From the Publisher

Welcome to GEOGRAPHY, a newsletter for educators that brings you current perspectives and enrichment articles for your geography courses. This issue centers around topics from human geography. What does geography say about the Europeans' multilingual abilities? Why is an understanding of geography important in any discussion of environmental impacts and economic growth? How can we use geography to better understand population growth? Articles by Darrick Danta, Dean Hanink, and Brian Blouet show how the geographer's tools and methodologies shed light on the human condition.

Two more articles address the human side of the study of geography: its history and its futures. First, Geoff Martin spotlights the many individuals who have contributed to the development of geography as a discipline and challenges you to test your skill at identifying 20 of these folks. How many can you identify?

The future of geography, its students, is the focus for Mike Kuby, John Harner, and Patricia Gober. Their new approach to the human geography course centers on the student as learner. Human Geography in Action is an active learning approach to the core concepts of human geography. Designed to facilitiate active student involvement in learning, it features the ability to localize and personalize the activities, use technology, and more.

We at Wiley are very proud to be publishing this exciting new approach and encourage you to watch for its publication this fall (November, 1997). If you are interested in previewing the book, or testing some or all of the activities in it, please contact the editor, Nanette Kauffman at (212) 850-6521, or send email to nkauffma@wiley.com.

We hope you enjoy this issue of the newsletter and feel free to duplicate any of the articles for use with your students. We welcome contributions from our readers and invite you to send your comments and suggestions for future issues to science@jwiley.com.