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Human Geography

1. Carefully define the following: Language Family; Dialect; Pidgin; Creole; Sign

2. Identify and explain the design features of human languages

3. Compare and contrast the Conquest Theory and the Agricultural Theory of the diffusion of the Indo-European Language Family

Introduc tion to Human Geography

1CHAPTER

Field Note Awakening to World Hunger

KENYA

SU DA

N ETHIOPIA

TANZANIA

UGANDA

SO M

AL IALakeTurkana

INDIAN OCEAN

Lake Victoria

0° Equator

40°E

Kericho

Masai Mara

Dragging myself out of bed for a 9:00 A.M. lecture, I decide I need to make a stop at Starbucks. “Grande coffee of the day, please, and leave room for cream.” I rub my eyes and look at the sign to see where my coffee was grown. Kenya. Ironically, I am about to lecture on Kenya’s coffee plantations. Just the wake-up call I need.

When I visited Kenya in eastern Africa, I drove from Masai Mara to Kericho and I noticed nearly all of the agricultural fi elds I could see were planted with cof- fee or tea (Fig. 1.1). I also saw the poor of Kenya, clearly hungry, living in substan- dard housing. I questioned, “Why do farmers in Kenya grow coffee and tea when they could grow food to feed the hungry?” Trying to answer such a question sheds light on the complexities of globalization. In a globalized world, connections are many and simple answers are few.

Figure 1.1 Kericho, Kenya. Tea plantations established by British colonists in western Kenya. © H. J. de Blij.

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Source: Fouberg, Erin H., Alexander B. Murphy and Harm J. Di Blij. 2012. Human Geography: People, Place and Culture, 10th edition. Wiley-Blackwell.

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This initial section is interesting but you can skip it if you are really short on time, you can jump to page 8 and "What is Human Geography?"
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OK, some more annotations here. I'm going to try to make notes like I would if I were trying to learn this for class--which I, in fact, am. But don't let my notes keep you from making your own, either with the pdf reader you have or in another file on screen or paper while you are reading. The notes you make in/about texts are what solidifies the learning!
2 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

On its face, such a huge problem might seem easy to solve. Take the total annual food production in the world, divide it by the world’s population, and we have plenty of food for everyone. Yet, one-seventh of the world’s popula- tion is seriously malnourished. The vast majority of the 1 billion malnourished people on Earth are women and children, who have little money and even less power.

Figure 1.2 shows how food consumption is currently distributed-unevenly. Comparing Figure 1.2 with Figure 1.3 shows that the wealthier countries also are the best fed and that Subsaharan Africa (the part of Africa south of the Sahara Desert)

Figure 1.2 World Food Program Hunger Map, 2011. Classifi cations designate the proportion of the population malnourished. The World Food Program estimates just under 1 billion people worldwide are malnourished. Courtesy of: United Nations World Food Program 2011.

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Awakening to World Hunger 3

is currently in the worst position, with numerous countries in the highest catego- ries of hunger and malnourishment.

The major causes of malnourishment are poverty (inability to pay for food), the failure of food distribution systems, and cultural and political prac- tices that favor some groups over others. Where food does reach the needy, its price may be unaffordable. Hundreds of millions of people subsist on the equiv- alent of one dollar a day, and many in the vast shantytowns encircling some of the world’s largest cities must pay rent to landlords who own the plots on which their shacks are built. Too little is left for food, and it is the children who suffer most.

Is solving hunger as simple as each country growing enough food to feed its people? Do the best-fed countries have the most arable (farmable) land? Only 4 percent of Norway is arable land, and more than 70 percent of Bangladesh is arable

GREENLAND

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IVORY COAST

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4 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

land (Fig. 1.4). Despite this disparity, Norway is wealthy and well fed, whereas Bangladesh is poor and malnourished. Fortunately for the Norwegians, they are able to overcome their inadequate food production by importing food. Unfortunately for the Bangladeshis, two-thirds of their country is fl ooded each year during monsoon season. The monsoon rains are good for rice production, but they make survival a daily challenge in Bangladesh.

