Geographic Models

1. Connie Hudgeons Advanced Placement Human Geography Albuquerque High School Albuquerque, New Mexico connie@handywerks.com Geographic Models

4. Geography Its Nature And Perspective

5. Four Traditions of Geography The Four Traditions were outlined by William Pattison at the NCGE Opening Session on November 29, 1963.

6. Definition: The belief that the physical environment has played a major role in the cultural development of a people or locale. Also called environmentalism. Examples: In previous years, environmental determinism was popular and it was acceptable to believe that cultures were ruled by their environment. The well-known contrast between the energetic people of the most progressive parts of the temperate zone and the inert inhabitants of the tropics and even of intermediate regions, such as Persia, is largely due to climate . . . the people of the cyclonic regions rank so far above those of the other parts of the world that they are the natural leaders. Ellsworth Huntington, Principles of Human Geography, 1940 Environmental Determinism

7. A philosophy seen in contrast to environmental determinism that declares that although environmental conditions do have an influence on human and cultural development, people have varied possibilities in how they decide to live within a given environment. Even possibilism has its limitations, for it encourages a line of inquiry that starts with the physical environment and asks what it allows. Yet human cultures have frequently pushed the boundaries of what was once thought to be environmentally possible by virtue of their own ideas and ingenuity. Harm de Blij, Human Geography, 7th ed., page 33. Environmental Possibilism

8. The Best Source of information USGS This Dynamic Earth: The Story of Plate Tectonics http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html Plate Tectonics

9. http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/graphics/Fig2-5globes.gif

10. Population

11. World population is in a state of very rapid increase. This may be expressed is various ways. On arithmetic scale population appears to be in an explosive stage. World Population http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/tropical/lecture_14/lec_14.html

12. If we plot human population on a log scale there appears to be 3 phases brought about by levels of historical development:

13. Happy 248th B-Day – Feb 14 or 17, 1766!! In 1798, hastily written text, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers, was published by Thomas Robert Malthus. Often known today as the "patron saint of demography" and while some argue that his contributions to population studies were unremarkable, Malthus did indeed cause population and demographics to become a topic of serious academic study. Thomas Malthus

14. Two Views on Populations Alarmists - Population bomb Mass starvation (Paddock, 1975 wrote Famine 1979) Major world issue, the only real issue is the disappearance of world surpluses Technocrats - Science and technology will find the way. Famines are decreasing. People are better fed than ever before. World food supply shows the same graph as world population. Population Dynamics Growth is determined by: Biological capacity of woman to bear children Natural length of life Ecological factors that Produce food Determine fertility Determine mortality

15. Malthus noted that food production increases arithmetically (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4) while human population increases geometrically (e.g. 1, 2, 4, 8). Since human population is determined ultimately by the food supply, Malthus thought population would be brought in balance only by famine and pestilence. He never foresaw the tremendous growth of food with modern agriculture due to new lands and the scientific revolution. Malthusian predictions have not yet come to past.

16. According to Thomas Malthus, preventative checks are those that affect the birth rate and include marrying at a later age (moral restraint), abstaining from procreation, birth control, and homosexuality. Malthus, a clergyman in the Church of England, considered birth control and homosexuality to be vices and inappropriate (but nonetheless practiced). Positive checks are those that increase the death rate. These include disease, war, disaster, and finally, when other checks don't reduce population, famine. Malthus felt that the fear of famine or the development of famine was also a major impetus to reduce the birth rate. He indicates that potential parents are less likely to have children when they know that their children are likely to starve.

17. Malthusian Checks http://www.ditext.com/flew/malthus-1.jpg

18. Diagram of Malthus's theory of population growth. http://library.thinkquest.org/C002291/high/future/images/malthusgraph.gif

19. Population Growth Malthus Marx http://www.southtexascollege.edu/nilsson/4_ES_Exams_f/chapter7/f7-04_a_thomas_malthus_.jpg

20. "In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work". Charles Darwin, from his autobiography. (1876) This often quoted passage reflects the significance Darwin affords Malthus in formulating his theory of Natural Selection. What "struck" Darwin in Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was Malthus's observation that in nature plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that Man too is capable of overproducing if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, man's misery of famine would become globally epidemic and eventually consume Man. Malthus' view that poverty and famine were natural outcomes of population growth and food supply was not popular among social reformers who believed that with proper social structures, all ills of man could be eradicated.

21. Neo Malthusian Theory Those who continue to agree with Malthus’ concerns are sometimes called Neo Malthusians. They point out that human suffering is now occurring on a scale that Malthus could not have imagined. They argue that it is not enough to assert that the current state is merely an inevitable stage in world population. The Neo-Malthusian population theory claims that poor nations are stuck in a cycle of poverty that will not be broken without some type of preventative measures. Malthus's model is based upon a relationship between both population growth as well as economic development. Some empirical studies indicate that the population model was flawed because the two main variables (population growth and level of per-capita income) have no clear link.

