Concept Caching: Shennong River, China

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The Shennong River is one of the tributaries to the Yangtze River in China. It is a sleepy river valley with farm houses nestled along the valley floor and its surrounding mountains. Farmers in this community must terrace the surrounding hills to have sufficient acreage to cultivate. This means laborious work by hand, bringing buckets of water up and down the mountains every day to make sure their precious crops are sustained.

This image submitted by Vicki Drake offers a picturesque visualization for some of the rural landscapes of the Chinese interior.  The Shennong River, or Shen Nong Stream, is one of the tributaries to the Yangtze River just miles upriver from the Three Gorges Dam.  The Shennong valley blends from agricultural landscape to geological landscape as its stream grade cuts one of the lesser gorges leading to the Yangtze in this high relief area.  The image can suggest the “sleepy” quality of the area, but can also foster recognition of the potential for natural disasters and difficulty in providing emergency services in such relatively remote, but populated area, as mentioned in the post Chinese Environmental Problems and the Potential for Change.

Chinese Environmental Problems and the Potential for Change

Over the past month there has been much in the news about catastrophic natural disasters and anthropogenic environmental woes plaguing the vast Chinese landscape.  This is certainly not “news” for its novel or exceptional nature.  Yet, the extent of these events does raise questions about the future of China’s environment and of the choices that its government will make to secure or squander that future.

Some of the biggest news stories focused on the July 16^th oil spill in Dalian.  Two oil pipelines ruptured and exploded leaking thousands of barrels of oil into the sea near this northernmost warm water seaport in the Yellow Sea.  In the days that followed, there were many reports questioning the Chinese government’s account of the size of the spill and documenting the improvised nature of the “grim task” that was its clean-up.  This event showed the lack of preparedness in mitigating or responding to such a disaster.

Long before the oil spill, the southwestern countryside had been experiencing a record drought dating back to October of 2009.  The drought was then ended by heavy rains that touched off landslides and swelled the waters of the Yangtze River and tested the limits of the Three Gorges Dam.  Days later, reports followed of the worst flood in a decade along the Yangtze that killed at least 273 people as of July 22^nd.  More rains and deadly landslides hit the north-central county of Zhouqu killing 127 people in early August.  And more rain is forecast for the area, thwarting clean-up, rescue and aid efforts.  Such crises require resources and planning to respond to such national emergencies in providing for citizens’ basic needs.

Amid such devastation, one of the most interesting discussions has focused on the power of these events and on assessing their role in affecting the Chinese governments’ current policy toward its environment, its people, and its economic livelihood.  A Reuters blog speculates if this is China’s “Minamata moment”, referencing Japan’s Minamata Bay long plagued by industrial pollution that poisoned large numbers of local fisherman and their children with high levels of mercury.  The “moment” led the Japanese government in the 1970s to prioritize pollution reforms.  A staff writer for the Natural Resources Defense Council attempts to provide some answer to the speculation by highlighting two lessons learned from these and other events.  First, “You can only solve the problems you know about,” referring to the slow reporting of industrial-related accidents.  Second, “Social stability comes from fixing the problem,” recognizing that social stability is ultimately one of Chinese national priorities and to best secure that priority, China needs to find big picture solutions for these types of problems.  A writer from the Atlantic introduces yet another possibility.  The article is skeptical of recent events’ role in bringing about a largely transformative moment, instead seeing it as a “recalibration” that will attempt to find a new balance between status quo economic interests and the need for more responsive environmental needs.

Discussion Questions:

1. Pick one or more of the recent Chinese environmental problems mentioned in any of the articles.  What do you think should be expected of the government in mitigating and/or responding to such an event or events?
2. Think about the vast scale of the Chinese national landscape.  What challenges do you think are inherent in dealing with the diverse and changing environments in this area?  Can you make any suggestions for such a scale dilemma?
3. What do you think that these events will mean for the future of the Chinese environment and its people?  How do you think the Chinese government will weigh the interests of its industries and economy against that of its peoples’ and lands’ well-being?

Mapping Your State and Community

A lesson, by Joseph Kerski, entitled “Mapping Your State and Community” is on PUMAS–The Practical Uses of Math and Science – The Online Journal of Math and Science, at NASA. This is a collection of examples (“lessons” or “activities”) showing how math and science topics taught in K-12 classes can be used in interesting settings, including everyday life.

