Human Geography: Nature and Scope - Class XII

Fundamentals of Human Geography - Class XII Textbook Summary

Human Geography - Nature and Scope

• Geography is an integrative, empirical, and practical field of study.
• Geography studies the earth by focusing on both the physical environment and life forms including human beings.
• Physical geography studies the physical environment whereas human geography studies the relationship between the physical/natural and human aspects of the world.
• Geography explores the spatial distributions of human phenomena, their origins, and the social and economic differences across regions.
• Geography strives to understand earth as the home of human beings, emphasizing the elements that sustain them.
• German geographers describe the 'state/country' as a 'living organism' and, networks of road, railways and waterways are often described as "arteries of circulation"
• Human geography studies the inter-relationship between the physical environment and the socio-cultural environment created by human beings through mutual interaction.
• Human beings interact with the physical environment through technology, reflecting a society's cultural development and understanding of natural laws.
• Environmental determinism describes the early human-nature interaction where humans were greatly influenced and adapted to nature due to low technological development.
• Possibilism explains the transition from humans being controlled by nature, to a point where humans create new possibilities using resources from their environment which get slowly humanised.
• Neodeterminism introduces a middle ground, suggesting humans can conquer nature by obeying it, creating possibilities within environmental limits to avoid ecological damage.
• There are three schools of thought within human geography: welfare/humanistic, radical, and behavioral which each differ in their considerations.

Stages and Thrust of Human Geography

• Early colonial period: Exploration and description due to imperial and trade interests, encyclopedic descriptions of new areas formed an important aspect.
• Later colonial period: Regional analysis led to elaborate descriptions of all aspects of a region, the idea being all regions are part of a whole.
• 1930s through inter-War period: Areal differentiation focused on identifying the uniqueness of any region and understanding how and why it was different from others.
• Late 1950s to late 1960s: Spatial organization using computers and sophisticated statistical tools, with physics laws applied to human phenomena, the main objective being to identify mappable patterns for different human activities.
• 1970s: Emergence of humanistic, radical, and behavioral schools as a discontentment with quantitative revolution, making human geography more relevant to socio-political reality.
• 1990s: Post-modernism in geography questioned grand generalizations, emphasizing the importance of understanding each local context.

The World Population - Distribution, Density and Growth

• The people of a country are its real wealth, and ultimately, a country is known by its people.
• The world recorded a population of over 6 billion at the beginning of the 21st century.
• Population distribution describes how people are spaced over the earth's surface.
• Roughly ninety percent of the world's population lives on approximately 10 percent of its land area.
• The 10 most populous countries account for 60% of the world’s population.

Density Factors

• Population density is the ratio between the number of people and the size of the land and it is measured in persons per square kilometer.
• Geographical Factors: Availability of water, landforms (flat plains and gentle slopes), climate, and the soils.
• Economic Factors: Areas with mineral deposits, urbanization(cities), and industrialization(industrial belts) attract more people.
• Social and Cultural Factors: Places with religious or cultural significance attract people, while social or political unrest drives people away.
• Positive population growth occurs when the birth rate exceeds the death rate, or when there are permanent migrations to the area.
• Negative population growth occurs when the death rate exceeds the birth rate, or people migrate away from the country.
• Migration, which means people move from one place to another, can permanently or temporarily affect population size.

Demographic Transition

• The demographic transition theory explains that a population transitions from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as society progresses from rural/agrarian to an urban/industrialized state.
• Push factors, such as unemployment, political unrest, or natural disasters, make places less attractive.
• Pull factors, like better job opportunities or peace and stability, make destinations more attractive.
• Population has increased more than tenfold in the past 500 years and quadrupled in the twentieth century alone.
• Family planning aims to affect population growth and improve women's health through education and access to services.

Human Development

• Leading a long and healthy life, acquiring knowledge, and having sufficient means for a decent life constitute the most significant aspects of human development.
• Capability and freedom to make choices are essential; their absence stems from lack of knowledge, material poverty, social discrimination, and institutional inefficiency.
• Dr. Mahbub-ul-Haq introduced the concept of human development, defining it as development that expands people's choices and enhances their lives.

Four Pillars of Human Development

• Equity: Ensuring equal access to opportunities for everyone, regardless of gender, race, or caste.
• Sustainability: Guaranteeing the continuity of opportunities for future generations.
• Productivity: Enhancing human labor productivity through improved capabilities.
• Empowerment: Granting people the power to make choices through increased freedom and capabilities, requiring good governance and people-oriented policies.

Approaches to Human Development

• Income Approach: Sees human development as directly linked to income, assuming a higher income equates to a greater level of freedom.
• Welfare Approach: Views human beings as beneficiaries of development, advocating for increased government spending on social sectors.
• Basic Needs Approach: Focuses on providing six basic needs: health, education, food, water supply, sanitation, and housing.
• Capability Approach: Associated with Amartya Sen, emphasizes building human capabilities through health, education, and access to resources.
• According to the Human Development Report 2020, the top three countires are Norway, Ireland and Switzerland

Primary Activities

• Economic activities are classified into primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary groups.
• Primary activities are directly reliant on the environment and include hunting and gathering, pastoral activities, fishing, forestry, agriculture, mining, and quarrying.
• Gathering and hunting are primeval economic activities carried out in regions with harsh climatic conditions.
• Products include food, shelter and clothing as well as valuable plants such as leaves, barks of trees and medicinal plants.
• Pastoral nomadism or nomadic herding is a subsistence activity where herders rely on animals for food, clothing, shelter, tools, and transport.
• Commercial livestock rearing is more organized and capital-intensive which is associated with western cultures and ranches.

