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The Power of Place - Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape (Hardcover)
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The Power of Place - Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape (Hardcover)
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In recent years a spate of books and articles have argued that the
world today is so mobile, so interconnected and so integrated that
it is, in one prominent assessment, flat. But as Harm de Blij
contends in The Power of Place, geography continues to hold
billions of people in an unrelenting grip. We are all born into
natural and cultural environments that shape what we become,
individually and collectively. From our "mother tongue" to our
father's faith, from medical risks to natural hazards, where we
start our journey has much to do with our destiny, and thus with
our chances of overcoming the obstacles in our way. Incorporating a
series of revealing maps, de Blij focuses on the rough terrain of
the world's human and environmental geography. The world's
continuing partition into core and periphery, and apartheid-like
obstructions to migration from the former to the latter, help
explain why, in this age of globalization, less than 3 percent of
"mobals" live in countries other than where they were born. Maps of
language distribution suggest why English, the Latin of the latter
day, may become as hybridized as its forerunner. The fateful map of
religion casts a shadow of what he calls "endarkenment" over the
future of the planet in a time of increasingly destructive
weaponry. De Blij also looks at the ways we are redefining place so
as to make its power even more potent than it has been, with
troubling implications for the future. Optimistic demographic
projections based on declining national populations in the global
core are tempered by the prospect that the vast majority of the 3
billion additions to the world's population will burden the
periphery. Megacities such as Lagos and Jakarta with their
corridors and nodes of globalization foreshadow a future of
potentially explosive social contrasts. Subnational entities from
southern Sudan to northern Sri Lanka seek independence at a time
when the planet's limited living space is already fragmented into
200 states. Looking down from the business-class compartment of a
transcontinental airliner, the world looks a lot flatter than it
does from the doorway of a dwelling in a local village. Harm de
Blij brings us back to earth to reveal the all-too-rugged contours
of place.
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