Dictionary:

geography

  (jē-ŏg'rə-fē)

1. The study of the earth and its features and of the distribution of life on the earth, including human life and the effects of human activity.
2. The physical characteristics, especially the surface features, of an area.
3. A book on geography.
4. An ordered arrangement of constituent elements: charting a geography of the mind.

[Latin geōgraphia, from Greek geōgraphiā : geō-, geo- + -graphiā, -graphy.]

The study of physical and human landscapes, the processes that affect them, how and why they change over time, and how and why they vary spatially. Geographers consider, to varying degrees, both natural and human influences on the landscape, although a common division separates human and physical geography. Physical geographers may study landforms (geomorphology), water (hydrology), climate and meteorology (climatology), the biotic environment (biogeography), or soils (pedology). Human geographers include urban, regional, and environmental planners; cultural geographers; regional and area specialists; economic geographers; political geographers; transportation analysts; location analysts; and specialists in the spatial nature of ethnic or gender issues. See also Biogeography; Climatology; Geomorphology; Hydrology; Pedology.

Many geographers are involved with the development of techniques and applications that support spatial analytical studies or the display of spatial information and data. Maps, whether printed, digital, or conceptual, are the basic tools of geography. Geographers are involved in map interpretation and use, as well as map production and design. Cartographers supervise the compilation, design, and development of maps, globes, and other graphic representations. See also Cartography.

A geographic information system (GIS) is a relatively new technology that combines the advantages of computer-assisted cartography with those of spatial database management. It facilitates the storage, retrieval, and analysis of spatial information in the form of digital map “overlays,” each representing a different landscape component (terrain, hydrologic features, roads, vegetation, soil types, or any mappable factor). Each of these data layers can be fitted digitally to the same map scale and map projection—in any combination—permitting the analysis of relationships among any combination of environmental variables for which data have been input into the geographic information systems. See also Geographic information systems.

Many geographers are applied practitioners, solving problems using a variety of tools, including computer-assisted cartography, statistical methods, remotely sensed imagery, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and geographic information systems. Today, nearly all geographers, regardless of their subdisciplinary emphases, employ some or all of these techniques in their professional endeavors. See also Physical geography.

One of the structures of how we understand society and space, practised, inter alia, by seeing, dwelling, collecting, travelling, mapping, representing, recording, and narrating; an approach which encourages a focus on complexity, multiplicity, and relational thinking. It is sometimes easier to define what is not geography. See the next entry.

For more information on geography, visit Britannica.com.

geography, (geōgraphia, ‘description of the earth’). For Homer and Hesiod the earth was a plane land mass of circular contour around the Mediterranean basin, surrounded by the stream of Ocean, and the first world maps drawn by Anaximander and Hecataeus in the sixth century BC largely supported this view. The Greeks and Romans knew of three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa (Libya), but of none of them fully. It was generally believed that the distance from east to west was twice that from north to south. During the fifth century works of descriptive geography began to be written. Herodotus' Histories contain much geographical and ethnological material. Ctesias wrote a geographical treatise and the first separate work on India. Two fourth-century historians, Ephorus and Timaeus, devoted several books to descriptive geography. The conquests of Alexander the Great and the opening up of western Europe by the Romans in the second and first centuries BC resulted in many treatises being written. The most notable work of descriptive geography to survive is that of the Greek Strabo (first century BC to first century AD) who combined physical, historical, political, and mathematical geography. This last had been made possible by Aristotle's proof (c.350 BC) of the earth's sphericity and his introduction of the general principle of dividing the globe into zones. Eratosthenes (c.275–194 BC) established mathematical geography as a science and Ptolemy applied its principles in the first half of the second century AD. Unfortunately the scientific geographers did not oust the traditional and erroneous beliefs of older writers, which were perpetuated in the compilations of late antiquity. (See also POMPONIUS MELA.)

As the study of the earth's surface, geography is among the most concrete and accessible of all the sciences. Yet the very definition of geographical knowledge has been highly contested throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Geographers have disagreed over whether theirs is an analytic or a synthetic study, whether it deals primarily with the realm of nature or culture, and the degree to which it should be concerned with spatial relationships. Geography has also contended with a persistent reputation as simply descriptive inventory of the earth's surface, which has exacerbated its relationship with neighboring disciplines.

Institutional and Intellectual Origins

Through most of the nineteenth century geography was a broadly defined and practical field of knowledge utilized by scholars, explorers, bureaucrats, and politicians. Organizations such as the National Geographic Society and the American Geographical Society flourished in the nineteenth century as meeting grounds for men of science and government. The American Geographical Society, chartered in 1851, was devoted to the nation's growth and progress westward, especially the development of a transcontinental rail route. The organization welcomed not just geographers but also leaders in government, business, education, and science who shared their outlook. Through the society these members were exposed to the nation's exploration, surveying, and mapping efforts, primarily in the American West. Similarly, the National Geographic Society was founded in 1888 as a forum of exchange of information for the community of scientists and bureaucrats in Washington, D. C., involved in geological work. The society continued to facilitate geologically oriented research until the Spanish-American War, when it began a vigorous defense of the nation's mission abroad. In both these organizations, geographical knowledge served the state both concretely, through the supply of scientific expertise, and abstractly, in striking a nationalist posture.

