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Hi, I'm Daniel Imrevar. I'm the author of Are We Really Prisoners of Geography, which was published in 2022.

This article is an attempt to make sense of a rash of books that have been coming out about geopolitics and mountain ranges and water tables explaining international affairs.

And I got really curious about why these were so popular all of a sudden,

and I came to feel that they were expressive of a kind of conservatism,

not just a political conservatism, but also a conservatism about the earth itself, that it won't change.

So I ended up writing a skeptical take on these.

One reason I got interested in this is that there's always two kinds of ways that international politics can go.

It can be an affair of ideas and trade goods and everything sort of effortlessly crossing borders, or it can be

an affair of defended borders and, you know, locking down the resources you have within them.

And it's always kind of ping ponged between the two, but it seems like we're in the age where

borders, where grounds, matters more, both because we're seeing a lot of border walls being built,

and we're seeing a lot of new claims about, you know, whose territory is this,

but also because the Earth is mattering more as we experience climate change.

And so I was interested in how those two things, which are both making, you know,

the actual physical stuff of the planet more relevant to our politics,

how they were playing with each other.

One thing that's happened since is that we now have a U.S. President who is openly speaking the language of colonization.

And that feels like an older language, the kind of language that geopolitical theorists would be very familiar with.

And it makes you think even more than I thought in 2022 that we are heading toward an age when territory, just in a purely physical sense, matters more.

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