World Regions in Global Context : Peoples, Places, and Environments Book

In my opinion the authors of this book should be fired from whichever universities are currently employing them, and the fact that they are not, but are rather considered competent to teach young men and women, is a very strong argument that something is seriously wrong in some areas of the social sciences. The book includes pretty much everything that's wrong with this field: A completely crazy amount of political correctness and blatantly politicizing coverage, unsubstantiated claims galore, an unscientific approach to data/evidence, etc., etc. If you wanted to write a parody book mocking geographers and displaying why you shouldn't take such people seriously, it would be hard for me to do it any better than these authors have, even if that was presumably not their aim.

In this book almost everything that's wrong with this world is blamed on white people, colonialism, 'neoliberalism', and so on. 'Diversity' is great, multiculturalism is great, environmentalism is great, etc. Whenever they have to mention in some context or another that yet another socialist/communist government ran out of money because of insane policies, in this book it always somehow seems to be the 'neoliberalist' reforms which are to be blamed for the hardships that followed, when some measure of sanity was at least reestablished. A lot of times when it's not the Designated Bad Guys (white, Western people) who've done something wrong, or at least when it seems - even to these people - unreasonable to somehow argue that it's really those guy's fault, the bad things somehow just 'happened', whereas whenever blame can be directed at the Designated Bad Guys you're not in doubt as to who did something wrong. Reading a book like this one will likely make you think only white people can be colonialist and imperialist, and the Arab slave trade is almost not mentioned, nor is the manner in which e.g. Muslim expansion took place; in terms of India, I think it's fair to say that the authors are frankly lying about what happened, certainly in the context of their treatment of the Mughal Empire. Whenever a politically correct topic can in any way, shape or form be included in the coverage you can bet your a** the authors have included that topic in their coverage, regardless of whether it's even remotely relevant or a good use of space. The book contains multiple factual errors (for example Australia is not the driest continent - Antarctica is; and despite what the authors would have you believe, Europe is actually quite a bit larger than the countries of Southeast Asia - "The region [of Southeast Asia] covers an area of 4 million square kilometers (1.5 million square miles), about the size of Europe ..." p.446). Occasionally the authors outright come across as clueless idiots, e.g. when they're suggesting that a yearly tourism revenue of $2 million of the Golden Triangle is a reason to consider this a promising alternative to opium production and logging ("Bringing $2 million to the region each year, tourism is proposed as a more sustainable activity for the Golden Triangle than opium and logging.") (p. 479). For people who don't know, they're talking about a region where in the early 90es nearly two-thirds of the *Worlds* entire opium production was produced.

When the authors talk about various historical data and figures, such as e.g. the pre-discovery native American populations, no hint of the uncertainties surrounding those estimates are even mentioned. They repeatedly report official numbers from various communist societies known to systematically lie about these things, such as e.g. USSR growth rates, as if they were fact, and the thought does not seem to enter their minds that it might be a good idea to at least mention to the readers that these numbers might not be completely accurate. They don't seem to be aware of how uncertain/contested the East European GDP/growth/production numbers of the late 80s were/are; either that or they're pretending there's no uncertainty to make the regime look better - no reader should be in doubt after having read just a few chapters of this publication that the authors are sympathetic with policies usually associated with the far left. Many, though admittedly not all, of Stalin's and Lenin's crimes against humanity, which would most certainly have been talked about in great detail if they had been committed by white Westerners and the victims had been non-Whites, go unmentioned and in the book Cuba's experiment with communism has not been a complete failure impoverishing the nation, but rather the outcome has been 'debated [among] scholars and politicians' (p. 390). Through the coverage you indirectly learn that the by far worst performing nations in Southeast Asia have a communist past, but the authors never draw explicit attention to this fact; you could write a book where you would not draw attention to such things and it would make sense to do so, but given that they talk about 'the evils of neoliberalism' at every chance they get, in my opinion these deliberate and seemingly quite systematic omissions and lies just make the authors look like manipulative, highly untrustworthy people.

I could talk a lot more about the contents of this book and discuss in more detail all the reasons why I think the book is terrible and the authors are wrong/misrepresenting facts/misleading the reader in various ways, but: "[t]he amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it", and it's just not worth it. I did read the book to the end despite everything, and my reasons for doing so are that it does include some good data and some interesting observations along the way, and I also along the way got interested in knowing in more detail what sort of worldview these people had - a 'know your enemy' sort of thing. Now I know.