Cultural Geography Final Exam Prep Flashcards
Seeds
After water and oxygen, seeds are about as crucial to human life as it goes.
Seeds provide hope for future harvests.
Agriculture
The cultivation of domesticated crops and the raising of domesticated animals
Swiddon Cultivation
Slash and burn cultivation
A type of agriculture characterized by land rotation in which temporary clearings are used for several years and then abandoned to be replaced by new clearings; also known as slash and burn agriculture.
Swiddon comes from an old english term meaning “burned clearing”
Neoplantations
A large corporate run plantation
often displaces peasant farmers
Domesticated Plant
A plant deliberately planted and tended to by humans that is genetically distinct from its wild ancestors as a result of selective breeding
Carl Sauer
Argued that domestication did not happen in response to hunger. Said first farmers were sedentary.
** Green Revolution **
Recent introduction of high-yield hybrid crops and chemical fertilizers and pesticides into traditional Asian agricultural systems most notably paddy rice farming.
Increased production and ecological damage.
Results in artificially high yields.
Von Thunen Model
a core-periphery model used to map food distribution
** Agribusiness **
Highly mechanized, large scale farming, usually under corporate ownership.
Uses conventional growing methods vs organic methods.
Highly dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Monoculture
Raising of only one crop on a huge tract of land in agribusiness
GM (Genetically Modified)
Genetically modified crops
Plants whose genetic characteristics have been altered through recombinant DNA technology.
Soybeans and corn are often genetically modified
Sustainable Agriculture
The survival of a land-use system for centuries or millennia without distraction of the environmental base, allowing generation after generation to continue to live there.
** Organic **
Organic Agriculture
A form of farming that relies on manuring, mulching, and biological pest control and rejects the use of synthetic fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and genetically modified crops.
Biofuel
Any form of energy derived from biological matter, increasingly used in reference to replacements for fossil fuels in internal combustion engines, industrial processes, and the heating and cooling of buildings.
Middle East Physical Features
World’s largest oil reserves - OPEC
only 1% of the world’s fresh water
South Asia & Oceania
BRICS - Countries aligned to counter the power of the United States: Brazil, Russia, India, China, S. Africa
Yangzte - Longest river in Asia
Micronesia - Islands east of the Philippines
Melanesia - includes Fiji, Fiji is the least aid dependent & most developed
Polynesia - Islands east of New Zealand
Primary Industry
An industry engaged in the extraction of natural resources such as agriculture, lumbering, mining.
Getting resources out of the ground.
Secondary Industry
Industry engaged in processing raw materials into finished products - Manufacturing
** Industrial Revolution **
Began in England in the 1700 with machines replacing human hands in the fashioning of finished products rendering the word “manufacturing” (meaning made by hand) technically obsolete.
Coal helped power this revolution.
England tried to hold a monopoly on it, but it got away, first to Germany.
Japan is the first non-western industrialized nation
** Deindustrialization **
The decline of primary and secondary industry, accompanied by a rise in the service sectors of the industrial economy.
Companies try to find cheaper places to produce goods.
TNC / MNC
Transnational Corporation / Multinational Corporation
Companies that have international production, marketing, and management facilities
Postindustrial Phase
The phase of society characterized by the dominance of the service sector of economic activity.
Dominance of the services sectors.
Outsource
The physical separation of some economic activities from the main production facility, usually for the purpose of employing cheaper labor
Moving production offshore to save costs
** Resource Crisis **
The rapid depletion of natural resources resulting in serious environmental distraction.
Example: Global warming - the pronounced climatic warming of the earth that has occurred since about 1920 and particularly since the 1970s. Scientists with increasing consensus regard the burning of fossil fuels as a significant factor in global warming.
ESI
Environmental Sustainability Index
A multiple criterion index of how well countries are doing in trying to achieve an ecological balance that might be sustained for centuries.
Ecotourism
Responsible travel that does not harm ecosystems or the well-being of local people.
Megacities
Term that refers to particularly large urban areas.
Cities of 10 million or more people.
W. Christaller
Developed the central place theory, a way to model how cities organize themselves.
** City Models **
Hydraulic Civilization - a civilization based on large scale irrigation.
Religious Factors - Civilization in which the priest class exercises control.
Political Factors - Civilization in which political leadership organizes labor forces.
** Cosmomagical Cities / Axis Mundi **
Cosmomagical Cities - types of cities laid out in accordance with religious principles, characteristic of very early cities, particularly in china.
Trying to ensure harmony.
Cities as a microcosm of the universe.
Axis Mundi - Symbolic center of cosmomagical cities, often demarcated by a large vertical structure.
** World / Global Cities **
Cities that are control centers of the global economy.
Financial centers such as New York, London, Tokyo
Globalizing Cities
Cities being shaped by the new global economy and culture.
Often a large city in an emerging country.
Barriadas
Illegal housing settlements, usually made up of temporary shelters, that surround large cities.
Often referred to as squatter settlements
Apartheid
In South Africa, a policy of racial discrimination and segregation against non-european groups.
Characterized by the Population Registration Act and Group Areas Act.
** Fast vs Slow Worlds **
Fast World - More developed, advanced, wealthy. The fast world is at the forefront of instantaneous global communication. Is also fully wired for the internet and adaptable to rapid shifts in global trends of investment, trade, production, and consumption.
Slow World - Undeveloped and poor. Slow world consists of hollowed out rural landscapes, declining abandoned manufacturing zones, and slums and shantytowns. Computers and internet access priced out of reach of most of the inhabitants.
Glocalization
The interaction between global and local forces.
The process by which global forces of change interact with local cultures, altering both in the process.
Change comes from both ides.
Internet
“Everywhere, yet nowhere in particular”
System of fiber optics, largely city bound
Global Tourist
Is or soon will be the largest industry in the world, second only to oil as the most important source of revenue for the Third World.
Carolyn Cartier
Peter Dicken
Johnson, Taylor & Watts
All described ways of looking at globalization
Cartier - Globalization is most closely associated with the transnational activities of large corporations
Dicken - globalization processes are linking far-flung places around the world in a complex integrated system for the production transport and marketing of many everyday commodities
Johnson, Taylor & Watts - under globalization, activities and outcomes do not really cross borders, these processes operate as if borders were not there.
** Six Features of Globalization **
- globalization involves global interactions among cultural, political, economic, environmental factors
- globalization is characterized by relentless movement - a constant flow of money, people, information, ideas, goods, and services throughout the world
- effects of globalization are felt unevenly in different places at different times
- transnational corporations are the primary drivers of globalization
- local and global-scale movements have formed to oppose globalization, hoping to limit or mitigate its effects.
- globalization is qualitatively different.
** Neolocalism **
Desire to reembrace the uniqueness and authenticity of place, in response to globalization.
Example: Backlash against walmart
