by If, somehow, Geography is supposed to be a ‘set of maps’, with professors wearing round and thick glasses, offering dispassionate monologues about rivers, longitudinal and transverse sections, differences in ancient volume, edges and sedimentary basins, or even a set of European policies, with dates that no one knows, geography is actually a science that, not only social, seems to be necessary for human development and allows the continuity of other sciences, such as history, economics or even physical self. If we look at a space economically, we look for ways to make it profitable, through the proximity of resources or people, described in various production models. on a geological or even physical level, it is not possible to understand the Coriolis effect without geographic spatial or climatic concepts.
Physical Geography irrevocably enters this armor of knowledge. It includes geomorphology, the study of relief and its forms, climatology, but not meteorology, some concepts of oceanography, geology, popular with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which allow delineation of hazard profiles, population distribution, in short, “map making” . Among other “geographical” disciplines and sub-disciplines, Physical Geography considers itself as an important way of understanding the cities, the populations and the whole of Portugal.
The big problem indexed in Physical Geography, at least in Portugal, is the growing obsolescence it is experiencing. To be honest, all of Geography has done it. The Portuguese don’t like maps, because they have Google Maps analyzing them. they don’t like to know the weather, mistaking it for meteorology, because they can see the IPMA. Anyway, the Portuguese, as a whole, don’t like Geography. The big question comes from the fact that Geography is vital to understanding why Portugal is the way it is and how it should go about it. If, when we build a city, we take into account landforms and the type of soil (geomorphology, for example), we can prevent flooding. if we consider it shades climatic conditions, we can, for example, know that low thermal pressures in Ibero-Africa are responsible for “stormy” weather in summer. Therefore, it is necessary to understand geography, in this case physics, to develop an updated Portugal.
In the shades topographical, latitude, distribution of population, relation of oceans, distribution of resources, belong to rigorous and exhaustive geographical analyses. The ability to connect specialized fields of knowledge, such as Geology, Physics, Economics, Sociology, Medicine, makes Geography a powerful “weapon” of economic development. It is important, therefore, to elevate Geography to the more banal sciences of knowledge, such as Mathematics or even Portuguese. It is just as important to know how to read as to know how to locate North (from moss, for example), or to know how to measure as to know how to understand the direction of rivers between downstream and upstream. So we can consider a “pilgrimage to the origin”.
Therefore, the rise of geography begins with the rise of its professionals, the geographers, be it teachers (with better careers and more teaching time for students), researchers, technicians, among others. By strengthening these jobs, we will not only strengthen economic growth, but also scientific development, important in a Portugal that seems to be increasingly outdated.
