Let’s sort the whole thing out! First, I’m disappointed that none of you spotted the deliberate error on the back cover of our Fall Newsletter, even though it would have cost me $10. I made a bet with Natalie Wong, our senior artist who created the graphic, that nobody would spot the fact that the coordinates given (at my request) were for the Department of Geology, not the Department of Geography. It’s a long story.
For years, the Santa Barbara News-Press has routinely confused us with the Department of Geology. So have the local organizers of I Madonnari, FedEx, and even the UCSB Public Affairs Office – not to mention the average man on the street. What gives?
Sure, both words begin with “geo” and end in the letter “y.” Both are from the Greek – Geography means writing about/describing the earth (Geo=Earth; graphy=to write or describe), while Geology means the science of or learning about the earth (Geo=Earth; logy=logic). So both disciplines study the earth; indeed, several universities have a “Department of Geography and Geology.” The main difference between the two seems to be the fact that geographers tend to study the earth in terms of human-environment interaction, while geologists focus on the natural processes involved in the creation and constitution of the Earth. Clear as mud, but it covers the ground…
Still, the lines blur when you compare Physical Geography with Geology (not to mention Geomorphology, Pedology, and Edaphology – which are studied by both disciplines). And I doubt that many of the faculty in our department would agree with the Wikipedia answer to the question of what the difference is: “One of the founders of geology thought the new science should be called ‘natural geography.’ This makes for an interesting comparison. Geology is to geography what natural history is to history. Geography deals with national borders and the lines that humans have made on the earth. Geology deals with the natural structure of the earth. More simply, geology is the study of minerals and rocks” (answers.com reference).
UC Berkeley offers a better answer by stating: “Unlike geologists, geographers do not just study the solid earth, but all aspects of the earth as an integrated and complex system. Geographers have a much different perspective than other scientists. Geography socialized the physical scientist. The geographer looks at the whole, not just a part. Geography differs from other environmental science majors in the people aspect and broad perspective. It combines the physical and social sciences. Geology focuses on the physical science of the earth and the environmental science major in L&S focuses on either the biological, physical, or social aspects of environmental issues. Geography, however, incorporates all of these areas in a broader perspective than just environmental impacts”.
However, even if we can agree on “what” Geography is, the problem of “where” it is remains. Mike Goodchild once teased me about the use of the aforementioned graphic (with the coordinates of the Department of Geography) by asking precisely what the coordinates referred to: “The coordinates 34º24’54.89”N 119º50’41.76”W are resolved to approximately 30 cm or 1 ft, so somewhere around Ellison is the True Center of the Department. Is it Mo’s chair perhaps, or Oliver’s, or the sign in the hall outside?? Should we have a survey monument at the exact point? Using Google Earth, it seems the third option is the closest, but we suspect their image is currently misregistered by about 20m, which would put the correct point down the hall in Beilei’s office.” Which prompted my reply, and this article: “it becomes a moot point if Google Earth can’t be trusted. Besides, if we’re going to move to Phelps in the ‘near’ future, who cares? And I bet that if Natalie had used the coordinates for the Geology Department, nobody would have noticed.” It seems that the definition of Geography has to do with both the “what” and the “where”; after all, everything is “spatial.” But then, that also applies to Geology. And don’t forget that our own Department of Geography evolved from UCSB’s original Department of Geology (see addenda below) which is now known as the Department of Earth Science. What a tangled web we weave.
Addenda:
1. Early History to 1966 (https://legacy.geog.ucsb.edu/about/history/)
Geography courses were first offered at Santa Barbara when it became a campus of the University in 1944. Faculty members of various departments taught these courses, notably J. Fred Hallerman, professor of economics, and Robert W. Webb, professor of Geology. In 1961, Robert B. Johnson was named lecturer in geography and began to expand the curriculum. Johnson was joined by Patrick J. Tyson in 1962. Five courses were offered that year and five in 1963…The geography program, which had been administered by the Department of Social Sciences, was included in the Department of Sociology-Anthropology in 1961, when the former department was split up. In 1963, Anthropology and sociology became separate academic departments and geography was put under the direct charge of the dean of the College of Letters and Science. (Berl Golomb, Geography, The Centennial Record of the University of California 1868-1968, UC Printing Dept, Berkeley, 1967, pg. 493).
2. Personal Correspondence (10/31/07) from Meryl Wieder, MSO of the Department of Geography until 2004:
I sat through many faculty retreats in which Geography faculty sat around for hours on end trying to make sure that their courses did not replicate or overlap courses taught in the Geological Sciences department. They felt a strong need to differentiate their work from that of Geology. Before that, when I was working in Geology (called Geology then), the Geology faculty voted to change the name to “Geological Sciences” because they felt what they were doing was “real science” (inorganic chemistry, vulcanology, etc.) and they wanted to set themselves off from Geography which they thought was more “social/soft science.” That was before Geography had evolved its Remote Sensing, Ocean Physics, and Hydrology specializations to prove that they, too, were “doing hard science.” And the big political-economic football is that Geography had to get itself re-classified as a “science” (hard science) department, because they are then blessed with greater funding than is available in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
