Showing papers in "Geographical Review in 1977"

Medical geography as human ecology: the dimension of population movement

Abstract: NO NE of the greatest hazards resulting from mismanagement of the environment and from ecological arrogance is an increase in human illness. Such diverse deteriorations of health as the rise of cancer in the American population, the spread of schistosomiasis in Africa with the extension of irrigated agriculture, the carnage being wrought by the automobile around the world, and, most poignantly, the existing magnitude of malnutrition and its consequences have shattered the entrenched prepossession of health professionals with the germ theory of disease. This change of paradigm, which has been accompanied by a shift in orientation from disease to health and by a consequent need to define, assess, and preserve health,1 offers an obvious invitation for geographical contributions. Health professionals frequently wonder how medical geography differs from epidemiology, or what geographers do that health planners do not. These are not idle questions, for in fact most models in medical geography have come from epidemiology or from health planners. More recently, the conceptual framework has been enriched by human ecologists working in anthropology and medicine as well as in geography. In this paper I summarize some of the developments in medical geography as human ecology and offer one approach to the problem of entering the holistic system of interaction between population and health environments.

Paleosols of the Southern Cape Coast, South Africa: Implications for Laterite Definition, Genesis, and Age

Abstract: _L ~ATERITES and lateritic soils sparked what probably has become the longest and most obfuscating discussion in the history of earth science. Sources'of the confusion surrounding the word "laterite" can be identified in terms of two general problems with past research.1 The all-important problem has been the general failure to develop a functional definitional framework for "laterite." Agronomists, geologists, geomorphologists, and pedologists have applied the term specifically to variably cemented, sesquioxide-rich soil horizons. It has also been widely used to describe any soil profile that contains such a horizon and has even been applied indiscriminately to any reddish colored soil or sediment at or near the earth's surface.2 In addition, assorted mineralogical definitions have been used, particularly by soil scientists. It is unclear whether any or all of these definitions should be considered correct. The definitional problem has been compounded by the different genetic explanations that have been provided for all possible definitions. The second problem with past "laterite" research has been the general lack of concern for recognition and dating of laterite-like paleosols, which reflect past rather than contemporary weathering conditions. Even when laterites have been identified according to an acceptable definition, they have often been uncritically ascribed contemporary formation in the environment in which they are now found. It is frequently not appreciated that a surficial sediment or weathering profile may be a relict of past environmental settings yet serves in an only slightly modified fashion as the substrate for the modern vegetation cover.3 Furthermore, when laterites have indeed been identified as "fossil," dating has generally proved to be difficult. Laterites

The evolution of migration patterns during urbanization in Peru

Abstract: In this paper I will suggest that the core of Zelinskys hypothesis "that there are definite patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility through space-time during recent history" is relevant to the analysis of population migration at regional and local levels. The objective of my study was to examine a relatively small area in the southern Peruvian highlands to see whether a definite spatial and temporal structure of migration could be identified. I relied principally on migration histories so I was dealing with movements within the memories of the oldest living inhabitants. My analysis is therefore restricted in both time and space compared with Zelinskys model but it deals with specific local and regional time-space patterns to put flesh on the bones of his abstract global hypothesis. What I will call the "migration transition" encompasses the change from Zelinskys Phase I or "premodern traditional society" to Phase II "early transitional society." (excerpt)

Negro Urban Clusters in the Postbellum South

Abstract: rT HE history of development of Negro residential areas in the South is distinctly different from the history of their development in the North.' The differences in the character and morphology of northern and southern Negro areas are attributable to their social and economic environments at the time of their inception. These environmental conditions are a function of the period in which the Negro communities were formed. The formation of the large Negro ghettoes during World War I was a consequence of the large-scale migration of Negroes from the rural South to the urban North.2 These migrants settled in inner-city tenement districts, and the Negro ghettoes thus formed expanded sectorally, by the process of residential invasion and succession of adjacent white working-class areas.3 Negroes had resided in southern cities long before the beginning of their northward migration in the twentieth century. In I860 Negroes comprised 20 to 40 percent of the population of the typical southern city.4 Although small antebellum Negro enclaves were scattered throughout southern cities, few large Negro residential areas came into being before the Civil War.5 Not until after the Civil War did that form of the modern southern Negro residential area begin to take shape. References to southern ghetto formation have been cursory in the literature on Negro residential areas, and no single author has dealt with the subject in depth. Karl and Alma Taeuber cited the postbellum development of peripheral Negro areas in Memphis, Tennessee, and Augusta, Georgia; and the formation of similar Negro areas in Washington, D.C.; Birmingham, Alabama; and Savannah, Georgia, has received attention from others.6 Thomas J. Woofter and Gunnar Myrdal proposed

