Extreme regionalism: the new sport

It started when Igor Panarin decided that the United States is going to disintegrate into six separate regions in 18 months. That made the front page of the Wall Street Journal. BLDBLOG picked up on it and commented. Cartophilia and The Map Room joined the chase, but the bloggers aren't the only ones interested in Panarin's prospects for geopolitics. No less than "Nine Nations" Joel Garreau himself has stepped up to the plate, with this piece in the Washington Post.

I'm not going to repost the map here, because it's been all over the place. And I won't spend too much time rehashing the arguments about the particular boundaries he drew (really, will the breakup actually follow state lines? We think not.). But I will ask one question and make one comment and leave it to you, the reader, to mull over.

The comment -- an observation fueled by having read Don Mitchell's landmark piece questioning the existence of culture (for no less than two separate and unrelated classes) this semester -- is that this is what happens when we allow economics, politics, or some other social factor to run rampant in our predictions without thinking about culture and subculture. As others in the blogosphere have no doubt already pointed out, if Panarin knew anything about US culture and regional subcultures, he never would have drawn the boundaries the way he did.

Is it unthinkable for the United States will eventually fall apart? No. The Roman Empire didn't last forever, so why should the US? But is it likely? Not in 18 months. Surely this country has experienced regional tensions since its inception (witness the Civil War), but that said we're no worse off now than we were thirty years ago, or even eighty years ago. But if and when the US does split, it's not going to look like that map. Why? Because that's just not how this country rolls, culturally. There is such thing as culture, kids, and it has a lot to say about how places change over time -- and why.

And the question: Where the hell have the geographers been in all of this? We've had plenty of bloggers who could be in the discipline (I don't know whether my respected colleagues out there are actually geographers or cartographic enthusiasts, to be honest) comment on this incident. The WSJ seems to represent economics as a discipline. And Joel Garreau is a fine journalist. I have no quarrel with any of these good people commenting on the issue -- the more the merrier.

But for Pete's (Pete Gould's? Dick Peet's?) sake, folks. We're geographers. This is what we're trained for. This is what we do for a living. We're that group of oddball academics who think about things like space and place and territory and geopolitics. And where the hell are we in all of this? Who among us has stood up and said with any sense of authority, "I'm a geographer and I study these things, and here's what I think"?

We complain ceaselessly that no one knows what we do. Yet given a prime opportunity to insert ourselves graciously, effortlessly, and -- heaven forbid -- appropriately into the scene, we're nowhere to be found!

Wake up, geography! Your people need you!