Agricultural Factors

• Subsistence agriculture is the type in which the farming areas consume all, or nearly all, of the products locally grown.
• Primitive subsistence agricultures include the practice of shifting cultivation by many tribes in the topics. Also called 'slash and burn agriculture'
• Intensive subsistence agriculture: two types. Dominated by wet paddy cultivation and dominated by crops other than paddy.
• Plantation agriculture has large estates which require large capital investment, using technical skills, methods, and cheap labor.
• Commercial grain cultivation is practiced in interior, semi-arid lands of mid-latitudes, focusing on wheat and other crops using mechanization over large areas.
• Mixed farming includes moderate-sized farms and equal emphasis is placed on crop cultivation and animal husbandry with high capital expenditure.
• Dairy farming has high capital investment in animal sheds, better facilities and special animal feed techniques.
• Mediterranean agriculture is highly commercial, focusing on fruits, vegetables, and vineyards.

Factors

• Market gardening and horticulture specialize in cultivating high-value crops like vegetables, fruits, and flowers for urban markets with farms located near urban areas.
• Cooperate faming pools farmers and their resources so they can farm both more efficiently and profitably.
• Collective Farming is based on social ownership, production and labor.
• Mining can be divided into surface and underground styles and can be affected by physical and economic factors.

Secondary Activities

• Economic activities are classified into primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary groups.
• Secondary activities add value to natural resources by transforming raw materials into more valuable products through manufacturing, processing, and construction.
• Industry also refers to those factories and processes that are involved in manufacturing the products.

Characteristics of Large Scale Manufacturing

• Speialization of Skills/Methods of Production
• Organizational Structure and Stratification
• Complex machine technology
• Extreme specialization and division of labour producing more goods with less effort and low costs
• Vast capital
• Large organizations
• Executive bureaucracy

Locational Factors

Industries are ideally located where they can yield the most profits through reduced costs.

• Access to market is an important factor. This market refers to those who demand these goods.
• Access to raw materials requires that they are both easy to transport and cheap. Availability and access to labor/energy, transportation (for finished goods), communication, government structures, relations with industry and other inter connecting savings.

Classifications and Types of Industries

• On Basic of Size
• Based on capital invested, numbers employed and volumes produced
• On Basis of Inputs/Raw Materials
• Use either raw or manufactured material

• Agro-Based
  

• Mineral Based
  

• Based On output
• Whether industry involves basic or consumer goods

• Basic
  

• Consumer
  

• Based On ownership
• Who owns the company

• Public
  

• Private
  

• Joint
  

Tertiary and Quaternary Activities

• In a service sector, manpower is especially important because much of activities are performed by skilled labor, trained experts and consultants.
• Many have jobs involved in the exchange of goods in retail and wholesale, transport and communication.
• Trading centers include rural and urban marketing with both selling specialized goods as well as many are from labor and semi labor.
• A service or facility in which goods and materials are often carried by one location safely. It includes essential arteries, vehicles and their organization.
• Certain developments such as mobile telephony and satellites have made communications independent of transport. Satellite communication touches human lives in many ways.
• The concept of a high tech industry is best understood as the application of various intensive research and development to manufacture.
• Tourism involves traveling for the sake of recreation instead of for business. Tourists are often known to look for climates in which they want sunny and warm weather for travel.

Quinary

• The service sector refers to jobs that make special decisions and are more subtle and differ greatly. These services focus on various creations, agreements or interpretations of existing or data. As data is a component of how the quinary sector functions daily.
• Some examples are as the following: Research and Development Legal Professions and the Banking Sector

Transport and Communication

• Trade, transport and communication are closely linked which helps connect areas for economic activity.
• Transport provides network links and carriers for economic trade and activities. The main modes of this transport are land, air and water ways.
• Highways in both North America and China help create these economic areas with their own benefits in economic trade.
• With communication, many development happen with satellite and cables that form internet.
• The most helpful areas in international ports are the harbors, port authorities, navigable channels and arranging for tugs to go by sea.
• Main forms of shipping are oil with sea ports often processing with said ports involving both shipping/processing.

International Trade

• International trade is an exchange of goods and services across national borders and is needed to obtain commodities a country cannot produce or can purchase cheaper elsewhere.
• This traded is typically conducted in two ways which are bartering and by money.
• There are multiple parts of history involved from way it started from ancient times from trade to mass productions post revolution.
• International trade is a result of specialization and benefits the world economy for better world outcomes. Difference occurs mainly for things such as resources that can depend on geology, climate, and the level of trade and skill involved. Balance of Trade helps record volumes on the export and imports. So countries should be cautious with this and imports in a specific way.
• The trade can be categorized as bilateral and done by to countries or through multi-lateral trade where things occur with many countries as one member.
• The opportunity for trade is one which focuses giving work outside agency by some amount.