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, in part to serve the needs of mercantile adventurers, but much of it merely to satisfy the curiosity of the educated, affluent classes. Today, that curiosity is strangely absent. It has been replaced, especially among human geographers, by a focus on assumed general laws of human responses to environment, space, place and people that ignores the diversity of contexts — physical and human -which is the overwhelming feature of the earth's surface. This shift of orientation among geographers is both myopic and dangerous. There is a desperate need for a rekindling of geographical curiosity about all parts of the earth's surface, not for any simplistic, voyeuristic reason but because without a major educational and academic discipline which removes the blinkers on the societies that it serves, world understanding, and ultimately world peace, will become even more threatened than it currently is.