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction

Abstract: Wt TILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-i962), an outstanding twentieth-century American author, was a prolific writer who explored unique styles and literary devices. He set the best of his novels and short stories in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which has become one of the famous fictional places in literature. Beginning with "Sartoris" in 1929 and ending with "The Reivers" in 1962,2 bit by bit, Faulkner unfolded so much concerning the people, the history, and the geography of Yoknapatawpha with such consistency that to many readers it seems to be an actual county. Robert Penn Warren has observed that geography is "scrupulously though effortlessly presented in Faulkner's work," and its "significance for his work is very great."3 Faulkner's prominence has resulted in a voluminous outpouring of criticism, none of which has been produced by geographers despite a growing awareness by them that fiction profoundly influences the images that people hold concerning places. This lack of evaluation is even more curious in light of the author's overt sense of geography. But lack of criticism of Faulkner's works by geographers has not resulted in lack of geographical evaluation. For more than two decades literary critics have written about the parallels between fictional Yoknapatawpha and real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and they have produced some material concerning Faulkner's geography.4 Many aspects, however, have not previously been considered, and the process

The mediterranean sugar industry

Abstract: OR almost a thousand years North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe received their supplies of sugar from an industry established around the shores of the Mediterranean. This industry began about A.D. 700, for centuries flourished in different parts of the region, and finally succumbed during the sixteenth century to competition from the new plantations in the Americas (Fig. I). The disappearance of sugarcane from the Mediterranean has been almost complete, leaving few legacies in the present landscape. Some fields of highly subsidized cane are still cultivated behind the tourist beaches of southern Spain near Motril. Ruins of stone sugar mills remain in Palestine and in the deserts of southern Morocco. The Gate of the Sugar Workers in the walls of Syracuse attests to the former importance of sugar cultivation in Sicily. Despite such remainders, the long association of sugar cultivation with the Mediterranean is largely forgotten, and its place in the historical geography of the region is little known. The Mediterranean is the most northerly part of the world in which sugarcane, a tropical crop, has been successfully cultivated. Hence, it provides an opportunity to study the adaptation of sugar cultivation to marginal environmental conditions. The organization of the Mediterranean industry, as it developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, heralds the organization of the Atlantic industry. Indeed, the Mediterranean sugar industry can be seen as a school for the colonizers of Madeira, the Canaries, and tropical America. It is an important link in the chain of diffusion and development that has taken sugar from indigenous garden plant in New Guinea to agro-industry in Jamaica, Hawaii, and other parts of the tropical world. In the standard histories of the Mediterranean in the medieval period, little attention has been given to the growth of the sugar industry. Sugar receives only passing reference as an exotic crop, an object of curiosity to Crusaders, and as an item of trade. Even Fernand Braudel in the most recent edition of his magisterial work on the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, gives sugar scant mention.1 The absence of any comprehensive study of the Mediterranean sugar industry by medievalists has left a gap that historians of sugar have found difficult to fill.2 Noel Deerr and Edmund von Lippmann, perhaps the most distinguished of these historians, made serious attempts to deal with the medieval period. Deerr's chapter on the

The First English Towns of North America

Abstract: LTHOUGH geographers have illuminated the contemporary urban scene in Anglo-America, geographical insights dwindle at an accelerating pace as we move back toward the seventeenth century-the dark ages of American urban geography.1 To insist that geographers redress this imbalance is pointless, given the pressing urban problems of the 1970's, and impractical, owing to the discipline's traditional bias toward present landscapes and spatial patterns. In such an intellectual context, the seventeenth century is remote indeed. Yet neglect of this era places geographers in the curious position of having no satisfactory explanation for the locational origins and early growth of several important cities in the contemporary urban system. New Amsterdam (New York), Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston are just a few of the places that had beginnings on the first European frontier, and their historical durability is reason enough for inquiry and interpretation. A large step in that direction is James E. Vance's mercantile model of urban systems.2 Vance asserts, principally on evidence assembled from the colonial period, that trade and commerce in staple crops regulated the location and early growth of frontier towns. The adequacy of a trade interpretation of urban development on the Atlantic Seaboard is, however, open to question. After a brief review of Vance's model and the historical evidence for and against it, I shall offer an urban model more appropriate to the early English frontier towns. Whereas Vance's model emphasizes trade, the monopolist-migration model presented here stresses the role of political-economic and demographic variables. The generality of both models for other frontiers is discussed in the conclusion.

