(COURSE PREVIEW)

Welcome to the virtual version of Geography 330, The United States and Canada.

The purpose of this course is to introduce you to the human and physical landscapes of North America as you would encounter them as you travel about the continent. We try to help you understand why landscapes differ from place to place and at the same time provide you with information and insight about what you should expect to find as you move about.

Much of what you will learn in this course is about the physical environment of the continent and how, against the backdrop of an unregulated economy, we have used what we perceive to be its resources to support our economic activities. Obviously, these resources differ from place, with the result that patterns of use of the landscape differ similarly.

In this course, we will spend quite a bit of time trying to understand these land use patterns, especially those created by agriculture, since more of the region has been transformed by agricultural pursuit than by any other activity.

Accordingly, this course has two primary aims. The first one is to describe the differences that exist from place to place in the contemporary physical/economic/cultural landscape of North America, and the second one is to explain these differences as a consequence of variations in both the physical landscape and the ways in which it has been perceived and utilized. People make choices about how to use the landscape. These choices are based on perceptions of the economic assets/limitations of the landscape combined with the personal desire to "make a living" and are related to

(1), the physical resources of the landscape and
(2), the complex social, cultural, economic, and political factors that prevail at the time, which are often fairly transparent.

Thus, the geographic patterns of agricultural land use and urban economic activity that result (the ways we use the land, in other words) is in most cases the result of rational decisions and are explainable, rather than haphazard or random. The notion that cause-and-effect relationships are involved in the regional differences of land use is an underlying theme of this course, and, although the emphasis is on the North American landscape, the principles we develop apply to most any region. The content of Geography 330 is structured around a regional framework. All "regions" are homogeneous in some respect, whether form or function. In many cases they are defined by physical criteria, though in some cases they are primarily economic. Many are defined "functionally" according to some unifying activity, such as agricultural regions wherein one kind of crop or farming technique (the "corn belt," for example) sets them apart from neighboring ones. The emphasis in the course will be on the regional limitations and the reasons why the contemporary land use and overall economic activity peculiar to specific regions have arisen. Although land uses in North America are diverse and sometimes appear even contradictory or counterintuitive, we will view them all as adaptive strategies in which success is measured largely in terms of costs/benefits (economic, ecological, and social).

The geography of agriculture is heavily emphasized in this course because, as noted, agriculture has so heavily transformed so much of the original North American landscape. At the same time, as an activity it is responsible for much of the food we eat. Therefore, a subsidiary objective in this course is to consider the geography of food, the study of what foods or food ingredients are grown where (and why). By the end of the session, you will be expected to identify the likely U.S.-Canadian sources of many common foods.

Professor Harman