Intellectually, American geography reflected a heavy European influence in the nineteenth century. Among the most influential and popular contemporary geographers were transplanted Europeans such as Karl Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt. Both elevated geography from the realm of description to that of science by considering the landscape as a unified entity to be studied as a whole, a process for which geography was uniquely suited in its stress on synthesis. Louis Agassiz, appointed at Harvard in 1848, was trained in the natural sciences and noted for his development of theories of glaciation and landforms. Arnold Guyot, appointed at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) in 1854, began to introduce a concept of geography not as a description of the earth's elements but rather as an observed interrelationship between land, oceans, atmosphere, and human life, all of which interacted harmoniously in a grand design. Though geography would gradually shed this teleological cast, Guyot had pushed geography from description to inter-pretation. George Perkins Marsh also explored this relationship in his Man and Nature (1864), though with a thoroughly theological bent. Into this basic framework of the relatively static view of the human and natural world, the work of Charles Darwin introduced the idea of evolution. As a result, geographers began to pay attention to the evolution of landforms over time, which eventually bolstered the study of physical geography.

By the late nineteenth century geography was no longer simply a tool of exploration, data gathering, and mapping. With the era of exploration waning, and with the coincident rise of American universities, geographers began to turn their attention toward reconceptualizing geography as an analytic, scientific body of knowledge. This was a difficult change for geographers, both intellectually and institutionally. Many worried that their field's reputation—as a broad field open to amateur armchair explorers as well as scientific experts—would taint its prospects in the newly professionalized university.

The unquestioned intellectual father of geography at this critical moment of late-century maturation was actually trained not in geography but geology, because doctoral programs in the former had yet to be developed. William Morris Davis was trained at Harvard as a geologist by Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and appointed professor of physical geography there in 1885. For Davis, the claims geographers made for their study as the "mother of all sciences" had to be halted if progress were to be made, for other scientists regarded this claim as the key indicator of geography's incoherence. Thus began a long tension within geography: What makes the field unique and worthy of its independence? How does a study that is essentially synthetic defend itself from the reach of neighboring sciences as diverse as geology, anthropology, and botany?

Together, Shaler and Davis initiated the first course of training in physical geography—the study of the surface features of the earth—and mentored the first generation of trained geographers in the United States. During the 1880s and 1890s Davis advanced an idea that applied Darwinian principles of evolution to the study of the physical landscape. The result was the science of geo-morphology, in which Davis argued that different elements of the environment worked to produce change on the landscape through dynamics such as soil erosion. This concept helped legitimate geography at the university level and in the process gave geographers a tremendous source of pride. At the same time, however, geomorphology reinforced geography's identity as a subfield of geology, thereby hampering its intellectual independence.

In the late 1870s modern geography began to appear as a field of study in American universities, usually found within departments of geology or "geology and geography." Only in 1898 was an independent department of geography established at the University of California. Davis was convinced that geography's weak reputation was in part attributable to organizations such as the American Geographical Society and the National Geographic Society—especially the latter, which became an increasingly popularized and middlebrow organization after the turn of the century. These groups were irritating to Davis because they reinforced in the mind of the academic and lay communities alike the sense that geography was the pastime of leisured travelers and curious amateurs. He actively dissociated himself from these organizations at the turn of the century, and at one point even attempted to take control of the National Geographic Society in order to return it to its serious, scientific roots. Thus Davis was enthusiastic about a new organization designed exclusively for professional geographers. The Association of American Geographers was founded in 1904, toward the end of the trend toward disciplinary organizations. While geologists were initially welcomed in order to solidify the new organization's membership base, within a few years their applications were deferred in the hope that disciplinary purity might be achieved.

The Advent of Human Geography

Davis was successful in training a number of young geographers at the turn of the century who began to return to the relationship between humans and their physical environment. More specifically, this generation found itself increasingly compelled to study the human response to the physical environment. This turn toward the "causal relationship" was in part a result of the imperative to strengthen geography's position among the disciplines. This new focus had the added benefit of distinguishing geography from geology. Physiography, which linked elements of the environment with one another, and ontography, which linked the environment with its human inhabitants, were the two main areas of disciplinary focus for geography just after the turn of the century. Most early geographers conceived of their discipline as having unique power to bridge the natural and human sciences. From the mid-1890s to World War I the prospect of uniting nature and culture through geography seemed both feasible and imminent at some of the most important centers of academic geography, including Pennsylvania, Chicago, Yale, and Harvard. But it was precisely this claim to breadth that neighboring sciences began to challenge, for in the new era of university science, disciplines were legitimated not by claims of breadth and inclusiveness but rather by narrowing their focus and delimiting their boundaries.

