First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Michael O’Mara Books Limited 9 Lion Yard Tremadoc Road London SW4 7NQ This electronic edition published in 2012 ISBN: 978-1-84317-940-5 in ePub format ISBN: 978-1-84317-939-9 in Mobipocket format ISBN: 978-1-84317-476-9 in hardback print format Copyright © Michael O’Mara Books Limited 2010 Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work. All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Illustrations by David Woodroffe Designed and typeset by www.glensaville.com Front cover lettering by Toby Buchan www.mombooks.com CONTENTS Foreword by Caroline Taggart Introduction THE PHYSICAL WORLD Rivers Coasts Tectonics Climate and Weather Global Issues THE HUMAN WORLD World Population Settlement Industry and Energy Tourism Development Afterword Further Reading Acknowledgements Index FOREWORD When the original version of I Used to Know That was published two years ago, I spent a very jolly couple of days in a small BBC studio in central London. With headphones over my ears and a microphone in front of me, I talked to people on radio stations all over the country about the book: why I had written it, what they liked about it and what brought back hideous memories. To my surprise, the hideous memories were what excited people most. Top of the list – and this bit wasn’t a surprise – was maths. One listener said that just looking at the letters a + b = c on the page had brought him out in a cold sweat, even though he no longer had any idea why. Another radio station carried out a series of interviews in the street asking people, among other things, if they knew who Pythagoras was. ‘Oh yes,’ said one man, ‘he’s to do with triangles and angles and all that malarkey.’ I thought that was wonderful: ‘all that malarkey’ summed up perfectly the way many of my generation were taught. We had to learn it (whatever ‘it’ was); we were never really told why; and, once exams were over, unless we went on to be engineers or historians or something, we never thought about it again. But it lingered somewhere at the back of our minds, which may be why I Used to Know That touched a chord. However, covering five major subjects and including a catch-all chapter called General Studies meant that a single small volume couldn’t hope to deal with anything in much depth. This is where the individual titles in this series come in: if I Used to Know That reminded us of things that we learnt once, these books will expand on them, explain why they were important and even, in the case of geography, update us on theories that have been dismissed, developed or expanded upon since we went to school. If you enjoy this one, look out for I Used to Know That: English, Maths, History and General Science as well. The teaching of geography has changed beyond recognition over the last few decades. I was of what Will Williams calls the ‘capes and bays’ generation: we learned the names of places and the heights of mountains, but it never crossed anyone’s mind to take us out of doors to stroll along a beach or wade through a river, to see for ourselves how these things actually worked. And certainly no one ever persuaded me that geography was fascinating because it was all around me, an unavoidable and ever-changing part of my daily life – and the daily life of everyone else in the world. Will Williams brings the subject alive principally by showing just how wide-ranging it is. Everything from volcanic eruptions to ecotourism, climate change to models for the development of settlements is here – and it is all geography! As Will says, this is a holistic discipline, encompassing science, economics and sociology, not to mention the geographical sub-disciplines of geology, geomorphology, tectonics and others too numerous to mention. Even if you are young enough to have been taught the theory of how landscape has changed over time, or the economic and social importance of population growth, you are sure to find new insights in this book; if you never got further than memorizing the lengths of the Nile, the Amazon and the Congo, it will be a revelation. In other words, whether it is a trip down memory lane or a voyage of discovery or as a helpmeet for future quizzes, I Used to Know That: Geography has something to offer anyone with an interest in the workings of this planet and the people who live on it. And if that sounds like a sweeping claim – well, that’s geography for you. CAROLINE TAGGART LONDON, 2010 INTRODUCTION When you took off for the annual ‘Family Summer Holiday’, it would be your father who would navigate: navigate and drive. You and your sibling(s) would fight in the back of the car and your mother took sole responsibility for ‘The Map’. This meant that when you needed a detour or (whisper it) got lost, it was Mum who would be unfairly to blame. Not that Dad ever looked at the map, he preferred the method of learning the roads and the sequence of settlements en route. Nowadays folks just plug in the destination location, set the satnav and off they go, hopefully avoiding low bridges and dead ends. This vignette encapsulates the role of geography in our lives and unfortunately demonstrates the limits of its reach into many people’s lives. Avoiding all of the talk about how the world of work has changed and how we have all become more isolated from people in our own communities: just think of the maps! Be it Lewis and Clark in the USA, Flinders across Australia or Livingstone in Africa, the great explorers didn’t set out to create maps for us to then downgrade them in the face of technology. Maps are where most people first encounter geography and though satnav demonstrates the limits of people’s engagement now, maps have made a pretty spectacular comeback. Modern geographers go nuts over ‘geographical information systems’ (GIS) and you too may, probably unwittingly, have become a geographer at least once in your working day. The Internet is awash with maps, maps with data on them, maps that show you where your friends (or at least their mobile phones) are, maps that show you when your house will flood, maps that locate your nearest restaurant, maps in fact that can show anything and everything. So geography is here to stay, a vital part of all our lives. To be a geographer in the opening decades of the twenty-first century is to be on the one hand excited about the endless possibilities for travel, study and fulfilment, yet on the other to be frustrated with the lack of true joined-up thinking out there. Geography has a unique and valuable role to play in bringing together the strands that surround complex issues and produce clarity of focus. Nowhere can this be seen in more sharp relief than in the debate over climate change. Across the world we know that use of renewable resources must be a foundation for our descendants. We know too that, locally, weather patterns have changed over time as the climate has varied in the past. Also, we know that carbon dioxide levels have rocketed upwards since we have helped move carbon from its stores in the ground, up into the atmosphere. But we don’t actually know that the climate is changing because of man. It probably is, but it doesn’t matter. The reality is that due to dwindling supplies of fossil fuels sometime in the future, we will have to change our reliance. And it’s geography that plays a part in all facets of this debate, and geographers who are perhaps uniquely placed to spot the simple coherent pathway to explanation. Be it economic concerns over the rising price of oil, environmental concerns over the impact of fossil fuel production and combustion, scarcity concerns where national supplies will be cut off or political concerns over one country’s influence on others – it doesn’t matter. In the end we need to become more sustainable, hence we need to adapt to renewable resources and we need geographers to bring together the disparate fields of enquiry to provide the ideas for moving to the next stage of development. This issue is our modern ‘Malthusian debate’ (see here), that cornerstone of public consciousness that yields column inches of erudite copy and its fair share of mumbo-jumbo too. We now have the twenty-four-hour news network and the live blogosphere to keep the debate swirling around the world. Who would have thought that when you were learning your US state capitals, your longest rivers in the world and your flags of the UN you were laying down the foundations for a subject that would become more and more relevant as the world has grown in complexity?