What is Geography???

I would define geography as

Name:__________ Date: August 28, 2013

What is Geography?“Geo” – Latin for Earth

“graphy” – Greek for graph or map

Geography: a perspective; a way of analyzing virtually everything that is distributed across space.

Three Progressive Steps

1. Spatial distributions – by asking who, what, when and where.

2. Spatial processes – by asking why and how

3. Prediction and decision making – by asking what if and how can

History vs. Geography????Immanuel Kant, 18th Century German idealist

philosopher – categorized human knowledge into subject areas.

History and geography were ways of thinking.

History – a perspective that looks at change over time

Geography – a perspective that assesses change over space

****Because space changes over time, the historical perspective is an integral part of geography.****

“In our human experience, we have found that virtually everything is connected through space, and nothing happens in isolation. What the geographic perspective offers is a way of looking at this interconnectedness. Would you expect that the American passion for eating frog legs would lead to health problems in Bangladesh? Or that providing Egyptians with hydroelectric power would decrease their agricultural yields? Applying the geographical perspective, which assess all relevant information, to such seemingly unconnected problems shows us that these things are in fact connected. The benefit of using this methodology in everyday life is that it helps us to avoid the short-sighted decisions that would cause such problems.” - Brown

Favorite Place

My favorite place

Characteristics:

Five Themes of Geography

Location

Place

Movement

Human/Environment Interaction

Region

Five Themes of Geography

1. Location - place where a particular object or point exists.Absolute location – exact

location, use of coordinates

Relative location – how it’s related to other places, to locate a place relative to other places/landmarks.

Five Themes of Geography

2. Place – includes those features and characteristics that give an area its own identity or personality.

3. Movement – The Way people, products, information, and ideas move from one place to another

Five Themes of Geography

4. Human-Environment interaction – how people adapt to the environment and how they change it.

5. Region – an area defined by similar characteristics.

Six Essential Elements

1. World in Spatial Terms – the way in which geographic interests are arranged or organized across space

2. Places and Regions – to show how identities and lives of individuals and people are rooted in particular places.

Six Essential Elements

3. Physical Systems – study of the physical earth and how physical processes interact with plant and animal life to create, sustain, and modify ecosystems.

4. Human Systems – “man” land – shows how people are central to geography in that human activities help shape the Earth’s surface, human settlements and structures.

Six Essential Elements

5. Environment and Society – how or why people change their surroundings.

6. The Uses of Geography – shows how the knowledge of geography enables people to develop an understanding of the relationships between people, places, and environments over time. Earth as it was, is, and might be.