William Bunge

William Wheeler Bunge Jr. (born 1928, La Crosse, Wisconsin; died October 31, 2013, Canada) was an American geographer active mainly as a quantitative geographer and spatial theorist. He also became a radical geographer and anti-war activist in the US and Canada.

Quotes

• There are two particularly bothersome problems in treating geography as a science. The first problem is concerned with the role of description in geography and the second with the predictability of geographic phenomena.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• Some take the position that description is non-scientific. This position cannot stand.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• The question of predictability is crucial since it is the basic assumption of all theory. The predictability of geographic phenomena depends in turn on the answer to a question: Are geographic phenomena unique or general? If they are unique, they are not predictable and theory cannot be constructed. If they are general, they are predictable and theory can be constructed.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• Science is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of uniqueness. It is willing to sacrifice the extreme accuracy obtainable under the uniqueness point of view in order to gain the efficencies of generalization.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• In order to produce aerial classifications of identical sort no matter what differentiating characteristics are considered, it is necessary that there exist a perfect aerial correlation between all phenomena of human significance. This condition is not met on the earth's surface.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• As an alternative attempt to preserve the region as a concrete unit object, it is possible, but absurd, to insist on some one arbitrary areal classification as sacred and immutable.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• Unlike most other phrases of cartography, metacartography is not directly concerned with the preparation of maps or their psychological impact; rather metacartogrpahy attempts to stand back from the subject to see how maps perform as a device in portraying spatial properties in competition with other devices, such as photogrpahs, pictures, graphs, language, and mathematics.
  • From Bunge's 1962 book "Theoretical Geography"

• I threw myself into the peace movement when it was supported at that time by less than four percent of the American people. Having lived through McCarthyism, I fully expected to be in a concentration camp within a year. (Instead I was forced into exile in five.)
  • From Bunge's 1979 paper Perspective on Theoretical Geograph in volume 69 issue 1 of Annals of the Association of American Geographers

• I am short tempered with academic geographers, even Marxist ones. The campus geographers tend to separate theory from practice. They read too much and look and, often, struggle not at all. They cite, not sight. In the heady atmosphere of all theory and no practice all sorts of objections are raised to our work, but the one that is most fearful is an ideological Marxist reductionism. In science the methodology does not endorse itself. Only the substance recommends the methodology. Theory requires experiment. If the substantive work is good, then ask the scientist his methods. But in religion that is all backwards. The methodology becomes everything. Dogma is never put to a test. Perhaps citations of past masters, who did in fact deal with the real world, is permitted, but mostly a convolution, and an embroidery develops in dogmatic Marxism. Heady nonsense spins off. Dogmatic Marxists are as out of place as Christian Scientists. Marxism is ascience relating theory to experimental practice, but the followers of Marx, typically those who have never organized a union or a community, never put out a leaflet, never mobilized a demonstration, but who have buttressed themselves with tons of books, announce their purity. They are a pain in the gluteus Maximus and often delude good people because of the fanaticism of their opinions.
  • From Bunge's 1979 paper Perspective on Theoretical Geograph in volume 69 issue 1 of Annals of the Association of American Geographers

• They will say that there is bourgeois geography and proletariat geography. True enough. And there is no other. False! There is the geography both sides agree upon. Do the bourgeois geographers insist that the earth is round? Certainly. Then should the proletariat geographers insist it is flat? Certainly not.
  • From Bunge's 1979 paper Perspective on Theoretical Geograph in volume 69 issue 1 of Annals of the Association of American Geographers

• Another aspect of my perspective on Theoretical Geography is the constant attempt to discredit my work by discussion of my personality, which, contrary to my detractors, is innately cheerful and outgoing as evidenced by my popularity with most of my driving taxi cab.
  • From Bunge's 1979 paper Perspective on Theoretical Geograph in volume 69 issue 1 of Annals of the Association of American Geographers

• I am a scientist. That is enough. I do not make value judgments in my work or worry about ethics or doing right (or wrong). I simply do science, geography.
  • From Bunge's 1979 paper Perspective on Theoretical Geograph in volume 69 issue 1 of Annals of the Association of American Geographers

• So what is the state of geography today? It is in a mess – hyphenated, obfuscated, as confused as it is confusing. Why? Society is itself degenerating. The culture is coarse, vulgar, prostituted, chaotic, ‘dummied down’. We are in desperate need of intellectual reinforcements, and geography can help some.
  • From Bunge's 2001 paper Author’s response: geography the innocent science– a completed geography awaiting its birth in print (published as the author's response to critiques in Classics in human geography revisited: Theoretical geography) in volume 25, issue 1 of Progress in Human Geography