Human Interest

The impact of the Three Gorges Dam on the residents upstream is amazing. I cannot imagine anything like this happening in the US, mostly because of the impact on the people both upstream and downstream. Ecological damage from this dam may not phase the Chinese government, but I think any North American or European government would shudder at the thought of the backlash among their citizens this would create.

Three Gorges damn in China is the largest dam ever constructed. This was created to save on power by creating hydroelectric power for the people of the land. One of the issues with this was the the flooding of the land up streams displacing millions of people. It created a larger up stream area and very small down stream. A lot of the people that lived up stream had to be relocated further inland and faced changing climatif weather. The banks of the river are carved out between what seems like mountainous regions so as you move more uphill the weather and temperature will be a whole new category of life (Depending on how far you relocated).

unit 1 and 4

Unit 4

What do these say about the world?

Un vrai plaisir

This shows how even small populations can make a big impact on the world from the changes in urbanization.

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Summer reading KQ1: How has the Earth's environment changed over time?

Human-Environment Interaction in GIFs.

This is a great demonstration of human impacts on ecosystems. 7 locations in the world show dramatic change over time.

APHG-Unit 1

This article is interesting from a geographic and social perspective, because the overhead pictures show just how much we alter the land with our prisons.  What is really interesting is how the US has less than five percent of the world's population but has one quarter of its prisoners.  Because of this, it can be inferred that the country has many prisons.  Yet, what astonished me about the prisons is that they seem to be out in the middle of nowhere.  The buildings seem expansive on the landscape and dominate it.  It just makes me wonder, how much does the United States spend on building and up-keeping these complexes.

This article explores a graphic representation of the quantity and volume of prisons throughout the United States. The project has no figures, statistics, or words - the pictures stand on their own as statements about the growing amount and size of prisons across the country. The photos show many rural prisons that house prisoners from urban areas, which changes both the areas where the prisons are and the areas that the inmates came from.

The photos are an intriguing visual of the money and materials put into prison systems in the United States. The photographer (Josh Begley) noted that upon seeing all the images together, the thing that stood out to him was that there were baseball fields in almost all of them. He says, "the baseball field mimicked the form about these buildings as well. There was something very American about it when I first saw it."

It's surprising to see how much material is necessary to, as the article described it, "warehouse" people. While prisons do more than just house inmates, seeing a visual representation of all the money put into prisons in the United States makes me wonder whether it could be better spent on reformed versions of prisons, rather than on maintaining the ones we already have and the new ones just like those that are currently being constructed.

- K

These picture demonstrate the power of satellite imagery and technology perfectly. While I am amazed by the sheer beauty in spatial organization and design by these prisons, I am horrified at the maps incarcerations that are occurring in America, especially the mass incarceration of poverty stricken minorities in America. Prisons demonstrate a larger social issue than what I previously thought. I never knew that such a thing as prison-based gerrymandering could even exist. Prisons demonstrate economic and political problems as well. With more prisons, state must allocate more of their budget to supporting these facilities. The fact that so many prisons are being built demonstrate a larger problem in the political world, and that maybe there is an issue with the justice system. Fixing the system would allow for states to allocate more money that would have been use on supporting prisons to supporting education and helping those who are less privileged.

This is a cool little video. It even shows the level of Aral Sea we read about.

Satellites have been watching us for 40 years. Here's what their images reveal

Summer reading KQ2, How have humans altered Earth's environment? key concepts- remote sensing, land use

Spatial Perspective!

This scoop shows an example of built environmental space. The highly urban and crowded Thailand has little green space. So why is this massive green park looking landmass there? Its a strictly environmental section of land to help water flow into the ocean. The people call it the "green lung" because its plants give off oxygen and provide a contrast from its urban sprawl. This article shows the importance that should be placed on having more strictly environmental places in big cities. 

It's interesting to see the mixture of natural and manmade landscapes in this image. Humans have an enormous influence on the world around us- we have moved entire rivers for our own purposes, reshaped entire regions. In China, we have literally made it rain. Therefore, it's nice to see remnants of the rich environments that used to cover the urban sprawls of many of the world's largest cities, like Central Park in New York. Bang Kachao in Bangkok is another example of this, a reminder of the richness of the region before it was overwhelmed by the urban development that has characterized Bangkok over the previous century. The oasis serves as a valuable tourist attraction, as Westerners come to enjoy the bike trails and small farming community within Thailand's green lung. Leave it to hipsters to travel halfway across the globe just to enjoy nature within the confines of one of the world's largest cities. 

It is amazing what irrigation can produce.  The border between China and Kazakhstan is a perfect picture of land with irrigation and one without supplied water.  Eastern Kasakhstan has farmland but it is only subsidized by natural rainfall whereas on the greener Chinese side of the border it is supplemented with water by the farmers.  Great picture!

Seeing such a striking difference between two countries that are so close together is strange and thought-provoking. Knowing a little bit about the two countries can make a world of difference, though. In this case, we have China and Kazakhstan, two countries located in East/Central Asia. Kazakhstan borders China to the west, along the northern part of its western border. Much of China's inland land use is devoted to agriculture, as the majority of its industry is located near its coast. This is evident by the amount of green space seen in the satellite image above. With well over a billion people to feed, China needs to make use of as much of its arable land as possible. Kazakhstan, on the other hand is a much smaller country with much less land devoted to agriculture. Its farmland is mostly large and industrial, as a result of Soviet-era farming and is rain-fed rather than irrigated, like China's.

Knowing the history as well as the economic strengths of a country can therefore be useful in interpreting satellite images such as the one in this article. A lack of knowledge about China and Kazakhstan's economy and history may lead to an assumption that the Chinese are just better farmers than the Kazakhs. This is of course not necessarily true, but what is true is that China has a much larger and more immediate need for agriculture than does Kazakhstan and so devotes more of its land, time, and energy to farming. Likewise, it shouldn't be assumed that Kazakhstan has no need for agriculture at all. Instead, its history has largely influenced its economic strengths and needs, and the result is a country that looks very different from China. 

It's crazy to see how much human influences can reshape the landscape, or how things we tend to think of in more abstract terms- like national boundaries- can be very physical in nature. I liked reading about the differing agricultural approaches the two nations take, and being able to see the physical manifestations of those two different approaches so obviously. It's impressive to think that China is able to support such a massive population- one in every 5 people alive on the planet is Chinese- with so little land, and the consequences are plain to see in the image above. Increased irrigation efforts leads to the unnaturally bright green patches in the middle of a relatively dry area, serving as a symbol of man's attempts to bind mother nature to his will. Although not always successful, such attempts appear to be working well here. In contrast, Kazakhstan's population demands vary wildly from that of China's, and its solution for feeding its people can therefore take a more natural, backroads approach, with food production concentrated in a few areas. I wonder what other international borders can be seen so neatly with the naked eye.

Borders can tell us a great feel about the relationship beween the two  nations.

The concept of a political boundary has been developed over many many years into an unbreakable line between two different sets of people with different ideologies, religions, and government styles. The boundary extends into the ground, into the air, and includes any resources within the boundary. These pictures show the different shapes and various lines between countries, and displays the intricacies of boundaries in the world.  

Photographs show how different countries can be even by just the border. Number 3 really stuck out to me that Haiti doesnt have as many regulation reguarding deforestation as the Dominican Republic and its very noticable.