WORLD REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY
LECTURE 2: WHAT THE HECK IS GEOGRAPHY, ANYWAY?
I. What the heck is geography, anyway?
A. Geography is an attempt to understand what gives places their particular locations and characteristics. Geographers look at the interaction of physical and human-made factors to understand those characteristics.
B. Geography is an open discipline with many connections to other disciplines
C. Geography has three components
a. Physical Geography
i. The study of natural environments and their world distributionb. Human Geography
i. The study of human beings, how they are shaped by the places they inhabit, and how those places shape them.
c. GIS
i. Technologies which help geographers obtain data about the earth's surface, and to organize that data in meaningful ways.
I. Physical Geography
a. Physical geography is the study of natural environments
b. Physical geographers study four major areas
i. Major physical features like oceans, seas, mountain ranges.
1. How are mountains formed? What makes rivers change course? How can we predict flooding? What is making the Sahara expand?
ii. Climate and climate change
1. Is the earth warming? What caused the last "little ice age," and when can we expect another one?
iii. Ecosystemscomplex systems of plants, animals and soils
1. How does the availability of plankton in the Atlantic affect the size of the whale population? What happens when the size of a wolf pack's territory is made smaller? What are the effects of introducing non-native trout species into Rocky Mountain streams?
iv. Environment and societyhow human action is affecting the natural environment
1. How a local mining operation affects groundwater and water quality for a nearby city
2. Where, how and who generates acid rain and what can be done to abate it.
3. How human use of coal, oil and gas is creating carbon gas that leads to global warming, and how global warming is affecting the polar ice sheets (Steffen).
I. Human Geography
a. The study of human beings, how they are shaped by the places they inhabit, and how those places shape them
b. Human geographers study four things:
i. Population and demography
1. Rapid increase in population: from .5 billion in 1600 to over 6.9 billion people in 2010.
2. Where do all those people go? Are they evenly distributed across the globe?
3. Uneven distribution means regional geographers have to ask
a. "How is the world population distributed?"
b. "Why are some areas of the globe more densely populated than others?"
c. "How are processes of population change different from region to region," and, increasingly,
d. "What makes large numbers of people move from region to region?
4. The answer to these questions has a lot to do with how people make their livelihood.
a. Natural resources in area
b. Historic use of those resources
c. Type of dominant economy and technology
5. Labor Migration
6. Population Control: making sure that the earth can support the number of people living on the planet.
i. Political geography (Slide 2.7) is the study of how governments influence the human geography of the world and its regions.
1. Political Geographers study (Slide 2.8):
2. Nations and Nationalisms: (Show World Political Map, slide 2.9). How did all these lovely lines marking borders come to be? Are they natural features? (Askno).
a. They are artifacts of the Westphalian system, which originated in Western Europe in 17XX.
b. A nation is not a country. Nation is an "imagined community," usually based on a single ethnic identity, and often sharing language, religion, customes, and historical background.
c. The Westphalian system says that every ethnic group must be a nation, every nation must have its own state, and every nation-state must have its own territory without any other national groups in it, and its own government to rule that bounded territory.
d. Does this happen in real life? How many ethnically homogeneous countries are there? (NONE). But the contradictions between the ideal of an ethnically homogeneous sovereign territory and the reality of an ethnically mixed territory with incomplete sovereignty lead to a WORLD OF TROUBLE. (Yugoslavia, World War II).
3. Governments and Policy
a. The forms of government and their effects on space, e.g. public and private space.
4. Transnational Organizations
a. Groupings of countries over a larger space: eg. NATO, WTO, EU, OPEC.
i. Economic Geography (Slide 2.10) is the study of how goods and resources are produced, distributed, and consumed across space.
1. (Slide 2.11) Economic geographers study:
a. How the economy is divided into sectors
i. Primary sector: raw materials and natural resources
ii. Secondary sector: manufacturing
iii. Tertiary sector: service sector, including distribution, retail, transportation, professional service.
b. The Global Economy
i. How and where multinational corporations choose to invest
ii. Offshore production to avoid taxation, labor unions, and to gain access to cheaper materials and labor.
iii. How MNCs segment the production process to move portions of their operations to lower-wage areas or to gain proximity to customers (Maquilas vs. Gerber, Microsoft's Indian software development or Motorola's Czech chip shrink division).
c. Development and Poverty
i. Why particular regions are less economically developed than others (e.g. Luxembourg has $45,360 GNP/PPP per capita, while Zimbabwe has a PPP/GNP of 1.737 per capita)
ii. Effects of poverty: HIV/AIDS in Africa, other public health disasters, low rates of employment and literacy.
iii. Natural resource reasons, historical reasons
iv. How agencies like the World Bank and the IMF can create sustainable human development to reduce mortality rates, increase standards of living.
ii. Cultural geographers (Slide 2.12) study systems of values, beliefs, meanings, practices and social relations across space.
1. Cultural geographers study (Slide 2.13):
a. Languages
b. Religions
c. Race
d. Class
e. Gender
f. The diffusion of ideas about these topics and the ways they inform actions in everyday life
2. Overlaps with other kinds of human geography.