Geography Awareness

Geography, History and Cultures 4 Minutes

Though I am running a week behind the actual Geography Awareness week, which begins on the third week in November, I think it’s always important to understand place and our relationships to our environments. The study of geography must move beyond memorizing state capitals. In this vein, I wish to offer some tidbits from what used to be an annual Geography Awareness Week (GAW) program on a public radio station in the Central High Plains. My dear friend, Lynn, and I did this fabulous music show. The music reflected people of the world and the music of their people.

Neither of us live near that public radio station, and the live show is not one we can do remotely, though I do have an in-home studio, thanks to National Geographic Society (NGS)! Over the years, Lynn and I have collected geography facts and turned them into radio segments called, “Did You Know?”

GAW used to have different themes each year, and we would find music, of the world in the folk traditions, that matched or supported the themes. Lately, NGS encourages teachers, professors, and anyone else interested in promoting the discipline of geography, to celebrate all aspects of geography since it is considered “the mother of all sciences.” Here are some geography facts that you may not have known or thought of.

Did you know that early human migrations are thought to have begun when Homo erectus first migrated out of Africa to Eurasia around 1.8 million years ago?

Did you know that one of the greatest waves of immigrants to the USA was during the 1820s – 1890s, when more than 5 million immigrants arrived in America from Ireland and Germany.

Did you know that Immigration to Australia is estimated to have begun around 50 000 years ago when the ancestors of Australian Aboriginals arrived from the islands of the Malay Archipelago and New Guinea. 

Did you know that according to the Migration and Remittances Factbook 2011, 3% of the world population (more than 215 million people) live in a country other than the one in which they were born.

Did you know that the largest migration corridor in the world is Mexico? The second largest migration corridor in 2010 was between the Ukraine and Russia, followed by Bangladesh and India. 

Did you know that Asian Indians make up the largest percentage of immigrants coming into the United Kingdom, followed by migrants from Pakistan, Poland, Australia and China. 

Did you know that relative to world population size, more people were migrating around the end of the 19th Century than they are now, in the 21st Century. 

Did you know that an “emigrant”’ is a person who is leaving one country to live in another?  An “immigrant” is a person who is entering a country from another country to make a new home, and a refugee is a person who has moved to a new country because of conflict, abuses, and other harmful threats in the home country.

Did you know that in 2017, 48% of international migrants were women? Female migrants outnumber males in all regions except Africa and Asia.  In some countries of Asia, male migrants outnumber females by about three to one.

Did you know that Human Migration is movement by people from one place to another with the intension of settling temporarily or permanently in the new location? It may involve movements over long distances and from one country to another.

Did you know that a demographer is a scientist who studies human population dynamics by investigating three main demographic processes?  Demographers consider birth, migration, and aging. 

Did you know that Climatology is the study of how climates are created and what they do the environment?  Climatology is a long-term study of the geographic world. 

Did you know that Geography is considered the “Mother of Sciences”?  Geography’s study field embraced the entire universe and later bore many children, among them astronomy, botany, geology, and anthropology. 

Did you know that the Geographic Inquiry Process helps us to understand the interaction of human and natural systems with a framework that promotes understanding?  Geo-Inquiry guides us to Ask, Collect, Visualize, Create, and Act.  For more information, explore geo-inquiry online. 

Did you know that Human Ecology, the study of humans in their environments, is a unique field of Geography?  This form of geographic inquiry aims to clarify the relationships between natural environments and varying activities of humans.

Did you know that the study of geography explores different systems such as human, physical, and biological through space? Explore geography! It is more than states, capitals, rivers and trivia. 

Did you know that geography explores human systems, which include culture, economics, migration, and politics?

Did you know that geography explores physical systems such as landforms, climate, and rivers?

Did you know that geography explores biological systems such as habitat, species dispersal, and adaptation?

Did you know that Geographers identify relationships and explain spatial patterns?

Did you know that geography is not just something you know; it is something you do!  Geographers explore systems and processes in human, physical, and biological worlds using a geographic perspective!  Look it up!

Did you know that geography has different perspectives within its discipline? For example, an ecologist might study how individual species depend on one another while a biogeographer might study how those dependencies influence and are influenced by location!

These geography moments come from several of my geography friends who love this discipline as much as I do.  I have had the pleasure of serving as a National Geographic Society Explorer these past four years. Lynn and I serve on the Kansas Geographic Alliance, a group of fine people.  I hope you enjoy these geography moments.

Thank you for reading.

Published by djhbolton

I am a geographer specializing in human systems. My passion is studying underrepresented populations so that I can assist in their integration into the communities in which they live. I studied Human Ecology because it is a wonderful blend of the disciplines of geography, anthropology and sociology. No matter the context in which I find myself, I am an observer of humans in their environments and how the influences in those settings build and nurture sense-of-self, sense-of-place, and sense-of-direction in educational, familial, and community settings. My work focuses on the cross-cultural and intercultural traditions of multi-lingual populations acculturating into their receiving communities and being successful in educational arenas of higher education. This work includes gathering, analyzing, and writing about health, well-being, and environmental/social connectedness in their communities. My research focuses on Minority-majority, rural, Midwest communities. My role as director of intercultural learning and academic success at Kansas State University allows me to discover more about myself as I work with others in their paths to self-discovery in their own interactions with students and families who come from different parts of the country and the world all converging in educational spaces. Recently, I lived, worked and played in Southwest Kansas, a region marked by Minority-majority populations centers (56% – 68%). Some of my research results are used to address poverty, low educational attainment, poor health outcomes, and cultural norms in multi-cultural settings. I work to assure a representative sample for my research, so I engage in multi-lingual research (English, Spanish, Burmese, French, Tigrinya, and Somali). Building trust and relationships is the key to my success as a multilingual researcher. Presently, my research takes me in the micro-communities of populations represented by nine African countries (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Somalia, and Cameroon), seven Latin American countries, and six Asian countries. Yes, it is rural Southwest Kansas, and many of the densely-settled and frontier rural communities act as receiving centers for refugees and other displaced populations, because of the availability of jobs. I am the recent recipient of National Geographic Society’s Research and Exploration grant to introduce Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to females of color. This inter-generational, intercultural class hosted middle school, high school, and adult females who learned the basics of GIS with a variety of applications from remote sensing to city planning to Google Earth, and to Pokémon GO! By the time the young ladies finished the class, they were able to build cities, map their communities, log trips from their countries of origin to the Midwest. I am in the mid-year of the grant funding, and my target for completion was July 2018. I have new funding to extend this work to new cohorts.

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