1.1 1 Geography: An Exploration of Connections

1.1.1 Geographic Insights

Where Is It? Why Is It There? Why Does It Matter?

Where are you? You may be in a house or a library or sitting under a tree on a fine fall afternoon. You are probably in a community (perhaps a college or university), and you are in a country (perhaps the United States) and a region of the world (perhaps North America, Southeast Asia, or the Pacific). Why are you where you are? Some answers are immediate, such as “I have an assignment to read.” Other explanations are more complex, such as your belief in the value of an education, your career plans, and your or someone’s willingness to sacrifice to pay your tuition. Even past social movements that opened up higher education to more than a fortunate few may help explain why you are where you are.

The questions where and why are central to geography. Think about a time you had to find the site of a party on a Saturday night, the location of the best grocery store, or the fastest and safest route home. You were interested in location, spatial relationships, and connections between the environment and people. Those are among the interests of geographers.

Geographers seek to understand why different places have different sights, sounds, smells, and arrangements of features. They study what has contributed to the look and feel of a place, to the standard of living and customs of the people, and to the way people in one place relate to people in other places. Furthermore, geographers often think on several scales, from the local to the global. For example, when choosing the best location for a new grocery store, a geographer might consider the physical characteristics of potential sites, the socioeconomic circumstances of the neighborhood, traffic patterns locally and in the city at large, as well as the store’s location relative to the main population concentrations for the whole city. She would probably also consider national or even international transportation routes, possibly to determine cost-efficient connections to suppliers.

To make it easier to understand a geographer’s many interests, try this exercise. Draw a map of your most familiar childhood landscape. Relax, and recall the objects and experiences that were most important to you there. If the place was your neighborhood, you might start by drawing and labeling your home. Then fill in other places you encountered regularly, such as your backyard, your best friend’s home, or your school. Figure 1.2 shows the childhood landscape remembered by Julia Stump in Franklin, Tennessee.

Consider how your map reveals the ways in which your life was structured by space. What is the scale of your map? That is, how much space did you decide to illustrate on the map? The amount of space your map covers may represent the degree of freedom you had as a child, or how aware you were of the world around you. Were there places you were not supposed to go? Does your map reveal, perhaps subtly, such emotions as fear, pleasure, or longing? Does it indicate your sex, your ethnicity, or the makeup of your family? Did you use symbols to show certain features? In making your map and analyzing it, you have engaged in several aspects of geography:

• Landscape observation
• Descriptions of the Earth’s surface and consideration of the natural environment
• Spatial analysis (the study of how people, objects, or ideas are related to one another across space)
• The use of different scales of analysis (your map probably shows the spatial features of your childhood at a detailed local scale)
• Cartography (the making of maps)

As you progress through this book and this course, you will acquire geographic information and skills. Perhaps you are planning to travel to other lands or are thinking about investing in East Asian timber stocks. Maybe you are searching for a good place to market an idea or are trying to understand current events in your town within the context of world events. Knowing how to practice geography will make your task easier and more engaging.

What Is Geography?

Geography is the study of our planet’s surface and the processes that shape it. Yet this definition does not begin to convey the fascinating interactions of human and environmental forces that have given the Earth its diverse landscapes and ways of life.

Geography, as an academic discipline, is unique in that it links the physical sciences—such as geology, physics, chemistry, biology, and botany—with the social sciences—such as anthropology, sociology, history, economics, and political science. Physical geography generally focuses on how the Earth’s physical processes work independently of humans, but increasingly, physical geographers have become interested in how physical processes may affect humans and how humans affect these processes in return. Human geography is the study of the various aspects of human life that create the distinctive landscapes and regions of the world. Physical and human geography are often tightly linked. For example, geographers might try to understand:

• How and why people came to occupy a particular place.
• How people use the physical aspects of that place (climate, landforms, and resources) and then modify them to suit their particular needs.
• How people may create environmental problems.
• How people interact with other places, far and near.

Geographers usually specialize in one or more fields of study, or subdisciplines. Some of these particular types of geography are mentioned over the course of the book. Despite their individual specialties, geographers often cooperate in studying spatial interaction between people and places and the spatial distribution of relevant phenomena. For example, in the face of increasing global warming, climatologists, cultural geographers, and economic geographers work together to understand the spatial distribution of carbon dioxide emissions, as well as the cultural and economic practices that might be changed to limit such emissions. This could take the form of redesigning urban areas so that people can live closer to where they work, or encouraging food production in locations closer to where the food will be consumed.

