Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Cholera bacteria diffuse to broader areas because once
one person has cholera it can be spread through his or her
feces. In an impoverished area with no sanitary sewer sys-
tem, the person's feces can easily contaminate the water
supply. Even in places with sanitary sewer systems, chol-
era contamination occurs when rivers, which are typically
the water supply, fl ood the sanitary sewer system.
We expect to fi nd cholera in places that lack sanitary
sewer systems and in places that are fl ood prone. In many
of the teeming shantytowns of the growing cities of the
developing world, and in some of the refugee camps of
Africa and Asia, cholera remains a threat. Until the 1990s,
major outbreaks remained few and limited. After remain-
ing cholera-free for a half century, Europe had its fi rst
reappearance of cholera in Naples in 1972. In 2006, a
cholera outbreak in Angola, in southern Africa, spread
quickly throughout the country. When heavy rains came to
West Africa in 2010, an outbreak of cholera killed 1500 peo-
ple in Nigeria alone.
A cholera outbreak in the slums of Lima, Peru, in
January 1991 became a fast-spreading
epidemic
(regional
outbreak of a disease) that touched every country in the
Americas, infected more than 1 million people, and killed
over 10,000 in the region. The outbreak in Peru began
when the ocean waters warmed off the coast of Peru.
Cholera bacteria live on plankton in the ocean, and the
warming of the ocean allowed the plankton and cholera to
multiply. Fish ate the plankton, and people ate raw fi sh,
thus bringing cholera to Peru.
In the slums of Peru, the disease diffused quickly. The
slums are densely populated and lack a sanitary sewer system
large enough to handle the waste of the population. An esti-
mated 14 million Peruvians were infected with cholera,
350,000 were hospitalized, and 3500 Peruvians died during
the outbreak in the 1990s. Peruvians who accessed health
care received clean water, salts, and antibiotics, which com-
bat the disease.
In January 2010, an earthquake that registered 7.0 on
the Richter scale hit Haiti, near the capital of Port au Prince.
Months later a cholera outbreak started in the Artibonite
region of Haiti (Fig. 1.6). Health offi cials are not certain
whether the outbreak began in the multiple refugee camps or
elsewhere. The disease diffused quickly through the refugee
camps and by October 2010 reached the capital city of Port
au Prince. Scientists worry that the cholera outbreak in Haiti
will be long lasting because the bacteria have contaminated
the Artibonite River, the water supply for a large region.
Although purifying water through boiling and thoroughly
washing hands prevent the spread of cholera, water contam-
inated with cholera and a lack of access to soap abound in
many neighborhoods of world cities. A vaccine exists, but its
effectiveness is limited, and it is costly. Dr. Snow achieved a
victory through the application of geographical reasoning,
but the war against cholera is not yet won.
The fruits of geographical inquiry were life-saving in
Snow's case, and the example illustrates the general advan-
tage that comes from looking at the geographic context of
events and circumstances. Geographers want to understand
how and why places are similar or different, why people do
different things in different places, and how the relationship
between people and the physical world varies across space.
The Spatial Perspective
Geography, and being geographically literate, involves
much more than memorizing places on a map. Place loca-
tions are to geography what dates are to history. History is
not merely about memorizing dates. To understand his-
tory is to appreciate how events, circumstances, and ideas
came together at particular times to produce certain out-
comes. Knowledge of how events have developed over
time is thought to be critical to understanding who we are
and where we are going.
Understanding change over time is critically impor-
tant, and understanding change across space is equally as
important. The great German philosopher Immanuel
Kant argued that we need disciplines focused not only on
particular phenomena (such as economics and sociology),
but also on the perspectives of time (history) and space
(geography). The disciplines of history and geography
have intellectual cores defi ned by these perspectives
rather than by subject matter.
Human geographers employ a
spatial perspective
as they study a multitude of phenomena ranging from
political elections and urban shantytowns to gay neigh-
borhoods and folk music. To bring together the many
subfi elds of human geography and to explain to non-
geographers what geographers do, four major geograph-
ical organizations in the United States formed the
Geography Educational National Implementation
Project in the 1980s. The National Geographic Society
published their fi ndings in 1986, introducing the
five
themes
of geography. The fi ve themes are derived from
geography's spatial concerns.
The Five Themes
The fi rst theme,
location
, highlights how the geographical
position of people and things on Earth's surface affects what
happens and why. A concern with location underlies almost
all geographical work, for location helps to establish the
context within which events and processes are situated.
Some geographers develop elaborate (often quantita-
tive) models describing the locational properties of particular
phenomena—even predicting where things are likely to
occur. Such undertakings have fostered an interest in
loca-
tion theory
, an element of contemporary human geography
that seeks answers to a wide range of questions-some of them
theoretical, others highly practical: Why are villages, towns,
and cities spaced the way they are? A geographer versed in
location theory might assess where a SuperTarget should be