22. Ester Boserup was a Danish economist and writer. She wrote several books covering world economics. Her most notable book is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure (Chicago, Aldine, 1965). This book presented a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." In doing so, she upended the assumption dating back to Malthus’s time (and still held in many quarters) that agricultural methods determine population via food supply. Boserup’s Thesis

23. Boserup’s research indicated that population determines agricultural methods. Boserup’s theory opposes Malthus by saying that the agricultural methods depend on the size of the population. Malthus states that in times when food is not sufficient for everyone, the extra people will have to die. Boserup states that in those times of pressure people will find out ways to increase the productivity of food by increasing workforce, machinery, fertilizers, etc. A major point of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention". .

24. Boserup Malthus http://www.geographyalltheway.com/igcse_geography/population_settlement/population/imagesetc/malthus_graph.jpg

25. Although Boserup is widely regarded as being anti-Malthusian, both her insights and those of Malthus can be comfortably combined within the same general theoretical framework. She argued that when population density is low enough to allow it, land tends to be used intermittently, with heavy reliance on fire to clear fields and fallowing to restore fertility (often called slash and burn farming). Numerous studies have shown such methods to be favorable in total workload and also efficiency (output versus input). In Boserup’s theory, it is only when rising population density curtails the use of fallowing (and therefore the use of fire) that fields are moved towards annual cultivation.

26. Contending with insufficiently fallowed, less fertile plots, covered with grass or bushes rather than forest, mandates expanded efforts at fertilizing, field preparation, weed control, and irrigation. These changes often induce agricultural innovation but increase marginal labor cost to the farmer as well: the higher the rural population density, the more hours the farmer must work for the same amount of produce. Therefore workloads tend to rise while efficiency drops. This process of raising production at the cost of more work at lower efficiency is what Boserup describes as "agricultural intensification". The theory has been instrumental in understanding agricultural patterns in developing countries, although it is highly simplified and generalized.

27. This website has a Resources section with articles relating to Malthus, Erlich, the Club of Rome, Boserup, and Simon. There are several web-based activities covering population theories. http://www.geographyalltheway.com/ib_geography/ib_resources/ib_population_resources.htm

28. The Demographic transition model (DTM) is a model used to represent the process of explaining the transformation of countries from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth rates and low death rates as part of the economic development of a country from a pre-industrial to an industrialized economy It is based on an interpretation begun in 1929 by the American demographer Warren Thompson of prior observed changes, or transitions, in birth and death rates in industrialized societies over the past two hundred years. Originally designed with three stages, it is now common to see the model with five or more stages. Demographic Transition Model

29. Sociological Explanation of Population Growth Demographic transition is the change from a low population growth rate based on high or medieval birth and high death rates to a low population growth rate based on low (modern) birth and death rates. During this transition, death rate starts to drop faster than birth rate which leads to an explosive population increase. Birth rate is the number of live births per 1000 population. In l875 birth rate was in the high 30s; in l930 the birth rate declined to between 15 and 20 (1.5–2.0%).

30. The transition involves four stages, or possibly five. In stage one, pre-industrial society, death rates and birth rates are high and roughly in balance. In stage two, that of a developing country, the death rates drop rapidly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life spans and reduce disease. These changes usually come about due to improvements in farming techniques, access to technology, basic healthcare, and education. Without a corresponding fall in birth rates this produces an imbalance, and the countries in this stage experience a large increase in population.

31. In stage three, birth rates fall due to access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes. Population growth begins to level off. During stage four there are both low birth rates and low death rates. Birth rates may drop to well below replacement level as has happened in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan, leading to a shrinking population, a threat to many industries that rely on population growth. As the large group born during stage two ages, it creates an economic burden on the shrinking working population. Death rates may remain consistently low or increase slightly due to increases in lifestyle diseases due to low exercise levels and high obesity and an aging population in developed countries.

32. Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Birth rate Natural increase Death rate The Classic Stages of Demographic Transition Time Note: Natural increase is produced from the excess of births over deaths. Lesson Plan: The Demographic Transition, Activity One

33. Five stage Model

35. The original Demographic Transition model has just four stages. Some theorists consider that a fifth stage is needed to represent countries that have undergone the economic transition from manufacturing based industries into service and information based industries called deindustrialization. Countries such as United Kingdom (the earliest nation universally recognized as reaching Stage Five), Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and most notably Japan, whose populations are now reproducing well below their replacement levels, are not producing enough children to replace their parents' generation. China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Cuba are also below replacement levels, but this is not producing a fall in population yet in these countries, because their populations are relatively young due to strong growth in the recent past.

37. The population of southern Europe is already falling, and Japan and some of western Europe will soon begin to fall without significant immigration. However, many countries that now have sub-replacement fertility did not reach this stage gradually but rather suddenly as a result of economic crisis brought on by the post-communist transition in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Examples include Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and the Baltic States. The population of these countries is falling due to fertility decline, emigration and, particularly in Russia, increased male mortality

38. As with all models, this is an idealized picture of population change in these countries. The model is a generalization that applies to these countries as a group and may not accurately describe all individual cases. The extent to which it applies to less-developed societies today remains to be seen. Many countries such as China, Brazil and Thailand have passed through the DTM very quickly due to fast social and economic change. Some countries, particularly African countries, appear to be stalled in the second stage due to stagnant development and the effect of AIDS.

