Book Review: Geography as Human Activity

Abstract

Introduction:  About a century ago, in his seminal essay «School and Society,» John Dewey articulated a perspective on geography which grew out of an understanding of knowledge as connected
to the activities of living: The unity of all sciences is found in geography. The significance of geography is that it presents the earth as the enduring home of man. The world without its relationship to human activity is less than a world. Human industry and achievement, apart from their roots in the earth, are not even a sentiment, hardly a name. The earth is the final source of all man’s food. It is his continuous shelter and protection, the raw material of all his activities, and the home to whose humanizing and idealizing all his achievement returns. It is the great field, the great mine, the great source of the energies of heat, light and electricity; the great scene of ocean, stream, mountain, and plain, of which all our agriculture and mining and lumbering, all our manufacturing and distributing agencies, are but the partial elements and factors. It is through occupations determined by this environment that mankind has made its historical and political progress. It is through these occupations that the intellectual and emotional interpretation of nature has been developed. It is through what we do in and with the world that we read its meaning and measure its value (Dewey, 1990, p. 19).