Don't Know Much About Geography: Revised and Updated Edition

575 Pages·2013·1.88 MB·English

by  Kenneth C. Davis

Dedication
To my parents,
Evelyn and Richard Davis,
who gave me good directions.
Epigraph
Geography is a representation of the whole known world together with the
phenomena which are contained therein.
In Geography one must contemplate the extent of the entire Earth, as well as
its shape, and its position under the heavens . . . the length of its days and nights,
the stars which are fixed overhead, the stars which move above the horizon, and
the stars which never rise above the horizon at all. . . .
It is the great and exquisite accomplishment of mathematics to show all these
things to human intelligence.
—PTOLEMY
GEOGRAPHIA

No two countries that both had McDonald’s had ever fought a war against each
other since each got its McDonald’s. (Border skirmishes and civil wars don’t
count since McDonald’s usually served both sides.) . . . The Golden Arches
Theory of Conflict Prevention . . . When a country reached the level of economic
development where it had a middle class big enough to support a network of
McDonald’s it became a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s
countries didn’t like to fight wars anymore.
—THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
THE WORLD IS FLAT (2007) What kind of world is likely if we take no deliberate action?
What kind of world do we want?
What kind of world is possible if we act effectively?
—WILLIAM HOOKE
WWW.LIVINGONTHEREALWORLD.ORG
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph

Preface to the Revised Edition
Introduction: How Come the Nile River Flows Up?
Chapter 1 - The World Is a Pear
Chapter 2 - What’s So Bad About the Badlands?
Chapter 3 - If People Were Dolphins, the Planet Would Be Called “Ocean”
Chapter 4 - Elephants in the Alps
Chapter 5 - Paradise Lost? Geography, Weather, and the Environment
Chapter 6 - Lost in Space?
Appendix I - What the Hell Is a Hoosier? Names and Nicknames of the Fifty
American States
Appendix II - Table of Comparative Measures
Appendix III - The Nations of the World
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index