The Bicentennial Landscape: A Mirror Held Up to the past

Abstract: EARLIER this year the United States inaugurated a small-town President. Indeed, that origin helps to account for the choice. "The Carters are from Plains, Georgia, with a population of 680," one analyst wrote. "The constant repetition of the number gives an idea of the awe in which it is held. This outstanding smallness is a fact of considerable symbolism, a good deal of it from movie sets which the clapboard storefronts of the Main Street in Plains helplessly, ruthlessly recall. "' Even if Carter had not won the election, or were to vacate the office, the president would still be a small-town boy-or a country boy, as they prefer to be known. Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia; Walter Mondale of Afton, Minnesota; Robert Dole of Russell, Kansas; even Gerald Ford-for if Grand Rapids is "not exactly Possum's Crossroad's, [it] is not quite Detroit either." Nowadays "large numbers of people attribute special salvationary spiritual power to rural living," Russell Baker points out. In the I960's the younger generation was "chucking it all to find salvation in the woods, . . . [drinking] goat's milk and trimming the kerosene wick and hoeing the radish patch," and reading Thoreau, Hermann Hesse, and the "Whole Earth Catalog" by firelight. Their elders hung back; "many of them had lived the rustic life when there was no alternative" and did not consider "slopping the hogs ... a spiritual experience." But now they too follow in Rousseau's footsteps and yearn for the sticks.2

The Pennsylvania Town: An Overdue Geographical Account

Abstract: E KNOW surprisingly little about the form and appearance of the vast majority of the cities and towns of North America. We know even less about the meaning of these phenomena in the cultural scheme of things. Although each of our major metropolises has generated its own iconography and body of writing-some of them quite masterly1-and although a corps of cultural geographers, distinctly rural in their leanings, have told us much about the look of the American countryside,2 systematic knowledge of the morphology of what lies between, some several thousand smaller cities and towns, remains exceedingly scrappy.3 But what we strongly suspect; or rather feel, and what is persistently expressed as a vigorous undercurrent in much of our best fiction and social science reportage on the American scene,4 is intimate interaction between "townscape"5 and the cultural

Coca in Bolivia

Abstract: COCA has been an integral part of the cultural life of Bolivia since pre-Incaic times.' Various segments of the indigenous population chew it to cure a variety of ailments, and it is highly praised as a general stimulant. The production of coca in Bolivia has increased significantly in recent years, yet there is no evidence that the incidence of coca chewing is growing. Indeed, many observers believe the use of coca is declining as the forces of modernization shift it from a generally accepted stimulant into the realm of a social stigma. If the increase of Bolivian coca production is not the result of an indigenous demand for the leaf, then it is an attempt to meet an international demand for coca derivatives, namely cocaine. Cocaine use in the United States, for example, is currently the nation's most serious hard drug problem as measured by the number of arrests for hard drug use and by the number of seizures of large amounts of cocaine.2 The demand for coca to produce cocaine is having a significant impact on the entire coca system in Bolivia. Crop controls on coca are being considered as a result of the increasing numbers of cash-crop farmers whose success can be noted in production statistics. The coca-chewing population may find it increasingly difficult to compete at the marketplace as "coke" producers affect both the general patterns of coca distribution and the ability of a chewer to sustain his "habit."3 This paper is concerned with the use of coca in Bolivia and some of the implications of an illegal external demand on a traditional cash-crop and marketing system.

The hydrologic cycle and the wisdom of the child

Abstract: It was neither theology nor psychology that drew us to ask small children for their perceptions and resource appraisals, but curiosity about the world inside peoples' heads and its relationship to the world perceived by science or, in this case, by adults. In pursuing such an inquiry, we seem to be unique. A review of the voluminous psychological literature from 1927 to the present finds that most studies of children's thoughts, concepts, and perceptions do not deal with children and the physical environment as they experience it.3 Elm Park Center, where our observations, interviews, and field trips took place, is a small day care center attached to an equally small training institution for day care workers. The twenty-four children of working parents who come each day are free to choose activities and to move indoors and outdoors in an open-education setting. They are a cross-section of their age group in Worcester, an industrial city of 176,000 in central Massachusetts. It is the special quality of preschool age, the mixture of innocence and worldliness, unspoiled by formal teaching, that allows us to report introductory findings derived with pleasure and delight. One of us, a resident in this day care setting, began a year ago to collect from the staff anecdotal material and observations related to the children's experiences with water. Our initial reaction as geographers, specialists in water resources and not in child development, was surprise at the sophistication of experience. For example, * We wish to thank Hilary L. Renwick for her creativity and skill in drawing illustrations more delightful than we were able to imagine.

