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.

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?

Concept Caching: Kericho, Kenya

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 offers a glimpse into the landscapes and scale of the globalization of Kenya’s agriculture.  It provides a visual context to the discussion of Kenya in the post Geography Directions: Africa and economic recovery.

Geography Directions: Africa and economic recovery

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.

The recent media coverage of the disruption to air travel due to volcanic activity in Iceland concentrated mainly on the impact it had upon holiday travel. However, stranded holiday  makers were not the only victims of the flight ban across Europe, not least the flower and vegetable growers of Kenya. Recent news articles on this subject have highlighted that Kenya provides nearly a quarter of all the fruit and vegetables that are air-freighted into Britain and it is estimated that in total, 1,000 tons of roses, carnations, mange tout, asparagus green beans and other fresh produce is exported each day to European supermarkets. Additionally,there are more than 150,000 people who work in Kenya’s horticulture industry, which is one of the country’s largest earners of foreign exchange, providing a fifth of the economy which in 2009 was worth $924 million.

The horticultural industry in Kenya is just one example of recent economic growth within the countries of the African continent and Pádraig Carmody discusses this in his Geography Compass article “Exploring Africa’s Economic Recovery”.  Pádraig investigates the depth, structure and significance of Africa’s current economic recovery’. He explains that for most of the past 30 years Africa has been blighted with economic decline, AIDS, degradation of the environment and conflict, but more recently the number of conflicts has reduced, the economic growth rate has improved and for the first time in decades poverty may be reducing.  He also pays attention to the rising role of the Chinese trade and investment in the country.

To fully understand how and why these changes are taking place it is highly recommended to read Pádraig’s fascinating article and the next time that you buy flowers from the florist or choose green beans cultivated in Kenya from the supermarket shelf you will appreciate how and why they got there.

By Paulette Cully
To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Soybean Agriculture in Presho, South Dakota

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 Erin Fouberg provides a visualization of the scale and landscapes of crop agriculture in the United States.  The companion image description offers insight into this landscape and details over the two types of crop agriculture in this region.  It is also an interesting visual companion to some of the issues raised in the post, “Geographies of Green Diets.”

“Driving across the semiarid ranchlands of western South Dakota, I noticed the presence of a crop in the landscape that was recently found only in the eastern, moister region of the state: soybeans.

I called a colleague who works in agriculture at South Dakota State University to ask, “When did the cattle ranchers of western South Dakota start growing soybeans?” He replied, “When the soy biodiesel plants started popping up in Nebraska and Kansas and when genetically modified soybeans made it possible to grow the crop here.” He explained the development of Roundup Ready soybeans, a particular genetically modified soybean that can grow in more arid regions of the country. First, you plant the soybean; then you use an airplane to spray Roundup, a common weed killer that is manufactured by the company that produces the Roundup Ready soybeans, over the field. The application of Roundup over the entire field saves a lot of time and energy for the farmers because the genetically modified soybeans are resistant to the Roundup, but the weeds are killed. Monsanto, the company that produces Roundup, has developed soybeans, corn, cotton, and other crops that are resistant to Roundup.

Counter to the genetically modified Roundup Ready crops, organic agriculture —the production of crops without the use of synthetic or industrially produced pesticides and fertilizers—is also on the rise in North America. In wealthier parts of the world, the demand for organic products has risen exponentially in recent years. Sales of organic food in the United States, for example, went from under $200 million in 1980 to $1.5 billion by the early 1990s to over $10 billion by 2003 and $17.8 billion in 2007. Organic foods are now about 3 percent of all food sales in the country. The growth rate is so strong that some predict organic sales will approach 10 percent of total U.S. food sales within a decade. Parts of western Europe are already approaching that figure—notably Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Germany.”

To continue reading the cache description visit the Concept Caching website.

Geographies of Green Diets

With the discursive onset of “global warming” in the global lexicon, seemingly inconsequential personal choices are subject to questions of ‘Greenness’ (Green indicating an alternative that is better for the environment than the status quo).  In a world that is increasingly linked technologically, economically, and culturally in a complicated web of globalization, your diet (what you eat, not your weight loss plan) raises convoluted issues of scale, politics and environment that are not always so easy to comprehend.

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the questions behind a “Green Diet” is how geography is implicated in all aspects.  Whether this is a question of agricultural and land-use practices, of environmental problems or solutions, of scale from the local to global, or of socio-economic, culture or politics, each has a spatial component and consequence.

The United Nations International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management argues in a June 2010 report that, “Current patterns of production and consumption of both fossil fuels and food are draining freshwater supplies; triggering losses of economically-important ecosystems such as forests; intensifying disease and death rates and raising levels of pollution to unsustainable levels.”  The report calls for a controversial shift in global diets to reduce such environmental pressures.  This shift would be away from those including a large amount of animal-based products to those including more vegetable-based foods.  This report was certainly not the first to call for such a dietary shift, another contribution came from well-known author and activist, Michael Pollan who challenged readers to eat whole fresh foods, a little meat, and avoid processed foods.

Yet, after the UN-backed report, there seems to be a resurgence of dialogue over the greenness of our diets.  An author from the Atlantic asks, “Can Meat Eaters be environmentalists?” arguing that the two are not a contradiction.  She has also authored the New York Times article “The Carnivore’s Dilemma” researching the connection between meat and global warming.  An excellent Mother Jones article tackles the “merits of vegetarianism” by taking the question to a panel of experts and to readers, cheekily poised as “Bacon Lovers vs. Soy Huggers.”  This article is an outstanding source for both sides of the debate and includes plenty of interesting, albeit covert, geographical references from trophic structures to cultural preferences.  Another aspect of greening diets comes from the Local Foods movement, dubbed by the USDA as “Know your Farmer, Know your food”, which focuses more on where your food comes from rather that what you eat.  An NPR program and article offers a very interesting once over of the movement, but also of the economic and logistical challenges, combined with the overall reluctance of food distributors to make the change.

Overall, the underlying issues behind these questions have to do with various ‘costs’:  energy costs, food supply costs, economic costs, and environmental costs.  Each of these costs indicates difficulties that can be best understood in a holistic, interconnected way.  Indeed, geographers best understand the human-environment connections behind our diets:

-  How fossil fuel use may be translating into warmer climates;

-  How most crop agriculture is devoted to animal agriculture, creating fossil fuel and economic entanglements in between, and then topping it all off with the addition of more heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere;

-  How the economic networks associated with status quo crop and animal agriculture mean jobs, taxes, and livelihoods to large populations of Midwestern and Central United States;

-  How environmentally costly, both looking back and forward, commercial agriculture has been for native grassland ecosystems and rainforest ecosystems, freshwater supplies, and perhaps for climates throughout the globe.

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you know where your food comes from or how it is produced?  When you are out at your local grocery store, favorite restaurant, school cafeteria, café, farmer’s market, etc. look for clues about where food products come from, how they are produced, and how they are delivered.
2. What do you think about the arguments made in the “Bacon Lovers vs. Soy Huggers” article?  What conclusions can you draw about which diet is greener?  What are some further questions you might have?
3. Think about the connection between food production (meat, vegetables, and processed foods) and climate.  List the various ways that production, distribution, and consumption contribute or neutralize effects on climate.

Sarah Goggin

Mato Grosso: The Future of Food

Paul Ehrlich’s publication of The Population Bomb in 1968 explained why human population growth was accelerating, and touched off serious debate about whether enough food could be produced to feed ever-more billions of people. Even as many have faced malnutrition and even starvation, however, total food production has tended to keep pace.

For the foreseeable future, population will continue to grow, albeit it at a decreasing rate. Over the next half-century, the question seems not to be whether humans will produce enough food, but rather how that food will be produced. The human population is passing through what E.O. Wilson has called the bottleneck, and by the middle of the twenty-first century, it is likely to level off at somewhere between 8 and 9 billion people.

Overall food production can be achieved in just a few ways:

• Distribute food more equitably by curtailing over-consumption and reducing the production of meat
• Increase crop yields
• Increase the land area under cultivation

Each of these broad strategies involves a lot of possible specific cases and a number of complicated trade-offs. The story of soybeans in Brazil — particularly in the huge, interior state of Mato Grosso — illustrates several of the complications associated with the second and third options.

I took these photographs of Cargill’s riverfront terminal just downstream from Porto Velho, Rondônia in 2003. Much of the soy grown in the center-west portion of the country is brought by road to this break-in-bulk point, where it is transfered to barges that can take it all the way to Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, for export.

For many years, agricultural production in Brazil increased slowly, if at all, and sometimes not fast enough to keep up with domestic population growth. What little increase did occur was strictly the result of increases in the amount of land being cultivated. Even though considerable efforts were made to increase yields, improvements in technology did little more than offset the poor quality of the new lands being cultivated.

The twentieth-century experience of Brazil is hardly surprising; humans farm about 1/8 of the earth’s land surface and almost by definition this is the most productive 1/8. Any new areas brought into production are likely to be marginal lands in both senses of the word: in peripheral locations relative to existing human settlement and of lower quality relative to already-settled lands.

By the close of the twentieth century, however, something clearly had changed, as Brazil’s agricultural output — particularly of soybeans — began to challenge the role of the United States as the dominant producer in the Western hemisphere. Reporting for the radio program Living on Earth, Bruce Gellerman has described this transition beautifully in Magic Seeds and the Miracle Crop. (His report is available as an mp3 and as text with some excellent photographs.)

The report describes how Mato Grosso has become such a large and still-growing producer of soybeans, despite the unsuitable soil conditions. It then goes on to describe the consequences associated with such success: increased reliance on pesticides, the tendency of crop pests to develop pesticide resistance, and the great loss of habitat in the savanna, known in Brazil as cerrado, or “closed” for its traditional inaccessibility.

Brazil is advancing on its frontier just as the United States did more than a century ago. A decade ago, I wrote  comparison of the two frontier experiences: that of the United States in the 19th-century West and that of Brazil in the 20th-century Amazon. According to Gellerman’s report, the process continues in the 21st-century cerrado, but with more than one biome at stake and with the potential for much more substantial clearing. With the techniques currently being employed, the area remaining to be cultivated in Brazil might be greater than the area currently cultivated in the entire United States.