Many geographers specialize in a particular region of the world, or even in one small part of a region. Regional geography is the analysis of the geographic characteristics of a particular place, the size and scale of which can vary radically. The study of a region can reveal connections among physical features and ways of life, as well as connections to other places. These links are key to understanding the present and the past, and are essential in planning for the future. This book follows a “world regional” approach, focusing on general knowledge about specific regions of the world. We will see just what geographers mean by region a little later in this chapter.

Geographers’ Visual Tools

Among geographers’ most important tools are maps, which they use to record, analyze, and explain spatial relationships, as you did on your childhood landscape map. Geographers who specialize in depicting geographic information on maps are called cartographers.

A map is a visual representation of the surface of the Earth used to record, display, analyze, and explain spatial relationships. Figure 1.3 explains the various features of maps.

The first thing to check on a map is the legend, which is usually a small box somewhere on the map that provides basic information about how to read the map, such as the meaning of the symbols and colors used (see parts A–C and the “Legend” box in Figure 1.3). Sometimes the scale of the map is also given in the legend.

In cartography, scale has a slightly different meaning than it does in general geographic analysis. Scale on a map refers to the relationship between the size of things on the map and the actual size they have on the surface of the Earth. It is usually represented with a scale bar (see Figure 1.3D–G) but is also sometimes represented by a ratio (for example 1:8000) or a fraction (1/8000), which indicates what one unit of measure on the map equals in the same units on the ground. For example, 1:8000 in. means that 1 inch on the map represents 8000 inches (about an eighth of a mile) on the surface of the Earth.

A scale of 1/800 is considered to be larger than a scale of 1/8000 because the features on a 1/800 scale map are larger and can be shown in greater detail. The larger the scale of the map, the smaller the area it covers. A larger-scale map shows things larger; a smaller-scale map shows more things—with each thing smaller, less visible. You can remember this with the following statement: “Things look larger on a larger-scale map.”

In parts A–C of Figure 1.3, different scales of imagery are demonstrated using maps, photographs, and a satellite image. Read the captions carefully to understand the scale being depicted in each image. Throughout this book, you will encounter different kinds of maps at different scales. Some will show physical features, such as landforms or climate patterns at the regional or global scale. Others will show aspects of human activities at these same regional or global scales—for example, the routes taken by drug traders. Yet other maps will show patterns of settlement or cultural features at the scale of countries or regions, or cities, or even local neighborhoods (Figure 1.3D–G).

It is important to keep the two types of scale used in geography—map scale and scale of analysis—distinct, because they have opposite meanings! In spatial analysis of a region such as Southwest Asia, scale refers to the spatial extent of the area that is being discussed. Thus a large-scale analysis means a large area is being explored. But in cartography, a large-scale map is one that shows a given area blown up so that fine detail is visible, while a small-scale map shows a larger area in much less detail. In this book, when we talk about scale we are referring to its meaning in spatial analysis (larger scale = larger area), unless we specifically indicate that we are talking about scale as used in cartography (larger scale = smaller area). In the Understanding Maps: Scale box in Figure 1.3, the largest-scale map is that on the left (D); the smallest is on the right (G).

Most maps contain lines of latitude and longitude, which enable a person to establish a position on the map relative to other points on the globe. Lines of longitude (also called meridians) run from pole to pole; lines of latitude (also called parallels) run around the Earth parallel to the equator (see Figure 1.3H).

Both latitude and longitude lines describe circles, so there are 360° (the symbol ° refers to degrees) in each circle of latitude and 180° in each pole-to-pole semicircle of longitude. Each degree spans 60 minutes (designated with the symbol ′), and each minute has 60 seconds (designated with the symbol ″). Keep in mind that these are measures of relative linear space on a circle, not measures of time. They do not even represent real distance because the circles of latitude get successively smaller to the north and south of the equator until they become virtual dots at the poles.

