Geography Courses Online

I dare to suggest that the most important topics are the structures that constrain realization of better lives for most people. The single strongest is, and always has been, the capacity of those in effective power (economic and cultural) to control society and to amass disproportionate wealth. It is the corporate–political–military alliance, whatever the economic social system, but in today’s world, the dominant part of the triad is probably global capital. The second most powerful structure is religion, curiously exempt from serious analysis, but used throughout history to justify the inequality of power. It is obvious that religion has been and remains both an immensely creative and supportive institution, but also an astoundingly destructive one. Iraq and Iran exemplify the weird relation between these two dominant structures. In a less obvious way, so does the relation between economic and cultural forces in the seeming widening polarization in the United States, well illustrated by the recent presidential elections.

Geography Test – UMB PTN 2009

More deeply, certainly in the United States, the pervasive acceptance of very traditional supernatural forms of belief encourage nonscientific thinking more generally, and the ability of people to hold whole structures of contradictory understandings simultaneously.

A major need is to analyze far more deeply the geographic or spatial fixes that society so loves to deal with social problems: discrimination, poverty, crime, and the environment. What are really the long-term effects of mandatory bussing for desegregation? What are the costs and effects of building or not building walls, like that in Israel, or the proposed Mexican border fence? What are the effects of public housing as such and of contemporary reconstruction that tries to integrate “classes?” What are the effects of growth management and of urban growth boundaries on housing affordability, commuting, and benefits and costs to different classes? Is there a rational basis for sin zoning in the city, or for locating prisons and other such facilities, for buffer zones for locating released sex offenders? What are the effects of gerrymandering and incumbent protection on the sense of representation? What are the effects and adaptations on particular places of the entry of immigrants, both legal and illegal. Serious answers require not only a lot more fieldwork and use of more qualitative methods than many of us are used to. Rescuing a scientific geography may require it.

What is the real issue?
The question of ontology is whether existence is material, and that what we deem spiritual is a manifestation of material nature, or whether there is a separate non-material dimension. The latter is a matter of belief, rather than testable knowledge, but science is concerned with the material world. Now you may read of tests of the effectiveness of prayer, with mixed results, but such experiments tell us nothing about whether any effects are beyond material or not; they are a disservice to either ontology.