The lesson:
https://pumas.gsfc.nasa.gov/examples/index.php?id=118

Others lessons in the listing:
https://pumas.gsfc.nasa.gov/examples/index.php

“The examples are written primarily by scientists, engineers, and other content experts having practical experience with the material. They are aimed mainly at classroom teachers, and are available to all interested parties via the PUMAS web site.

Our goal is to capture, for the benefit of pre-college education, the flavor of the vast experience that working scientists have with interesting and practical uses of math and science.” The fact that this GIS lesson is on the site may help you in your ongoing work with your math and science educator colleagues.

Joseph Kerski is a Geographer and Education Industry Curriculum Development Manager at the Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI).

Geography Directions: Islamic Finance

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Public confidence in the banking sector has been significantly shaken over recent years.  Given the turmoil caused by the global financial crisis, the depression and the public bail-outs of banks like RBS and Northern Rock; the raising levels of doubt and mistrust are hardly surprising.  Furthermore, such doubts show little sign of abating this week, as seven EU banks fail newly imposed ‘stress tests‘ by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS).  As a result increasing numbers are looking for an alternative form of banking in which to invest and Islamic finance could just fit the bill.

Unlike the traditional banking sector, Islamic banking is based upon a strict set of principles; the central of which is that “money itself has no intrinsic value. [Also] as a matter of faith, a Muslim cannot lend money to, or receive money from someone and expect to benefit – interest (known as riba) is not allowed. To make money from money is forbidden – wealth can only be generated through legitimate trade and investment in assets. Money must be used in a productive way” (IBB).  As a result of this central principle Islamic finance is considered more stable (as the temptation to risk in search of profit is reduced) and more ethically appealing to many private savers and investors dismayed by increased profits and bankers bonuses.  Moreover, Pollard (2010) suggests that many organisations like the IBB, are attempting to market themselves as ‘ethical banks’ in areas such as the EU and USA which could otherwise be sceptical of the Islamic name.

In a recent issue of Area geographers Bassens, Derudder and Witlox detail the global spread of the Islamic finance model in recent years, charting how Islamic financial services have moved out of their historical base in the cities of the Middle East and become “anchored in the more conventional world cities” (2010, 44) of London and Paris, challenging our pre-existing geographical imaginations of the global financial sector.

These changes should be of great interest of all Human Geographers, as they offer a potentially fruitful intersection between social and cultural, political and economic geographical research; as we explore how the actions and values of the individual impact upon these globalised networks.

By Alexander Leo Phillips

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Dubai, UAE

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

This image submitted by Harm de Blij provides a local backdrop for understanding the development of global economic and financial networks in the Middle East region.  Dubai emerged as a world center for business along with the region’s boom in oil.  Today, an entire sector of global finance is governed by Islamic institutions, centered in places like Dubai, as mentioned in the post Geography Directions: Islamic Finance.

No Impact Man

For the first several years after  my family moved to Massachusetts in 1997,  New York became a place we passed through as we drove between our new home in Bridgewater and our relatives in Maryland. Sometimes these trips would include a stay near the scenic Hudson with our geographer friend Jeff, who is a planner for, well, Scenic Hudson. In more recent years, we have spent a lot more time exploring the center of the state, as we take our daughter to and from a camp in the Adirondacks. One of those outings, in fact, led me to post a Concept Cache about a coffee shop in rural central New York.

During all of this time, our visits to New York City have been relatively few, though we have enjoyed the visits when we have enjoyed The City (as it is often known) immensely when we have made the effort. The “effort” has to do with two main factors: expense and transportation. Both of these barriers can be lowered with a bit of ingenuity and experience, of course, but so far our visits have been very special treats. Recently, I watched the film No Impact Man as part of my wife Pamela’s Celebrating the States blogging project, and it led me to think critically about the role of New York City — and cities in general — in human-environment interactions.

In my course on the geography of environmental problems, I use Andrew Goudie’s Human Impact Reader anthology to help my students examine the spatial aspects of a variety of impacts humans have on the environment. In simple terms, the impact of humans on the environment can be summarized as I=PCT, which is to say that the human impact is a function of population, per-capita consumption, and the technology used for that consumption. As we read the anthology’s seminal scientific articles on a wide variety of human impacts — from coastal erosion and soil degradation to flash floods and climate change — I emphasize the spatial dimensions of each of these impacts.

No Impact Man — which should really be called No Impact Family — is the story of one year in the life of Colin Beavan, his wife, and their young daughter. As the title implies, the goal of the family’s year-long approach was to reduce their net impact on the environment to zero, by a combination of reducing negative impacts and increasing positive impacts, with an emphasis on pursuit of the former. Their effort leads to some important findings about the spatial dimensions one the other side of the equation. Specifically, how might high density mitigate or enhance the relative contributions of population, consumption, and technology?

In my earliest thinking about the environment, I viewed cities mainly as sources of environmental problems, given the high density of some sources of air and water pollution.  I have since learned that low density can also be problematic, as  suburban sprawl tends to increase the use of private vehicles, among other effects. From an environmental-impact perspective, the clearest advantage of urban density is the ability to reduce or eliminate automobile dependency and thereby eliminate a major source of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The Beavan family gave up airplanes and automobiles for the entire year, used trains only for long distances, and used walking and biking for almost all of their transportation needs. To do this while still enjoying access to many cultural, educational, and employment opportunities, it is almost essential to live in an urban place, where a great number of such opportunities can be found within a short travel distance.

In reducing their impact, the Beavins also focused a lot of their effort on food — growing some of their own and buying from nearby sources. The spatial dimensions of this are a bit more complicated. Food that is grown locally does not have to be transported very far, reducing the use of fossil fuels for transportation. Food that is grown organically does not require chemical inputs (and therefore eliminates chemical waste streams). Eating low on the food chain — that is, vegetarian or vegan — further reduces the use of both energy and chemicals. An advantage of pursuing these goals in an urban setting is that a critical mass of like-minded consumers can be found, creating enough demand for farmers from the region to supply urban farmers’ markets. Whether such efforts could ever be scaled up to supply the entire food needs of major metropolitan areas, however, remains to be seen.

Colin Beavan hopes to have an impact beyond the one-year experiment. His No Impact Man blog is an effort to build on the experience.

Geography through Art, Part 1

For the student of Geography music and movies are often times the most economical and efficient way to see examples of the concepts, places, regions, and environments they are studying.  Recent posts have looked at music playlists for Natural Disasters and we wanted to know what other Geography topics lend themselves to using music or movies to teach the content. 

We asked Carolyn Coulter of Atlantic Cape CC how she would go about using music and movies to help teach the concept and theories of Geographies of Development to students and she shared with us some suggestions: 

Movie Illustration
Movie: Slumdog Millionaire  
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Running Time: 121 minutes
Main Characters: Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), Salim Malik (Madhur Mittal), Latika (Freida Pinto)

Movie Summary
Jamal Malik spent his entire childhood living and working throughout the slums of India. As a young adult he suddenly finds himself a contestant on the wildly popular game show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. His impoverished life as an orphan on the streets of India is recalled through vignettes from his childhood and these memories parallel the questions that are asked of him on the game show. This film is a testament to the abject poverty that is experienced by hundreds of thousands of Jamal Malik’s all over the world.

Scene Descriptions
[Scene 1] Salim and Jamal are operating a business in which they charge money to patrons to use an outhouse that deposits directly into marshland. A movie celebrity flies into the area via helicopter while Jamal is using the outhouse that is intended for customers. His brother Salim seeks revenge on Jamal for lost wages due to Jamal using the outhouse by locking him in upon the arrival of the celebrity. Jamal only has one exit and he makes the decision to jump into the marshland that contains the deposits from the outhouse so that he can get an autograph from the celebrity.

[Scene 2] A bus full of young children are dropped off under a highway overpass and told “get to work” by Salim. Many of the children do not have shoes and it is unclear what exactly they will be doing for work. This is until Salim happens upon a baby and gives the baby to Latika and remarks “babies earn double”. The children scatter and spend the day on the streets of Mumbai begging for money. This is especially apparent when a young girl pantomime’s feeding herself in an attempt to get money from people in cars.

[Scene 3] Salim and Jamal are sitting atop a semi-constructed high building that overlooks the dharavi slums of Mumbai in which they grew up. The city looks much different now; Salim and Jamal are young adults now and the city itself has changed remarkably. Salim reflects and this as he points to the location that used to house the slums in which he and Jamal lived and worked as children.

Discussion Questions

1. How does the fact that Jamal and Salim work in an outhouse in Scene 1 indicate differing global levels of development?
2. What is happening in Scene 2 that might not happen in More Developed Countries? Why not?
3. How and why has Mumbai changed in terms of development in Scene 3?
4. How does Scene 3 make an argument for World-Systems Theory?

