Age of Globalization
Globalization: what is it and what does it mean to me?  Economically? Technologically? Politically? Socially? Morally?
We constantly hear about how the world is getting smaller--is it? No, the world is becoming more connected.  More information is flowing faster than ever before. For the first time EVER any of us could travel to ANY part of the world virtually overnight.  We can communicate in REAL TIME with any part of the globe.

 We are the first generation of humans, in all human history to enjoy foreign travel as a casual part of life, to communicate by direct-dialing with any country on all continents, to receive instant news of world happenings, to be expected to work overseas or work for a company that deals overseas: EXPECTED, NOT THE EXCEPTION.   This is a really important concept, especially to you--the first generation that is living in the post-industrial, high technology, interconnected age.

Many if not all of you will work for multinational companies whose business is all over the world.  Many if not all of you will work and live outside of the US at some point in your careers.  People who understand and can interpret the world around them are much more versatile and therefore quickly become NON-EXPENDABLE.  Businesses and jobs are internationalizing as we speak—almost all jobs, not just the fancy ones.  You guys are the people that are going to be running the world. You guys are the decision makers--when all is said and done I'm just a dude teaching here at Virginia Tech.  But YOU all will be the ones building the bridges, and electing leaders, and stabilizing governments, and controlling monetary exchange rates, or setting up all sorts of private or national or even international businesses/programs/projects that will shape the world and all the people on it.

Make no mistake about it, the AIDS rate in Africa DOES affect you, the increasing coal consumption in China DOES affect you, an earthquake in Japan, and the price of cocaine leaves in Colombia DOES affect you. (allocation of your tax dollars, your jobs, the price you pay for goods, the amount of goods we sell, etc.) Globalization is pretty much a one-way street.  We are not going back to medieval times, no matter what isolationist say, do, or think.  Ignore the rest of the world at your own peril—you wont be hurting anyone but yourself.

Knowledge is power, or at least empowerment. The more you know about the world in which we live, the more power you have.
 

What is Geography?
Geography is one of the most fundamental sciences, a discipline awakened and informed by a long-standing human curiosity about our surroundings and the world environment.  The term geography has its roots in the Greek words for "describing the earth", and this discipline has been carried forward since classical times by all cultures and civilizations.  With the inherent satisfaction about knowing different environments comes pragmatic needs that compliment exploration, resource exploitation, world commerce, and travel.  In some ways, geography can be compared to history: while that field describes and explains what has happened over time, geography describes and explains Earth's spatial dimension--of how the world differs from place to place.  However, geography is a very holistic field; given that to describe any place on earth fully, we must include its history, its physical properties, its people, etc. etc.--so much so, that a myriad of different fields could be examined in geographic, or spatial, terms for any place on earth.

Given the broad scope of the geographical charge, it is no surprise that geographers have many different approaches to studying the world based upon conceptual emphasis guiding their study.  At the most basic level, geography can be broken into two complementary pursuits, physical and human geography. As the term suggests, physical geography examines things like climate, landforms, soils, vegetation, and animal life, while human--or cultural--geography concentrates on the spatial analysis of economic, political, religious, architecture or farming systems.  For example, the physical geographer in the Amazon river basin might be interested primarily in the ecological diversity of the tropical rain forest or how the destruction of that dense vegetation changes the local climate or hydrology.  The human geographer, on the other hand, might focus on the social and economic factors explaining migration of settlers into the rain forest or the tensions and conflicts over land and resources between these people and indigenous peoples.

Approaches to geography
All geographers collect and analyze geographic information, but they focus on different topics and employ different analytical approaches.  What I love about geography is the fact that we can study virtually ANYTHING on earth in a geographic fashion--since everything in our lives occurs on earth by default we can study it in the context of where it happens, and ask other questions like why, when  and how.  Here are three basic approaches to consider when studying anything geographically:

• As a geographer, you can study Earth in a context of interrelated environmental (physical) and human systems. Systems are interdependent groups of items that interact in a regular way to form a unified whole. We can focus on physical systems such as climate or volcanoes, on human systems such as religions or economies, or even human-environmental relationships such as how a places resources or terrain (physical) affect its local economy (cultural).  We have whole branches of specialization within this context that are tied to other independent fields--you may study how weather works in meteorology, but if you study weather on a spatial context (where certain patterns of rainfall occur, how temperature affects vegetation in an area, etc.) then you would be in the geographic specialization of climatology.  The diagram to the right outlines a few other such relationships in this systematic approach in geography.
• We can also simply take a spatial analysis approach to any particular subject--be it a person, place or thing, or even a process.  Thinking spatially means asking the question 'where' about a phenomenon, and describing or developing your answer around this question.  After determining 'where', you might then ask other questions like 'why here?' 'why at this time?', 'how did it get there, or how did it develop?'.  You can use this approach to literally study anything on earth--the distribution of cockroaches, the travel path of Alexander the Great, the diffusion of rock and roll music, the relationship between tornado paths and trailer parks, market distribution of Coors beer, fan distribution of the Chicago Bulls--you name it, we can study it geographically.
• Finally, and most pertinent to our class, we can use area analysis which integrates the geographic features of an area or place in a method of study.  Geographers have a long tradition (3 or 4 thousand years) of surveying, describing, and compiling geographic data about places.  Each place in the world occupies a unique location and features a unique combination of human behavior and environmental processes that give it a special character.  For purposes of geographic study, we divide the earth into regions, which are areas defined by one or more distinctive characteristic or features, such as climate, soil type, language, or economic activity.  Certain human activities and environmental processes give their regions unified character and distinguish them from other areas of earth's surface.  We can define our regions strictly by physical characteristics such as climate zone, strictly by human characteristics such as political entities (i.e. Mexico is a region defined by its political borders), or a combination of physical and human characteristics such as the region we call Eastern Europe.  This last type of regional delineation is what we will mainly utilize in our class.

