ABSTRACT
Geography has not addressed the question of evil and, with it, the entire realm of morals and ethics that has been and still is a central concern of philosophy both in the East and in the West since ancient times. A reason for this is modern geography’s root in a physical science, geology, rather than in a human “science”— history or political philosophy. Morals and ethics are not inherent to a physical geographer’s work for the simple reason that his or her subject matter is inanimate. The biogeographer does engage with animate reality, but, interestingly enough, most biogeographers are plant geographers, and plants are not normally seen as possessing feeling, and along with it, the possibility of delight, suffering, and pain that raises moral issues. What if there were more zoogeographers? Would confronting a nature that is “red in tooth and claw” become inevitable? Not necessarily, for human geography is a well established field, and people certainly have feelings-they love, hate, build, destroy, and kill-and yet, until well into the second half of the twentieth century, geographers have managed to avoid morals and morality altogether, or skirt around their edges.
