Newswise — Australian publisher Millennium House made its big book about the oceans available in the U.S. in late 2010, with Charles F. Gritzner listed on the cover as the chief consultant.
Maritimea: Above and Beneath the Waves is a guide to the maritime world, with expert writers addressing such topics as the formation of the oceans, how tides, waves and currents work, the importance of temperature, pressure, salinity, the sea floor, marine life, early navigators, sea trade, and marine warfare.
What’s somewhat noteworthy is the fact that the chief consultant spent the greater part of his career at landlocked South Dakota State University, about as far from any ocean as you can get in North America. Is there an explanation for how Charles F. “Fritz” Gritzner ended up editing a book about the sea?
“Actually, as an undergraduate student at Arizona State, out in the middle of the desert, I had a course in oceanography,” Gritzner notes with his tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Probably there’s an even better explanation. It’s the fact that Gritzner, a distinguished professor emeritus of geography at South Dakota State, may be the dean of geography writers by some measures. He is passionate about anything involved in understanding the Earth, including the ocean world.
“The ocean occupies 71 percent of Earth’s surface, so as a geographer, you really need to know about the ocean and its dynamics, its importance geographically,” Gritzner said.
Gritzner’s writing is only one of the ways he promotes the study of geography. He taught more than 70 different courses before his retirement in 2010 after 50 years of college teaching. He remains active as coordinator of the South Dakota Geographic Alliance and the South Dakota Geographic Bee, one of the state contests leading to a national event. Gritzner credits the National Geographic Bee, sponsored annually since 1989 by the National Geographic Society, with restoring some focus on geography for students in the fourth through eighth grades in participating American schools. There are also other factors boosting interest in geography.
“Globalization has of course some impact. Many more people than in the past are able to travel. I think we’re more aware of the world’s problems, where places are, what they’re like. This feeds into an interest for geography.”
Gritzner is doing his part to satisfy that thirst for knowledge. His recently completed book about the island nation of Haiti is the 35th book Gritzner has written or co-written, mostly for Chelsea House Publishers. Amazon.com’s author page for Gritzner currently lists 19 of his titles as available. In addition, he’s edited about 80 manuscripts for books for Chelsea House, a leading nonfiction publisher of curriculum-oriented books for children and young adults.
One of the highlights of Gritner’s career as a geographer and writer was serving as chief consultant for Millennium House’s 2008 volume, Earth: The World Atlas.
On Millennium House’s Maritimea, Gritzner helped plan the table of contents and the sequence of topics. He also wrote the introduction and several other sections, and lined up many of the authors — including four of his colleagues from SDSU. SDSU geographers Bruce Millett and Donald Berg and SDSU master’s degree geography student Zoran Pavlović wrote some sections. SDSU political scientist Gary Aguiar also contributed.
Gritzner believes the fact that there is an interest in such specialized books bodes well for the future of geography, which is safely past the day when people thought of it as memorization of states and capitals. Gritzner has been working for years on a nimble definition of his discipline.
“My very simplified definition of geography is: What is where, why there, and why care? You can use this in relation to anything on Earth’s surface. You use geography to try to understand patterns, features, interactions,” Gritzner said. “Historians ask, ‘When and why?’ Geographers ask, ‘Where and why?’”
Gritzner believes the father of American geography, William Morris Davis, may have actually hurt geography by supplying the impulse to make school geography focus on physical geography and geomorphology, or the processes that shape landforms.
“That was deadly. Teachers couldn’t teach it, kids could care less about that; how in the world do you get a high school freshman interested in some kind of landform out there? And so a committee was actually formed to find an alternative,” Gritzner said. “In 1916, social studies was ‘invented’ here in the U.S.”
From Gritzner’s perspective, that shift has not been good to geography, and not necessarily helpful to students.
“The United States is the only country in the world that really focuses upon this fused amalgam, if you will — a real mess, in my view — of social studies. Almost every country in the world places geography at the very core of the curriculum. You have your reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic, the three r’s, and then geography — because if you live a good geography, you leave a good history.”
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