If a poor country has a small proportion of arable land, does that destine its population to a lifetime of malnourishment? It depends on the place. Of all the land classifi ed as arable, some is much more productive than others. For example, only 8 percent of Kenya’s land is arable, but the land in the western highlands is

Figure 1.3 Per Capita Gross National Income (in U.S. dollars) (GNI), 2009. Data from: World Bank, World Development Indicators, 2011.

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Awakening to World Hunger 5

some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. Do the Kenyans sim- ply not produce enough food on their lands? Is that what accounts for their mal- nutrition rate of over 30 percent? No, hunger in Kenya depends much more on what they produce, who owns the land, and how Kenya is tied into the global economy.

Kenya’s most productive lands, those in the western highlands, are owned by foreign coffee and tea corporations. Driving through the open, luxury-crop-covered slopes, I saw mostly Kenyan women working the plantations. The lowland plains are dotted by small farms, many of which have been subdivided to the point of making the land unviable. Here, an even higher proportion of the people working the lands are women, but the lands are registered to their husbands or sons because, by law, they cannot own them.

GREENLAND

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ETHIOPIA

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LIBERIA

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IVORY COAST

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CONGO GABONEQUATORIAL

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JAPAN

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6 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

As I drove through the contrasting landscapes, I continued to question whether it would be better for the fertile highlands to carry food crops that could be consumed by the people in Kenya. I drove to the tea processing center and talked to the manager, a member of the Kikuyu ethnic group, and asked him my question. He said that his country needed foreign income and that apart from tourism, exporting coffee and tea was the main opportunity for foreign income.

As part of an increasingly globalized economy, Kenya suffers from the com- plexities of globalization. With foreign corporations owning Kenya’s best lands, a globalized economy that thrives on foreign income, tiny farms that are unproduc- tive, and a gendered legal system that disenfranchises the agricultural labor force and disempowers the caregivers of the country’s children, Kenya has multiple fac- tors contributing to poverty and malnutrition in the country. In addition to these structural concerns, Kenyan agro-pastoralists, especially in the northeast, have

Figure 1.4 Percent of Land That Is Arable (Farmable), 2008. Data from: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 2011.

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Awakening to World Hunger 7

suffered higher rates of famine since a drought began in the region in 2006. Agro- pastoralists raise crops and have livestock and therefore struggle against drought as well as livestock diseases and political confl ict.

To solve one of the structural problems in Kenya raises another. If Kenyans converted the richest lands to cash crop production, how would the poor people be able to afford the crops? What would happen to the rest of Kenya’s economy and the government itself if it lost the export revenue from tea and coffee? If Kenya lost its export revenue, how could the country pay loans it owes to global fi nancial and development institutions?

Answering each of these questions requires geographic inquiry because the answers are rooted in the characteristics of places and the connections those places have to other places. Moreover, geographic fieldwork can provide tremendous insights into such questions. Geographers have a long tradition of fi eldwork: they go out in the fi eld and see what people are doing, they observe how peoples’ actions and reactions vary across space, and they develop maps and other visualizations that help

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8 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

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 book 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 book, 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).

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Here's the definition not quite provided in the Phillips chapter.
What Are Geographic Questions? 9

Globalizing processes occur at the world scale; these processes bypass country borders and include global fi nancial markets and global environmental change. However, the processes of globalization do not magically appear at the global scale: what happens at other scales (indi- vidual, local, regional, national) helps create the processes of glo- balization and shape the outcomes of globalization.

Some argue that the impacts of globalization are exag- gerated, but as geographers Ron Johnston, Peter Taylor, and Michael Watts explain, “Whatever your opinion may be, any intellectual engagement with social change in the twenty fi rst century has to address this concept seriously, and assess its capacity to explain the world we currently inhabit.” We integrate the concept of globalization into this textbook because processes at the global scale, processes that are not confi ned to local places or national borders, are clearly changing the human geography of the planet. At the same time, as we travel the world and continue to engage in fi eldwork and research, we are constantly reminded of how different places and people are from one another—processes at the individual, local, regional, and national scales con- tinue to change human geography and shape globalization.

