Human Geography: Making Sense of Planet Earth

Alec Murphy introduces the techniques and tools of human geography that human geographers have developed for understanding the ever-changing human landscape. It is this knowledge that is proving to be absolutely critical for success in the complex, globally interconnected world of the 21st century.

Program two focuses on the most fundamental aspect of the human cultural landscape: the distribution and concentration of people across the planet. At the same time it examines how population distribution has changed over time, and why.

Humans are among the most social animals on the planet. We need a shared system of language, beliefs, norms and values to survive and mature from birth to adulthood. In this program, Alec Murphy investigates human culture and how geography helps everyone make sense of the cultural landscape.

Isolationism, colonialism, regionalism and imperialism are all geographically inspired political ideas. They are examples of different ways of thinking about how the world has been, or is, divided politically. Human geography can make sense of why the world has been divided politically in the past and how it is divided politically today.

As the human population has grown to over 7 billion people, nothing has had to change more than the geography of agriculture. Program five studies the primary relationship between people and the cultivation of land and how agriculture has developed to sustain Earth's incredible, ever-growing population.

Economic growth, wealth creation, outsourcing, economic inequality, resource distribution, and the uneven penetration of the global economy are phenomena that have a strong geographic base. In program 6 Alec Murphy looks at how human geography can make sense of the economic world in the global economy of the 21st Century.

In 1800 only 3% of the world's population lived in cities. Now in the 21st century more than half of humanity lives in urban areas. Program seven examines where cities are located, how are they organized, and what are they like and how by answering these questions we can begin to understand how to live on a planet of global cities.

In the 21st century, the Earth's surface is being reshaped and reorganized on a scale unprecedented at any other time in the planet's history. It is a change directly caused by humans. Alec Murphy investigates why geographical concepts and insights are critical to the effort to confront the challenges of our ever-changing planet as its population grows to a staggering 10 billion people.