GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

The Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, is a magnet for tourists, but it is increasingly difficult for locals to live a normal life around it.

Source: www.youtube.com

Just how much of the world’s cropland can we really call urban? That’s been a big mystery until now.

Now, a study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters has an answer: Somewhere around 1.1 billion acres is being cultivated for food in or within about 12 miles (20 kilometers) of cities. Most of that land is on the periphery of cities, but 16.6 percent of these urban farms are in open spaces within the municipal core.

Source: www.npr.org

“Uganda plans to introduce a new anti-gay law that will withstand any legal challenge, a government minister has told the BBC. It will not explicitly refer to homosexuality, but will rely on the penal code which prescribes a life sentence for ‘unnatural acts’, he said. Activists say the plan is more draconian than anti-gay legislation annulled by the courts in August. The US and other donors cut funding to Uganda in protest against the law. Uganda is a deeply conservative society where homosexual acts are already illegal.”

Tag: sexuality, Uganda.

Source: www.bbc.com

Thanks to the worst drought in eight decades, millions of people in São Paulo are facing water outages.

Tags: Brazil, urban, water, urban ecology, climate change, environment depend, sustainability, agriculture, food production.

Source: www.vox.com

“Naif al-Mutawa, creator of comic book series THE 99, spoke with Al-Monitor about the recent death threat by the Islamic State and how US President Barack Obama’s enemies became his.”

Seven years after the Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur first launched his comic book series based on the 99 attributes of Allah, he’s facing a sudden onslaught of death threats, fatwas and lawsuits (his comic books where highlighted in this TED talk on cultural change in the Islamic World). His US distributor, meanwhile, continues to sit on a TV deal, in part because of pressure from conservative bloggers who object to any positive description of Islam.

Source: www.al-monitor.com

The most viral images on the internet, curated in real time by a dedicated community through commenting, voting and sharing.

Source: imgur.com

This is a fantastic way to visualize physical geographic processes. 

Tags:  physical, fluvial, geomorphology, erosion, landscape.

“This program, Boundaries and Borderlands, introduces the case study approach of the course. Here we examine the borderland region between the regions of North America and Latin America. The first case study, Twin Cities, Divided Lives, follows the story of Concha Martinez as she crosses between the U.S. and Mexico in order to make a life for herself and her children.  The second case study, Operation Hold the Line, follows up the question of cross-border migration raised in the first program. It takes a look at how U.S. border policy is shaping the lives of not only the people living in this borderland region, but in more distant U.S. and Mexican locations as well.”

Source: www.learner.org

This is a not a new resource and I know that many of you are familiar with it, but this is worth repeating for those not familiar with the Annenberg Media’s “Power of Place” video series.  With 26 videos (roughly 30 minutes each) that are regionally organized, this be a great resource for geography teachers that need either a regional of thematic case-study video clip.     

Tags: migration, regions video, APHG.

“Mass killings have become increasingly common across Mexico due to the country’s ongoing war on drugs. Cartels and gangs, often working with help from local police, are murdering innocent victims by the dozens and leaving them in unmarked graves. So just how bad is the violence in Mexico, and what is the Mexican President doing to stop it?”

Source: www.youtube.com

Read the transcript of the video here, as well as some good links for additional research on the topic.

Tags: Mexico, narcotics.

A new study links climatic instability and a lack of natural resources to belief in moralizing gods in cultures around the world.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

I’m not posting this in spite of its controversial nature—I am sharing this precisely because it has raised eyebrows.  Many have read this and seen elements of environmental determinism in the cultural analysis of religions (despite the researcher’s insistence that their findings should not be taken as a form of geographical determinism).

While there appears to be a correlation between a belief in moral god(s) and a harsh environment, others could also look at this map and see the mapping of poverty, colonialism or historical evangelism.  Environmental determinism was used to justify colonialism and racist ideologies, geography fully rejected anything with even a hint of environmental determinism.  Geographers are hypersensitive to the critique of environmental determinism; that is why it is difficult to find modern geographic research that knocks on the door of determinism. 

Questions to Ponder: How much environmental determinism is in this research?  What alternatives exist to environmental determinism?  How much of a factor is the environment in shaping cultural patterns? 

Tags: environment, religion, culture,  unit 1 GeoPrinciples.