Theories of urbanization in australia

Abstract: C APITAL city dominance has been the outstanding feature of Australian urbanization since the middle of the nineteenth century. The proportion of the country's population living in the state capitals has increased almost without interruption and reached 63 percent in 1971. Although the urban pattern is simple, the theories proposed to explain it appear to conflict, partly because they have been developed without reference to one another. Yet many of the difficulties can be resolved by determining the time period to which each theory is most relevant. In this paper I undertake a synthesis and extension of the general answers that have been offered to three questions: How has the distribution of settlement in Australia been determined? Why do the majority of people live in the capital cities? Why is Australia so highly urbanized? Most of the material discussed here concentrates either on the limits to settlement imposed by the physical environment or on the relationship between settlement evolution and economic and social processes.

Natural gas: a geographical perspective

Abstract: The paper attempts to illustrate the utility of a linear programming model for predicting natural gas flows between producers and local distributors. The model is used to replicate past flow patterns. Natural gas flows are derived from estimate of 1980--1990 supply and demand, assuming that wholesalers will attempt to obtain natural gas from the least expensive available supplier in terms of wellhead price and transportation costs combined, and that Canada will permit exportation of surplus production. Estimations of 1990 flows are based on the assumption that the Federal government will allocate a supply of natural gas to satisfy an equal proportion of demand for each state. An attempt is made to identify possible locations for synthetic natural gas and liquefied natural gas facilities and new pipeline routes. 7 figures, 2 tables.

Applied Geography: Should We, Must We, Can We?

Abstract: EOGRAPHERS are being forced by economic circumstances to look for applications of their discipline to real-world problems, but many of them are neither happy nor comfortable with this development. Little prestige has been accorded applied geography in recent decades, even though it continues a long geographical tradition. A major adjustment, more in attitudes and purposes than in curriculum, will be necessary if the application of their research is to offer either greater recognition or opportunities to geographers. These are some of the conclusions reached at a masterfully organized symposium on "Applications of Geographic Research" that was held at Michigan State University on June 2 and 3, 1977. Harold A. Winters and Gary A. Manson arranged the symposium around a program of fifteen papers prepared by staff members and advanced graduate students at Michigan State and by geographers who had received a doctorate from the university. In addition, fourteen guests were invited to discuss the implications of the papers and the broader problems of applying geographical research. A volume containing the papers (Applications of Geographic Research: Viewpoints from Michigan State University [edited by Harold A. Winters and Marjorie K. Winters; Dept. of Geography, Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, 1977]) was circulated before the symposium and can be purchased for $2.50 from the Social Science Research Bureau, 206 Berkey Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824. The papers, presented in three sessions, were designed to discuss the applications of geographical research to generally recognized problems, to call attention to needed research, or to exemplify applied work under way. The first set of papers was grouped under the title "Applications of Geographic Techniques and Methodology." These papers, except for one philosophical introduction, dealt primarily with specific cartographic or computer research techniques or with places and mechanisms to apply geographical research. The discussant for this session, John D. Stephens, found the suggestion of a geographical extension service to involve residents of an area in geographical research to be especially provocative. The second group of papers dealt with "Applications of Physical, Historical, and Cultural Geography." Because of the difficulties of programming, this was a particularly disparate group of topics. In discussing the papers, Stephen S. Birdsall pointed out that it was perhaps surprising that the geomorphic research reported had most clearly been applied to solve generally perceived problems. The final session of papers covered "Applications of Economic, Political, Social, and Urban Geography." The topics ranged from an economic development problem in the United States, through a catalog of research needed in social geography, to a plea for greater involvement by geographers in development problems of foreign areas. The discussant, Clifford E. Tiedemann, noted that the papers did not always distinguish between studies of something and studies for someone. He observed that for their results to be accepted, geographers must learn to define problems in terms meaningful to the client. The rest of the time was spent in wide-ranging discussions (especially by the invited guests) of applying geographical research and of doing applied geography. The distinction is not clear to many geographers, who continue to wonder if we are asking relevant questions in our research. Anyone can apply the results of geographical research, but concern for finding relevant questions is the wrong focus for applied geography. As Howard G. Roepke pointed out, there is no need to search for problems-many already exist and are recognized by everyone. What is needed is for geographers to study obvious problems and to be bold enough to advocate the solutions that their research indicates would be useful. Timidity or obscurity

Recent Immigration from the Philippines and Filipino Communities in the United States

Abstract: FILIPINOS constitute one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States.1 In the 1970 census, approximately 343,000 people identified themselves as Filipinos.2 Since then more immigrants have come to the United States each year from the Philippines than from any other country except Mexico.3 If present immigration trends continue, by 1980 there will be approximately as many Filipinos in the United States as there are Chinese or Japanese. Thus an analysis of Filipino immigration, settlement, and ethnicity will contribute to our understanding of the geography of American society.4