39. The rise of the industrial age during the second half of the nineteenth century revolutionized life and working patterns for millions of people across Europe and North America. The disruptive influence of factories, railroads and economies of scale changed both the nature of opportunity and where it could be found. Millions of people were uprooted from their traditional homes and livelihoods and hit the road in search of a better life or to escape one that had become intolerable. In a paper delivered to the Journal of the Statistical Society in England in 1885, Ravenstein outlined a series of "laws of migration" that attempted to explain and predict migration patterns both within and between nations. Ravenstein's basic laws, and additional laws subsequently derived from his work, continue to serve as the starting point for virtually all serious models of migration patterns over a century later. Ravenstein: Laws of Migration 1885

40. Most migrants only proceed a short distance, and toward centers of absorption. • 2) As migrants move toward absorption centers, they leave "gaps" that are filled up by migrants from more remote districts, creating migration flows that reach to "the most remote corner of the kingdom.“ • 3) The process of dispersion is inverse to that of absorption. • 4) Each main current of migration produces a compensating counter-current. • 5) Migrants proceeding long distances generally go by preference to one of the great centers of commerce or industry. • 6) The natives of towns are less migratory than those of the rural parts of the country. • 7) Females are more migratory than males.

41. At the heart of Ravenstein's emerging migration model were the concepts of absorption and dispersion. He defined a county of absorption as having "a population more or less in excess of the number of its natives enumerated throughout the kingdom." In other words, it was a country that on the whole took in more people than it gave up. A county of dispersion, then, would be one of the counties that on the whole gave up population over time, or in Ravenstein's words, "the population [of the county] falls short of the number of [its] natives enumerated throughout the kingdom."

42. Ravenstein's laws immediately created a stir, with some complaining that he had identified patterns of migration, but that this was not the same as discovering "natural laws." Four years, later, he presented another paper that looked at migration patterns elsewhere in Europe and North America, in which he highlighted an exception to migration patterns based upon the American frontier experience. He noted that people are more willing to travel long distances to occupy unsettled land than they would in a country more fully settled, as was the case in the United Kingdom. Modified from www.csiss.org

43. Culture

44. The geographer Otto Schluter is credited with having first formally used “cultural landscape” as an academic term in the early twentieth century. In 1908, Schluter argued that by defining geography as a Landschaftskunde (landscape science) this would give geography a logical subject matter shared by no other discipline. He defined two forms of landscape: the Urlandschaft (trans. ‘natural landscape’) or landscape that existed before major human induced changes and the Kulturlandschaft (trans. 'cultural landscape') a landscape created by human culture. The major task of geography was to trace the changes in these two landscapes. Sauer & Cultural Landscape

45. Carl Sauer was probably the most influential in promoting and developing the idea of cultural landscapes. Sauer was determined to stress the agency of culture as a force in shaping the visible features of the Earth’s surface in delimited areas. Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. His classic definition of a 'cultural landscape' reads as follows: “The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are the medium, the cultural landscape is the result“

46. Since Schulter's first formal use of the term, and Sauer's effective promotion of the idea, the concept of 'cultural landscapes has been variously used, applied, debated, developed and refined within academia. In 1992, the World Heritage Committee elected to convene a meeting of the 'specialists' to advise and assist redraft the Committee's Operational Guidelines to include 'cultural landscapes' as an option for heritage listing properties that were neither purely natural nor purely cultural. Since then, UNESCO has created a list of 878 World Heritage Sites to preserve humanity’s heritage. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list

47. Sauer was a fierce critic of environmental determinism, which was the prevailing theory in geography when he began his career. He proposed instead an approach variously called "landscape morphology" or "cultural history." This approach involved the inductive gathering of facts about the human impact on the landscape over time. Sauer rejected positivism, preferring particularist and historicist understandings of the world. He drew on the work of anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and was accused of introducing a "superorganic" concept of culture into geography. Sauer expressed concern about the way modern capitalism and centralized government were destroying the cultural diversity and environmental health of the world.

48. http://www.harpercollege.edu/mhealy/geogres/maps/worldgif/wwhearth.gifhttp://www.harpercollege.edu/mhealy/geogres/maps/worldgif/wwhearth.gif

49. A portion of Clark Wissler's map of the culture areas of the Native American United States. The map, which is designed to highlight similarities in food gathering techniques, lists seven culture areas: the woodsmen of the eastern forests, the hunters of the plains, the Navaho shepherds, the Pueblo farmers, the desert dwellers, the seed gatherers and the northern fishermen. Map Source: "Three Maps of Indian Country," United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, Lawrence, Kansas: Haskell Institute (1948).

50. National Geographic Expeditions Lesson Plan The Evolution of Cultural Landscape http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/06/g912/cultural.html