The Quality of Life: YOUR MOVE

Foremost among educational needs today is the ability to cope with life on a rapidly shrinking planet, where population is exploding, resources dwindling, and where pressures are mounting dangerously for even the most elementary creature comforts - food and space. Failure to give people a basic knowledge and understanding of the global patterns which will shape their lives would represent a sorry abandonment of our commitment and a dereliction of our duty as educators. Many, if not most, of the problems this generation will be called upon to face have strong geographic overtones. Where, physically, will we put another 100 million people in the United States by the year 2000? Where will we build the 100-odd cities - each averaging one million inhabitants and all unknown and unnamed today - to accommodate them? Where will we find the resources to feed, clothe, house, and educate these new Americans, much less the three billion additional neighbors they will acquire within the next 30 years? Where will the levels of pollution and human attrition become most serious? Why does the mortality rate from civilization's most common killers, heart disease and cancer, demonstrate a stronger correlation with geographic factors than with genetic factors? These are the kinds of questions for which people are going to need answers. These are also precisely the type of questions to which modern geographers are already addressing themselves.

In the past geographers have concentrated chiefly on the spatial analysis of patterns which are directly observable on the earth's surface and have devoted much less study to analysis of the mental images people form of the space around them. Clearly mental images are no less real than other patterns and their analysis may well provide insight into the direction, speed and intensity of man's impact on the environment.

Recent technological advances, in developed countries at least, have led to lower costs and a decreasing significance of the time - distance continuum. Thus the traditional constraints on the location of industry, business and even place of residence have been somewhat loosened. Does it not follow that the decision to locate, today more than ever, is related to the preconceptions or mental images of the quality of place held by key leaden of industry, commerce and government?

With this thought in mind and with the knowledge that quality of life has become a significant resource in the minds of most Americans today an evaluation of the mental images that Dartmouth undergraduates (leaders of tomorrow) have of geographic space was undertaken by the students in the course Introduction to Human Geography.

Class members interviewed 2,000 undergraduates and from each obtained a mental map of the quality of place over the surface of the 48 contiguous states. The instructions pointed out clearly that the economic surface was to be considered as flat, that real income as measured in dollar flow was to be considered identical at all locations. The 2,000 mental images of the quality surface were compiled into a single topographic map which will be presented in a future issue of the Alumni Magazine. The class would like very much to compare the undergraduate evaluation with that of Dartmouth alumni. You are invited to read the following instructions and fill out and return the map on the next page.

Professor Huke has been a member of the GeographyDepartment since 1953. The first two paragraphs of this commentary are from: Robert Huke and Vincent Malmstrom. Geography as a Discipline, Association of AmericanGeographers, Washington, D.C., 1973.

You have just been-Promised a job by the Allstate MoneyCompany. You have your choice of location in any one of thecontinental 48 states, USA, as shown on the accompanyingmap. Irrespective of where you live, your income and costs forthe year will be exactly the same. Please rank the states by marking on the map in order of preference. Number 1 being the statewhere you would most wish to live for the next five years andnumber 48 being the state where you would least like to live.

Cut out and return the completed map to Robert E. Huke, Department of Geography, 310 McNutt, Hanover, N.H.