What is geography?

Why study geography? We live on the earth's surface, depend on its resources, and adjust our food, clothing and work to our surroundings. Early societies lived on 'natural means of subsistence' (wild plants and animals); later, technology let people grow food from land, soil and water. Geography helps us appreciate diversity and find the causes of differences over space and time.

What is geography? The term was coined by the Greek scholar Eratosthenes (276-194 BC), from geo (earth) and graphos (description). Scholars defined it as 'the description of the earth as the abode of human beings'.

• The earth's surface varies physically (mountains, plains, plateaus, oceans, deserts) and culturally (villages, cities, roads, ports, markets). So geography came to be seen as the study of areal differentiation: phenomena that vary over space.
• Geographers study not only the variations but their causes, in a frame of cause and effect, which also helps them foresee the future.
• Geographical phenomena are dynamic: they change through the interaction of a changing earth and ever-active human beings.

Nature and human beings. Nature leaves its mark on food, clothing, shelter and occupation; people have come to terms with nature through adaptation and modification. Technology loosened the hold of the environment, reduced hard labour and raised production. A poet put it as a dialogue: nature made the soil, the human made the cup; nature made the night, the human made the lamp. Today we have 'humanised nature and naturalised human beings'.

• Transport and communication organise space: routes (links) and settlements (nodes) join places together. Geography studies this spatial organisation and spatial integration.

Three questions of geography:

• What? identifies the patterns of natural and cultural features.
• Where? describes their distribution. These two give an inventory of features and locations, an approach popular in the colonial period, but they did not make geography a science.
• Why? explains the causal relationships between features and processes. This question made geography a scientific discipline.

Example (new): a map showing where tea gardens are in India answers 'what' and 'where'; asking why they cluster on the well-drained, rainy hill slopes of Assam and the Nilgiris is the 'why' question that makes it geography.