Readings
for Workshop 4
The following
material comes from Chapter 4 of Geography for Life. You
may read it here or in its complete form in your text. For additional
readings, go to Resources.
The National
Geography Standards for Workshop 4
The national
geography standards highlighted in this workshop include Standards
5, 6, 9, 13, and 14. As you read, be thinking
about how the standards apply in lessons you may have taught.
Standard
5: That People Create Regions to Interpret Earth's Complexity.
Region is
a concept that is used to identify and organize areas of Earth's
surface for various purposes. A region has certain characteristics
that give it a measure of cohesiveness and distinctiveness and
that set it apart from other regions. As worlds within worlds,
regions can be used to simplify the whole by organizing Earth's
surface on the basis of the presence or absence of selected physical
and human characteristics. As a result, regions are human constructs
whose boundaries and characteristics are derived from sets of
specific criteria. They can vary in scale from local to global;
overlap or be mutually exclusive; exhaustively partition the entire
world or capture only selected portions of it. They can nest within
one another, forming a multilevel mosaic. Understanding the idea
of region and the process of regionalization is fundamental to
being geographically informed.
Understanding
the nature of regions requires a flexible approach to the world.
The criteria used to define and delimit regions can be as spatially
precise as coastlines and political boundaries, or as spatially
amorphous as suggesting the general location of people with allegiances
to a particular professional athletic team or identifying a market
area for distributing the recordings of a specific genre of music.
Regions can be as small as a neighborhood or as vast as a territorial
expanse covering thousands of square miles in which the inhabitants
speak the same language. They can be areas joining people in common
causes or they can becomes areas for conflict, both internal and
external. Geographers define regions in three basic ways:
The first
type is the formal region. It is characterized by a common human
property, such as the presence of people who share a particular
language, religion, nationality, political identity or culture,
or by a common physical property, such as the presence of a particular
type of climate, landform, or vegetation. Political entities such
as counties, states, countries, and provinces are formal regions
(e.g., areas with a Mediterranean climate), landform regions (e.g.,
the Ridge and Valley and Piedmont regions of Pennsylvania), and
economic regions (e.g., the wheat belt of Kansas, the citrus-growing
areas of south Texas, and the irrigated farmlands of the Central
Valley of California). Formal regions can be defined by measures
of population, per capita income, ethnic background, crop production,
population density and distribution, or industrial production,
or by mapping physical characteristics such as temperature, rainfall,
growing season, and average date of first and last frost.
The second
type of region is the functional region. It is organized around
a node or focal point, with the surrounding areas linked to that
node by the transportation systems, communication systems, or
other economic association involving such activities as manufacturing
and retail trading. A typical functional region is a metropolitan
area (MA) as defined by the Bureau of the Census. For example,
the New York MA is a functional region that covers parts of several
states. It is linked by commuting patterns, trade flows, television
and radio broadcasts, newspapers, travel for recreation and entertainment.
Other functional regions include shopping areas centered on malls
or supermarkets, areas served by branch banks, and ports and their
hinterlands.
The third
type of region is the perceptual region. It is a construct that
reflects human feelings and attitudes about areas and is therefore
defined by people's shared subjective images of those areas. It
tends to reflect the elements of people's mental maps, and, although
it may help to impose a personal sense of order and structure
on the world, it often does so on the basis of stereotypes that
may be inappropriate or incorrect. Thus southern California, Dixie,
and the upper Midwest are perceptual regions that are thought
of as being spatial units, although they do not have precise borders
or even commonly accepted regional characteristics and names.
Some regions,
especially formal regions, tend to be stable in spatial definition,
but may undergo change in character. Others, especially functional
regions, may retain certain basic characteristics, but may undergo
spatial redefinition over time. Yet other regions, particularly
perceptual regions, are likely to vary over time in both spatial
extent and character.
Regional change,
in the context of the human spatial organization of Earth's surface,
is an area of study that provides students with opportunities
to examine and learn about the complex web of demographic and
economic changes that occur.
