How important is geography?

On the morning of December 26, 2004, Tilly Smith a ten-year-old English girl was holidaying in a beach in Thailand. She suddenly turned to her mother and said: "Mummy, we must get off the beach now. I think there is going to be a tsunami." A recently done school project had come to Tilly's mind...

The girl saved a hundred fellow tourists from the tsunami because of a geography lesson about the giant waves.Tilly Smith urged her family to get off Maikhao beach in Thailand after seeing the tide rush out and boats on the horizon bob violently. Tilly told the media that credit for her quick-thinking should go to Andrew Kearney, her geography teacher at her school.

We may not understand all about the mysterious ways of the world around us but at least we can begin to think like Albert Einstien who said "the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible". Geography is a subject that helps us make sense of the natural world around us. Many of us have distasteful memories of geography as a subject that makes us learn and locate capital cities on the map. An image that needs to be corrected.

Learning begins from right where you are. Observing and understanding the natural lay of the land around us is the first thing that we ought to do, but most often dont. Natural and man-made landscapes teach us a lot about how we interact with nature...

(http://www.gobartimes.org/20050331/gt_ecofuture.htm)