You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan
Published in January of 2017.
Most of us find ourselves bewildered and unbalanced by the current political moment.
Perhaps what we all need is a good old-fashioned road trip.
That is the idea behind Robert D. Kaplan’s superb 180 page (5 hour and 21 minute) new book.
Earning the Rockies was written before Donald Trump became President Trump, but maybe if it came out before the election we, (or at least I), would have been less surprised by the outcome.
What Kaplan finds is that the people living in large swaths of the country have less and less in common with the political, media, and (yes academic) elites of the coasts.
Theories of the benefits of globalization, free trade, and technology disruption hold little interest to American's struggling with stagnant wages and rising housing/educational/medical costs.
Rather than being depressed by the economic struggles of the non-Uber hailing / Airbnb staying population, Kaplan finds strength in the interior. He argues that in the gifts of geography (including more navigable inland rivers than the rest of the world combined), and natural resources (from hydrocarbons to hydropower), that we find the true roots of American exceptionalism.
The fact that our history is that of a frontier nation instilled within our culture a belief that hard work, risk, and perseverance are the building blocks of progress. Those core beliefs, so argues Kaplan, are still the dominant strain of thinking in the vast expanse of geography that is too often thought of as “flyover country”.
I’ve long been a fan of Kaplan’s books and articles. His longstanding argument that learning geography lies at the heart of any understanding of the world is one that I’ve come to share.
The idea that to understand the U.S. that we must not only learn its history, but also travel its highways and visits its small town and medium-sized-cities, is an idea that is hard to dispute.
My way of understanding the world is to read about it in books. That method somehow failed me in understanding how the last election was going to turn out.
Perhaps I need to do more things than read more books - even when those books are as illuminating and enjoybale as Earning the Rockies.
What are you reading?