What is a REGION?
The human intellect seems driven to make sense out of the universe by lumping together phenomena into categories of similarity.  Biology has its taxa of living objects, history its eras and periods, geology its epochs of earth history.  Geographers too make sense of the world by compressing and synthesizing vast amounts of information into spatial categories of similar traits.  The resulting areal units are referred to as regions.

Sometimes the unifying threads of a region are physical, such as climate and vegetation, resulting in regional designations such as the Sahara Desert or the tropical rainforest.  Other times the threads are economic and cultural, as in the popular term Midwest for the central United States.  All human beings need to compress large amounts of information into some stereotypes; often the geographic region is just that, a spatial stereotype for a section of earth that has some special signature or characteristic which sets it apart from other places on earth.

That is a good jumping off point for what we will consider a region in this class.  A region has three things: 1) has to have some area 2) has to have some boundaries--although these boundaries are typically fuzzy, or imperfectly defined, and 3) it has to have some homogeneous trait which sets it apart from surrounding areas.  What trait is homogeneous is defined by the user.  You can define any place on earth as being in an infinite number of regions, depending on what trait you pick.  The campus of Virginia Tech is simultaneously in a regions we could define as in the town of Blacksburg, as in SW Virginia, as in the state of Virginia, as in SE United States, as in a forested region, as in a humid subtropical climate zone, as in the Mid Atlantic, as in North America, as in coal mining belt, as in a Bible belt, as in the Western Hemisphere--what region do you think we are in?

Here is a quick breakdown of the world regions we will be examining in this class:

A Matter of Scale
There is a sense of scale to all systematic inquiry, whatever the discipline.  In biology, for example, some scientists study the smaller units of cells, genes or molecules while others take a larger view, examining plants, animals or ecosystems.  Similarly, some historians may focus on a specific individual at specific point in time, while others take a broader view of international events changing over several decades or throughout a century.   Geographers also work at different scales.  While some may concentrate on analysis of a local landscape--like the geography of Blacksburg, or the Blue Ridge Mountains--others will focus on the regional picture, on the spatial characteristics and interactions of a larger sphere, like the entire United States, or North America.  Others do research at a still larger global scale, examining emerging trade networks between Asian countries and North America.

This ability to move between different scales--global, regional, local--is critical for understanding contemporary world regional geography because of the way globalization links  together all people and places.  Few villages today, however remote, are without contact to the modern world.  Global economies draw upon local crops and resources, and conversely, fluctuations in world commodity prices affect the well-being of those local people.  Global TV and video introduce foreign styles, ideas, mannerisms, and expectations into small towns and remote settlements in formerly isolated parts of the world.  Further, very few places and peoples are isolated from global politics and tensions, from the influences of superpowers, supranational organizations, or, increasingly, from the ambitions and agendas of regional separatists and national splinter groups.

The other reason to pay attention to scale is because it plays an important component of our definition of regions.  Since we have already expressed that regions have some sort of homogeneous factor which defines them, we must consider at what scale does this homogeneity apply--because it is defined by the scale itself.  Let me give you an example.

Two presidential elections ago our country, by majority, elected Bill Clinton--a Democrat--to the presidency.  Since more than half voted Democrat, we could say that the US at the country scale is a Democratic region, based on that singular homogeneous trait.  However, if we looked at the state of Virginia, it voted predominately Republican--so at a smaller scale, we are in a Republican region.  Montgomery County, a smaller region within Virginia, may have voted predominately Democrat. Maybe most of the people on your block, a smaller region still, voted Republican.  Perhaps everyone in your house voted Democrat, so you are back in a Democratic region.   Thus, defining regions based on voting preferences DEMANDS that you state the scale of focus.  And most importantly, the larger the region you define, the more exceptions to your homogeneous trait you will find within your region.  This is what generalizations are all about--we are going to discuss and define our regions with GENERALLY HOMOGENEOUS traits within the region, knowing full well our generalization won't apply to everyone and every place.