No place on Earth is untouched by people. As people explore, travel, migrate, interact, play, live, and work, they make places. People organize themselves into communi- ties, nations, and broader societal networks, establishing political, economic, religious, linguistic, and cultural sys- tems that enable them to function in space. People adapt to, alter, manipulate, and cope with their physical geo- graphic environment. No environment stands apart from human action. Each place we see is affected by and created by people, and each place refl ects the culture of the people in that place over time.

Imagine and describe the most remote place on Earth you can think of 100 years ago. Now, describe how globalization has changed that place and how the people there continue to shape it and make it the place it is today.

WHAT ARE GEOGRAPHIC QUESTIONS? Geographers study human phenomena such as lan-

guage, religion, and identity, as well as physical phenom- ena such as landforms, climate, and environmental change. Geographers also examine the interactions between humans and environment. Human geography is the study of the spatial and material characteristics of the human- made places and people found on Earth’s surface; physical

geography asks similar questions about the natural envi- ronment. Human and physical geographers adopt a similar perspective but focus on different phenomena.

Geographer Marvin Mikesell once gave a shorthand defi nition of geography as the “why of where.” Why and how do things come together in certain places to produce particu- lar outcomes? Why are some things found in certain places but not in others? How do the characteristics of particular places shape what happens? To what extent do things in one place infl uence those in other places? To these questions, we add “so what?” Why do differences across geographic space matter? What role does a place play in its region and in the world, and what does that mean for people there and else- where? Questions such as these are at the core of geographic inquiry—whether human or physical-and they are of critical importance in any effort to make sense of our world.

If geography deals with so many aspects of our world, ranging from people and places to coastlines and climates, what do the various facets of this wide-ranging discipline have in common? The answer lies in a perspective that both human and physical geographers bring to their stud- ies: a spatial perspective. Whether they are human geog- raphers or physical geographers, virtually all geographers are interested in the spatial arrangement of places and phe- nomena, how they are laid out, organized, and arranged on the Earth, and how they appear on the landscape.

Mapping the spatial distribution of a phenomenon can be the fi rst step to understanding it. By looking at a map of how something is distributed across space, a geog- rapher can raise questions about how the arrangement came about, what processes create and sustain the particu- lar distributions or patterns, and what relationships exist between different places and things.

Maps in the Time of Cholera Pandemics In medical geography, mapping the distribution of a dis- ease is the fi rst step to fi nding its cause. In 1854, Dr. John Snow, a noted anesthesiologist in London, mapped cases of cholera in London’s Soho District.

Cholera is an ancient disease associated with diarrhea and dehydration. It was confi ned to India until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1816 it spread to China, Japan, East Africa, and Mediterranean Europe in the fi rst of several pandemics, worldwide outbreaks of the disease. This initial wave abated by 1823, but by then cholera was feared throughout the world, for it had killed people everywhere by the hundreds, even thousands. Death was horribly convul- sive and would come in a matter of days, perhaps a week, and no one knew what caused the disease or how to avoid it.

Soon a second cholera pandemic struck. It lasted from 1826 to 1837, when cholera crossed the Atlantic and attacked North America. During the third pandemic, from 1842 to 1862, England was severely hit, and cholera again spread into North America.

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Globalization has played a major role in the development of Detroit, so it'worth learning about here
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"They Why of Where" is a great descrip-tion for much of what we'll do in class.
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We will do a lot of spatial distribution (and chronological distribution) work
10 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

Figure 1.5 Cases of Cholera in the Soho District of London, England, 1854. Adapted with permission from: L. D. Stamp, The Geography of Life and Death, Cornell University Press, 1964.