Because of their interest in the causal relationship, theories that united the realm of humans and their environment held special appeal for geographers. For instance, natural selection, though widely misinterpreted, was used to describe the relationship between the physical and the human environments as one of inorganic control and organic response. Evolutionary concepts became central to geography's effort to explain nature's influence upon human behavior, and geography focused increasingly on the question of why certain races, societies, or groups flourished while others languished. To be sure, geographers neglected the idea of random variation and exaggerated and accelerated the process of "struggle" in order to incorporate humans into the ecological world. Yet without this causal connection—the influence of environment on human behavior—the areas of study under geography could easily be divided up among other disciplines.

Even more important than Darwin's ideas were those of Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck, who suggested that characteristics acquired through the course of a lifetime could be passed biologically to off spring. Lamarck's ideas were well suited to the needs of the new social sciences at the turn of the century because they united the study of nature and humans by linking biology with environment. Though the rediscovery of Mendel's laws concerning genetic heredity in 1900 eroded the credibility of Lamarckian thought, geographers continued to invoke this model when describing the core of their study as the relationship between humans and their natural environment. In other words, Lamarck created for geographers a process to study, and this appeal was too strong to be easily dismissed. Furthermore, Lamarckian constructions meant that geographers were now studying the progress of civilization, which vastly expanded their field of inquiry. By focusing on one's adaptation to the physical environment, the random chance of Darwinian evolution could be replaced with the strength of an individual, a culture, a race, or a nation. These assumptions were not always conceived in deterministic ways. While some geographers invoked them as evidence of an intellectual and social hierarchy in order to justify American expansionism or European imperialism, others used them to open up possibilities for social change. This indeterminacy implicit in Lamarckism allowed it to shape geography long after it had been discredited in other behavioral sciences. In fact it was the range of interpretations possible in Lamarckian expositions that made it so attractive to geographers.

Geography and the State

One of the striking characteristics of geographical thought at the turn of the twentieth century was its implicit support of American expansionism, as demonstrated in the sharp turn that the fledgling National Geographic Society made toward an aggressive defense of America's position abroad during the Spanish-American War. Two Europeans, Halford Mackinder and Friedrich Ratzel, also exercised considerable influence over American geographical thought. Ratzel, trained as a zoologist, argued that a relationship existed between human history and physical geography, in some ways similar to Davis's idea of ontography. But while Davis was relatively tentative in his formulations, Ratzel painted in broad strokes by applying the idea of Darwinian struggle to human society in order to frame the state as an organism that was forced to expand in order to survive. Known by many as the father of geopolitical thought, Ratzel fit well with the contemporary expansionist posture of Josiah Strong, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Theodore Roosevelt, each of whom was encouraging American expansion into world affairs. Much like the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, Ratzel's ideas allowed geographers to link nature and culture. Ratzel's well-regarded The Sea as a Source of the Greatness of a People (1900) argued that sea power was central to national survival in the twentieth century.

Similarly, Halford Mackinder emphasized environmental influence as a key to the disciplinary identity of the new profession of geographers. His "Geographic Pivot of History" (1904) gave him an extraordinarily solid reputation in the United States; in it he laid out the geopolitical dimension of international politics. For Mackinder, the age of exploration had given way to a new era where the manipulation of information would be critical. In Mackinder's mind the human experience of geography and space had changed in fundamental ways in the late nineteenth century. As Stephen Kern has noted, the rise of geopolitics owed much to the cultural and technological changes taking place around the turn of the twentieth century, including the arrival of standardized time, the advent of flight, the expansion of the railroads, and advances in communication and radio, all of which transformed the everyday experience of space and time. Ratzel and Mackinder used geopolitical ideas in order to come to terms with this changed sense of distance resulting from these innovations. Both emphasized the relationship between geographical influence and human response.

Among the first generation of university-trained geographers who inherited these ideas of Ratzel, Mackinder, and Davis were Ellen Semple, Ellsworth Huntington, and Isaiah Bowman. Semple, a student of Ratzel's, was especially taken with environmentalist models as a way to explain American history. In works such as American Historyand Its Geographic Conditions (1903), Semple argued that living organisms evolve from simple to more complex forms through adaptation to physical environment. The larger the state, race, or people, the more certain its chance of survival relative to others competing for the same resources. Similarly, Huntington posited that the primary influence over human history was climate, and even suggested that these effects could be biologically passed on through generations. Books such as his Civilization and Climate (1915) were tremendously popular with the general public in the early twentieth century, though roundly criticized within geography and other social sciences.

