THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Geographical line of extension in sobriety; the fund of the earth, mediated with work
It looks as if almost all distant coasts have been discovered. Few habitable lands are still unentered, and the Blue Flower* has not been found. Thus nothing, or almost
nothing has survived of the geographical dream in its old form. Nevertheless, the earth has not been fully learnt nor, in spatio­temporal terms, fully experienced. It is so
only in its given breadth, not in the given task of its depth direction, its discoverable line of extension. This line runs through the mediation, through the interaction
between man and earth, through this still absolutely unclosed transaction. It runs through economic geography, through the political, technological, and cultural kind, yet
precisely through the earth space and earth object itself, it runs through economics, politics, and technology not just as purely social processes. But the earth itself also
plays a part in the metabolic exchange between man and nature, in an interaction with an equally powerful and changeable share of nature. Climate and existing raw
materials objectively determined the particular human world that arose; and this human world never lay on the moon, never purely in the mind. It lay on the earth, which
supplied the physical possibilities for human work and was itself changed by this work for this very reason, into an agrarian, and finally into an urban and industrial
landscape. Thus apart from a few vast deserts, high mountains, primeval forests, and for the time being also the Antarctic, almost all areas of the earth's surface came
within the radius of human action, were changed by the state of society and according to the state of society, have a fresh say in it, in short, they have become earth in a
line of extension which is just as varied as it is unfinished. Most splendidly, Soviet society gave its natural sciences and technology the task of rebuilding nature. Here the
business of clearing which began with the first farmers culminates in a way which was previously inconceivable; plants, rivers, and the climate find themselves changed,
even the tundra is transformed into cornfields. The Soviet Union is hereby helping enormously to shape the features of the cultivated land of which the earth is capable
and in which it has been expanding since it was first cultivated. In inhabited regions, geography without and before man does not exist any more, but this is precisely
why this very geography continues to be historically comprehensive — as both an arena and a framework. Just as the mechanical
* The unattained Romantic ideal in Novalis' novel ‘Heinrich von Ofterdingen’.