Perhaps you can. If you can and you’re a resident of the United States, consider yourself part of an enlightened minority. As a whole, Americans seem to know little about where places are situated in the world. In a shrinking world, that’s a problem for a variety of reasons explored in a terrific essay by Thomas Swick in the latest issue of Westways. He writes: “[I]t is not enough to know one’s individual piece of Earth, one’s place, because today all places are lavishly linked.”

He continues:

On an average day we may put on an Italian suit made in Malaysia; get e-mail in English, Hebrew, and Mandarin; order from a Romanian waitress in an Indian restaurant; fill the tank of our Japanese car with gas made from Saudi Arabian oil; and then settle down for a quiet evening of televised baseball with players from Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea.

We can graze a dozen different cultures simply by getting up in the morning. The broader world has engulfed, and enriched, our smaller ones.”

Travel, Swick writes, gives us a better understanding of geography and allows us to “fill in the blanks” of the world, to better understand the people we come in contact with everyday and the news we get from around the world.

We agree. That’s why last year we praised the Teaching Geography is Fundamental Act.

Note: You might need to plug in a Southern California zip code to access the story at Westways. Try 90210, the one SoCal area code I’d wager most Americans know.

Photo courtesy of NASA.

Related on World Hum:
* Name Every UN Member State. You Have 10 Minutes.
* 2006: The Year of Mapping Dangerously
* Q-and-A with Thomas Swick: A Way to See the World