7 Summary

This first module was designed to introduce you to major concepts within the geographic discipline, to understand how geographers examine and work in the world. While geography literally means “to describe the Earth,” geography is not just locating places on maps but understanding how those places are created and change over time. Understanding where places exist is essential to success in today’s world, especially because of globalization’s increasing economic and political integration of countries all over the world. Geographers thus pay a lot of attention to the spatial and temporal scales in which globalization and other processes play out. To help us visualize and understand these processes and the patterns they produce, geographers make maps and utilize Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Finally, geographers study human-environment interactions. This includes both how the environment affects humans and how humans affect the environment. Human impact on the environment in recent years has been very large, leading to big questions about what the future of life on Earth will be. Module 1 began with these concepts because we will be exploring them in even greater depth for the rest of the course.