Song Illustration
Song Title: Why? (2:06)
Artist: Tracy Chapman
Album: Tracy Chapman
Label: Elektra/Wea

To view the lyrics click here.  Or you can go to iTunes to download the song.

Discussion Questions

1. What does the line “Why do the babies starve when there’s enough food to feed the world” indicate to you?
2. What might the singer mean when she says, “Why is a woman still not safe when she’s in her home”?

 

What movies or music would you add to this list?

Exploring the Gulf Coast Oil Spill with AGXOnline

Exploring the Gulf Coast Oil Spill with AGXOnline
Submitted by Chris Bunin, The Virginia Geographic Alliance

http://edcommunity.esri.com/arclessons/lesson.cfm?id=536

This tutorial provides a quick and easy introduction to ArcGIS Explorer Online (AGX). Using the Gulf Oil Spill as the presentation topic, students learn to build an AGXOnline project by adding a base layer, adding content to the map (layers, points, and hyperlinks), and by capturing and editing slides into a classroom presentation.

Concept Caching: Haiti and Dominican Republic political boundary

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all  Geography classes.

This image submitted by Harm de Blij reveals a striking landscape of deforestation and hints at the differing impacts of local politics and governance that is behind such a difficult global problem.  The image provides a pertinent partner for the discussion of deforestation in the post, Hopes for World Forests.

Hopes for World Forests

Deforestation has long been a troubling global trend that has affected most of Earth’s arboreal environments.  Discussions of this topic may often focus on the economic and agricultural reasons for the destruction of forestlands.  Juxtaposed are the greedy corporations and illegal loggers against indigent subsistence farmers desperate for land.  Either way, the discussion ends as so many talks of 21^st century environmental problems often do: disheartened and despondent.  However, there has been much recent buzz in the media related to deforestation, and some of it actually hopeful.

A Newsweek article believes that Haiti’s economic recovery may be contingent upon the recovery of its forest lands.  Haiti’s trees have long been mowed down by colonizers, plantations, industry and locals alike.  It is hoped that reforestation will ultimately help to minimize the impact of natural disasters, like hurricanes and floods, and to restore nutrients to overworked agricultural lands.

On a global scale, recent policies of developing countries have made a concerted effort to remove illegally logged wood from world markets.  The New York Times Green blog reports on the European Parliament’s bill cracking down on timber from illegal logging.  Other countries from the developing world like Nigeria and Ghana to the developed world like the United States have previously contributed to fining or banning wood logged illicitly.

In particular, it is the Amazon that many environmentalists lay their hopes on.  The New York Times Dot Earth blog reports on the optimism that comes with Brazil’s current demographic and economic development trajectories and with restoration and preservation efforts of environmentalists on the ground.  The Amazon has also been the subject of a year-long study conducted by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (also reported with accompanying images at Surrey Satellite Technology LTD’s Space Blog).  They analyzed satellite images of the region which revealed a slowing of deforestation rates as compared with previous years.

The link between the world’s forests and possible climate change should also be discussed in any deforestation dialogue.  Earth scientists have long been studying the carbon cycle and tracking the ways that carbon is found in active and inactive stores throughout the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.  One of the global scale puzzle pieces to this study has now been provided by NASA satellites as they mapped world tree heights.  CNN argues that this will aid in tracking world forest carbon and study the ability of world forests to continue to take up atmospheric carbon. This map will also help to produce models to understand forest fires, ecosystems, and more.

A succinct article provided by the New York Times Green blog titled, “Is the tide turning on deforestation?” is suitable for most undergrad students and sums up these hopeful developments well.  Combine that with a recent BBC News article that reports the findings of the London-based think tank Chatham House observing a marked decline in illegal logging and discusses the major contributions to that trend.

However hopeful, this deforestation discussion should also end with a sobering dose of reality:  reiterating that deforestation, especially at the hand of illegal logging, is still a harrowing global problem.

Discussion Questions:

1. How might economic recovery connect to reforestation in the example of Haiti?  Explain the benefits of reforestation and how they will contribute to economic gains.

2. Suggest comparisons or contrasts of the policies against illegal logging between the developing world and developed world.  Think about production/consumption and source/destination streams, as well as underlying motivations at various scales.

3. How will the mapping of world tree heights help scientists to track carbon and understand climate change?

4. What hopeful trend countering deforestation do you think will make the most difference and why?  Do you have any other suggestions for what the global community can do to help save the world’s forests?

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