The globe is also divided into hemispheres. The Northern and Southern hemispheres are on either side of the equator. The Western and Eastern hemispheres are defined as follows. The prime meridian, 0° longitude, runs from the North Pole through Greenwich, England, to the South Pole. The half of the globe’s surface west of the prime meridian is called the Western Hemisphere; the half to the east is called the Eastern Hemisphere. The longitude lines both east and west of the prime meridian are labeled from 1° to 180° by their direction and distance in degrees from the prime meridian. For example, 20 degrees east longitude would be written as 20° E. The longitude line at 180° runs through the Pacific Ocean and is used roughly as the international date line; the calendar day officially begins when midnight falls at this line.

The equator divides the globe into the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Latitude is measured from 0° at the equator to 90° at the North Pole or South Pole.

Lines of longitude and latitude form a grid that can be used to designate the location of a place. In Figure 1.3H, notice the dot that marks the location of Khartoum below the 20th parallel in eastern Africa. The position of Khartoum is 15° 35′ 17″ N latitude by 32° 32′ 3″ E longitude.

Printed maps must solve the problem of showing the spherical Earth on a flat piece of paper. Imagine drawing a map of the Earth on an orange, peeling the orange, and then trying to flatten out the orange-peel map and transferring it exactly to a flat piece of paper. The various ways of showing the spherical surface of the Earth on flat paper are called map projections. All projections create some distortion. For maps of small parts of the Earth’s surface, the distortion is minimal. Developing a projection for the whole surface of the Earth that minimizes distortion is much more challenging.

For large midlatitude regions of the Earth that are mainly east/west in extent (North America, Europe, China, Russia), an Albers projection is often used. As you can see in Figure 1.3I, this is a conic, or cone-shaped, projection. The cartographer chooses two standard parallels (lines of latitude) on which to orient the map, and these parallels have no distortion. Areas along and between these parallels display minimal distortion. Areas farther to the north or south of the chosen parallels have more distortion. Although all areas on the map are proportional to areas on the ground, distortion of actual shape is inherent in the projection, because, as previously discussed, parts of the globe are being projected onto flat paper.

The Mercator projection (see Figure 1.3J) has long been used by the general public, but geographers rarely use this projection because of its gross distortion near the poles. To make his flat map, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) stretched out the poles, depicting them as lines equal in length to the equator! As a result, Greenland, for example, appears about as large as Africa, even though it is only about one-fourteenth Africa’s size. Nevertheless, the Mercator projection is still useful for navigation because it portrays the shapes of landmasses more or less accurately, and because a straight line between two points on this map gives the compass direction between them; but actual distance measurements are distorted.

The Robinson projection (see Figure 1.3K) shows the longitude lines curving toward the poles to give an impression of the Earth’s curvature, and it has the advantage of showing an uninterrupted view of land and ocean; however, as a result, the shapes of landmasses are slightly distorted. In this book we often use the Robinson projection for world maps.

Maps are not unbiased. Most currently popular world map projections reflect the European origins of modern cartography. For example, Europe or North America is often placed near the center of the map, where distortion is minimal; other population centers, such as East Asia, are placed at the highly distorted periphery. For a less-biased study of the modern world, we need world maps that center on different parts of the globe. Another source of bias in maps is the convention that north is always at the top of the map. Some cartographers think that this can lead to a subconscious assumption that the Northern Hemisphere is somehow superior to the Southern Hemisphere.

The acronym GISc is now widespread and usually refers to Geographic Information Science, the body of science that supports spatial analysis technologies. GISc is multidisciplinary, using techniques from cartography (mapmaking), geodesy (measuring the Earth’s surface), and photogrammetry (the science of making reliable measurements, especially by using aerial photography). Other sciences, such as cognitive psychology and spatial statistics (geomatics or geoinformatics) are increasingly being used to give greater depth and breadth to three-dimensional spatial analysis. GISc, then, can be used in medicine to analyze the human body, in engineering to analyze mechanical devices, in architecture to analyze buildings, in archaeology to analyze sites above and below ground, and in geography to analyze the Earth’s surface and the space above and below the Earth’s surface.

GISc is a burgeoning field in geography, with wide practical applications in government and business and in efforts to assess and improve human and environmental conditions. GIS (without the c) is an older term that refers to geographic information systems and is applied to the computerized analytical systems that are the tools of this newest of spatial sciences.

