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.

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

Hoover Dam, On Location with Alan Arbogast

Learn about the Geography of the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead with Wiley author and MSU Professor Alan Arbogast.

Running Time: 7:08