The latest (Sept-Oct 2012) issue of the NGA’s in-house magazine, Pathfinder, is a special issue on “Human Geography” (cover below). Motto:

Right Place, Right Time

Human geography tells “when” and “where” to put boots on the ground.

Now I don’t usually get too bothered about military/intel appropriations of the discipline, but the photo and text above is just so ridden with contradictions and, well, let’s just be frank, propaganda, that it’s impossible to let pass.

Whatever happened to geography as a tradition of care, so well put by Peter Gould in his brilliant piece “Thinking like a Geographer” ? Or the rest of his senses: a sense of communion, of disquiet, of relevance, of justice, of the spatial, of need, of right? Of course these could apply to any discipline, not geography alone.

Is that an apple the child is offering? A ball? Is the infantryman…