The now widespread use of GISc, particularly by governments and corporations, has dramatically increased the amount of information that is collected and stored, and changed the way it is analyzed and distributed. These changes create many new opportunities for solving problems, for example, by increasing the ability of local governments to plan future urban growth. However, these technologies also raise serious ethical questions. What rights do people have over the storage, analysis, and distribution of information about their location and movements, which can now be gathered from their cell phones? Should this information reside in the public domain? Should individuals have the right to have their location-based information suppressed from public view? Should a government or corporation have the right to sell information to anyone, without special permission, about where people spend their time and how frequently they go to particular places? Progress on these societal questions has not kept pace with the technological advances in GISc.

Most geographers use photographs to help them understand or explain a geographic issue or depict the character of a place. Interpreting a photo to extract its geographical information can sometimes be like detective work. Below are some points to keep in mind as you look at the pictures throughout this book; try them out first with the photo on this page in Figure 1.4.

• (A) Landforms: Notice the lay of the land and the landform features. Is there any indication of how the landforms and humans have influenced each other? Is environmental stress visible?
• (B) Vegetation: Notice whether the vegetation indicates a wet or dry, or warm or cold environment. Can you recognize specific species? Does the vegetation appear to be natural or influenced by human use?
• (C) Material culture: Are there buildings, tools, clothing, foods, plantings, or vehicles that give clues about the cultural background, wealth, values, or aesthetics of the people who live where the picture was taken?
• (D) What do the people in the photo suggest about the situation pictured?
• (E) Can you see evidence of the global economy, such as goods that probably were not produced locally?
• (F) Location: From your observations, can you tell where the picture was taken or narrow down the possible locations?

You can use this system to analyze any of the photos in this book or elsewhere. Practice by analyzing the photos in this book before you read their captions. Here is an example of how you could do this with the photo below (Figure 1.4):

• (A) Landforms:
  • 1. The flat horizon suggests a plain or a river delta.
    Environmental stress is visible in several places.
  • 2. This oily liquid doesn’t look natural. Could it be crude oil?
    What would have caused the landscape transformation? Maybe an oil spill?
• (B) Vegetation:
  • 3. This looks like a palm tree. There are quite a few palm trees and other trees.
    This must be the tropics and be fairly wet and warm.
• (C) Material culture:
  There is not much that is obviously material culture here, just a single person. The whole area might be abandoned.
• (D) People:
  • 4. The clothing on this person doesn’t look like he made it. It looks mass produced.
    This suggests that he has access to goods produced some distance away, maybe in a nearby city. Or possibly, he could buy things in a market where imported goods are sold.
• (E) Global economy: See (D).
• (F) Location: This could be somewhere tropical where there could have been an oil spill. Hint: Use this book! See Figure 6.26 for a figure showing OPEC members. This suggests that the photo could be of Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria, Angola, or Indonesia. Suggestion: Look for relevant information in Chapter 7.

The Region as a Concept and Thematic Concepts and Their Role in This Book

A region is a unit of the Earth’s surface that contains distinct patterns of physical features and/or distinct patterns of human development. It could be a desert region, a region that produces rice, or a region experiencing ethnic violence. Geographers rarely use the same set of attributes to describe any two regions. For example, the region of the southern United States might be defined by its distinctive vegetation, architecture, music, foods, and historical experience. Meanwhile Siberia, in eastern Russia, could be defined primarily by its climate, vegetation, remoteness, and sparse settlement.

Another issue in defining regions is that they may shift over time. The people and the land they occupy may change so drastically in character that they no longer can be thought of as belonging to a certain region, and become more closely aligned with another, perhaps adjacent, region. Examples of this are countries in Central Europe, such as Poland and Hungary, which, for more than 40 years, were closely aligned with Russia and the Soviet Union, a vast region that stretched across northern Eurasia to the Pacific (Figure 1.5A). Poland and Hungary’s borders with western Europe were highly militarized and shut to travelers. With the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the drastic political and economic changes that then came about, Poland and Hungary became members of the European Union (EU) in 2004 (Figure 1.5B). Their western borders are now open, while their eastern borders are now more heavily guarded in order to keep unwelcome immigrants and influences out of the European Union. But through all this change—on the ground, in the border regions—people share cultural features (language, religion, historical connections) even as they may define each other as having very different regional allegiances. For this reason, we say regional borders can be fuzzy, meaning that they are hard to determine precisely.