World War I had a substantial impact on American academic geography. Most obviously, the war demonstrated the flexible nature of geographical borders in Europe and the ephemeral nature of colonial associations worldwide. The faith in European civilization was now tempered by its unparalleled capacity for destruction. In the United States, the war demonstrated the utility of geographic knowledge to the public and also advanced the careers of professional geographers called to work for the government. The geographer who benefited most from the war was Isaiah Bowman, then director of the American Geographical Society. One of Bowman's goals had been to make the society more relevant to social and political problems, and by placing its resources at the disposal of the federal government, the society's vast reserve of maps became pivotal to the construction of postwar Europe. The war also led many geographers, especially Bowman, to admit the limits of the environment over human behavior and to stress human influence over the environment. After World War I, geographers devoted tremendous energy to searching for a new relationship to unite the disparate areas under their field, prove its worth in the university, and conform to modern social scientific wisdom, which had deemed environmentalism a false and damaging approach to the study of human affairs.

Geography Since Midcentury

One response to the rejection of environmentalist frameworks as the basis for research was to narrow geography's field of inquiry. The clearest indication of this was Richard Hartshorne's The Nature of Geography (1939), a massive statement of the field's direction written on the eve of World War II. For Hartshorne, what had historically made geography unique was its attention to systematic description of areal variation, not speculation about change over time or causal relationships between humans and their environment. The hope among earlier generations to discover laws of human behavior was dismissed by Hartshorne in favor of a focus on concrete, discrete studies.

Carl Sauer, one of the century's most influential geographers, rejected Hartshorne's treatise—and the approach of the interwar geographers generally—and characterized this period as "the great retreat" when geographers studiously avoided causal relationships between humans and their environment. Sauer thought this unacceptable: geography now conceded physiography to geology and shied away from the social sciences for fear of repeating past sins of environmental determinism. One of Sauer's alternatives was to emphasize the influence of humans over their environment rather than the reverse. In his wake, many students adopted Sauer's new approach in delving into the particularities of place and paying close attention to the development of landscape. Yet despite Sauer's attempt to discredit environmentalism, many geographers continued to grant the physical environment influence over human behavior during the interwar period, an indication of the fractured nature of the discipline at midcentury. In 1947, Harvard made the decision to dissolve its department of geography, the original locus of academic geography in the United States. In subsequent years, Stanford, Yale, Michigan, and innumerable smaller institutions closed their geography departments. Yet the overall number of geography programs rose sharply in the postwar years, a reflection of the general growth of higher education.

Geographers themselves found renewed energy in the 1950s and 1960s by turning toward quantitative analyses as the basis for a redefinition of geography. The "quantitative revolution" did not constitute a change in goals so much as in method: geographers were still searching for locational patterns, but they began to adopt mathematical models, which in some cases led a return to a more abstract, general orientation and away from the idiographic focus on discrete regions. This school of geography drew heavily from economics. But by the late 1960s the quantitative revolution left many concerned that geography was bereft of any purposive, reformist content. Some argued that the quantitative model of geography essentially operated conservatively, in defense of the status quo, and contained little critical potential. A reaction to this—in part inspired by Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)—brought a resurgence of political concerns to the study of geography, but this time with a radical rather than a conservative thrust.

Postmodern, or radical, geography involves first and foremost a critique of the traditional relationship between notions of space and time. For geographers such as Neil Smith and Edward Soja, for instance, Western culture has been preoccupied since the nineteenth century with a historicist focus, and this has come at the expense of an explicitly spatial orientation. They argue that this temporal bent has obscured our awareness of just how deeply the dynamics of power—especially those created by capitalism—are inscribed in spatial relations. For both Smith and Soja, to remedy this requires a critique of historicism and a turn toward spatial concerns. This goal of a more activist, self-critical form of the discipline has continued from the late 1970s forward to the beginning of the twenty-first century, and has brought special attention to the relationship between power and capitalism in the study of urban space. It has infused geography with both theoretical concerns and concrete purpose. In recent years considerable research has also been undertaken in the field of feminist geography, which explores the way gender relations are reinforced by spatial arrangements of societies. The wide influence of these new, conceptually rich areas of research extends well beyond the disciplinary bounds of geography, which suggests the trend toward a more ambitious and socially relevant scope for the subject.

Bibliography

Blouet, Brian, ed. The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States. Hamden, Conn. : Archon, 1981.

Driver, Felix. "Geography's Empire: Histories of Geographical Knowledge." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992): 23–40.

Godlewska, Anne, and Neil Smith, eds. Geography and Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1983.

Kirby, Andrew. "The Great Desert of the American Mind: Concepts of Space and Time and Their Historiographic Implications." In The Estate of Social Knowledge. Edited by Jo Anne Brown and David K. van Keuren. Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Livingstone, David N. The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Martin, Geoffrey J., and Preston E. James. All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1993.

Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass. : Polity Press, 1993.

Schulten, Susan. The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880– 1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London and New York: Verso, 1989.

