Geography and Worldview?

Zardnaar

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Nov 16, 2003
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19,956
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Dunedin, New Zealand
Intellectually I know things are different around the world but sometimes basic things surprise me.

For example I gave an American friend who lives in Oklahoma. She has never seen the ocean. I've never seen a desert as I don't really travel much.

Living on an island I also think in north and south terms. The bigger cities are north and might drive 5 or six hours to get to one or I might fly to Auckland. I haven't traveled two hourswest for close to two decades though partly because of tourism hell and price inflation.

Apart from small nations like Fiji our nearest neighbors are Australia which is further away than you think. It's similar to the distance between California and NYC.

Ifi drive north to south all through NZ in distance it's similar to Bordeux in France to the top of Denmark. Could cover several languages here at best you get some slight variations between the provinces. Or maybe Polynesian areas of Auckland that you probably pass through from the airport to where you want to go.

Weather wise it's very temperate here but my island has 4 climate zones, several micro climates and parts of NZ have a Mediterranean climate. Only the alpine areas have anything even resembling a northern European/American winter.

I know some of you have visited NZ and idk if you saw NZers walking around in bare feet but we take it for granted here. Climate, no snakes and not much broken glass so why not?

Apparently we're friendly in some ways insular and naive in other ways due to relative isolation. Geography has effected culture eg sport and leisure activities like tramping/hiking and swimming. I've never used our town pool but do jump in a river/lake/ocean.

Anyway how does geography affect your worldview? Or have you never really thought about it?
 
How would I answer that? I went from small town podunk USA to big city livin’ in the Far East. More than just geography changed, although I eat more seafood now given that there’s actually like a sea and stuff.
Yep access to fresh seafood is a thing. I can't stand it myself.
 
I know some of you have visited NZ and idk if you saw NZers walking around in bare feet but we take it for granted here. Climate, no snakes and not much broken glass so why not?

Never been to New Zealand. Too scared of walking upside down and treading bare foot on hedgehogs.
 
Never been to New Zealand. Too scared of walking upside down and treading bare foot on hedgehogs.
Hedgehogs are supposedly more afraid of you than you are of them.


To answer the OP: Entire books - many books and essays - have been written about geography and the Canadian psyche. Yes, it greatly affects my worldview.
 
My wife is a travelling nurse, so while she's on assignments around the USA we do a lot of touring of the areas she's in. For instance Summer 2020 we were in the Phoenix area and toured around Tonto National Forest before the wildfires erupted. Currently we're in the Pacific Northwest doing a lot of day trips along Rt 101 up and down the Pacific coast: absolutely stunning coastline! Then we'll be heading back east and I'll be doing the skiing thing for the winter. What I find for us in regards to geography and worldview is that variety is the spice of life: we enjoy immensely travelling around and seeing new things (and the people in these environments). It gives us a lot of different perspectives that we can enjoy and appreciate, as well as apply as we continue on our journey down this road of life.

D
 
I live in what is (incorrectly) described as the driest state in the driest continent.
The climate along the narrow stip of coastline is classified as Mediteranean, similar to south-
to mid-California. Winter minima are around 5C; summer maximum temperatures are around 48C (119F).

How does geography affect your worldview?
Although there are sporadic plans to increase the population to about 3 million, they end up fizzling
out because of the lack of water. We have barely enough for the 1.3 million in Adelaide.

I've always felt that I live at one edge of the world; looking north, all I see are seas of troubles.
With Covid, that feeling has become even more pronounced and unreal. We have had 4 deaths in 2 years
in a state with about 1.8 million people. That is unbelievably out of kilter with how most of the
world is suffering!

As @Zardnaar pointed out elsewhere, being an island is a great way to dampen the spread of corona. We
also have a desert that's about 1500 km across from the north-east to the far west. South from here is an
ocean full of gigantic white pointer sharks, all the way to Antarctica. It also contains a vast supply of
delicious seafood.

South Australians are affectionately(?) referred to as "crow-eaters". Early settlers were alleged to
have eaten the breast meat of crows, parrots and cockatoos when there was a shortage of red meat. The
term entered the lexicon in the late 1800s. (Alternatively, "crow" is a butcher's term for mesentery,
an otherwise little-eaten tripe.)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/croweater

There are superb wineries that were started by German immigrants circa 1850 as well as associated food
and dairy industries.

It's a very boring place for teenagers and young adults, but it's well serviced and cheap to live.
Sydney and Melbourne are very expensive by comparison, among the worst in the world.
If you don't feel like working and don't mind a frugal lifestyle, the dole (unemployment benefits) is
more than enough, mainly because of the universal health care and other discounts for "bludgers".

Adelaide is a very easy place to get things up and running easily. Six of us commie ratbags set up
the housing cooperative network here. With funding from the State Labor (politically centre-Left)
government we ended up owning 1200 houses by the time we opted out about 25 years ago to be
nuisances elsewhere. My son has a 2 bedroom co-op apartment that is 6km from the CBD that costs
him $150 per week. He could opt to buy it if he wanted, or stay there for life and never pay more than
20% of his income when employed (capped at market rates).

Finally...
Many thanks to the fabulous Mondragon Corporation in Spain for the inspiration and methods to be
useful political ratbags with a purpose. And to some of the meanest, toughest, black dames from the
Chicago Freedom Movement on how to set up Womens' Shelters within the coop network!
 
