Geographers are interested in time in the sense of studying its effects on the planet Earth and its peoples, and how the concept of time has changed, and how our perception of time and distance has seemingly shrunk through the process of globalization.
"Contemporary globalization is a classic example of how the concepts of time and space are linked together. The idea of globaliztion has dominated much thinking in human geography and beyond in the last decade or so. It is self-evidently a spatial term since it references and announces a specific geographical scale of activity, the 'global.' But the spatial-scale reference makes sense only in relation also to time." (Holloway, 2009)
While I was intrigued by all the stops on our field trip, a couple stood out to me. The first one was the Forks of Cheat church and cemetery. Buried on that spot of earth were dozens of persons, many of whom probably spent their entire lives in what would be considered today a very small area. They were confined by the technology of the time. While we made the trek in around twenty-thirty minutes from downtown Morgantown to the church, during the time that many of these persons lived, the same trek would have taken several hours or even over a day on horseback or carriage. Somebody who lived in that area in the eighteenth or nineteenth century most likely did not visit Morgantown or Uniontown very often, perhaps a couple times a year. Today on that same small area of land, many folks commute to Morgantown on a daily basis to earn their living and support their families. Just a short hundred or two hundred years ago, all that one needed to survive and support themselves and their families was right there on that tiny piece of earth. Many had no reason to leave.
The other spots that really stood out to me was at the quarry and the iron furnace. Energy is one of our most precious commodities today, and we will go to any lengths to get it. They were mining for limestone, which is one of the essential materials needed for scrubbers on coal-fired power plants. However, the horizon over the quarry was dotted with windmills.
While energy is our most precious commodity today, a hundred or two hundred years ago, the world was much different. A very valuable commodity was iron, which was used for many things, but at the turn of the nineteenth century, iron was being used to fuel the steel industry in Pennsylvania. The iron furnace is just a remnant of that past economy, but still an important one. The people that once worked literally around the clock burning the precious wood that the forest generated. During this time, people lived there on site, burned wood from that site, and shipped the final product just down the river to Pittsburgh or the surrounding steel mills and other consumers. The steel industry fueled our nation's economy of the time, enabling everything from the first skyscrapers to the automobile, but everything happened on a very local scale. Coal and iron came from northern West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, which were sent to the steel mills in the Pittsburgh area. It all happened on a very small spatial scale by today's standards. I think Derek Gregory summed the idea up quite well in the Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th edition:
"An increase in the social life and a diminution in the constraining effects of distance on human activities. Processes of htis kind have along and varied history, but when David Harvey (1989b) first proposed the term, his primary purpose was to deisnate the product of what Marx sawas the compulsion to 'annihilate space by time' under Capitalism. [...] Harvey showed how this extraordinary volatility - the accelerating rhythm of social change - is connected through the restless expansion of capital accumulation to far-reaching transformation in the structures of an increasingly global space-economy." (Gregory, 2009)
Where we once saw the economy riding on the backbone of a localized area, we now see very globalized or nationalized processes. In the same time it took to ship iron from northern West Virginia to Pittsburgh, we can ship from anywhere in the country. In order to power the steel factories, we need the coal from one part of the country, and the limestone from another, and the iron from yet another place. And inside that factory, the machines may come from another country across the globe, and the paper from a paper mill somewhere. People commute much further distances than they once did, and relocating for said work is much easier than it once was.
Holloway, Sarah L. Key Concepts in Geography. 2nd ed. London: SAGE Publications, 2009. Print.
Gregory, Derek. The Dictionary of Human Geography. 5th ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2009. Print.
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