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H. J. de Blij
Whatever happened to geographic literacy?
By Heather Lamson
Associate Features Editor
FILE PHOTO
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“I was the son of a father who managed throughout his life to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result my determination to be a geographer grew ever stronger.” Thus began H.J. de Blij’s lecture, a good indicator of the knowing humor and passion for geography the audience was about to enjoy. de Blij’s brief but extraordinary history began in nazi-occupied Holland, his home country. His family moved after the war to South Africa “the day the government promulgated apartheid,” he said. From there his family moved to Mozambique the week rebels there exploded their first bombs. de Blij brought his parents to Benton Harbor, MI.
After this brief historical introduction, de Blij moved on to his true passion: geography. Among his credits and achievements are the seven years he spent at ABC’s Good Morning America as the Geography Editor. de Blij lamented the near-absence of geographic education in American high schools, colleges and universities.
“Our geographic illiteracy is intensifying, troubling, and I hope to prove to you today, a threat to our national security. We are seemingly unable to grasp the larger world spatially. We see far too few maps and the maps we frequently see in newspapers and on television tend to be wrong. As a result we are uninformed about political issues about which we as voters have to make decisions,” de Blij said. “We are the only country of consequence in the world where you can go from kindergarten through graduate school without ever taking a course in geography.”
Though de Blij assumed a slightly higher level of geographic literacy for his West Michigan audience, he gave a brief explanation of the essence of geography. “We look at the world spatially,” he said. “Our key question is ‘where are things?’ We relate human society to natural environments.” de Blij later said, “A map can show what words can’t.”
To further support his assertion de Blij spent the remainder of his lecture describing the
geographic background of three major challenges facing America today, beginning with environmental change.
“The fact of the matter is that the risk we run at this stage of our existence on this planet is a reversal to glacial cold,” de Blij said. “In the totality of the pattern we have seen, we are likely to be at the end of a warm period and may plunge into coldness very soon. Let me remind you that just 70 million years ago the earth was much warmer and moister and luxuriantly vegetated than it is today.” Here de Blij’s flicker of humor reentered his speech as he said, “You will recall from your reading of general knowledge that just 65 million years ago a swarm of comets of which one landed near the Yucatan peninsula erased the dinosaurs and made the world safe for democracy.” He went on to describe the overall pattern of cold followed by a comparatively short “plateau” of warmth, which we are currently enjoying. “Please don’t get complacent,” he said. “Global warming is temporary; global cooling is always there. Let me make no mistake about this. We should stop polluting the atmosphere with gasses that enhance this global warming. But having said that, don’t expect a reward. We will still be coping with global warming if we get rid of every part of our pollution tomorrow, and that is the scary thing, as far as I’m concerned, because we’re not preparing ourselves for the eventualities of rising sea levels and the stormy conditions that will prevail. However, 10, 15, 20 years from now I would imagine and we’ll see another reversal that will be much, much harder to deal with, with a population of 6.3 billion people on this tiny planet. We should see global warming as nothing more than the temporary phenomenon that it is. You can see how short these interludes of warmth are. We are already beyond our average amount of time.”
He briefly touched on the concept of viewing the Middle East not in terms of political borders, but by the ethno-linguistic groups occupying those countries. For instance, he showed how Iraq is actually more like four countries, based on the groupings of people who live there. He also warned that many Muslims believe that any geographical area which was once Islamic will be Islamic again, because Allah has willed it.
The second major concern de Blij discussed the predicted rise of Chinese culture in the future, based on the historical, geographic pattern of shifts in world power. “Our great challenge in the 21st century,” de Blij said, “will be a growing and more powerful superpower in China, and the question is not inevitability but how to manage the inevitable clash of conflicts we will face. The interesting thing is that China is still an empire. The biggest concern I have is that as time goes on, our presence in East Asia will become a greater ad greater irritant to a more and more powerful China, and there is the potential for a cold war. Now ladies and gentlemen, I never lost any sleep over the cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. We had mutual assured destruction and all that, but we were ultimately all westerners and we weren’t going to blow each other up over a minor detail like world power. This will be the first inter-cultural cold war.”
Finally, de Blij addressed the very hot topic of rising tension between the United States and North Korea. “May I just say that geographically there is a brighter future here than you might think,” de Blij said. He showed a map depicting the mineral-rich highlands and lowlands that prevail in North Korea, and the agriculturally rich and productive land prevailing in South Korea. “Removing the border between the two,” de Blij said, “could be extremely mutually beneficial. It is the best thing about the prospects for Korea.” He suggested moving “those 37 thousand troops” out, adopting a “more sensible attitude” toward North Korea in terms of anti-nuclear policies, and allowing the Koreans to “sort it out themselves.”
de Blij ended his lecture apologizing for speaking slightly over his allotted hour, but most likely leaving the audience wishing he had been given two.
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