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When the pandemic that began in 1842 reached England in the 1850s, cholera swept through the Soho District of London. Dr. Snow mapped the Soho District, marking all the area’s water pumps—from which people got their water supply for home use—with a P and marking the residence of each person who died from cholera with a dot (Fig. 1.5). Approximately 500 deaths occurred in Soho, and as the map took shape, Snow noticed that an especially large number of those deaths clustered around the water pump on Broad Street. At the doctor’s request, city author- ities removed the handle from the Broad Street pump, making it impossible to get water from that pump. The result was dramatic: almost immediately the number of reported new cases fell to nearly zero, confi rming Snow’s theory about the role of water in the spread of cholera.

Dr. Snow and his colleagues advised people to boil their water, but it would be a long time before his advice reached all those who might be affected, and in any case many people simply did not have the ability to boil water or to wash hands with soap.

Cholera has not been defeated completely, however, and in some ways the risks have been rising in recent years rather than falling (Fig. 1.6). People contract cholera by eating food or water contaminated with cholera bacteria.

Figure 1.6 Cholera in Haiti, 2010. Artibonite and Centre departments have been hard hit by the cholera outbreak in Haiti, in part because the Artibonite River is contaminated by cholera bacteria and in part because of the large number of Haitians displaced from Port-au-Prince who have fl ed to camps in Artibonite and Centre. Data from: Centers for Disease Control, 2011. http://www. bt.cdc.gov/situationawareness/haiticholera/map_1.asp

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What Are Geographic Questions? 11

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

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Time, and space added to "discipline" (see Phillips)
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1. Where is it? (and why is it there?)
12 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

built (downtown or in a suburb), given the characteristics of existing neighborhoods and new developments, the median income of people, the locations of other shopping areas, and the existing and future road system. Similarly, a geographer could determine the best location for a wildlife refuge, given existing wildlife habitats and migration patterns, human set- tlement patterns, and road networks.

A spatial perspective invites consideration of the rela- tionship among phenomena in individual places—including the relationship between humans and the physical world. Thus, the second of the fi ve themes concerns human- environment interactions. Why did the Army Corps of Engineers alter Florida’s physical environment so drastically when it drained part of the Everglades? Have the changes in Florida’s environment created an easier path of destruction for hurricanes? Why is the Army Corps of Engineers again changing the course of the Kissimmee River, and what does that mean for farmers around the river and residential devel- opments in the south of Florida? Asking locational ques- tions often means looking at the reciprocal relationship between humans and environments.

The third theme of geography is the region. Phenomena are not evenly distributed on Earth’s surface. Instead, features tend to be concentrated in particular areas, which we call regions. Geographers use fi eldwork and both quantitative and qualitative methods to develop insightful descriptions of different regions of the world. Novelist James Michener once wrote that whenever he started writing a new book, he fi rst prepared himself by turning to books written by regional geographers about the area where the action was to occur. Understanding the regional geography of a place allows us to make sense of much of the information we have about places and digest new place-based information as well.

The fourth theme is represented by the seemingly simple word place. All places on the surface of Earth have unique human and physical characteristics, and one of the purposes of geography is to study the special char- acter and meaning of places. People develop a sense of place by infusing a place with meaning and emotion, by remembering important events that occurred in a place, or by labeling a place with a certain character. Because we

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Figure 1.7 Desirable Places to Live. Where Pennsylvanian and Californian college students would prefer to live, based on questionnaires completed by college students. Reprinted by permission of: P. R. Gould and R. White, Mental Maps. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986, pp. 55 and 58.

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2. How have people changed it? (and how has it changed people)
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3. How does it group together in clusters?
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4. What is it like there? What does it mean to be there?
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What Are Geographic Questions? 13

Figure 1.7 (continued)

experience and give meaning to places, we can have a feel- ing of “home” when we are in a certain place.

We also develop perceptions of places where we have never been through books, movies, stories, and pic- tures. Geographers Peter Gould and Rodney White asked college students in California and Pennsylvania: “If you could move to any place of your choice, without any of the usual fi nancial and other obstacles, where would you like to live?” Their responses showed a strong bias for their home region and revealed that students from both regions had negative perceptions of the South, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and Utah (Fig. 1.7). What we know shapes our perceptions of places.

