A COMMON CAUSE FOR GEOGRAPHY?

In March 2009, Newcastle University's Geography department held a light-hearted debate to find a 'Common Cause' for the subject.Modelled on a recent Earthwatch debate 'irreplaceable - the world's most invaluable species', six scholars in the department battled it out to convince the audience that their cause was the most significant and pressing for geography today. The audience put questions to each cause before the winner was decided by popular vote.

Nick proposed 'place' as the common cause, and his talk is below. The five other topics were: rivers, glaciers, international justice, against sexual trafficking, and love.

If I were to ask you to name three fish beginning and ending with the letter 'K', I wonder what you'd come up with? How about: killer shark, Kwik Save frozen haddock, and Kilmarnock? What, you, Kilmarnock isn't a fish: it is, it's a place in Scotland.

Yes, a misunderstanding occurred when I rang the chair up to offer to argue the case for plaice, pleuronectes platessa, a commercially important flatfish occurring on the sandy bottoms of the European continental shelf, as the common cause in geography. She thought I meant 'place', a bounded portion of geographical space.

I like a challenge and didn't chose that spelling because it is so obvious that it is the central concept and key cause in geography that it scarcely even needs debating.

Indeed, all of the causes that my esteemed colleagues are endorsing are merely subsets of place. After all, what is a river other than a place to moor one's gently rocking rowing boat in a secluded river bend, and lie back beneath the starts with one's beloved in one arm and a decent glass of claret in the other? What is a glacier other than a splendid place to backdrop to an improbable scene in a James Bond movie?

Place is the key concept in the life of a geographer, and I'll briefly mention how it drives our curiosity and our ethics.

Curiosity about the places we live in is where geographical science begins. As Peter Haggett put it in his book, The Geographer's Art, 'One of the delights of a life as a geographer is that 'it provides a copper bottomed excuse to spend time in the oddest corners of the world.' We are celebrating the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth. As he stood in the forests of Brazil and Tierra del Feugo he wrote in his diary of being in "temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature:-no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body". It is therefore firstly that curiosity about, indeed, wonder at, places that drives us.

But, secondly, place is at the heart of our race's ethical endeavours. Arguably the greatest geographer of our age, Yi-Fu Tuan, wrote that whereas philosophy's key question is 'what is a good life?', Geography's is 'what is a good place?'

Our best utopian visions of a better world are inextricably place-bound. For British socialism and the labour movement, using the language of poet William Blake, the endeavour to fashion a just society was one of building 'Jerusalem, In England's green and pleasant land' - building a better world through the imagination of the ideal place. We are meeting on Wednesday - Odin's day - and for the Vikings, that was Valhalla, the place of feasting for gods and warrior heroes. This is a Wednesday in the middle of a term sandwiched between Christmas and Easter. This reminds us of the Biblical account, which too is one of place. Humanity fell from a place of perfection, Eden, and the Bible envisages a future new earth, reunited with heaven, where in the words of the prophet Isaiah God will 'wipe away the tears from off all faces'.

Because we can be sure of such a vision, it can persuade us that the universe is on the side of peace and justice, and animate us to build such places now. It is therefore that we can confidently strive against sexual trafficking; that we may have an ethical vision for an international justice that is truly boundless; that joyful love for the places in which we dwell and the people who inhabit them with us drives us to understand the human and physical geography of our blue planet.

Place is the key concept in geography, the object of both the curiosity and the ethical visions that drive us. Every other cause offered to you this afternoon is but a worthy subset of it: I urge you to embrace it as our common cause, and leave you with one final thought:

Place - there's nothing fishy about it.