Informing the public and the government of the United States and other countries about world geography is a mission of the American Geographical Society that it renews through the new Bowman Expeditions program.
As geographers recently abroad, we have come to the sad realization that the United States is perceived as an overbearing global power crippled by its ignorance of the world. Troubled by intelligence failures and the cost of geographic ignorance, AGS President Jerome E. Dobson proposed sponsoring expeditions to different countries and world regions, named in honor of former AGS Director Isaiah Bowman, who was geographer for Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.
Bowman Expeditions are based on the belief that good government, science, education, environmental management, peacemaking and peace keeping, as well as economic development and humanitarian aid, all need detailed, dependable, updatable digital geographies of the world’s peoples and places. These digital regional geographies are needed at the level of foreign policy, but also at the community and local levels.
The AGS Bowman Expeditions Program envisions future digital geographies with open access to original and disaggregated data for the cumulative construction and use of regional geographical knowledge through the power of GIS. The program aims at the following:
- To re-ignite a past when the U.S. government invested more in understanding world geography, with its different peoples and places.
- To show geographers are best equipped to produce open-source geographic intelligence.
- To show AGS Bowman Expeditions provide a way to combat “geographical ignorance” and bring “cultural awareness” back into government, public policy, business, and education.
- To provide a non-controversial method for developing cultural awareness and the human terrain working with students and professors (in contrast, American Anthropological Association denounced Human Terrain Teams).
- To show positive United States Government collaboration is reflective of distinguished U.S. Office of Naval Research Geography Program (1948-1972).
- To fill an urgent need for developing the digital human terrains of foreign lands and peoples desperately needed for global peace and prosperity.
- It offers a lower-cost option for reliable place-based GIS data needs.