About the Author
Also by Kenneth C. Davis
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Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface to the Revised Edition of Don’t Know
Much About® Geography
Okay. They always tell you to lead with the headline. So here goes.
BREAKING NEWS: They’ve added an ocean.
Say what?
That’s right. There are five oceans now where there used to be only four. Or,
at least, so says the IHO (no, not IHOP). The International Hydrographic
Organization is a multinational, intergovernmental group that oversees issues of
navigation and charting and other oceanic matters. Based in Monaco—I know;
tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it—the IHO decided a few years ago that
there is a Southern Ocean, or as some call it, an Antarctic Ocean. As readers of
the original book would know, this is not a brand new idea. I discussed the
subject of the Southern Ocean in the first edition of the book. But now it’s more
“official.”
This neo-ocean extends up from Antarctica and would count as the world’s
fourth largest ocean—if it counted. This is in addition to the four we were
supposed to learn back in the fifth grade. (The Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and
Arctic, in size order, just in case you were absent or just bored that day.)
Now you may also have heard that Pluto was downgraded from planetary to
“dwarf planet” status. There’s still some dispute about that one, too, but it did get
plenty of media attention.
But coming up with a new ocean! You would think that would have made the
front pages.
But this Earth- (or ocean-) shaking news hasn’t exactly taken the world by
storm. Many people and reference books, including the Time Almanac 2012, do
not seem to know about this extra ocean. Or not everyone recognizes its
existence. The Rodney Dangerfield of oceans—it gets no respect.
It must also be said that there is in fact only one ocean—the great single body
of interconnected water that covers much of the earth’s surface and is only
occasionally broken up by the little plots of land called continents and islands.
And that is one reason why geography can be so confusing, as I wrote in this
book when it was originally published. Geography, from the Greek meaning “to
describe the earth,” is sometimes as much art as science and some terms are less
easily defined. Seas can be lakes. Jungles can be rain forests. And continents can
be islands.
In the two decades since this book was first written, the earth hasn’t changed
much. Oh sure, along with that new ocean, we’ve added millions of people to the
head count—with billions more expected to arrive on board Spaceship Earth
over the next few decades. Some of the borders have changed; countries have
broken apart—like Czechoslovakia, which peacefully split into the Czech
Republic and Slovakia in January 1993. Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, and
erosion continue to reshape the earth’s features. And the global temperature
continues to climb.
When this book first appeared, America had just ended a war against Iraq led
by President Bush. Now in 2012, America has just ended a war against Iraq
begun by President Bush. Of course, different wars, different presidents Bush,
and very different outcomes.
So while some things stay the same, there have been enormous changes in
the world in twenty years. And this book has been updated and revised with new
questions to reflect these essential changes:
The role of the Internet and other technology in transforming global life
(What was the Arab Spring?)
The rise of China, India and other former “developing nations” as world
economic powers amid the globalization of commerce (What can you build
with BRICS? Does the World Bank have ATMs?)
The question of sustainability in a world that is growing, as author Thomas
Friedman succinctly put it, “hot, flat, and crowded”
The debate over climate change and evolutionary science and the related
question of how science has become a partisan political issue—particularly
in the United States (Is all the talk of global warming just a lot of hot air?)
As I wrote in the original Introduction to this book, geography is not just
about memorizing place names and state capitals or knowing how to read maps.
It is about understanding our place in the world and who our neighbors are. It is
about understanding the links between places and events. My goal was to get
people to “think geographically”—to look at the world with the great sense of
curiosity that some of the ancient thinkers possessed—and attempt to figure out
the world. That was the beginning of science. Which raises the most serious
point of this book.
During the past twenty years, America has witnessed a concerted assault on
science. While some of those attacks come from the fact that we learn new
things about medicine, space, and biology all the time—and yes, we know that
science and scientists can be wrong—much of the assault has come from people
with very specific agendas. Those agendas can be motivated by profit, political
ideology, religious belief, or faith in what has been called “junk science.”
But the serious threat to good science and, more importantly, science
education is a dangerous thing, especially in a world that will increasingly
demand complex technological and scientific answers to its pantheon of
problems. I have tried to address some of these hot-button issues, especially
climate change and evolution, very directly.
As I write this, a 2012 Gallup survey showed that 46 percent of Americans
believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at
some time within the last ten thousand years.* That belief, largely a matter of
faith among some Christians, has been aggressively introduced into American
public education in recent years. Once known as “creationism,” this idea was
repackaged as “intelligent design,” or ID—an attempt to put very old wine into a
new bottle. In a closely watched court case in Pennsylvania, the intelligent
design movement made a thinly veiled attempt to question all of evolutionary
biology by introducing doubt over relatively small and unresolved issues. This
was an end-run approach to introduce the biblical view of creation, previously
ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, into science classes. The strategy
was completely rejected in December 2005 by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones
III, who wrote in his ruling, “[We] find that ID [Intelligent Design] is not science
and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory as it has failed to
publish in peer-reviewed journals, engage in research and testing, and gain
acceptance in the scientific community. ID, as noted, is grounded in theology,
not science. Accepting for the sake of argument its proponents’, as well as
Defendants’ argument that to introduce ID to students will encourage critical
thinking, it still has utterly no place in a science curriculum.”*
That ruling by a Republican administration-appointed judge dismantled the
ID argument. Yet the issue—and the fundamental belief attacking evolutionary
science behind it—has not gone away.
It is my hope that this book will shed more light than heat about geography
and its wonders.
Looking back at the changes over the past two decades, both historically and
technologically, it is difficult to imagine writing about the world twenty years
from now. But geography helps by showing us where we have been and, maybe,
where we are going.
Now, about those oceans: When the question “How many oceans are there?”
comes up and the multiple-choice answers are:

a. One
b. Four
c. Five
d. All of the above

Now you know. Go with D.
Introduction: How Come the Nile River Flows
Up?
Way back in elementary school, I had a social studies teacher I’ll call Mrs.
McNally. One day, in the middle of a geography lesson, Mrs. McNally lost it.
Things started to fall apart for her when she pulled down one of those wonderful
window-shade maps we had in grade school.
Remember them? Three or four maps mounted over the blackboard? You
pulled one down and it usually snapped right back up again. Geography class
sometimes looked like a Three Stooges routine. (Yes, children, once upon a time,
we had maps on paper, not on laptops, PCs, smartphones, and tablets.)
On this particular morning, it was a map of Africa because the class was
studying Egypt and the Nile River. As the teacher spoke, a small hand shot up
and a tiny voice asked, “How come the Nile River flows up?”
Today, it seems like a silly, yet innocent, child’s question. (If you are asking
yourself the same question, then you really need this book!) But back then, it
was a puzzle that immediately caught the attention of the whole class. With the
proverbial light bulb clicking on over our heads, we all wondered, “Yeah, how
could a river flow up?”
To our fifth-grade minds, it simply made no sense for a river to flow up the
map. Everybody knew that water had to flow down. We had caught the teacher
in a very obvious mistake.
Of course, on a map oriented along the lines of this jingle:
North to the ceiling,
South to the floor,
West to the window,