Geology to Ideology

GEOGRAPHY IN HUMAN DESTINY--Roderick Peattie--Stewarf ($3).

Geography usually means a big bookful of maps and statistics behind which crafty schoolboys munch apples. But last week Ohio State University's Geographer Roderick Peattie, elder brother of rhapsodic Botanist Donald Culross Peattie (A Prairie Grove, Audubon's America, etc.), explained geography to grownups. Geography in Human Destiny presents geography as the study of fact-relationships, not of facts. Says Author Peattie: "What it is, is a correlation between sciences. ... If one must classify it, call it a philosophy." Geography, Peattie thinks, nudged mankind into history. The human mind had to evolve to meet ice-age problems of finding shelter, food, defense, and has probably not progressed since the great glacier withdrew. Then nomadic men settled in the grasslands of the Nile, Euphrates, Yangtze, etc., to become tillers and develop cultures. Out of the nomadic, pastoral life of the early Jews grew the symbolism of their religion and of Christianity--e.g., "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want."

Classical civilization, says Peattie, was sunlit, but Western civilization was born in shadowy forests. "Never in a history is there adequate description of the dark forests in which the story of early medieval Europe was enacted," he claims, forgetting that both John Ruskin and Oswald Spengler made the point long ago. The Renaissance was the product of nasty weather. Rain, cold, floods, plagues, famines, sunspots flourished in the 14th Century. Result: Giotto, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, the Medicis. Confessed Leonardo da Vinci: "All the genius that I have comes from the air [climate] of my native province." When the weather cleared, Italian genius dozed off again in the sunshine.

Geography has pretty much determined U. S. politics. Abundance of national resources made waste tolerable, thus sired economic individualism and laissez faire. But "depletion of resources is forcing people to new social theories." Peattie tactlessly equates geography with conservation, conservation with socialism. "If progress is to be made, each compromise must, in the nature of things, be nearer the social left." From geology to ideology, Peattie's small book is absorbing enough so that readers will wish it were big enough to munch an apple behind.

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