Human Geography: Making Sense of Planet Earth

Human Geography: Making Sense of Planet Earth presents human geography’s unique perspective. Human geography focuses on the distribution of places and human traits across the globe and their connection to one another. Presented by acclaimed geographer Alec Murphy this incredible series shot in HD reviews significant discoveries, individuals, and theories that make human geography a cutting edge science in the 21st Century.

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Title ID 77-HG
Science, Agriculture, Core Science, Earth Science, Social Studies, Geography, Economics
8 Programs
10 Supplemental Files
10th Grade through Post Secondary
Published by Ambrose Video Publishing Inc./Centre Communications

Included Programs

Supplemental Files

The Tools of Human GeographyRunning time is 29 minutes

Alec Murphy introduces the techniques and tools of human geography that human geographers have developed for understanding the ever-changing human landscape. It is this knowledge that is proving to be absolutely critical for success in the complex, globally interconnected world of the 21st century.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: What is Human Geography: One of the pioneers in human geography was Carl Sauer, and the human geographical perspective is really what we call the spatial perspective and allows us to educate ourselves on the complexity and interconnectiveness of the global system from landforms to the economy.
Chapter 2: Maps and Human Geography: Many of the tools used in physical geography, such as maps, are used in human geography to examine such things as population and population density.
Chapter 3: Importance of Scale in Human Geography: Scale is one of the fundamental issues in the analysis of space and can help people understand and solve environmental sustainability issues.
Chapter 4: Formal, Functional and Vernacular Regions: For geographers there are basically three types of regions - the vernacular region, functional region, and formal region.
Chapter 5: Fieldwork in Human Geography: Human geography's fundamental interests in the places and patterns created by humans on the Earth's surface.

Population Distribution and MigrationRunning time is 29 minutes

Program two focuses on the most fundamental aspect of the human cultural landscape: the distribution and concentration of people across the planet. At the same time it examines how population distribution has changed over time, and why.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Population Distribution: Population density depends upon factors like topography and climates such as temperate climates.
Chapter 2: History of Population Growth: Surplus agriculture is a major reason for population growth and why people conglomerate.
Chapter 3: The Demographic Transition Model: U.S. demographer Warren S. Thompson was a pioneer in examining the change in birth and death rates of a country over time as it changed from an agricultural society to a more urbanized and more industrialized society and the resulting population growth with the diffusion of people from place to place.
Chapter 4: Thomas Robert Malthus Prediction: Thomas Robert Malthus and his Malthusian population theory did not account for the 20th century's Green Revolution.
Chapter 5: The Three Types of Migration: Migration, the movement of immigrants from place to place is inherently geographic and can be a cyclical movement or a periodic movement.
Chapter 6: Push and Pull Factors of Migration: Push and pull factors of migration can explain out-migration.
Chapter 7: Migratory Counterflows: The migration of people from one country to another, such as the brain drain from third world countries to the U.S. can also have counterflows that show there is a tendency for population systems to equilibriate over time.
Chapter 8: Future Population Growth: The rate of population growth has slowed since the middle of the 20th century but the population still growing toward 10 billion people by 2050.

Understanding Human CultureRunning time is 29 minutes

Humans are among the most social animals on the planet. We need a shared system of language, beliefs, norms and values to survive and mature from birth to adulthood. In this program, Alec Murphy investigates human culture and how geography helps everyone make sense of the cultural landscape.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Culture and Place: Culture, place, cultures, local culture, Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and others have written books on place and local culture such as the Cherokee in North Carolina.
Chapter 2: Folk Culture: Cajuns in Louisiana and Chinese Americans in America's Chinatowns are examples of folk cultures which are different than popular culture.
Chapter 3: Popular Culture: Popular culture is what makes people feel that they belong to the whole world in some way shape or form.
Chapter 4: What is Diffusion: Diffusion is important in cultural geography and in understanding the movement of culture traits.
Chapter 5: The Three Types of Diffusion: Geographers have identified and defined three types of diffusion - contagious diffusion, hierarchical diffusion and, stimulus diffusion.
Chapter 6: Language: Language is part of humans' cultural heritage and language distribution is noted through language families such as Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Dravidian and Niger-Congo.
Chapter 7: Religion: Religion, such as Muslim, Protestant Catholic, Islam, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Shinto as well as their unifying rituals are important to population centers.
Chapter 8: Race and Ethnicity: Race and ethnicity serve as focal points of identity for groups such as Blacks, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians and can be part of push pull factors in migration.

