5 Themes of World Geography: Transcript

In this lesson we’re going to take a look at the 5 themes of World Geography. Now it’s important to note that these are not in any special order. You should not anticipate a test question in the future along the lines of, “what is the 3rd theme of world geography” by which you answer Human Environment Interaction and I shout at and say “you’re wrong! It’s Regions!” followed by ordering you to the corner of shame for getting the question wrong. So there’s no order to the themes of Geography and what’s important is that you just understand the basic ideas.

1. Location: Where is it? We can answer this question by simply giving the latitude and longitude coordinates. For example, the absolute location of Houston is 29.7628° N, and 95.3831° W. But these are modern methods, so what other method did people use before the use of the latitude and longitude measurement system? That method would be the relative location; and simply one would try to give you their position by referencing a number of terrain features or landmarks. For example, I am at the movie theater by Klein Oak High School, or I am at the pet store in the Woodlands Mall.

2. Place: What is it like? Place includes the physical features and cultural characteristics of a location.” ie. Climate, landforms, infrastructure, water sources, topography, soil, vegetation, & elevation. For example if we were interested in the cultural characteristics of Iraq we would discover that the population is Muslim. But not only is the population Muslim it is primarily composed of Shia Muslims (60-65%) the next largest group are Sunni Muslims at 32-37%. Now for many of you this is probably your first time hearing the term “Shia” and “Sunni.” In Islam there are two branches Shiat Ali which means “party of Ali”, and from here on were going to call Shia; Now the next group “Ahl al-Sunna” which means the “people of tradition” and from here on where going to call simply Sunni. These two branches date all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad’s death in the 7th century. Both branches hold the same fundamental Islamic beliefs but where they differ is political or in the way that power is passed. Sunni Muslims believe after Muhammad died, that power would be passed to someone who they thought would do a good job or be a good leader. Shia Muslims believe that power should have passed to Muhammad’s only surviving heir which would have been his son-in-law Ali. In modern day Iraq, these two groups are constantly fighting each other for political power. Almost weekly you were hear or see something on the news regarding a Sunni Muslim or Shia Muslim going to one of their competitors mosque’s on suicide missions aimed at killing as many people as they can. Just recently there was an onslaught by disgruntled Sunni Muslims in a terrorist organization that branched out of Al-Qaeda Called ISIS: Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Now Levant is the region of the Easter Mediterranean which is composed of a number of countries for example, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Jordan, Palestine, and Turkey. After the Iraq war the U.S. government disbanded the Iraqi Army and many of the commanders have left to lead this terrorist organization ISIS in an attempt to retake Iraq. There was a recent battle where the Iraqi forces have fought back ISIS at Saddam Hussein’s home town Tikrit. As you can imagine there

are lots of pieces of information we will be uncovering throughout this course when talk about “place.”

3. Regions: Formal, Functional, and Vernacular (or perceptual)After you have learned this information about Iraq, suppose now you are curious about finding out just how large the Muslim population in the world is. So we’re no longer talking about a specific “place” like Iraq, we are now going to be talking about a number of places. This leads to the next theme of World Geography called Regions. Now region’s has a few sub-categories Formal, Functional, and Vernacular (or perceptual). Formal regions can be physical like the Himalayan Mountains that reside north of India, or the Hawaiian Islands. Formal regions can also refer to countries like the United States, Canada, and Mexico which currently share a trade treaty called the North America Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA for short. Here you can say that NAFTA “functions” in a specific region or across a number of regions like the U.S., Mexico, and Canada; that is the extent of that trade agreement. Whenever we talk about religious groups, and in particular large religions and how they are spatially dispersed throughout the world, we are back in the realm of formal regions. So that leads us back to our earlier curiosity about how the Muslim population is spatially dispersed throughout the world. And if you have the appropriate map in front of you, and if you don’t you can find some good ones on the web, for example I am looking at a demographics map from Pewforum.org

You can see that most of the Middle East, North Africa, and some areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia have most of the world’s populations of Muslims of which 85-90% are Sunni and the other 10-15% are Shia Muslims. Now most Americans who see a women clothed in a burqa will automatically think that she’s from the Middle East. This would coincide with their vernacular or perceptions of those areas. Another example would be hearing someone with a strong “southern” accent by which one may conclude that this person is from the South. Those examples fall under our study of vernacular or perceptual regions.

4. Movement: What things move? Ideas, people, and diseases.Now let’s go back to our Muslim demographics map, suppose now after examining that map you now have another curiosity. How did Islam spread across this whole area? And if I did not mention before, followers of Islam are called Muslims. This leads us to the next theme of World Geography: Movement. Here we are concerned about what things that have moved that had an impact on the world we are in; things like ideas, people that bring their culture with them, and even diseases that have had a huge impact on the world like Small Pox that came over with Europeans that wiped-out 95% of the Native populations in the Americas.

5. Human Environment Interaction: What do people do to adapt to the environment?The final theme of World Geography, (and it’s important to note that none of these are to really be in any order), is Human Environment Interaction. How do people adapt to their environments in order to make their lives better, self-sufficient, and sustainable. For example, the Incas lived primarily within the area of the Indus Mountains along modern day Peru and Chile. Now farming

in mountains is greatly difficult so there would need to be new innovative farming techniques and the Incas developed the farming technique of Terrace Farming. Now they are certainly not the only people in the world to utilize this technique. This technique would be utilized by a number of other people groups in the East and South East Asia.

Now another way people have tried to modify the environment is by creating a system of levees. There was a great flood around the Mississippi River basin in 1927 which prompted the construction of the largest system of levees. However, in 2005 Hurricane Katrina will break a number of those levees around New Orleans with powerful storm surges which are surges of water that accompany hurricanes and crash on land. Most damage or casualties by hurricanes are accompanied with storm surges. The levees protecting New Orleans were about 7 meters high (21 feet) and were unable to stop the storm surge which resulted in billions of dollars of damage and a loss of about 1,800 people and displaced 300,000 Louisianans.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has redesigned the levee system in New Orleans investing 14.5 Billion dollars with state of the art technology. Utilizing a number of GIS systems and computers, they predict that the new levee system can actually curtail mega storms that happen once every 500 years. It won’t totally stop it from flooding, but it greatly reduces the chances of damage.

Hurricane Graphic of Katrina flooding

Redesign Levee to Curtail 500 Year Storm:

One last example of human environment interaction I would like to highlight would be in the case of Japan. Japan has a population of 127,000,000 people. So how does such a large population of people condensed to a land area the size of California broken up into a number of islands sustain itself, or at least in the case of electricity? The Japanese answer to that question was nuclear power plants. Now before I go into that, it’s important for us to note that Japan sits

on the Ring of Fire which is a large area that encompasses the Pacific Basin and is largely composed of volcanoes due to the colliding of tectonic plates. Now when these plates collide, earthquakes happen. In fact, 90% of the world’s earthquakes occur along the Ring of Fire.

Now, one should ask themselves, is it a good idea to place a nuclear power plant along an area that is frequented by earthquakes? The answer is obviously no but the Japanese are an ingenious people and if anyone could design a nuclear power plant to function within the Ring of Fire then they are your best bet. However, in March 11, 2011 there was a 9.0 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan followed by a tsunami (which are caused by earthquakes). Tsunamis are a number of ocean waves that crash along land much like storm surges. These things would trigger a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. 300,000 people needed to be evacuated and it has been confirmed as of July 22 of 2013 that nuclear waste has been seeping into the ocean. To this day, the Japanese are still trying to clean up that mess.

Sources:

1. Upgraded metro New Orleans levees will greatly reduce flooding, even in 500-year storms

http://www.nola.com/hurricane/index.ssf/2013/08/upgrated_metro_new_orleans_lev.html

2. The population goes down to 127,341,000 people in Japanhttp://countryeconomy.com/demography/population/japan

3. Ring of Firehttp://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/glossary/?termID=150

4. Abe Pledges Government Help to Stem Fukushima Water Leaks

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-07/fukushima-leaks-priority-not-nuclear-restarts-activists-say.html

TEKS

History: 1a

History: 2a

Geography: 3b

Geography: 4a

Geograhy: 7c

Geography: 8 a,b, &c

Geography: 9 a & b

Culture: 16 a & b