Regions serve
as a valuable organizing technique for framing detailed knowledge
of the world and for asking geographic questions. Because regions
are examples of geographic generalization, students can learn
about the characteristics of other regions of the world by knowing
about one region. Knowing about the physical processes that create
the Mediterranean climate and vegetation of southern California,
for example, can serve as an analogue for learning about other
regions with Mediterranean climates and vegetation in Australia,
Europe, South America, and Africa. Regions provide a context for
discussing similarities and differences between parts of the world.
Through understanding
the idea of region, students can apply geographic knowledge, skills,
and perspectives to solving problems as immediate as making an
informed decision about a neighborhood zoning issue, or as long-range
as predicting the reconfiguration of political and economic alliances
owing to resource shortages or changes in the global ecosystem.
Most importantly, studying regions enables students to synthesize
their understanding of the physical and human properties of Earth's
surface at scales that range from local to global.
Standard 6: How Culture and Experience Influence People's Perceptions
of Places and Regions.
People's perception
of places and regions is not uniform. Rather, their view of a
particular place or region is their interpretation of its location,
extent, characteristics, and significance as influenced by their
own culture and experience. It is sometimes said that there is
no reality, only perception. In geography there is always a mixture
of both the objective and the subjective realms, and that is why
the geographically informed person needs to understand both realms
and needs to see how they relate to each other.
Individuals
have singular life histories and experiences, which are reflected
in their having singular mental maps of the world that may change
from day to day and from experience to experience. As a consequence,
individuals endow places and regions with rich, diverse, and varying
meanings. In explaining their beliefs and actions, individuals
routinely refer to age, sex, class, language, ethnicity, race,
and religion as part of their cultural identity, although some
of their actions may be at least partly a result of sharing values
with others. Those shared beliefs and values reflect the fact
that individuals live in social and cultural groups or sets of
groups. The values of these groups are usually complex and cover
such subjects as ideology, religion, politics, social structure,
and economic structure. They influence how the people in a particular
group perceive both themselves and other groups.
The significance
that an individual or group attaches to a specific place or region
may be influenced by feelings of belonging or alienation, a sense
of being an insider or outsider, a sense of history and tradition
or of novelty and unfamiliarity. People's perception of Earth's
surface is strongly linked to the concept of place utility - the
significance that a place has to a particular function or people.
For example, a wilderness area may be seen as a haven by a backpacker
or as an economic threat by a farming family trying to hold back
forest growth at the edges of its fields. The physical reality
of the wilderness area is the same in both cases, but the perceptual
frameworks that assign meaning to it are powerfully distinct.
A place or region can be exciting and dynamic, or boring and dull
depending on an individual's experience, expectations, frame of
mind, or need to interact with that particular landscape. The
range, therefore, of perceptual responses to a place or region
is not only vast, but is also continually changing.
Some places
and regions are imbued with great significance by certain groups
of people, but not by others. For example, for Muslims the city
of Mecca is the most holy of religious places, whereas for non-Muslims
it has only historical significance. For foreign tourists Rio
de Janeiro is a city of historical richness that evokes images
of grandness, energy, and festiveness, but for many local street
youths it is a harsh environment where they have to struggle for
daily survival. Around the world the names of such places as Hiroshima,
Auschwitz, Bhopal, and Chernobyl convey profoundly sad and horrific
collective images, but for the people who live there, the reality
of life tends to be how best to earn a living, raise a family,
educate children, and enjoy one's leisure time. At another level,
Disneyland or "my hometown" may evoke equally strong
but positive and idiosyncratic images among local inhabitants.
People's group perceptions of places and regions may change over
time. For instance, as settlement and knowledge spread westward
during the nineteenth century, parts of what are now Oklahoma,
Kansas, and Nebraska went from being labeled as within the Great
American Desert to being likened to the Garden of Eden. Then during
the drought years of the 1930s, these same areas changed character
yet again, becoming the heart of what was known as the Dust Bowl.
Culture and
experience shape belief systems, which in turn influence people's
perceptions of places and regions throughout their lives. So it
is essential that students understand the factors that influence
their own perception of places and regions, paying special attention
to the effects that personal and group points of view can have
on their understanding of other groups and cultures. Accordingly,
it may be possible for students to avoid the dangers of egocentric
and ethnocentric stereotyping, to appreciate the diverse values
of others in a multicultural world, and to engage in accurate
and sensitive analysis of people, places, and environments.
