Geography is the study of the earth’s surface and human interactions with the earth. Geography as an interest can originate as it did for the author: growing up in a Navy family, and moving often, means that there is a new place that will be experienced.
Becoming interested in the new places the family would be living, the places the family would be moving to, and remaining interested in the places left behind became natural.
It becomes exciting and a necesscity to learn the geography of places. Places from the past, the present, the soon to be, and the places it would be fun to visit all became geographically interesting.
Geography can look at the world in two large ways: physical geography and human geography.
Physical geography is a description of physical characteristics of the surface of the earth. Continents, islands, rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, hills, plains, glaciers, waterfalls, vegetation, climate, and all the other natural features of the planet.
Human geography is a description of the “human world” and its interaction with the physical world. It includes things such as use of resources, economic geography, political geography (dividing the planet up between groups), cultural geography. Human use, misuse, and interactions with our natural world.
There is another way to approach geography. The “five themes of geography.”
In 1984 two groups, the Association of American Geographers and the National Council for Geographic Education, wrote what are known as the “5 themes of geography.” Those five themes are: location, place, human/environment interaction, movement, and regions.
Location comes in two forms. Absolute location is the specific location of a place, described in terms of the grid lines we know as longitude and latitude. Relative location describes a place in relation to other places-its neighbors, borders, the way it connects with other places by technology or other interactions.
Place is a description of a place by looking at the physical (natural) and human characteristics of a site. Physical characteristics would include things like plant and animal life, rivers, and mountains. Human characteristics would include population, language, industry and agriculture, building styles and materials, and trade.
Human/environment interaction deals with the consequences of actions that people make, intentionally or not, in the areas in which they live. This includes things such as buildings, dams, bridges, and irrigation.
Movement deals with travel and interactions between people as they communicate, trade, work and interact with other people who are not in their immediate neighborhood.
Regions are the basic way of looking at geography, looking at one trait that ties an area together, one common unifying factor. The factor can come from physical traits, such as location or land form or general climate; or human/cultural traits, such as language, political ties, ethnicity, or urban/rural.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/
http://alliance.la.asu.edu/azga/
