Population Clusters	Physical Geography of Europe
Cultural Geography	European Region
Economic Geography

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Human Geography Human geography includes politics, religion, art, music, dance, pop culture, folk art, urban studies, architecture, economics, business, technology, science, medicine and health, manufacturing, agriculture, demography, immigration, language, religions, ethnicity, and history, among other things.  If we were going to to a good regional geography, we would examine all of these human dimensions of change and stability and take note of which ones are particularly important in giving the European region its character and set it off from other regions. We would look at flows of ideas, goods, raw materials, people, capital, and information. We would map trends. We would map the past. We would map correlations of things that we thought might be causally related. We would examine people's attitudes toward nature and the earth.  However our course schedule says we can only spend two classes on Europe.  So, if there is time,  I want to examine population, language, religion, devolutionary trends, supranationalism, and conflicts.   Population Clusters When preparing for this class I came across this remote sensing map of city lights observed from space. What do you think about this image? I was struck by it so I went looking for others and found this one of lights from the whole earth.  Here is an animation of population growth of Europe    Perhaps the magnitude of the demographic situations will be clearer from this graph. With a population of 582 million, Europe comprises about 9% of the world's population. It's land area of 2,193.6 square miles constitutes less than 5% of the world's land area. This gives Europe a population density of 265.1 people per square mile. This is this is the third largest population density after south Asia, east Asia, and southeast Asia.  Here is a map of European population density. Not surprisingly, there is some correlation between population density and major centers of industrialization and this map of environmental issues and this map of soil degradation   What is causing the growth in population? For hundreds of thousands of years the human population was growing at a low but steadily increasing rate. Then, in less than 250 years, the world population went from 1 billion to 6 billion people. Why? Because the balance between birth and death has been broken.   United Nations projections show that, in the next 50 years, family planning will be widely used all over the world and birth rate will become universally low. Simultaneously, average life expectancy will reach at least 70 years. Population growth will then start to slow down until it stabilized around the end of the next century. So why are there so many people? Visit Le Musée de l'Homme 6 billion people exhibit for an online interactive answer.   Cultural Geography   What is culture?  The dictionary says culture is a : the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon humanity's capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations  b : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group  c : the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation Culture can be  things - material culture - like tools, houses, weapons, clothes ...  major institutions like religions, political practices, economic systems, legal systems ... common practices like marriage rules, social/class stratification,  moral norms, parenting ... rite-of-passage rituals like puberty, menstruation, births, funerals ... world views, forms of life, ways of knowing, games We learn culture through language - not just verbal language - but our whole way of representing the world symbolically.  Much of what we learn, we learn from our parents telling us do this or don't do that. But a great deal of what we learn, we learn from participating in activities - playing games, getting jobs, going through rites-of-passage, using tools, and being part of civil society. So, though I am about to show you maps of European languages and talk about them, I want you to think about all the things that language means and all the different ways in which we use it. It is the milieu of culture. Linguistic Geography We can use language as a marker for ethnicity and map the dominant languages in an area.  Almost all languages in Europe derive from a single language called Proto Indo European. They are members of the Indoeuropean language family - one of major divisions into which the world's languages can be divided.   Economic Geography As the countries of Eastern Europe continue their structural adjustment  programs, their economies are becoming more integrated into the global economy especially into the European economy. More on this next class.

European migration

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