Stoddart, D. R. On Geography and its History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

—Susan Schulten

Russia is the world's largest country, 1.7 times larger than second-place Canada, ten times larger than Alaska, and twenty-five times larger than Texas. It stretches from 19° E Longitude in the west to 169° W Longitude in the east, spanning 5,700 miles (9,180 kilometers) and eleven time zones. If Russia were superimposed on North America with St. Petersburg in Anchorage, Alaska, the Chukchi Peninsula would touch Oslo, Norway, halfway around the globe. Thus, when Russians are eating supper on any given day in St. Petersburg, the Chukchi are breakfasting on the next. From its southernmost point (42° N) to its northernmost islands (82° N), the width of Russia exceeds the length of the contiguous United States.

Russia's size guarantees a generous endowment of natural features and raw materials. The country contains the world's broadest lowlands, swamps, grasslands, and forests. In the Greater Caucasus Mountains towers Europe's highest mountain, Mt. Elbrus. Flowing out of the Valday Hills northwest of Moscow and into the world's largest lake, the Caspian Sea, is Europe's longest river, the "Mother Volga." Almost three thousand miles to the east, in Eastern Siberia, is Lake Baikal, the world's deepest lake. The Russian raw material base is easily the world's most extensive. The country ranks first or second in the annual production of many of the world's strategic minerals. Historically, Russia's size has ensured defense in depth. Napoleon and Hitler learned this the hard way in 1812 and in the 1940s, respectively.

Because Russia is such a northerly country, however, much of the land is unsuitable for human habitation. Ninety percent of Russia is north of the 50th parallel, which means that Russian farmers can harvest only one crop per field per year. Three-fourths of Russia is more than 250 miles (400 km) away from the sea. Climates are continental rather than maritime. Great temperature ranges and low annual precipitation plague most of the country. Therefore, only 8 percent of Russia's enormous landmass is suitable for farming. The quest for food is a persistent theme in Russian history. Before 1950, famines were harsh realities.

The Russian people thus chose to settle in the temperate forests and steppes, avoiding the mountains, coniferous forests, and tundras. The primary zone of settlement stretches from St. Petersburg in the northwest to Novosibirsk in Western Siberia and back to the North Caucasus. A thin exclave of settlement continues along the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. Except for random mining and logging, major economic activities are carried out in the settled area.

Russia's size evidences great distances between and among geographic phenomena. Accordingly, it suffers the tyranny of geography. Many of its raw materials are not accessible, meaning they are not resources at all. The friction of distance - long rail and truck hauls - accounts for high transportation costs. Although in its entirety Russia displays great beauty and diversity of landforms, climate, and vegetation, close up it can be very dull because of the space and time required between topographical changes. Variety spread thinly over a massive land can be monotonous. Three-fourths of the country, for example, is a vast plain of less than 1,500 feet (450 meters) in elevation. The typical Russian landscape is flat-to-rolling countryside, the mountains relegated to the southern borders and the area east of the Yenisey River. The Ural Mountains, which divide Europe from Asia, are no higher than 6,200 feet (1,890 meters) and form a mere inconvenience to passing air masses and human interaction. Russia's average elevation is barely more than 1,000 feet (333 meters).

Russia is a fusion of two geologic platforms: the European and the Asiatic. When these massive plates collided 250 million years ago, they raised a mighty mountain range, the low vestiges of which are the Urals. West of the Urals is the North European Plain, a rolling lowland occasioned by hills left by Pleistocene glaciers. One set of hills stretches between Moscow and Warsaw: The Smolensk-Moscow Ridge is the only high ground between the Russian capital and Eastern Europe and was the route used by Napoleon's and Hitler's doomed armies. Further north between Moscow and St. Petersburg are the Valday Hills, which represent the source of Russia's major river systems: Volga, Dnieper, Western Dvina, and so forth. Where it has not been cleared for agriculture, the plain nurtures a temperate forest of broadleaf trees, which dominate in the south, and conifers, which prevail in the north. The slightly leached gray and brown soils of this region were first cultivated by the early eastern Slavs.

In the south, the North European Lowland merges with the Stavropol Upland of the North Caucasus Foreland between the Black and Caspian seas. Here the forests disappear, leaving only grassland, or steppe, the soils of which are Russia's fertile chernozems. Along the western and northern shores of the Caspian Sea, desert replaces the grasslands. Farther south, North Caucasia merges with the Greater Caucasus Mountains, the highest peak of which is Mt. Elbrus (18,481 feet [5,633 meters]).

The northern part of the European Lowland supports a northern coniferous forest, known as taiga. The largest continuous stand of conifers in the world, the taiga stretches from the Finnish border across Siberia and the Russian Far East to the Pacific Ocean. Even farther north, flanking the Arctic Ocean is the Russian tundra. Permafrost plagues both the taiga and tundra, limiting their use for anything other than logging and mineral development. Soils are highly infertile podzols. Virtually all of Siberia and the Russian Far East consist of either taiga or tundra, except in the extreme southeast, where temperate forest appears again.

