Module 2 Lesson 2.4: Themes of Location & Human-Environment Interaction

Five Themes of Human Geography

Human Geography explores several fundamental themes to understand the relationship between people and their environment. These themes provide a framework for geographical inquiry.

Place

This theme addresses the character of a location. Key questions include:

  • What is the place like?

  • What kind of place is it?

  • What image does the place conjure?

Regions

Regions involve the study of areas with similar characteristics or those that are distinct. Considerations include:

  • What regions are similar/different?

  • What is unique to a particular region?

  • Why are regions different?

Human-Environment Interaction

This theme focuses on the dynamic relationship between humans and their natural surroundings, exploring how people adapt to, modify, and depend on the environment. (Detailed explanation below).

Location

Location is about position on the Earth's surface and is explored in three distinct ways:

Absolute Location

  • Also known as mathematical location, it refers to the exact spot of a place, typically defined by coordinates.

  • Utilizes latitude and longitude, which form the global grid of parallels and meridians.

    • Latitude is the angular distance of a point on the Earth's surface, measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds, north or south from the equator.

    • The Global Positioning System (GPS) and other coordinate systems are practical applications.

  • According to Fellmann et al. (2008), absolute location is "unique to each described place, is independent of any other characteristic or observation about that place, and has obvious value in the legal description of places, in measuring the distance separating places, or in finding directions between places on the earth's surface."

  • Longitude is critically important for the calculation of time, and the inability to measure it accurately was a major impediment to early exploration and discovery.

Relative Location

  • Describes the position of something in comparison to something else.

  • It is often expressed through landmarks, time, direction, or distance from one place to another, associating places spatially.

  • Typical responses to questions like "Where are you?" or "How far is it?" often involve relative location.

  • This concept highlights spatial interconnection and interdependence.

  • Fellmann et al. (2008) state that "relative location tells us that people, things, and places exist not in a spatial vacuum but in a world of physical and cultural characteristics that differ from place to place."

  • Example: A map showing train stations (Stabekk, Lysaker, Skøyen, Oslo S, etc.) relative to each other rather than precise coordinates.

Cognitive Location

  • A person's personal, subjective perception of their own world.

  • Involves Mental Maps, which are internal images we create to make sense of spatial arrangements. These mental maps aid in navigation, organizing information, and creating meaning.

  • As stated by Downs & Stea (quoted in Kitchin, 1994), "Cognitive mapping is a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of the phenomena in [their] everyday spatial environment."

  • Artistic Examples of Cognitive Maps: The New Yorker covers by Saul Steinberg ("View of the World from 9th Avenue"), Barry Blitt ("A Room with a View"), and The Economist's "How China sees the world" by Jon Berkeley illustrate how different perspectives drastically alter the perceived importance and proximity of global places. These works often communicate a critique of provincialism or self-centeredness.

  • Activity: Creating a mental map of one's campus or local area helps understand this concept practically.

Movement

This theme examines the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Key questions include:

  • What moves?

  • What prevents movement?

Human-Environment Interaction: In-Depth

This theme forms the foundation for geographic inquiry, deeply concerning how humans adapt, modify, and depend on the environment.

  • Humans have consistently interacted with natural systems, leading to the formation and development of coupled human and natural systems.

    • A diagram illustrating this shows two boxes for "HUMAN SYSTEMS" and "NATURAL SYSTEMS," with "COUPLING" processes connecting them, and "condition" labels beneath each system and process.

  • While human-biophysical environment interaction has existed throughout history, its scope and intensity have dramatically increased since the Industrial Revolution.

Examples of Human-Environment Interaction

  • Land Use Transformation: New housing subdivisions and agricultural fields (e.g., Chandler, Arizona). Clearing land for cul-de-sac developments (e.g., Miami Area, Florida). Planned waterfront communities built on wetlands (e.g., Harborwalk, Galveston, TX), which are vulnerable to future environmental changes.

  • Resource Management: Pivot irrigators in deserts (e.g., Strauss Area, New Mexico) demonstrating water use for agriculture in arid regions. Flower fields (e.g., Carlsbad, California) as an aesthetic and economic use of land.

  • Large-Scale Alterations: The Colorado River Basin, with its extensive dam system (Hoover Dam, Davis Dam, Parker Dam, Glen Canyon Dam, Navajo Dam, etc.), illustrates massive human modification for water management, hydroelectric power, and agriculture, impacting states like California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado.

  • Waste Management: Garbage barges in New York Harbor and trucks emptying waste into landfills (e.g., Washington D.C. Area) highlight the environmental impact of human consumption and disposal.

The Visible Imprint of Human Activity: Reading the Landscape

Geographers are keen on understanding the visible imprint of human activity on the physical environment. The landscape offers clues to the cultural practices, values, and priorities of its inhabitants.

  • As Lewis (1979) notes, "Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form."

  • Thought Experiment: Examining images like the heavily commercialized highway interchange in Breezewood, Pennsylvania, prompts questions about what we see and how we interpret such human-altered landscapes.

