I am a climate scientist and geologist and think that climate, geology, and geography are incredibly interesting fields that people deserve to know more about. If you have any questions that you’ve sat with for a while, are just curious, want to know more about future or past scenarios, or even have worldbuilding questions, feel free to ask!
I'm wondering about something that's more a political/history question about the field: So I often hear about how geography was the first modern science. Apparently it fueld many advances in how science is organized, including in other fields. The first modern scientific institution is supposed to have been the royal geographic society in Britain. And many learned people at the time at least new some geology. For example the first science fiction writer Jules Vern packs his journey to the center of the earth full of geological lingo, that his intended readership was expected to understand or at least associate with a feeling of modernity and progress.
So I wondered what's special about geography and geology (why weren't engineering, physics, biology etc. first to get big). And I wonder if the following take sounds plausible: that it was important for colonialism and imperialism, but even before that and more significantly for the enclosure of the commons. Many land surveyors were needed for primitive accumulation.
If you want to take people's communally owned land, which there was a lot of, and divide it up and sell it, you need to be able to point on it on a map. So many surveyors needed to learn the trade and got send out to every last village, forest and field to steal people's land, which they needed to live. Of course, thereby at the same time providing the initial funding for capital and also creating a vast army of hungry and newly landless people migrating to the cities to become workers. And to teach the surveyors, you needed professors and institutions and state funding and all that. And this spilled over to newer fields of the natural sciences and replaced the centuries old focus on theology (and law) at the Universities.
And that's how geography helped to start both modern western science and capitalism. And that's why it was always intertwined with the capitalist hegemony from the beginning. And it still is, isn't it? Then again, there seem to be more Marxists among geographers then in other technical fields. I wonder why.