Standard 9: The characteristics, distribution, and migration
of human populations on Earth's surface.
Human population
has increased dramatically over the last few centuries. In 1830,
more than 900 million people inhabited Earth. As the twenty-first
century approached, Earth's population was nearly six billion.
At the same time, extraordinarily large and dense clusters of
people are growing: Tokyo has already reached a population in
excess of 25 million. The geographically informed person must
understand that the growth, distribution, and movements of people
on Earth's surface are the driving forces behind not only human
events - social, cultural, political, and economic - but also
certain physical events - large-scale flooding, resource depletion,
and ecological breakdown.
Students need
to develop an understanding of the interaction of the human and
environmental factors that help to explain the characteristics
of human populations, as well as their distribution and movements.
The distribution and density of Earth's population reflect the
planet's topography, soils, vegetation, and climate types (ecosystems);
available resources; and level of economic development. Population
growth rates are influenced by such factors as education (especially
of women), religion, telecommunications, urbanization, and employment
opportunities. Mortality rates are influenced by the availability
of medical services, food, shelter, health services, and the overall
age and sex distribution of the population.
Another key
population characteristic is growth, which may be described in
terms of fertility and mortality, crude birth- and death rates,
natural increase and doubling time, and population structure (age
and sex distribution). These basic demographic concepts help bring
focus to the human factors that explain population distributions
and densities, growth patterns, and population projections. Population
pyramids, for example, indicate the differential effects of past
events, such as wars, disease, famine, improved sanitation, and
vaccination programs, on birth- and death rates and gender. An
analysis of specific age cohorts enables predictions to be made.
For example, a large proportion zero to 15 years old suggests
rapid population, which will soon require significant resources
to support the elderly. Both predictions could have significant
geographic implications for a community; for example, a young
population could create a need for more housing and schools, whereas
an older population could create a need for more retirement and
medical facilities. Such demographic analyses can be performed
at all scales.
Almost every
country is experiencing increased urbanization. Across Earth peasant
and pastoral life is giving way to the more economically promising
lure of life in cities, as people seeking better jobs or more
income move to areas where opportunities are better. The majority
of the world's people are moving toward a way of life that only
a minority of people experienced less than a century ago. Population
geographers predict that Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Bombay, Shanghai, Lagos,
and Mexico City will be the 21st century's massive population
centers. However, people in some developed countries are giving
up the economic advantages of city life for the ease and attractions
of suburbs and small towns, especially those with access to employment
in metropolitan areas.
Migration
is one of the most distinctive and visible characteristics of
human populations, and it leads to significant reshaping of population
distribution and character. It is a dynamic process that is constantly
changing Earth's landscapes and modifying its cultures. It takes
place at a variety of scales and in different contexts. At international
scales geographers track the flows of immigrants and emigrants.
At national scales they consider net regional balances of in-
and out-migrants or the flows from rural to urban areas, which
are a principal cause of urbanization. At a local scale they consider
the continuous mobility of college students, retirees, and tourists
or the changes of address that occur without necessarily resulting
in a job change or change in friendship patterns.
The context
of migration varies from voluntary and discretionary (the search
for a better place to live), to voluntary but unavoidable (the
search for a place to live), to involuntary and unavoidable (the
denial of the right to choose a place to live).
In the two
voluntary contexts, migration often results from the weighing
of factors at the point of origin and at potential destinations
against the costs (financial and emotional) of moving. "Pull"
factors may make another place seem more attractive and therefore
influence the decision to move. Other factors are unpleasant enough
to "push" the migrant out of the local setting and toward
another area. These factors reflect people's objective knowledge
of places and also their secondhand impressions. As a consequence,
many countries have experienced waves of people going from settled
areas to new lands in the interior (e.g., the westward movement
in the United States in the nineteenth century and the move from
the southeast coast to the interior of Brazil starting in the
1960s, when the new capital city of Brasilia was built).
Voluntary
and unavoidable migration occurs when much of a region's or country's
population is impelled into migration streams, such as the millions
of Irish who fled to the United States in the 1840s because of
the potato famine or the millions of Somalis, Sudanese, and Rwandans
who moved in the 1990s because of drought, famine, and civil war.
