Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
them situate and analyze what they see. We, the authors, have countless fi eld experi-
ences, and we will share these with you to help you understand the diversity of Earth's
surface and show how global processes have unique outcomes in different places.
Solving major global problems such as hunger or AIDS is complicated in our
interconnected world. Each solution has its own ramifi cations not only in one
place, but also across regions, nations, and the world. Our goals in this topic are to
help you see the multitude of interconnections in our world, to help you recog-
nize the patterns of human geographic phenomena that shape the world, to help
you understand the uniqueness of place, and to teach you to ask and answer your
own geographic questions about this world we call home.
Key Questions
For Chapter 1
1.
What is human geography?
2.
What are geographic questions?
3.
Why do geographers use maps, and what do maps tell us?
4.
Why are geographers concerned with scale and connectedness?
5.
What are geographic concepts, and how are they used in answering
geographic questions?
WHAT IS HUMAN GEOGRAPHY?
Human geographers study people and places. The
fi eld of
human geography
focuses on how people make
places, how we organize space and society, how we inter-
act with each other in places and across space, and how we
make sense of others and ourselves in our localities,
regions, and the world.
Advances in communication and transportation
technologies are making places and people more inter-
connected. Only 100 years ago the fastest modes of trans-
portation were the steamship, the railroad, and the horse
and buggy. Today, people can cross the globe in a matter
of days, with easy access to automobiles, high-speed rail-
roads, airplanes, and ships.
Economic globalization and the rapid diffusion of ele-
ments of popular culture, such as fashion and architecture,
are making many people and places look more alike. Despite
the push toward homogeneity, our world still encompasses a
multitude of ways in which people identify themselves and
others. The world consists of nearly 200 countries, a diver-
sity of religions, thousands of languages, and a wide variety
of settlement types, ranging from small villages to enormous
global cities. All of these attributes come together in differ-
ent ways around the globe to create a world of endlessly
diverse places and people. Understanding and explaining
this diversity is the mission of human geography.
Because the world is so interconnected, we cannot
look solely at the characteristics of individual places.
Instead, we must recognize that places all over the world
are fundamentally affected by the “globalization” of many
phenomena.
Globalization
is a set of processes that are
increasing interactions, deepening relationships, and accel-
erating interdependence across national borders. It is also a
set of outcomes that are felt from these global processes—
outcomes that are unevenly distributed and differently
manifested across the world.
All too often, discussions of globalization focus on
the pull between the global, seen as a blanket covering
the world, and the local, seen as a continuation of the tra-
ditional despite the blanket of globalization. Geographers
are well placed to recognize globalization as something
signifi cantly more complex. Geographers employ the
concept of “scale” to understand individual, local,
regional, national, and global interrelationships. What
happens at the global scale affects the local, but it also
affects the individual, regional, and national, and simi-
larly the processes at these scales infl uence the global.
Reducing the world to “local” and “global” risks losing
sight of the complexity that characterizes modern life. In
this topic, we study globalization, but as geographers we
are sensitive to the fact that the same globalized process
has different impacts in different places because no two
places are the same. Moreover, whenever we look at
something at one scale, we always try to think about how
processes that exist at other scales may affect what we are
looking at, and vice versa (see the discussion of scale later
in this chapter).
