The idea that the physical environment directly impacted human physical and social evolution. Generally accepted from the 1800s through 1930s.
Environmental determinism
What enabled the academic community to legitimate Eurocentric views of "primitive" cultures, particularly those of lower latitudes?
Environmental determinism
What climates were blamed for creating people's characteristic of dark skin and a "lazy disposition."
Tropical and subtropical climates
What British creation reflects expatriates' fear of becoming like the locals due to warm climate?
Hill Stations
How do human geographers feel about environmental determinism today?
Believe environment does have an impact upon human activity, but not sole variable.
What is the new emphasis on in human geography?
human agency
The idea that we have a role in shaping our own activity and that we also have a large impact in shaping the physical environment.
Human agency
How has human agency been a bad thing?
Climate change, habitat destruction, and massive species extinction.
Where must change come from in terms of sustainability?
The bottom-up.
Whether economic, social and environmental systems of the community provide a healthy, productive, meaningful life for all community residents.
Sustainability
Most definitions of sustainability address:
Living within specified limits, recognizing connections among the economy, society, and environment (fracking), and equitable distribution of resources and opportunities.
How is there too much focus on short term goals?
We promote jobs in boom and bust activities like drilling and mining.
Flourishing of all people and the ecosystems of which they are a part.
Sustain
To improve or bring all people to a more advanced state without increasing energy and resource consumption.
Development
A group of people who live and interact within a specific geographical area
Community
The size or geographical extent of the area being studied.
Scale
What is an intensification connectivity between local and global scales?
Glocalization.
What is an example of glocalization?
Where we buy our groceries, such as Wal-Mart.
The production, distribution, and consumption of material goods and services that people consume.
Economy
NAtural, social, human, and built capital from which a community relies for continued existence.
Community capital
Resources/ecosystem services
Natural capital
Using people as laborers
Human capital
Communicative connections between people
social capital
Buildings, factories, and machinery that people make
Built capital
The population that can be supported indefinitely by its supporting systems
Carrying capacity
Fairness, whether all people in a community have similar rights, opportunities, and access to community capital.
Equity
Fairness between current and future members of a community.
Inter-generational equity
Comprised of flows of energy and matter through space.
Systems
Some systems are homeostatic, but what is more the norm?
Disturbance and disequilibrium. Invasive insects defoliate trees, for example.
What does disturbance lead to?
Renewal as old and new relationships between system components emerge. When gypsy moths kill oak forests, maples often grow in their place.
Characteristics of deeply integrated systems that appear external to the system itself.
Emergent properties.
The recycling of matter and energy to form new kinds of living matter.
Ecological metabolism
What results as energy is dissipated into the environment?
Entropy
The productivity of biomass is considered its _________
Trophic level
What cycle is dynamic?
Carbon cycle
Where are there vast resevoirs of carbon?
Crust, oceans, and forests
What does deforestation do, in terms of carbon?
Releases it and removes future capacity to absorb excess atmospheric carbon
Can we plant enough trees to fix all of the carbon we are releasing?
Probably no. We need to curb our consumption of coal and petroleum.
What fish are invasive species?
Carp
What out-compete native species when ecosystems are altered?
Generalists
Name two types of generalists
Rats and carp
Fruit bats and their relationship with tree fruits is a kind of....
Coevolution. They feed on the tree fruits, and also pollinate the flowers.
What are two examples of habitat fragmentation?
Suburbia and deforestation
Why are deer thriving today?
They like to live on the edges of forests. With deforestation, there are many small forests for them to take over.
Spaces with similar distributions of climate, growth patterns, and vegetation.
Biomes
Type of forests frequent in upper latitudes
Boreal forests
Some of the most productive biomes on the planet, but dying out at alarming rates.
Coral reefs
True or false. Coral reefs could completely disappear in the next 40 years.
True
Why is the connectivity of inland freshwaters a bad thing?
Allows foreign species to migrate easily, and biodiversity is lost with changing water quality.
