogra- phy’s audience. For much ofthe time since Eratosthenes (275–194 BC) coined the Greek word ‘geo-graphy’, or ‘earth writing’, over 2,200 years ago, written geographies were produced for and by a small elite. Their authors assumed that ordinary people had narrower horizons; that their interests were local and insular.
对世界知识的渴望和需要似乎是人类的基本属性，但这些渴望和需要的内容和形式是多变的。另一个变化的是地理学的受众。自从埃拉托色尼（公元前275-194年）在2200多年前创造了希腊语“地理学”或“地球文字”以来，大部分时间里，文字地理学是为一小部分精英制作的。他们的作者认为普通人的视野更窄；他们的兴趣是地方性的和孤立的。
Today, huge swaths of the earth’s population have ready access to, and an apparent eagerness for information about places, peoples and events that are thousands of miles from where they live.  Many millions see  international travel and international awareness as normal parts of ordinary lives.
今天，地球上的大量人口可以随时获得，并明显渴望获得离他们居住的地方数千英里的地方、人民和事件的信息。数百万人将国际旅行和国际意识视为日常生活的正常部分。
Tales of exotic destinations once had an aura of rarity and were often preceded by a low bow from a diplomat returning to court. Today they have become so common as to be banal. Stories of journeys to far- flung destinations are told anywhere and by anyone. We are all, more or less, plugged into our planet. Its availability and accessibility have created  a  mass  cosmopolitanism.  Our  wired-up,  footloose,  travel- bugged world is stage to expanding and mutating forms of global geographical awareness.
关于异国情调的故事曾经有一种罕见的气氛，在故事发生之前，一位外交官返回法庭时通常会低头鞠躬。今天，它们变得如此普遍，以至于平淡无奇。到遥远的目的地旅行的故事在任何地方都可以被任何人讲述。我们或多或少都与我们的星球紧密相连。它的可用性和可及性创造了一种大规模的世界主义。我们这个布线严密、自由自在、旅行繁忙的世界是全球地理意识不断扩大和变异的舞台。

But as we imagine a world so easily spanned we also sense its vul- nerability. Geography can still talk to us in the primal language ofsur- vival. To discuss environmental crisis may seem a distant, rather dry exercise. But what is being discussed is survival. International knowl- edge can appear a globetrotter’s luxury. But our era is one of world wars and worldwide conflicts between opponents with the power to destroy the planet. 但当我们想象一个如此容易跨越的世界时，我们也感觉到了它的脆弱性。地理仍然可以用生存的原始语言与我们对话。讨论环境危机似乎是一项遥远而枯燥的工作。但现在讨论的是生存。国际知识可以成为环球旅行者的奢侈品。但我们的时代是一个世界大战和世界范围的冲突的时代，对手有能力摧毁地球。
International knowledge too is about survival. Talk of crisis is often overblown. But no other era has experienced the kind ofpressures on the environment that we have been witness to over the past century. And in no other period have ordinary people become con- scious of global conflict in the way we have today. It is a unique and terrible kind of wisdom: we know we can destroy the world.It  covers  everything  from  queer  theory  to  quaternary  science. Merely collating this vast body of activity will never lead to a plau- sible explanation of what geography is.
国际知识也是关于生存的。有关危机的讨论往往被夸大了。但在过去的一个世纪里，没有哪个时代经历过我们亲眼目睹的那种环境压力。在任何其他时期，普通人都没有像今天这样意识到全球冲突。这是一种独特而可怕的智慧：我们知道我们可以毁灭世界。



Why What is Geography?

There  are  many  introductions  to  geography.  Lots  of  academic overviews, lots of school textbooks. For the most part they offer summations of recent scholarship by academic geographers (if they are university books) or recent key topics in environmental or inter- national change (if they are school textbooks). What they do not tell us is what geography is. To do that you have to step back and look at the bigger picture. Geography has an interesting institutional history (see Chapter 5). But if its story is confined to only one insti- tutional form then it appears both random and disconnected. This much is obvious if one looks at contemporary academic geography.
有很多关于地理的介绍。大量的学术综述，大量的学校教科书。在大多数情况下，它们提供学术地理学家最近的学术总结(如果它们是大学书籍)，或者最近关于环境或国际变化的关键主题(如果它们是学校教科书)。他们没有告诉我们的是地理是什么。要做到这一点，你必须后退一步，着眼于更大的图景。地理有一段有趣的制度历史(见第5章)。但是，如果它的故事只局限于一种机构形式，那么它就显得既随机又脱节。如果你看一下当代学术地理学，这一点是显而易见的。它涵盖了从酷儿理论到第四纪科学的方方面面。仅仅整理这一大堆活动永远不会对什么是地理学做出合理的解释。

And we do need to know what geography is. Students do, journalists do, politicians do. Because they do not know. And because many of us have the nagging sense that it matters, that our world needs this kind of knowledge. I’ve taught geography in the university sector for many years now. Again and again students have asked me ‘So, what is geography?’. Colleagues too, more wearily. 我们确实需要知道地理是什么。学生有，记者有，政治家有。因为他们不知道。因为我们中的许多人都有一种挥之不去的感觉，即它很重要，我们的世界需要这种知识。我在大学教地理已经很多年了。一次又一次的学生问我‘那么，地理是什么？’。同事们也更疲倦了。
For years I’ve batted the question away. ‘Whatever geographers make it’ was my glib response. To be honest even asking the question seemed vaguely wrong: like calling the police round to spoil the atmosphere of a care-free, interdis- ciplinary party. But as the issues that are so central to geography – issues of environmental and global crisis – have become ever more pressing, the luxury of evasion has become harder to afford. In an era in which geographical questions are the central questions of the day we need to know what geography is.多年来，我一直回避这个问题。"无论地理学家做出什么决定"都是我轻率的回答。说实话，即使问这个问题似乎也隐约是错误的：就像叫警察来破坏一个无忧无虑的跨学科派对的气氛。但是，随着地理问题——环境和全球危机问题——变得越来越紧迫，逃避的奢侈变得难以承受。在一个地理问题是当今中心问题的时代，我们需要知道什么是地理。

This little book is for anyone who wants an answer to the question posed in its title. It is a personal statement.6  And it is full of contentious arguments. It explains what I think geography is. But I like to think it is more than that. This book recognises geography as a characteristically human enterprise.  Geography is  an  attempt to find and impose order on a seemingly chaotic world; an attempt that is simultaneously modern and premodern, ancient and contemporary.
这本小书是为任何想要回答书名中提出的问题的人准备的。这是一份个人声明。6它充满了争议性的争论。它解释了我所认为的地理是什么。但我更愿意认为这不止于此。这本书承认地理是人类特有的事业。地理学是一种试图在一个看似混乱的世界上寻找并强加秩序的尝试；一种同时具有现代与前现代、古老与现代的尝试。
The following chapters introduce us to this extraordinary ambi- tion. Geography spans both the human and the natural sciences (Chapters  1 and 2); its obsessions mirror our urbanising, mobile world (Chapter 3); and its methods reflect the challenges of acquir- ing environmental and international knowledge (Chapter 4). Finally, Chapter 5 shows that geography has many institutional forms but, somehow, constantly escapes and defies them. No institutional cage is quite big enough for a desire to know the world.
接下来的几章将向我们介绍这一非凡的抱负。地理学横跨人文科学和自然科学(第一章和第二章)；它的痴迷反映了我们城市化、流动的世界(第三章)；它的方法反映了获取环境和国际知识的挑战(第四章)。最后，第五章表明，地理有许多制度形式，但不知何故，不断地逃避和挑战它们。任何机构的笼子都不够大，不足以让人渴望了解世界。