“Slums lack:
Source: www.youtube.com
What is a slum? Why do so many people around the world live in slums? What are the largest slums in the world? These are the questions that this video seeks to answer as the TestTube team tackles one of the more pressing issues of confronting urban areas in the developing world.
Tags: poverty, squatter settlements, development.
“India is one of the world’s largest consumers of disposable plastic cutlery, which has the makings of a huge health and environmental crisis written all over it.”
Source: www.youtube.com
Plastics clog our landfills and single-use plastic consumption is one of the most wasteful elements of our consumer-based, disposable society. This product is a reaction against the waste of disposable cutlery, but it is also an intriguing developmental strategy (see company kickstarter page or website).
Tags: development, food, gender, agriculture, consumption, South Asia, pollution.
“This year, we’ve seen alarming bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, caused by warm sea temperatures. A recently completed aerial survey of the reef found that 93 percent of the smaller reefs that comprise it showed at least some bleaching, and in the northern sector of the reef, the large majority of reefs saw bleaching that was severe — meaning many of these corals could die. There was already considerable murmuring that this event, which damages a famous World Heritage site and could deal a blow to a highly valuable tourism industry, did not simply happen by chance. And now, a near real-time analysis by a group of Australian climate and coral reef researchers has affirmed that the extremely warm March sea temperatures in the Coral Sea, which are responsible for the event, were hardly natural.”
Tags: biogeography, environment, ecology, Australia, Oceania.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
“Ships carry 11 billion tons of goods each year. This interactive map shows where they all go. About 11 billion tons of stuff gets carried around the world every year by large ships. Clothes, flat-screen TVs, grain, cars, oil — transporting these goods from port to port is what makes the global economy go ’round. And now there’s a great way to visualize this entire process, through this stunning interactive map from the UCL Energy Institute.”
Source: www.vox.com
If you haven’t discovered www.shipmap.org then you are in for a treat. This delightful geographic visualization nicely shows the shipping lanes and connectivity that makes the globalized economy flow.
Tags: transportation, globalization, diffusion, industry, economic, mapping, visualization.
The process of making orange juice on a humongous scale. The Americans drink so much of the stuff I’m surprised they still have any left for export.
Source: www.youtube.com
If you image that your orange juice comes from farmers on ladders picking, then hand-squeezing oranges into orange juice, then you need to see just how mechanized this agribusiness is. The machinery alone means that a small-scale farmer simply can’t compete on the open market.
Questions to Ponder: Why is OJ concentrate cheaper in the store if they have to work hard to extract the water out of the juice? How would OJ concentrate be an example of either a bulk-gaining product or a bulk-reducing product?
Tags: food production, agriculture, food, economic, industry, economic, scale, agribusiness.
“Andrea Wulf’s new book The Invention of Nature reveals the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and how he created the way we understand nature today. Though almost forgotten today, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin. Humboldt was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. Perceiving nature as an interconnected global force, Humboldt discovered similarities between climate zones across the world and predicted human-induced climate change. Wulf traces Humboldt’s influences through the great minds he inspired in revolution, evolution, ecology, conservation, art and literature. In The Invention of Nature Wulf brings this lost hero to science and the forgotten father of environmentalism back to life.”
Source: vimeo.com
Alexander von Humboldt has been described as the last great ancient geographer concerned with understanding an eclectic cosmography as well as the first modern geographer. He is honored far and wide throughout Europe and especially Latin America for his explorations, but given that people are confused as how to categorize him and classify his contributions, today he is under-appreciated. Geographers need to reclaim his memory and call his extensive, globetrotting work on a wide range of subjects ‘geography.’ Here are more articles and videos on the man that I feel geographers should publicly champion as their intellectual ancestor the way that biologists point to Darwin.
Tags: historical, biogeography, book reviews.
Forget New York, London or Hong Kong. Here are seven cities that are racing up the rankings of the world’s richest, and will be among the top 10 by 2025, according to researchers from McKinsey.
Source: money.cnn.com
Tags: urban, development, economic, planning, labor, globalization, technology.
Three decades later, it’s not certain how radiation is affecting wildlife—but it’s clear that animals abound.
It may seem strange that Chernobyl, an area known for the deadliest nuclear accident in history, could become a refuge for all kinds of animals—from moose, deer, beaver, and owls to more exotic species like brown bear, lynx, and wolves—but that is exactly what Shkvyria and some other scientists think has happened. Without people hunting them or ruining their habitat, the thinking goes, wildlife is thriving despite high radiation levels.
Tags: National Geographic, physical, biogeography, environment, ecology, environment modify, disasters.
Source: news.nationalgeographic.com
The 50-state model is holding the country back. It needs a new system, built around urban corridors.
Source: www.nytimes.com
This is a great article to get students thinking about the spatial network of cities, not just the internal structure of particular cities based on some models. In this article, Parag Khanna argues that the United States is stuck in “an antiquated political structure of 50 distinct states” that isn’t aligned with growing urban regions that shape our internal and external economic linkages. He proposed that our infrastruture should strengthen these networks that cut across state boundaries more so than it currently does. “Federal policy should refocus on help these nascent [urban] archipelagos prosper, and helping other emerge…collectively forming a lattice of productive metro-regions efficently through better highways, railways, and fiber-optic cables: a United City-States of America.”
Questions to Ponder: What political obstacles would this proposal receive? Demographically, who would support/oppose this type of restructuring? How would this impact the economic geographies of the United States?
Tags: op-ed, regions, urban, transportation, economic, planning.
GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION 