On the First Law of Geography: A Reply

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Arbia's second law of geography reads "Everything is related to everything else, but things observed at a coarse spatial resolution are more related than things observed at a finer resolution." This suggests that aggregation has a smoothing effect, as is well known (see Tobler 1969 Tobler, W. 1969. Geographical filters and their inverses. Geographical Analysis, 1(3): 234–53. Google Scholar, 1990 Tobler, W. 1990. "Frame independent spatial analysis". In Accuracy of spatial databases, Edited by: Goodchild, M. and Gopal, S. 115–22. London: Taylor a sufficiently common occurrence as to warrant being called the second law of geography." This is comparable to the need for "boundary conditions" in many physical problems. It alsorelates, perhaps inversely, to Foucault's (1979) Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and punishment, Harmondsworth, , U.K.: Penguin. Google Scholar emphasis on "confinement." 2. Giddens (1984) Giddens, A. 1984. The constitution of society, Berkeley: University of California Press. Google Scholar also comments extensively on the relationbetween geography and sociology. Concerning distance, he states (p. 363), "Distance in space is apparently easy to comprehend and to cope with conceptually" sic. He goes on to say, "human beings do make their own geography." He finds great value in the concept of regionalization (p. xxv), but eschews the idea of laws in the social sciences (pp. xxxii–xxxiv). 3. The attribution of this statement to Chief Seattle has beenquestioned. It is likely a myth. See J. L. Clark (1986), "Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech,"Prologue, Spring 18(1). Also: http://www.jalcyon.com/arborhts/chiefsea.html and http://www.webcom.com/duane/seattle.html 4. This phrase, "the law of unexpected consequences," is quite common—as can be seen by entering it into Google on the Internet—and apparently, quite well understood, though theorigin is unclear. The distinguished historian H. Wayne Morgan Morgan, W. 1998. "Echoes and lessons from the Spanish American War". In The Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture in History XVII, Greenville, North Carolina: East Carolina University. Google Scholar, for example, uses it in his 1998 Brewster lecture inGreenville without his feeling any need for justification orelaboration. 5. An anonymous reviewer suggested looking at a book by R. A. Fisher (1935) Fisher, R. A. 1935. The design of experiments, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd. Google Scholar. I did this and found the following on page 66: "the widely verified fact that patches in close proximity are commonly more alike, as judged by the yield of crops, than those which are further apart."