However, some migrations are forced and involuntary. Such was
the case with African Americans who were taken to North and South
America in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
to work as slave laborers on sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations.
Demographic
shifts rearrange patterns of population and create new human landscapes.
Natural increase, war, famine, and disease play decisive roles
in influencing why many people live where they do. Migration sets
people in motion as they leave one place, strike out for a second,
and possibly settle in a third. Intervening obstacles influence
the patterns of migration. Physical barriers such as deserts,
mountains, rivers, and seas or cultural barriers such as political
boundaries, languages, economic conditions, and cultural traditions
determine how people move and where they settle.
It is essential
that students develop an understanding of the dynamics of population
characteristics, distributions, and migration, and in particular
of how population distribution (in terms of size and characteristics)
is linked to the components of fertility, mortality, and mobility.
Standard 13: How the Forces of Cooperation and Conflict Among
People Influence the Division and Control of Earth's Surface.
Competing
for control of large and small areas of Earth's surface is a universal
trait among societies and has resulted in both productive cooperation
and destructive conflict between groups over time. The geographically
informed person has a general understanding of the nature and
history of the forces of cooperation and conflict on Earth and
the spatial manifestation of these forces in political and other
kinds of divisions of Earth's surface. This understanding enables
the individual to perceive how and why different groups have divided,
organized, and unified areas of Earth's surface.
Divisions are regions of Earth's surface over which groups of
people establish control for purposes of politics, administration,
religion, and economics. Each such region usually has an area,
a name, and a boundary. In the past even small groups inhabiting
vast territories divided space in accordance with their cultural
values and life-sustaining activities. For them some spaces were
sacred, others were devoted to hunting or gathering, and still
others were intended for shelter and socializing. In present-day
urban, industrial societies, earning a livelihood, owning or renting
a home in a safe neighborhood, getting a drink of clean water,
buying food, being able to travel safely within one's own community
- all of these activities are linked to how Earth is divided by
different groups for different purposes.
Often, conflicts
over how to divide and organize parts of Earth's space have involved
control of resources (e.g., Antarctica or the ocean floor), control
of strategic routes (e.g., the Panama or Suez Canals or the Dardanelles),
or the domination of other peoples (e.g., European colonialism
in Africa). Language, religion, political ideologies, national
origins, and race motivate conflicts over how territory and resources
will be developed, used, and distributed. Conflicts over trade,
human migration and settlement, and exploitation of marine and
land environments reflect how Earth's surface is divided into
fragments controlled by different political and economic interest
groups.
The primary
political division of Earth is by state sovereignty - a particular
government is recognized by others as having supreme authority
over a carefully delimited territory and the population and resources
within that space. With the exception of Antarctica, Earth's surface
is exhaustively partitioned by state sovereignty. These political
divisions are recognized by the United Nations and its member
states, which discuss and act on issues of mutual interest, especially
international peace and security. However, the partitioning is
not mutually exclusive. Some nations exert competing claims to
certain areas (e.g., the islands in the South Atlantic Ocean,
which are claimed by Great Britain as the Falkland Islands and
by Argentina as the Malvinas).
Regional alliances
among nations for military, political, cultural, or economic reasons
constitute another form of the division of Earth's surface. Among
these many alliances are the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,
the Caribbean Community and Common Market, the Council of Arab
Economic Unity, and the European Union. In addition, numerous
multinational corporations divide Earth's space and compete with
each other for resource development, manufacturing, and the distribution
of goods and services. And non-governmental organizations such
as the International Red Cross and various worldwide religious
groups divide space to administer their programs.
Events of
the twentieth century illustrate that the division of Earth's
surface among different groups pursuing diverse goals continues
unabated at all scales of human activity. World wars, regional
wars, civil wars, and urban riots often are manifestations of
the intensity of feeling humans hold for the right to divide Earth
according to their particular perceptions and values. Traditionally,
most territorial disputes have been over the land surface, but
with the increasing value of resources in the oceans and even
outer space, political division of these spaces has become a topic
of international debate. Cooperation and conflict will occur in
all of these spatial contexts.
