The Evolution of Geographic Thought

Elvin Wyly

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2021, vol. 112, issue 5, 491-525

Abstract: The formal institutional entity we today call ‘Geography’ only exists because of nineteenth‐century struggles over the science, theology, and politics of human evolution. Old struggles continue even as today’s geographic thought evolves at an accelerating pace, amidst the dramatic transformations wrought by CRISPR gene‐editing technoscience and the consolidation of computational‐cultural forms of accumulation in surveillance capitalism. This paper explores some of the contradictions of these old and new processes in the evolution of geography and the geography of evolution. New, unconventional perspectives are possible with a synthesis of David Harvey’s theory of co‐evolutionary spheres of change in human and non‐human relations, Vine Deloria, Jr.’s analysis of Indigenous/Western settler‐colonial dialectics of space and time, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s portrayal of a noösphere of planetary consciousness. On the advancing frontiers of the Delorian noösphere, humanity confronts a proliferation of neo‐Lamarckian challenges and opportunities to create new geographies of planetary evolution.

Date: 2021
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