ABSTRACT
Geography is writing about the earth. As an academic discipline, its origins and early development reflected nineteenth-century interest in the acquisition of information about the great variety of environments, peoples and places on the earth's surface. Disengagement from the ends of the earth by geographers produces myopia. It may lead to the development of xenophobia. Geography, by virtue of its academic history, has long played a vanguard role in the education of people as world citizens, informed about the variety of environmental situations. In the contemporary world, the general processes in most regions relate to the operations of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist mode of production is not a deterministic mechanism, however, although some interpretations of it fall into the generalization trap. Not all societies are capitalist, and most of those that are were built on pre-capitalist foundations.
