The power of place : geography, destiny, and globalization's rough landscape /
Harm de Blij.
- New York : Oxford University Press, c2009.
- xiv, 280 pages : color illustrations, maps (chiefly color) ; 25 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Globals, locals, and mobals The imperial legacy of language The fateful geography of religion The rough topography of human health Geography of jeopardy Places open and shut Same space, divergent destinies Power and the city Promise and peril in the provinces Lowering the barriers
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 today 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.
9780195367706 0195367707
Human geography. Geografía humana Globalization. Globalización