Reflections on American Geography

Abstract

The request to present an overview of American geography in less than an hour presents an awesome challenge. I am delighted to be here and honored to have this opportunity to reflect on geography in the United States. I regret that I am not able to give this talk in Japanese and hope that by the time I come to Japan again I will have remedied this deficiency!
What I offer this afternoon is a personal statement on the status of American geography today. Because this will be a personal viewpoint, it is necessarily selective, partial, and biased, especially so in light of the fact that one of the hallmarks of American geography is its diversity. The thousands of practicing geographers in the U.S. today embody a remarkable variety of philosophical positions, areas of expertise, employment situations, and research and teaching interests.²⁾ I see this diversity as a strength of the discipline, for it opens the way for a continuous influx of new ideas, ensures lively ongoing debates within the field, and increasingly serves to link geography with other disciplines. This is an exciting time in American geography, with both the status of the field and its content undergoing change.