I'm sure that geography shapes one's world view. Precisely how I don't know. I do know that the more and more varied environments you spend time in create larger and larger impacts. When a new place is strikingly different the effect can be bigger. Moving to NM after living all my life on the east coast was pretty dramatic. Technology often allows us to ignore geography and make every place "feel" the same, but prior to mid 20th C, geography had a huge impact on people's lives and actions.
 
...Technology often allows us to ignore geography and make every place "feel" the same, but prior to mid 20th C, geography had a huge impact on people's lives and actions.

:old: This is true. Air conditioning turn the southwest US from the devil's frying pan into a population explosion. :grouphug:
 
I'm sure that geography shapes one's world view. Precisely how I don't know. I do know that the more and more varied environments you spend time in create larger and larger impacts. When a new place is strikingly different the effect can be bigger. Moving to NM after living all my life on the east coast was pretty dramatic. Technology often allows us to ignore geography and make every place "feel" the same, but prior to mid 20th C, geography had a huge impact on people's lives and actions.
Jared Diamond's world view provided an interesting answer to the New Guinean's
question: "Why do you have so much cargo?" :)
 
Odd to hear people talking about being on an island giving a sense of isolation. On a clear day you can see France from the hilltops, you can see the endless stream of ships in The Channel. England may be one step away from the continent, but the whole world is only two steps away.

It is a truism that the new world has geography while the old world has history. It's the weight of history here informs worldview. A couple of years ago I was thinking about this in Winchelsea, having a smoke and looking at the view. The garden wall predated Columbus. The "geography" of the valley I was looking at told the history of a millennium. It was once a wide river. Where the shipyards were is now twenty miles inland. The sleepy village was once a major city, one of the Cinque Ports. Wars and centuries later the river silted up and was drained for farmland. Peer off to one side and you can see the military canal and the Martello Tower from the Napoleonic Wars. Peer in the opposite direction and you can see the old windmill, now Paul Macartney's recording studio.

Geography changed by man. Geography given meaning by history. How to explain this place without explaining everything from feudalism to the Beatles via the inception of the Royal Navy? And that's a small village.

I wanted to write another paragraph about the neighbourhood where I grew up, but it's impossible to make concise. Why was the pub landlady French? Why did the local undertaker do Dianna's funeral? Weeeeell, a smidge of geography mediated by massive dollop of history. The Huguenots, the industrial revolution, the British Empire, Dickens, Yeats and Elliot, the worlds first social housing.

The oddity about history rather than geography "defining" worldview is that we do not all have the same knowledge of or understanding of history. Like the kids who live ten miles from the coast but have never seen the sea*, people can inhabit the same historical space with entirely different meanings.

I try to teach English to refugees, but am painfully aware that while they share my geography they don't share my understanding of history. Those ships going up and down The Channel don't have the same meaning.


* Or the kids who live in a suburb of London but have never been to central London.
 
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I live close to a linguistic border. I can drive north for half an hour, and hear German being spoken around me.

It used to be a little treat. Reach the central square of Bolzano, sit in the historical café and have German-style coffee and a slice of Sachertorte ('brought every morning from Vienna!'; not sure they still do). All while looking at the statue of Walther von der Vogelweide and imagining yourself in early '900 Mitteleuropa.
 
I have friends in the US and have done for years, but can't get my head around a "small trip" being, like, four hours or more. "just popping to the next state to see our parents" kind of deal. It breaks my tiny British brain.

Yeah four hours is a long drive for me lol. That's from here to Christchurch. 8 hours is mother's home town.

Just can't be bothered for the most part. US gas is about half the price as well.
 
I have friends in the US and have done for years, but can't get my head around a "small trip" being, like, four hours or more. "just popping to the next state to see our parents" kind of deal. It breaks my tiny British brain.
Yeah, this!

Even more so in central/west Oz, where towns can be 100s/1000s of km apart, so a "short" drive is 'only' a couple of hours.

My first time there in 1999, I arrived in Perth as a backpacker, knowing that I had relatives "just down the coast" in Albany, but not having actually looked it up on a map. Albany turned out to be >500 km away (at the time, along the near-coastal Route 1; Google now tells me it's 'only' a bit over 400 km along a more direct inland highway) — so I never got round to visiting them.

I was back in Oz in 2005–2006 with my wife, starting in Melbourne this time. We did a 6-week road-trip via Adelaide up through Alice, over to Townsville, then back down the east coast, putting >10000 km on our rental's clock. That's an average of ~240 km/day, not taking stops into account: most of the driving-days, we were covering 500–1000 km (e.g. Adelaide–Alice is >1500 km; I think we probably broke that stretch in/near Coober Pedy, but can't remember for sure).

But these days I'd rather take the train than drive 700+ km (6–8 hours) to visit my sister-in-law in Baden-Württemberg.
 
I have friends in the US and have done for years, but can't get my head around a "small trip" being, like, four hours or more. "just popping to the next state to see our parents" kind of deal. It breaks my tiny British brain.
Meanwhile, I'm flabbergasted at the "he's not from Manchester, he's from Liverpool, can't you tell by the accent?" Oh, sorry... wait, the two cities are thirty miles apart?
 
Meanwhile, I'm flabbergasted at the "he's not from Manchester, he's from Liverpool, can't you tell by the accent?" Oh, sorry... wait, the two cities are thirty miles apart?
Yeah, but they sound really different and really hate each other.
 
If you are prepared to risk being lynched and want to cause a riot, ask a bunch of Northies which is the capital of the North?
 
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