Chapter Outline

Geography

Geography: the study of Earth as a human environment where people and places interact and impact one another

Regional Organization

Earth consists of oceans, seas, and seven continents. These bodies are located within hemispheres:

• Location in the Northern and Southern hemispheres is measured by lines of latitude.
• Location in the Eastern and Western hemispheres is measured by lines of longitude.
• Regions within any of the hemispheres are usually described in terms of their physiographic, or natural, characteristics. However, regions can also be distinguished by cultural or economic differences.

Physical Systems and How Humans Affect Them

Humans have had a significant, and to a large part, threatening, impact on the natural world. The human activities that affect the environment include the following:

• energy consumption
• technological development
• food needs and production
• population growth and movement
• national and international trade
• uncontrolled industrialization
• industrial waste

Spoiled land and water and depletion of the ozone layer are some of the dangerous results of such activities.

Human Systems and Their Relationship to Environments

The challenges and resources that any particular physical location offers the group that inhabits it determine the character of the group and its set of customs and beliefs.

• The way of life that a group of people shares is called its culture.
• A cultural group whose way of life has been a response to the environment in which it has lived, whether desert, mountain, islands, tundra, or tropical forest, is called indigenous.

In the twenty-first century it is more and more difficult to find people who remain truly indigenous since human history has become largely a history of migrations, or movements of groups from one location to another.

• Circle migration involves people moving from one location to another and then back to the original location.
• Chain migration is the permanent movement of a group to a new place as a result of change or lack of accommodation in the original location.

Places Made by People

• Cities and civilizations are purely human innovations. As a result of the construction of cities, a more sophisticated level of social life developed. Civilizations are known for their wide diversity of professions, art, and architecture.



• In contrast to the dazzling and fascinating environments of cities, are the gruesome and horrifying concentration camps, also created by humans. These camps have been the tools of genocide, or the systematic destruction of an entire cultural or ethnic population.