The fi fth theme, movement, refers to the mobility of people, goods, and ideas across the surface of the planet. Movement is an expression of the interconnectedness of places. Spatial interaction between places depends on the distances (the measured physical space between two places) among places, the accessibility (the ease of reaching one loca- tion from another) of places, and the transportation and com- munication connectivity (the degree of linkage between loca- tions in a network) among places. Interactions of many kinds shape Earth’s human geography, and understanding these interactions is an important aspect of the global spatial order.

Cultural Landscape In addition to the fi ve themes, location, human- environment, region, place, and movement, landscape is a core element of geography. Geographers use the term landscape to refer to the material character of a place, the complex of natural features, human structures, and other tangible objects that give a place a particular form. Human geographers are particularly concerned with the cultural landscape, the visible imprint of human activity on the landscape. The geographer whose name is most closely identifi ed with this concept is former University of California at Berkeley professor Carl Sauer. In Sauer’s words, cultural landscapes are com- prised of the “forms superimposed on the physical land- scape” by human activity.

No place on Earth is in a “pristine” condition; humans have made an imprint on every place on the planet (Fig. 1.8). The cultural landscape is the visible imprint of human activity and culture on the land- scape. We can see the cultural landscape in the layers of buildings, roads, memorials, churches, fields, and homes that human activities over time have stamped on the landscape.

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5. How do people come and go. (how far, how easy, how connected)
14 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

Figure 1.8 Glacier National Park, United States. © Alexander B. Murphy.

Field Note “Hiking to the famed Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park brings one close to nature, but even in this remote part of the United States the work of humans is inscribed in the landscape. The parking lot at the start of the six-mile trail, the trail itself, and the small signs en route are only part of the human story. When I hiked around the turn in this valley

and arrived at the foot of the glacier, I found myself looking at a sheet of ice and snow that was less than a third the size of what it had been in 1850. The likely reason for the shrink- age is human-induced climate change. If the melt continues at present rates, scientists predict that the glacier will be gone by 2030.”

Any cultural landscape has layers of impressions from years of human activity. As each group of people arrives and occupies a place, they bring their own technological and cultural traditions and transform the landscape accordingly. Each new group of residents can also be infl uenced by what they fi nd when they arrive and leave some of it in place. In 1929, Derwent Whittlesey pro- posed the term sequent occupance to refer to these sequential imprints of occupants, whose impacts are lay-

ered one on top of the other, each layer having some impacts on the next

The Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam provides an interesting urban example of sequent occupance. Arabs from Zanzibar fi rst chose the African site in 1866 as a summer retreat. Next, German colonizers imprinted a new layout and architectural style (wood-beamed Teutonic) when they chose the city as the center of their East African colonies in 1891. After World War I, when

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You can tell your grandkids about "glaciers" (probably best not to delay that glacier tour, though)
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The question of overlapping (and displacing) layers is not only true in physical geography but human geography. "Sequent occupance" is a good concept.
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Although Detroit is only 300 years old as a "European settlement" it has lots of sequent occupance layers.
Why Do Geographers Use Maps, and What Do Maps Tell Us? 15

the Germans were ousted, a British administration took over the city and began yet another period of transfor- mation. The British encouraged immigration from their colony in India to Tanzania. The new migrant Asian population created a zone of three- and four-story apart- ment houses, which look as if they were transplanted from Bombay, India (Fig. 1.9 left and right). Then, in the early 1960s, Dar es Salaam became the capital of newly independent Tanzania. Thus, the city experienced four stages of cultural dominance in less than one century, and each stage of the sequence remains imprinted in the cultural landscape.

The cultural landscape can be seen as a kind of book offering clues into each chapter of the cultural practices, values, and priorities of its various occupiers. As geogra- pher Peirce Lewis explained in Axioms for Reading the Landscape (1979), “Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, refl ecting our tastes, our values, our aspi- rations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form.” Like Whittlesey, Lewis recommended looking for layers of history and cultural practice in cultural landscapes, adding that most major changes in the cultural landscape occur after a major event, such as war, an invention, or an economic depression.

Geographers who practice fi eldwork keep their eyes open to the world around them and through practice become adept at reading cultural landscapes. Take a walk around your cam- pus or town and try reading the cultural landscape. Choose one thing in the landscape and ask yourself, “What is that and why is it there?” How might the existence of that thing infl u- ence the future development of the neighborhood? Take the time to fi nd out the answers!

WHY DO GEOGRAPHERS USE MAPS, AND WHAT DO MAPS TELL US? Maps are an incredibly powerful geographic tool, and

cartography, the art and science of making maps, is as old as geography itself. (For details on cartography, see Appendix A at the end of this book.) Maps are used for countless pur- poses, waging war, promoting political positions, solving

Figures 1.9, left and right Mumbai, India (left) and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania (right). Apartment buildings through- out Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, are typically four stories with balconies. In Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, this four-story walkup with balconies (right) stands where single-family African dwellings once stood, refl ecting the sequential occupance of the city. © Alexander B. Murphy.

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The tools of geography.
16 Chapter 1 Introduction to Human Geography

medical problems, locating shopping centers, bringing relief to refugees, and warning of natural hazards, to name just a few. Reference maps show locations of places and geographic features. Thematic maps tell stories, typically showing the degree of some attribute or the movement of a geographic phenomenon.

Reference maps focus on accuracy in showing the absolute locations of places, using a coordinate system that allows for the precise plotting of where on Earth something is. Imagine taking an orange, drawing a dot on it with a marker, and then trying to describe the exact location of that dot to someone who is holding another orange so she can mark the same spot on her orange. If you draw and number the same coordinate system on both oranges, the task of drawing the absolute location on each orange is not only doable but simple. The coordinate system most frequently used on maps is based on latitude and longitude. For example, the absolute location of Chicago is 41 degrees, 53 minutes North Latitude and 87 degrees, 38 minutes West Longitude. Using these coordinates, you can plot Chicago on any globe or map that is marked with latitude and longitude lines.

The establishment of a satellite-based global posi- tioning system (GPS) allows us to locate things on the sur-

face of Earth with extraordinary accuracy. Researchers col- lect data quickly and easily in the fi eld, and low-priced units are encouraging fi shers, hunters, and hikers to use GPS in their activities. New cars are equipped with GPS units, and dashboard map displays help commuters navigate traffi c and travelers fi nd their way. Geocaching is an increasingly pop- ular hobby based on the use of GPS. Geocachers use their GPS units to play a treasure hunt game all over the world. People leave the treasures (“caches”) somewhere, mark the coordinates on their GPS, and post clues on the Internet. If you fi nd the cache, you take the treasure and leave a new one. Many mobile phones and “smart” devices are also equipped with GPS units, and applications such as Google Maps have helped to spread the use of GPS even further.

Relative location describes the location of a place in relation to other human and physical features. Descriptors such as “Chicago is on Lake Michigan, south of Milwaukee” or “Chicago is located where the cross-coun- try railroads met in the 1800s” or “Chicago is the hub of the corn and soybean markets in the Midwest” are all descriptors of Chicago relative to other features. In the southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and western Indiana region, all major roads lead to Chicago (Fig. 1.10).

Figure 1.10 All Major Roads Lead to Chicago. Network of Midwestern roads that lead to Chicago, refl ecting the dominance of Chicago in the region. © E. H. Fouberg, A. B. Murphy, H. J. de Blij, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Why Do Geographers Use Maps, and What Do Maps Tell Us? 17

Within this region, people defi ne much of their lives rela- tive to Chicago because of the tight interconnectedness between Chicago and the region. Northwestern Indiana is so connected to Chicago that it has a time zone separate from the rest of Indiana, allowing people in northwestern Indiana to stay in the same time zone as Chicago.

Absolute locations do not change, but relative loca- tions are constantly modifi ed and change over time. Fredericksburg, Virginia, is located halfway between Washington, D.C. and Richmond, Virginia. Today, it is a suburb of Washington, D.C. with commuter trains, van pools, buses, and cars moving commuters between their homes in Fredericksburg and their workplaces in metro- politan Washington, D.C. During the Civil War, several bloody battles took place in Fredericksburg as the North and South fought over the land halfway between their wartime capitals. The absolute location of Fredericksburg has not changed, but its place in the world around it, its relative location, certainly has.

Mental Maps We all carry maps in our minds of places we have been and places we have merely heard of; these are called mental maps. Even if you have never been to the Great Plains of the United States, you may have studied wall maps and atlases or come across the region in books, magazines, and newspapers frequently enough to envision the states of the region (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas) in your mind. Regardless of whether you have visited the Great Plains, you will use your mental map of the region. If you hear on the news that a tornado destroyed a town in Oklahoma, you use your mental map of the Great Plains region and Oklahoma to make sense of where the tornado occurred and who was affected by it.

Our mental maps of the places within our activity spaces, those places we travel to routinely in our rounds of daily activity, are more accurate and detailed than places where we have never been. If your friend calls and asks you to meet her at the movie theater you go to all the time, your mental map will engage automatically. You will envision the hallway, the front door, the walk to your car, the lane to choose in order to be prepared for the left turn you must make, where you will park your car, and your path into the theater and up to the pop- corn stand.

Geographers who study human-environment behav- ior have made extensive studies of how people develop their mental maps. The earliest humans, who were nomadic, had incredibly accurate mental maps of where to fi nd food and seek shelter. Today, people need mental maps to fi nd their way through the concrete jungles of cities and suburbs.

Geographers have studied the mental map forma- tion of children, the blind, new residents to cities, men, and women, all of whom exhibit differences in the forma- tion of mental maps. To learn new places, women, for example, tend to use landmarks, whereas men tend to use paths. Activity spaces vary by age, and the extent of peo- ples’ mental maps depends in part on their ages. Mental maps include terra incognita, unknown lands that are off- limits. If your path to the movie theater includes driving past a school that you do not go to, your map on paper will likely label the school, but no details will be shown regard- ing the place. However, if you have access to the school and you are instead drawing a mental map of how to get to the school’s cafeteria, your mental map of the school will be quite detailed. Thus, mental maps refl ect a person’s activity space, what is accessible to the person in his or her rounds of daily activity and what is not.

Generalization in Maps All maps simplify the world. A reference map of the world cannot show every place in the world, and a thematic map of hurricane tracks in the Atlantic Ocean cannot pinpoint every hurricane and its precise path for the last 50 years. When mapping data, whether human or physical, cartog- raphers, the geographers who make maps, generalize the information they present on maps. Many of the maps in this book are thematic maps of the world. Shadings show how much or how little of some phenomena can be found on a part of the Earth’s surface, and symbols show where specifi c phenomena are located.

Generalized maps help us see general trends, but we cannot see all cases of a given phenomenon. The map of world precipitation (Fig. 1.11) is a generalized map of mean annual precipitation received around the world. The areas shaded in burgundy, dark blue, and vibrant green are places that receive the most rain, and those shaded in orange receive the least rain on average. Take a pen and trace along the equator on the map. Notice how many of the high-precipitation areas on the map are along the equator. The consistent heating of the equator over the course of the entire year brings consistent pre- cipitation to the equatorial region. At the scale of the world, we can see general trends in precipitation, such as this, but it is diffi cult to see the microscale climates of intense precipitation areas that are found throughout the world.

Remote Sensing and GIS Geographic studies include both long- and short-term environmental change. Geographers monitor Earth from a distance, using remote sensing technology that gathers data at a distance from Earth’s surface.