East of the Urals is the West Siberian Lowland, the world's largest plain. The slow-moving Ob and Irtysh rivers drain the lowland from south to north. This orientation means that the lower courses of the rivers are still frozen as the upper portions thaw. The ice dam causes annual floods that create the world's largest swamp, the Vasyugan. The Ob region contains Russia's largest oil and gas reservoirs. In southeastern Western Siberia is Russia's greatest coal field, the Kuzbas. South of the Kuzbas are the mineral-rich Altai Mountains, which together with the Sayan, and the Yablonovy ranges, form the border between Russia, China, and Mongolia.

East of the Yenisey River is the forested Central Siberian Plateau, a broad, sparsely populated tableland that merges farther east with the mountain ranges of the Russian Far East. In the southeastern corner of the plateau is a great rift valley in which lies Lake Baikal, "Russia's Grand Canyon." Equal to Belgium in size, the world's deepest lake gets deeper with every earthquake.

Bibliography

Lydolph, Paul E. (1990). Geography of the USSR. Elkhart Lake, WI: Misty Valley Publishing.

Mote, Victor L. (1994). An Industrial Atlas of the Soviet Successor States. Houston, TX: Industrial Information Resources.

Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Shaw, Denis J. B. (1999). Russia in the Modern World: A New Geography. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

—VICTOR L. MOTE

The topography and geography of the Middle East are closely related to the geology and climate of the region.

A zone of mountainous terrain in the north in combination with higher latitudes, lower temperatures, and increased precipitation gives a distinctive character to Turkey, Iran, and parts of the Levantine (eastern Mediterranean) coast. To the south, in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, tilted fault-block mountains and volcanoes provide intermittent physical relief to an area largely consisting of plateaus and plains. Unremitting aridity and high temperatures typify the desert that dominates this southern part of the region.

The geology of the Middle East is determined by the movement of continental plates in a north-westerly direction. This movement, in turn, deforms masses of sedimentary strata deposited in Paleozoic times in the ancient Tethyan Sea, which once separated Eurasia and Africa. The African plate is the largest and consists of ancient igneous materials overlain, in part, by a relatively thin layer of more recent sedimentary rocks. With the exception of the folded strata that make up the Atlas and Anti-Atlas Mountains in the west of the Maghrib (North Africa), the Ahaggar and Tibesti Mountains of Algeria and Libya, as well as the highlands of the Ethiopian plateau, are volcanic in nature. The Arabian plate to the east consists of tilted Mesozoic sedimentary strata dipping beneath the Persian/Arabian Gulf: These strata overlie pre-Cambrian igneous basement rock exposed by erosion in the Asir Mountains along the western shores of the peninsula. The Red Sea, which the uptilted edge of the Asir overlooks, is a continuation of the East African rift valley system and is formed by the moving apart of the African and Arabian blocks. This rift system continues north through the Gulf of Aqaba and forms the valley of the Dead Sea and the Jordan River. It eventually disappears in the down-folded strata of the Biqa (Bekaa) Valley of Lebanon.

The heavily folded Zagros Mountains bordering the Gulf on its eastern side result from the collision and subduction of the Arabian plate under the Iranian plate. The Persian/Arabian Gulf, which is an inlet of the Indian Ocean along the axis of the subduction zone, has accumulated huge quantities of sediments from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Karun River, and numerous intermittent streams draining the lands on either side. Within these Tertiary sedimentary strata are found the largest petroleum fields in the world, with deposits in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Oman, in descending order of importance. To the northwest, the Turkish
plate is sliding westward along a transform fault and colliding with the Aegean plate. These areas of movement create major fault zones subject to severe earthquakes. In Turkey, the Erzincan earthquake of 1992 was typical. Faulting and recent volcanism terminate the northward extension of the rich petroleum fields of the Gulf beyond a few poor deposits near Batman, Turkey.

The northern part of the Middle East is a mountainous extension of the Alpine orogeny. The Pontic Mountains paralleling Turkey's Black Sea coast merge with the eastern highlands notable for volcanic Mount Ararat of biblical fame. The Taurus Mountains along Turkey's south shore extend eastward as the Anti-Taurus Mountains, joining the Zagros Mountains running southeast between Iran and Iraq. Another extension forms the Elburz Mountains bordering the Caspian Sea in Iran. Mount Damavand (18,934 ft [5775 m]), the highest peak in the Middle East and North Africa, is part of this range. Still farther east, the Kopet Mountains merge with those in Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush.

Great rivers have played their part in the history and development of the Middle East. The White Nile, which rises in equatorial Africa, is joined at Khartoum in Sudan by the Blue Nile, flowing from the highlands of Ethiopia. No precipitation sufficient for human survival occurs from that juncture north to the Mediterranean Sea, and all life in Egypt depends on the use of the combined waters of the two Niles. The Euphrates River and its companion the Tigris both rise in Turkey and join in southern Iraq to form the Shatt al-Arab, which empties into the Persian/Arabian Gulf. The area between the two streams, ancient Mesopotamia, was the site of the earliest civilization, Sumer (3500 B.C.E.), and other ancient civilizations based on irrigation farming.

