Why Geography Matters More Than Ever

Citation

de Blij, H. (2012). Why Geography Matters: More Than Ever (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

This is the second edition of a book first published in 2005 as Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America, whose subtitle named climate change, the rise of China and global terrorism. The 2012 edition keeps those three challenges at its centre and widens the frame. It runs to about 330 pages of text in twelve chapters, with a list of works cited and an index. Harm de Blij, a geographer and long-time geography editor for ABC's Good Morning America, writes for a general audience: the publisher describes the book as peppered with anecdotes from his professional travels and aimed at casual students of geography and policy-makers alike. Its argument, in the publisher's words, is that the United States has become the world's most geographically illiterate society of consequence, and that a geographical perspective is needed to make sense of world events.

Chapters 1–2: Why Geography Matters More Than Ever; Reading Maps and Facing Threats

The opening chapter states the case for geography as a way of understanding a turbulent world. Chapter 2, one of the longest, turns to maps: how they are made and read, the choices cartographers make among projections, and how maps shape the way threats are perceived.

Chapter 3: Geography and Demography

Population: its distribution, growth and composition, and why demographic patterns matter for the other challenges in the book.

Chapters 4–5: Geography and Climate Change; Climate, Place and Fate

The climate chapters take a long view. The terms that recur in the text include Pangaea, the Pleistocene and Holocene, glaciations and interglacials, the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age, alongside global warming: de Blij places present climate change within the Earth's climatic history and, in Chapter 5, connects climate to the fortunes of places and of human societies.

Chapters 6–7: The Geography Behind War and Terror; Interpreting Terrorism's Geographic Manifestations

Two chapters on conflict and terrorism, the second of the original three challenges. Chapter 6, the longest in the book, examines the geographical background of war and terror; Chapter 7 interprets where and how terrorism appears. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Sunni–Shi'ite divide are among the recurring terms in the text.

Chapter 8: China's Geopolitical Gauntlet

The third original challenge: China's rise and the geopolitical pressures around it; Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam and North Korea are among the neighbours that recur in the text.

Chapters 9–10: Superpower in the Making or Paper Tiger of the Future?; Trouble on the Eastern Front

Chapter 9 asks whether a power in the making will prove a superpower or a paper tiger; the publisher's description lists the "troubling disarray" of the European Union among the book's topics. Chapter 10 turns east, and Moscow, Putin and Chechnya are among the recurring terms in the text.

Chapters 11–12: Africa in a Globalizing World; More Than Ever

Chapter 11 looks at Subsaharan Africa's place in globalization, including the overlooked conflict in Equatorial Africa that the publisher's description mentions. The short final chapter returns to the book's argument that geography matters more than ever.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: Maps and people

• Geographic literacy: knowledge of the world's places, peoples and environments, which de Blij argues Americans conspicuously lack.
• Map projections: the unavoidable distortions of flat maps of a round Earth, and their consequences for how the world is seen.
• Demographic patterns: the geography of population growth and distribution.

Chapters 4–7: Climate and conflict

• Climate change in deep time: present warming viewed against glaciations, interglacials and abrupt shifts in Earth's past.
• Climate and place: how climatic conditions shape the prospects of regions and societies.
• Geography of terrorism: the spatial distribution and context of terrorist movements and attacks.

Chapters 8–12: World regions

• Geographic realms and regions: the large world regions through which de Blij interprets China, Europe, Russia and Africa.
• Geopolitics: how location, neighbours and territory shape a state's strategic position.
• Globalization: the uneven integration of regions, especially Africa, into the world economy.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear case for geography. The book makes an argument, not a survey: that events from climate extremes to terrorism and great-power rivalry can only be understood geographically. That makes it useful for students who need to see why the discipline matters before studying it.
• Wide range in a short book. In about 330 pages it moves from map projections and Ice Age climate to terrorism, China, the European Union, Russia and Africa, connecting physical and human geography in one argument.
• Written by an experienced communicator. De Blij wrote more than thirty books and spent years explaining geography on network television; the publisher notes the anecdotes from his travels, and the book is pitched for readers without background.

Limitations

• Dated. The second edition reflects the world as of 2012: the Arab Spring, North Korea's nuclear ambitions and the European Union's crisis of that time. Later developments, including Russia's wars against Ukraine and more recent climate science, are absent, so its chapters on Russia, China and climate should be read historically.
• American frame. The book is addressed primarily to American readers and their perceived geographical illiteracy, and the threats it discusses are often viewed from the standpoint of the United States.
• Not an academic political geography. It is a work of public argument with a short list of works cited; it does not engage the theoretical debates of political geography, and students will need a textbook for concepts such as territory, sovereignty and scale.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the political geography list this is background reading rather than a core textbook. It suits the start of a course, as a lively argument for why location, borders, resources and environment matter in world affairs. Dodds's Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction is a similarly short entry point but focused on geopolitical ideas and their critics, and reading the two together sets de Blij's region-by-region account of threats beside a critical history of geopolitical thinking.

The core texts take over from there. Flint and Taylor's Political Geography: World-Economy, Nation-State and Locality gives a systematic world-systems framework, and Sara Smith's Political Geography: A Critical Introduction treats power in space through feminist and anti-colonial approaches; both provide the theory that de Blij's book does not. Painter and Jeffrey's Political Geography and Elden's The Birth of Territory are for students going further into theory and the history of concepts.

How to Use This Book

The book is written for general readers and needs no background in geography; it suits first-year students, students from other disciplines, and anyone curious about why geography matters for current affairs.

A reading plan:

• Core: Chapters 1 and 2 for the argument and the treatment of maps, then the three challenges that structure the book: climate (Chapters 4–5), terrorism (Chapters 6–7) and China (Chapter 8).
• Regional chapters: Chapters 9–11 on Europe, Russia and Africa can be read selectively, according to a course's regional focus.
• Conclusion: Chapter 12 is short and restates the case.

Read it as an argument made in 2012. For each regional chapter, note the author's main claims and check what has happened since; this turns the book's datedness into an exercise in geographical reasoning. Pair the climate chapters with a current scientific summary, and the political chapters with the corresponding concepts in a political geography textbook.