ABSTRACT

Author have often wondered what would happen if people announced to San Franciscans that there was a 5050 chance of a really serious earthquake arriving some time next year. This is the geographic space shaped by human meaning, where today people see the traces of our own past humanity, the same spatial traces that will shape, in turn, tomorrow. As people have seen throughout this book, natural, living and human systems in space and time may be enormously complex, and as we move our thinking along that natural-living-human sequence the complexity increases by at least an order of magnitude each time. To state the problem in another, rather strange, but thoroughly geographical way: at one extreme we have physical systems of things whose courses and trajectories are shaped by the stable space-time geometry in which they are embedded. It is when we come to ourselves that self-reflective, thinking consciousness begins to shape the geometries.