Geography and Life 



Anna Botsford Comstock 

 Assistant Professor in Nature-Study, Cornell University 



Life and Geography have long been partners. The interests of 

 the two seem sometimes to have been diverse, and yet life is so 

 adaptive that in many cases these naturally divergent interests 

 have become unified 



A very important phase of biological work at present consists of 

 studying the many ways through which animals and plants have 

 unified their interests with geographic conditions; this phase we 

 know as ecology. 



The teachers of geography have perhaps been too occupied with 

 teaching geographic facts. They have dealt too exclusively with 

 " what is," — as for instance the desert is a place of sand and heat 

 and drought and upon it there is scant vegetation or none at all. 

 We have been content with such bald statements as these but they 

 satisfy us no longer. We are now coming over to the point of 

 teaching that behind every "is" there is a "because" and in very 

 many instances it is a geographical "because." So now we say the 

 desert is there because mountains shut off the moisture from the sea 

 and therefore there is no rainfall and therefore there are no rivers. 

 The winds, because of certain configuration of land or sea are 

 severe and dry and are never the bearers of rain clouds. There- 

 fore, in these wastes there is little vegetation; only such animals 

 and plants exist there as can endure heat and thirst and a scanty 

 food supply. 



It is slowly dawning upon the minds of those of us who are teach- 

 ing Nature-Study subjects that there are just as many and just as 

 cogent geographical "becauses" behind every "is" in the school 

 yard as there are in the desert or the swamp or a glacier-hemmed bit 

 of Greenland. And it is through understanding the because which 

 is nearest him that the child may understand the great because 

 that lies behind the most stupendous geographic facts in the world. 



The child is the center of our pedagogical circle and from each bit 

 of his own experience a radius may be drawn to the confines of the 

 universe and right here is where geography is helped by Nature- 

 Study because the latter leads inevitably to the intelligent under- 

 standing on the part of a child of his own environment. Let us 

 consider for a moment how we may begin extending these radii so 



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