Geography Still Matters.

An interesting special "sense of place" report from The Economist has just been published.

The report covers the synergy between our growing use of computers (mostly in the form of mobile devices) and suggests that, even in our hyper-connected digital age, the physical realm still matters.

Indeed, rumors of the "death of distance" have been highly exaggerated, even as the virtual and the physical realms are increasingly intertwined. 

Yi-Fu Tuan's Humanist Geography

The wait is over!  A career-spanning look-back by a pillar of "place" philosophy, Prof. Yi-Fu Tuan, is now available. I saw a copy of this at the American Society for Environmental History conference last spring but it hasn't been publicly available until now. Yes. I know. Exciting!

It seems to be distributed by both University of Wisconsin Press and GFT Publishing. They introduce the book as such:

For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography—what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called geosophy, a blending of geography and philosophy―to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search for Meaning, his latest and last book, is a final testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer.

I love this stuff. I'm not even sure why exactly. But I do. And that's okay.

As a student at UW with an interest in the "place literature" I have read a lot about it. Many, many scholarly articles mention Tuan when crediting the origins of this approach to humanity's interaction with the physical world. I've even seen him walking around campus once or twice. Sort of like nerd celebrity sighting. Next to Prof. Wm. Cronon, Tuan is about as close as one gets to such a sighting around here. Though I once saw Wisconsin alum, Jane Kaczmarek (a.k.a. the mom from Malcolm In The Middle) walking through the Memorial Union with some people who were probably family. And there are plenty of other well-known scholars who've come and gone through UW, I suppose. Still, seeing someone who you've "gotten to know" through books and essays is always a treat (at least for a sort-of lit nerd like me).

Tuan's Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (University of Minnesota Press, 1977) is a bookshelf favorite. Again, I'm not even sure why. Which is odd. But there is just something endearing about it. It's certainly not for everyone. It's not light fiction. It's no Jodi Picoult. Thank goodness.  The world's got enough of that crap. (Sorry, Mom).

GTF says that Tuan's intent with this book is "to show how wonderful life on our small planet can be, even as we must deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws." His take on the future is hopeful, which will be a welcome reprieve from my own pesky pessimism, to be sure.

If you pick up a copy, let's talk. I'll be cashing in my coin jar to scrape together the $26 purchase price post haste.