Political BoundariesRunning time is 29 minutes

Isolationism, colonialism, regionalism and imperialism are all geographically inspired political ideas. They are examples of different ways of thinking about how the world has been, or is, divided politically. Human geography can make sense of why the world has been divided politically in the past and how it is divided politically today.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Political Power and Territory: The geopolitical landscape is the study of territory, political power, power, strategic landscapes and authority, and can include such ideas as the old theory of Social Darwinism as it applied to clans and tribes.
Chapter 2: The Rise of Ancient Empires: In most ancient empires, the allegiance of the people within the empire was to the ruler - the Emperor, King, or Queen and in feudal warfare, kingdoms rose and fell with remarkable speed.
Chapter 3: Emergence of Nations: Fixed boundaries and national loyalties defined a new type of state, or nation state that emerged from the volkgeist of empires.
Chapter 4: Political Boundaries Make their Appearance: Today there are urban or municipal boundaries, country boundaries, state boundaries, country boundaries, even boundaries around supranational blocs like the European Union, but it was the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that created the Westphalian world and marked a transition from a world of large multinational empires to states with strong national identities and sovereignty, creating political boundaries around territories.
Chapter 5: The Territorial Evolution of the United States: The 240 year history of the U.S. is the story of America's search for a national identity.
Chapter 6: Distinguishing Between Nation and State: The difference between nation and state can be examined by looking at the United Kingdom, which includes Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland, or by looking at the multi-nation, Soviet Union or Soviet Empire, or the Jewish nation and Jewish state.
Chapter 7: The Creation of New Geopolitical Entities: Geographers examine how new Geopolitical entities can be shaped out of old empires, and they are also interested in political organizations and the reconfiguration of political maps.

Agriculture and Rural Land UseRunning time is 29 minutes

As the human population has grown to over 7 billion people, nothing has had to change more than the geography of agriculture. Program five studies the primary relationship between people and the cultivation of land and how agriculture has developed to sustain Earth's incredible, ever-growing population.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Global Distribution of Agriculture: The cultivation of food, the diffusion of seeds and the domestication of animals is part of the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones.
Chapter 2: First Agricultural Revolution: Geographers like Carl Sauer have theories about the first agricultural revolution, which began at a number of different places, such as the Andes and Southeast Asia with vegetative planting, seed crops, seed agriculture, cultivated plants, domesticated animals, grain and other food.
Chapter 3: Primary Regions of Agricultural Diffusion: Regions of agricultural diffusion and different foods include the Mediterranean basin and Mesoamerica, where the corn, or maize cultures, flourished.
Chapter 4: Second Agricultural Revolution: Subsistence agriculture gave way to the second agricultural revolution, and during the Industrial revolution, mechanization made food production and transportation as described by Von Thunen easier.
Chapter 5: The Green Revolution and Geopolitical Policy: The Green Revolution and the genetic manipulation of food has led to mass diffusion of foo distribution and food consumption.

Industrialization and Economic DevelopmentRunning time is 29 minutes

Economic growth, wealth creation, outsourcing, economic inequality, resource distribution, and the uneven penetration of the global economy are phenomena that have a strong geographic base. In program 6 Alec Murphy looks at how human geography can make sense of the economic world in the global economy of the 21st Century.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Economic Diversity: Economic diversity across the world, such as a market place in Northern Africa or one in Mumbai India, has led geographers to look at the spatial distribution of economic factors like resource availability, and labor costs and the interplay of these factors in different scales from the global economy to local economies.
Chapter 2: Gross Domestic Product: How economic development is measured and what it means are questions commonly addressed by looking at, GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, and differ from place to place.
Chapter 3: United States Economic History: How economies are always changing can be seen by looking at the United State sofa America's economic history
Chapter 4: Economic Development: Classically, economic development is associated with technology and technologies and goes back to the industrialization of the Industrial Revolution, creating unique characteristics such as the command economy of the U.S.S.R. or the market economy of the U.S., but economist Walt Rostow, put forth an evolutionary model of economic growth and development that argues that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages and includes things such as infrastructure.
Chapter 5: Natural Resources: Great civilizations have risen precisely because they are in a spatial relationship to other places that have natural resources that need to be exchanged.
Chapter 6: Commodity Chain: How the organization of manufacturing plays out across the planet can be seen by taking a look at how products develop through what is termed a "commodity chain."
Chapter 7: Economics and Geographic Place: In the emerging 21st century economy geographers and economists are beginning to understand why Geographic place plays a big role in the agglomeration of an industry.
Chapter 8: Redefining Economic Development: The development of an urban industrial society in the modern global economy has socio-economic consequences.