The Mediterranean Sea also has influenced many of the cultural and geographical characteristics of the Middle East. It has served as a major link between Europe, Africa, and southwest Asia since ancient times. The Turkish Straits, composed from north to south of the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles, are an important waterway joining the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean. Bronze Age ships plied these straits and sailed along the coast of Turkey as well as among the Aegean Islands. Early Phoenician traders established sea routes leading to the Straits of Gibraltar and beyond. Ancient Greek ships traveled through the Bosporus to bring grain from the shores of the Black Sea, and Roman triremes linked Italy and Africa. During the Middle Ages, some Arab navigational skills were conveyed to Europeans as Islam was spread. In the nineteenth century, the Mediterranean route was enhanced when the French and Egyptians completed the Suez Canal, joining the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and thus reducing the trip from Europe to India (originally by way of the Cape of Good Hope) by thousands of miles.

The Middle East is composed of four environments, expressed by climate, vegetation, and traditional lifestyle. Well-watered humid and subhumid lands border the Black Sea in Turkey and extend along the Caspian shore of Iran. In these well-populated places, maize (corn), tea, hazelnuts, and rice are important crops.

Mountainous terrain, with remnant forests of pine, cedar, and juniper, rims the Anatolian plateau of Turkey and extends southward into coastal Syria and Lebanon. Similar but drier environments are found in the Zagros and Elburz Mountains of Iran. These areas once supported dense growths of mature trees, but with the exception of more remote places in the Taurus Mountains, the logger's ax and the charcoal burners' ovens have depleted the forests while nomads' goats have prevented regrowth through overgrazing. The result is either disturbed and impoverished woodlands (French, maquis) or barren and rocky ground supporting low herbaceous shrubs (French, garrigue).

The interior plateau of Turkey, the foothills of the Anti-Taurus and Zagros Mountains, and the northern portions of Jordan and Israel are semiarid, with grazing or grain production depending on the amount of each year's precipitation. The variance of rainfall on the drier margins of these areas makes permanent rain-fed agriculture difficult. As a result, ancient peoples developed pastoral nomadism as a lifestyle that met this challenge. Herds and flocks were moved seasonally to new pastures to avoid over-grazing of sparse vegetation as well as to seek out water sources. Once an important means of livelihood, nomadism has largely been abandoned.

The semiarid steppes merge gradually into true deserts, which dominate southern Israel, Jordan, and Iraq as well as the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa west to the Atlas Mountains. Saharan conditions extend to the Mediterranean shore of North Africa from Gaza to Sfax in Tunisia, the only exception being a small outlier of Mediterranean climate on the Jabal al-Akhdar (Green Mountain) of Libya. Under desert conditions, agriculture is possible only in scattered oases and along the banks of rivers like the Euphrates in Iraq and the Nile in Egypt.

The narrow rim of Mediterranean climate, which extends north from Gaza through Israel, along the coasts of Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey, is the fourth environment. This same climate is also found from Tunis west to the Atlantic shores of Morocco. The Mediterranean environment is typified by winter rains and hot dry summers, which allow for the production of irrigated vegetables and citrus fruits, as well as various winter grains.

Bibliography

Beaumont, Peter; Blake, Gerald H.; and Wagstaff, J. Malcolm. The Middle East: A Geographical Study, 2d edition. New York: Halsted Press, 1988.

Blake, Gerald; Dewdney, John; and Mitchell, Jonathan. The Cambridge Atlas of the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Held, Colbert C. Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics, 3d edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.

Longrigg, Stephen H. The Middle East: A Social Geography, 2d edition. Chicago: Aldine, 1970.

— JOHN F. KOLARS

Food is grown in a one place, distributed to another place, and eaten in yet another place. Food is affected by culture, by economics, and by politics. Food affects our bodies, our relationships with other people, and our relationship with the land. This is the "food system," a system that encapsulates where and how food is produced, how it reaches our mouths, and why we eat what we do.

Anthropologists, nutritionists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers have long been concerned with different aspects of the food system. So too—and increasingly—are geographers.

Geography has a lot to say about food. A subject often misconceived as being concerned solely with maps and mapping, it is actually a philosophically and topically pluralistic discipline that is concerned with spatial processes in the human and physical environment. With a focus on both the spatial aspects of human existence and natural features, geographers are uniquely qualified to study a system that is, as Atkins and Bowler say in Food in Society (p. 13), "squeezed into a fault line between environment and society." Geographers seek to conceptualize the food system as a spatial construct that is driven in part by processes that operate from one physically definable and socially constructed space to another. Scale-dependent concepts such as regional, local, and global, location, place, and space, are the basis of questions geographers ask of the food system: Where is food grown and why? What are the processes controlling the movement of food from place to place? Why do we eat what we do? Why do we buy food where we do? How is food consumption related to production? Why is food consumption high in some parts of the world and low in others? Geographers think spatially. They also think systematically, theorizing about the relative roles of the environment and human beings as participants in the system under study and how they interact.

In the academy there are many different types of geographers, all of whom have a potential interest in food. Physical, economic, social, urban, rural, cultural, medical, and agricultural geographers all have their respective emphases on the analysis of the food system. All told, they study the production, consumption, provision, and distribution of food, from the local to the global, from feast to famine. And, as a tool, geographers can use relatively new computer-aided mapping techniques, especially geographical information systems (GIS) to map and analyze spatial data as it pertains to food systems.

Food production and how and why it varies over space is studied in physical and human geography. Physical geographers seek to explain the spatial arrangement of food crops throughout the world by analyzing the environmental factors that limit or promote food production, such as climate, soil, and topography. Human geographers look to the explanatory power of history, economics, and politics and place a greater emphasis on the role of agricultural (food production) systems in affecting how much food is produced and where. They seek to describe the systems—whether as subsistent, intensive, extensive, or industrial—and ask how social, organizational, and technological changes within the system are affected by spatial processes and how they in turn affect spatial outcomes. Geographers have helped pioneer the understanding of food production as an "industrialized" system, a system bound up with processes of economic development that subsequently affects where and how much food is produced.

Food production also has an impact on the environment. One of the first disciplines to recognize the human impact on the environment, geography has long identified the environmental impact of modern agriculture. Hydrologists and soil scientists measure the impact of fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation on water and soil quality. Desertification and deforestation are environmental issues identified by geographers as outcomes, in part, of food production. In turn, rural and developmental geographers take up the challenge of assessing the impact of environmental changes on local people and national economies.

In terms of food consumption, geographers argue that "place matters" in what people eat. Traditionally, geography has looked at regional patterns of diet, but over the past three decades focus has shifted to the symbolic meaning and cultural identity of food—to the way, in other words, that human beings use food to construct a place-related identity, either real or imaginary. Cuisines create a sense of identity; restaurant locations indicate spatially spreading food trends; the perception of what is "ethnic" and "local" food reveals the way we see ourselves fitting into society socially and geographically.

Food provision and retailing are another aspect of consumption studies within geography. Geographers seek to explain the spatial patterning of food retailers: Why, in many cases, do certain neighborhoods have very few food stores while others are supersaturated? Using the notion of "competitive spaces," geographers in the United Kingdom have been able to identify supermarket locating decisions as a response not only to state-imposed locational regulations, but to the market advantage of locating in a "competitive space."

Geography also asks how spaces of food consumption are linked with spaces of food production. An inherently geographical phenomenon, food is distributed in a variety of ways: national transportation systems, global trade, or local exchanges. Geographers have extended the study of these food distribution networks by seeking to uncover the relations between the site of raw food production and the site of consumption. Using the conceptual approach of "commodity chains," geographers trace food items from the point of consumption back through the chain of retail, wholesale, processing, and agricultural production, taking into account transportation, labor processes, technology, and politics. And in the related "food network" concept, institutional intermediaries such as state regulation and international agreements are added into the chain. Developments in this field have been spurred by increasing worldwide interest in the trend toward the replacement of national by international institutions, global sourcing of products, and the centralization of strategic assets, trends often conceptualized by the term "globalization." Geographers have highlighted, in particular, the local, regional, and national response to globalization, often finding that globalization in some way strengthens the local nature of food production.

Linking food production and consumption in terms of supply and demand is also very much part of the geographical tradition. Geographers ask why it is that in some regions and communities of the world people do not have enough to eat, whereas in others there is overnutrition. Some geographers analyze the spaces of hunger in terms of economics and social relations, others in terms of population growth and environmental limits on food production. Again, geographers are uniquely poised to ask questions about society and the environment. Space, it seems, unites them both.

Bibliography

Atkins, Peter, and Ian Bowler. Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. London: Arnold, 2001.

Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat. London: Routledge, 1997.

Goodman, David, and Michael J. Watts, eds. Globalising Food: Agrarian Questions and Global Restructuring. London: Routledge, 1997.

Goudie, Andrew. The Human Impact on the Natural Environment. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Grigg, David. An Introduction to Agricultural Geography. London: Routledge, 1995.

Marsden, Terry, Andrew Flynn, and Michelle Harrison. Consuming Interests: The Social Provision of Foods. London: UCL Press, 2000.

Shortridge, Barbara G., and James R. Shortridge, eds. The Taste of American Place. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.

Smil, Vaclav. Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Tansey, Geoff, and Tony Worsley. The Food System: A Guide. London: Earthscan, 1995.

Wrigley, Neil, and Michelle Lowe, eds. Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography. Harlow, Essex, U.K.: Longman, 1996.

—Corinna Hawkes