A recurring problem in world regional textbooks is the changing nature of regional boundaries and the fact that on the ground they are not clear lines but linear zones of fuzziness. For example, when we first designed this textbook in the mid-1990s, the changes to Europe were just beginning; its eastern limits were under revision as the Soviet Union disintegrated. There were also hints that as the Soviet Union disappeared, countries of Central Asia, long within the Soviet sphere—places like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan—should perhaps have been defined as constituting a new region of their own. Some suggested that these four, plus Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and possibly even western China, should become a new post-Soviet world region of Central Asia (Figure 1.6). The suggestion was that this region would be defined by what was thought to be a common religious heritage (Islam), plus long-standing cultural and historical ties and a difficult environment marked by water scarcity but also by rich oil and gas resources.

In fact, such a facile lumping together of these very different countries into a region based on such criteria would misrepresent the current situation as well as the past. A world region known as Central Asia may emerge eventually (and there are groups of interested parties discussing that possibility right now), but such a region will be slow to take shape and will be based on criteria very different from common religion, historical experiences, and environmental features. First of all, these supposed uniting features are actually a fallacy. There are many different versions of Islam practiced from the Mediterranean to western China and from southern Russia to the Hindu Kush. Also, to the extent that there are common historical experiences, they are actually linked more to European and Russian colonial exploitation than to an ancient and deeply uniting Central Asian cultural heritage. Finally, while environments generally defined by water scarcity are common to all the countries listed, oil and gas resources are not uniformly distributed at all. It could be that a Central Asian identity will eventually develop, perhaps centered on the leadership of Turkey or Dubai, which is trying hard to define itself as the affluent capital of such a region; but thus far, the region has not coalesced. Therefore in this book, the countries listed above are to be found in the three different regions shown in Figure 1.6.

If regions are so difficult to define and describe, why do geographers use them? To discuss the whole world at once would be impossible, so geographers seek a reasonable way to divide the world into manageable parts. There is nothing sacred about the criteria or the boundaries for the world regions we use. They are just practical aids to learning. In defining each of the world regions for this book, we have considered such factors as physical features, political boundaries, cultural characteristics, history, how the places now define themselves, and what the future may hold. We are constantly reevaluating regional boundaries and, in this edition, have made some changes. For example, the troubled new country of South Sudan is no longer administered from Khartoum. Because its population is majority Black African, it is now considered part of sub-Saharan Africa, to which it is more culturally aligned (see Chapter 7).

This book organizes the material into three regional scales of analysis: the global scale, the world regional scale, and the local scale. The term scale of analysis refers to the relative size of the area under discussion. At the global scale, explored in this chapter, the entire world is treated as a single area—a unity that is more and more relevant as our planet operates as a global system. We use the term world region for the largest divisions of the globe, such as East Asia and North America (see Figure 1.1). We have defined ten world regions, each of which is covered in a separate chapter. Each regional chapter considers the interaction of human and physical geography in relation to cultural, social, economic, population, environmental, and political topics. Because it is at the local scale that we live our daily lives—in villages, towns, city neighborhoods—we show how global or regional patterns affect individuals where they live.

In summary, regions have the following traits:

• A region is a unit of the Earth’s surface that contains distinct environmental or cultural patterns.
• No two regions are necessarily defined by the same set of attributes.
• Regional definitions and the territory included often change.
• The boundaries of regions are usually indistinct and hard to agree upon.
• Regions can vary greatly in size (scale).

Within the world regional framework, this book is also organized around nine thematic concepts of special significance in the modern world—concepts that operate in every world region (but with varying intensity) and interact in numerous ways.

The sections that follow explain each of nine thematic concepts, how they are related to one another, and how they tie in with the main concerns of geographers: Population (pages 12–17), Gender (pages 17–19), Development (pages 19–23), Food (pages 23–27), Urbanization (pages 27–30), Globalization (pages 30–33), Power and Politics (pages 33–37), Water (pages 37–40), and Climate Change (pages 40–43). While the concepts are relevant to every region and provide a useful framework for your rapidly accumulating knowledge of the world, the way they relate to current issues varies from region to region. For example, in some regions, water is chiefly a scarcity issue; in others, managing water resources equitably under conditions of climate change is the main concern; in still others, the use of newly discovered groundwater resources will be a focus.

The nine concepts are not presented in the same order in each chapter, but rather are discussed as they naturally come up in the coverage of issues.