Cities and Urban Land UseRunning time is 29 minutes

In 1800 only 3% of the world's population lived in cities. Now in the 21st century more than half of humanity lives in urban areas. Program seven examines where cities are located, how are they organized, and what are they like and how by answering these questions we can begin to understand how to live on a planet of global cities.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Urban Landscapes: Cities or urban landscapes have central places and marginal places, where people sort themselves out in space based on their needs to have access to these places.
Chapter 2: Origins of Urbanization: Archaeologists, like Carl Sauer have identified five hearths or places of origin for urbanization, all with their own pattern of spatial organization, which came out of cultural hearths which allowed the first urban places to have stratification and specialization.
Chapter 3: Urbanization Diffusion: Examples of urban diffusion of cities, like Athens, can be found in Mesopotamia, the Nile valley and Mesoamerica with the Anasazi and the mound builders.
Chapter 4: Feudalism: Feudalism had its own kind of stratification, but it is from feudalism that the mercantile city as well as industrial cities emerged.
Chapter 5: The Industrial Revolution: Industrial Revolution brought on specialization with manufacturing and hence the creation of manufacturing cities.
Chapter 6: Urban Land Use Models: Human geographer have several urban land use models, including central place theory, the Burgess Concentric Zone Model, Von Thunen Model, the Sectoral Mode and the, Harris Ullman Model.
Chapter 7: Urban Spaces: Central Place Theory holds true in U.S. urban spaces, or metropolitan areas, and can be seen in the way immigrants groups form small enclaves, like Chinatowns, in urban land use planning, zoning systems and open space.
Chapter 8: Future Urbanization: Most of human life is already concentrated in urban areas, and the planet is already over 65% urban, while the rest of the areas urbanization is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Confronting Future ChallengesRunning time is 29 minutes

In the 21st century, the Earth's surface is being reshaped and reorganized on a scale unprecedented at any other time in the planet's history. It is a change directly caused by humans. In program eight Alec Murphy investigates why geographical concepts and insights are critical to the effort to confront the challenges of our ever-changing planet as its population grows to a staggering 10 billion people in the 21st century.

Chapter List

Chapter 1: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences: Geographical thinking can help us understand natural disaster such as Hurricane Katrina.
Chapter 2: Species Extinction and Biodiversity Loss: Industrialization is a threat biodiversity in biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon rainforest and can lead to destruction of ecosystems and species extinction in those places.
Chapter 3: The Anthropocene Era: Anthropocene Era or Anthropocene is the modern era of geological time in which humans are a major agent of change in our Earth environment, affecting systems such as the hydrological cycle.
Chapter 4: Climate Change: The Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of the Anthropocene, changing the distribution of key factors such as wealth and access to resources and creating climate changes and globalization.
Chapter 5: Globalization: Globalization has created exploitive economies in different places.
Chapter 6: Economic Inequality: Economic inequality can be seen in the access to, natural resources, such as oil and gas reserves, and by examining the Gina coefficient.
Chapter 7: Food Production and Distribution: Inequalities between haves and have nots, migration, urban sprawl, access to food, hunger, the hunger index, mono-cropping, climate change, food deserts, the luxury diet and what is sustainable and what is not are among the forces shaping the planet in the 2st century, forces that can be analyzed and understood by collecting and cataloging information through new geospatial technologies.

Educator's Guide For Human Geography: Making Sense of Planet Earth: A guide for college teachers for Human Geography: Making Sense of Planet Earth
MARC Records for HG: MARC records for the series Human Geography: Making Sense of Planet Earth
Transcription for The Tools of Human Geography
Transcription for Population Distribution and Migration
Transcription for Understanding Human Culture
Transcription for Political Boundaries
Transcription for Agriculture and Rural Land Use
Transcription for Industrialization and Economic Development
Transcription for Cities and Urban Land Use
Transcription for Confronting Future Challenges

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