At smaller
spatial scales, land-use zones in municipalities, administrative
districts for airports and other essential services such as water
supply and garbage disposal, and school districting within counties,
states, and provinces are all examples of the local division of
space. Franchise areas, regional divisions of national and multinational
corporations, and free-trade zones indicate the economic division
of space. City neighborhood associations, suburban homeowners'
associations, civic and volunteer organization districts, and
the divisions of neighborhood space by youth gangs on the basis
of socioeconomic status, race, or national origin illustrate the
power of social and cultural divisions of space.
The interlocking
systems for dividing and controlling Earth's space influence all
dimensions of people's lives, including trade, culture, citizenship
and voting, travel, and self-identity. Students must understand
the genesis, structure, power, and pervasiveness of these divisions
to appreciate their role within a world that is both globally
interdependent and locally controlled.
Standard 14: How human actions modify the physical environment.
Many of the
important issues facing modern society are the consequences -
intended and unintended, positive and negative - of human modifications
of the physical environment. So it is that the daily news media
chronicle such things as the building of dams and aqueducts to
bring water to semiarid areas, the loss of wildlife habitat, the
reforestation of denuded hills, the depletion of the ozone layer,
the ecological effects of acid rain, the reduction of air pollution
in certain urban areas, and the intensification of agricultural
production through irrigation.
Environmental
modifications have economic, social, and political implications
for most of the world's people. Therefore, the geographically
informed person must understand the reasons for and consequences
of human modifications of the environment in different parts of
the world.
Human adaptation
to and modification of physical systems are influenced by the
geographic context in which people live, their understanding of
that context, and their technological ability and inclination
to modify it to suit their changing need for things such as food,
clothing, water, shelter, energy, and recreational facilities.
In meeting their needs, they bring knowledge and technology to
bear on physical systems.
Consequently,
humans have altered the balance of nature in ways that have brought
economic prosperity to some areas and created environmental dilemmas
and crises in others. Clearing land for settlement, mining, and
agriculture provides homes and livelihoods for some but alters
physical systems and transforms human populations, wildlife, and
vegetation. The inevitable by-products - garbage, air and water
pollution, hazardous waste, the overburden from strip mining -
place enormous demands on the capacity of physical systems to
absorb and accommodate them.
The intended and unintended impacts on physical systems vary in
scope and scale. They can be local and small-scale (e.g., the
terracing of hillsides for rice growing in the Philippines and
acid stream pollution from strip mining in eastern Pennsylvania),
regional and medium scale (e.g., the creation of agricultural
polderlands in the Netherlands and of an urban heat island with
its microclimatic effects in Chicago), or global and large-scale
(e.g., the clearing of the forests of North America for agriculture
or the depletion of the ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbons).
Students must
understand both the potential of a physical environment to meet
human needs and the limitations of that same environment. They
must be aware of and understand the causes and implications of
different kinds of pollution, resource depletion, and land degradation
and the effects of agriculture and manufacturing on the environment.
They must know the locations of regions vulnerable to desertification,
deforestation, and salinization, and be aware of the spatial impacts
of technological hazards such as photochemical smog and acid rain.
Students must be aware that current distribution patterns for
many plant and animal species area a result of relocation diffusion
by humans.
In addition,
students must learn to pay careful attention to the relationships
between population growth, urbanization, and the resultant stress
on physical systems. The process of urbanization affects wildlife
habitats, natural vegetation, and drainage patterns. Cities create
their own microclimates and produce large amounts of solid waste,
photochemical smog, and sewage. A growing world population stimulates
increases in agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization.
These processes expand demands on water resources, resulting in
unintended environmental consequences that can alter water quality
and quantity.
Understanding
global interdependence begins with an understanding of global
dependence - the modification of Earth's surface to meet human
needs. When successful the relationship between people and the
physical environment is adaptive; when the modifications are excessive
the relationship is maladaptive. Increasingly, students will be
required to make decisions about relationships between human needs
and the physical environment. They will need to be able to understand
the opportunities and limitations presented by the geographical
context and to set those contexts within the local to global continuum.
The above
material is from Geograpy for Life: The National Geography Standards,
1994. The Geography Education Standards Project.
© 1994 National Geographic Societly, Wahington, D.C.
Reprinted with the permission of the National Goeographic Society.