Meinig's "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene"

D.W. Meinig (1979) argues that even when looking at the same landscape, people "will not—we cannot—see the same landscape" because interpretation is subjective, influenced by what "lies within our heads" in addition to what "lies before our eyes."

Here are ten ways to interpret landscapes:

1. Landscape as Nature

  • Focus: Removing humans from the scene, imagining an area in its pristine, natural state.

  • Emotion: Often expressed as nostalgia or regret for what has been lost.

2. Landscape as Habitat

  • Focus: Viewing "every landscape" as a "piece of Earth" that is home to humans, seeing the domestication and reworking of nature.

  • Ideology: The earth is seen as a "garden of humankind."

  • Question: In what ways have humans adapted to nature?

3. Landscape as Artifact

  • Focus: Seeing "everywhere the work of man [humans]," where nature serves as a "stage or a platform."

  • Perspective: Humans are conquerors of nature.

  • Evidence: Alteration of soils (plowing, cropping), forests (burning, chopping), streams (channelizing, damning), etc. This interpretation highlights human modification rather than adaptation.

4. Landscape as System

  • Focus: Perceiving landscape as "a dynamic equilibrium of interacting processes," where the viewer sees "processes not products."

  • Scientific View: For scientists, it is "an immense and intricate system of systems" (e.g., a river is part of the hydrological cycle).

  • Mathematical Representation (as scientists might see it):

    • \nabla \cdot \mathbf{E} = \frac{\rho}{\varepsilon_0}

    • \nabla \cdot \mathbf{B} = 0

    • \nabla \times \mathbf{E} = -\frac{\partial \mathbf{B}}{\partial t}

    • \nabla \times \mathbf{B} = \mu0 \mathbf{J} + \mu0 \varepsilon_0 \frac{\partial \mathbf{E}}{\partial t}

    • f(x) = a + b\cos(x)

    • C6H{12}O6 + 6O2 \rightarrow 6CO2 + 6H2O

    • R{\mu\nu} - \frac{1}{2}Rg{\mu\nu} = \frac{8\pi G}{c^4} T_{\mu\nu}

5. Landscape as Problem

  • Focus: Viewing landscape "as a condition needing correction," eliciting "wrath and alarm" as a "mirror of the ills of our society."

  • Approach: Often seen as a design problem, where viewers imagine a redesigned landscape to achieve more pleasing harmony and efficiency, addressing issues like congestion, danger, incompatible uses, or aesthetic clutter.

6. Landscape as Wealth

  • Focus: Examining every scene with the "eyes of an appraiser," assigning monetary value to everything visible.

  • Ideology: Land is primarily a form of capital.

  • Perspective: A house is seen in terms of square-footage, bedrooms, and bathrooms; a business building by frontage, capacity, storage space, delivery access. Age is considered for depreciation, obsolescence, fashion, and prestige rather than history.

    • Examples: "LAND ACQUISITION," "Property," "Nicaragua Real Estate," "Emerald Investment."

7. Landscape as Ideology

  • Focus: Interpreting the landscape as a symbol of the values, governing ideas, and underlying philosophies of a culture.

  • Perspective: The scene offers "clues" to how American interpretations of freedom, individualism, competition, utility, power, modernity, expansion, and progress are manifested.

  • Significance: It emphasizes that changing the landscape significantly requires changing the ideas that created and sustained it.

  • Key Concept: Croire, Voir, Faire:

    • $Croire$ (to believe): Faith, ideology, or cultural frameworks shape perception.

    • $Voir$ (to see): Vision of landscape is never neutral, guided by belief systems.

    • $Faire$ (to make/do): Landscapes are materially transformed and maintained through human action based on those visions.

8. Landscape as History

  • Focus: Seeing "all that lies before his [their] eyes" as "a complex cumulative record of the work of nature and man [humans] in this particular place."

  • Perspective: The landscape is "a great exhibit of consequences," prompting questions about the past and the people who came before us.

  • Concept: Palimpsest: Like an ancient manuscript where original writing was erased and reused, a landscape can be seen as an object, place, or area reflecting its layered history.

9. Landscape as Place

  • Focus: Recognizing every landscape as "a locality, an individual piece in the infinitely varied mosaic of the earth," seeking out its uniqueness.

  • Impact: This view insists that individual lives are profoundly affected by the particular localities in which people live, making it inconceivable for someone to be the same person in a different place.

10. Landscape as Aesthetic

  • Focus: Less on identity and function, more on the artistic qualities and attractiveness of the landscape.

  • Perspective: "Landscape becomes a mystery holding meanings we strive to grasp but cannot reach…" It lies "utterly beyond science," connecting individual souls to an "ineffable and infinite world."

Meinig (1979) concludes that while we may agree on observing the same elements (houses, roads, trees, hills) in terms of number, form, diversity, and color, these facts only gain meaning through association and fitting together "according to some coherent body of ideas." Thus, any landscape is composed not just of what is seen but also of what is conceptualized.`,