Geography Concepts: A Personal View

So, you’re sitting at breakfast, scrolling the news, and you see it again: Greenland. That frozen chunk of ice, larger than any U.S. state, with more reindeer than people—and yet, the world’s powers are eyeing it like it's beachfront property in 1920s Miami. Why? Well, because it turns out the future runs through the Arctic. And under Greenland’s ice lies the mineral scaffolding of tomorrow's AI chips, solar panels, and hypersonic missiles. Which is why Donald Trump, in a moment that history may remember as absurd—or prophetic—decided America should just go ahead and buy it. But how did we get here? (maps from the economist magazine) Enter Denmark and Norway, in the age of colonial ambition. In 1721, a missionary named Hans Egede sailed north not to convert the Inuit—but to find Erik’s lost kin. He found no Vikings, only people with seal meat and spirit worlds. So he stayed, built forts, converted souls, and opened trade routes. Greenland, like Siberia and the Canadian Arcti...

So—imagine you’re living in a European city in the 1830s. You step outside your flat and into a street that doubles as a sewer. There’s no plumbing, no clean water, and the air is thick with smoke and the scent of horse dung, rotting food, and worse. Cholera kills thousands. Typhoid is common. Infant mortality is so high it's considered ordinary. And yet—people are flooding in. Why? Because that’s where the jobs are. That’s where the factories are. That’s where the future is being built. Now, at the time, nobody has the faintest idea why people are dying. The popular theory is miasma —bad air. You get sick because you inhale foul smells. So the solution? Incense, flowers, masks soaked in vinegar. Anything but plumbing. Enter germ theory . In the 1850s, a quiet revolution begins. Pasteur in France, Koch in Germany, Snow in London—each chips away at the idea that disease comes from the air. They argue, with evidence, that it's the water , the hands , the tiny invisible things ...

It begins, like many great revolutions, with a problem of spoilage. In the 1800s, if you wanted fresh meat in the city, you had two choices. Either bring the cow to town and slaughter it behind the butcher’s shop, or wait until it’s halfway rancid after a long wagon ride from the countryside. There were no iceboxes, no refrigerated trucks, no frozen chicken breasts wrapped in plastic. Food was immediate, local, and deeply fragile. Enter ice. At first, it came in blocks—harvested from northern lakes, packed in sawdust, shipped downriver, and used to chill milk and butter for a day or two longer than usual. Then came mechanical cooling—early ammonia systems, loud and dangerous, but effective. And then came electricity. Chemical refrigerants. Sealed units. Cold moved from a seasonal miracle to an industrial tool. And with it came the first great reordering of the food system. Suddenly, distance didn’t matter. A side of beef could be slaughtered in Chicago and shipped to New York withou...

It begins, as many revolutions do, with something small. A rock. Lodestone. Just a chunk of magnetized iron ore with an odd habit of twitching when suspended—pointing, more or less, in the same direction. In ancient China, scholars noticed this behavior and recorded it. At first, it was used not for travel but for geomancy— feng shui , the alignment of structures with cosmic forces. It wasn’t about finding your way. It was about placing your home in harmony with the unseen energy of the earth. But the moment that little stone was brought aboard a ship, suspended on silk in a bowl of water, it stopped aligning houses and started changing history. The compass doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t strike fear like a cannon or inspire awe like a cathedral. But its impact? Subtle, slow, and total. With it, sailors could travel beyond sight of land without getting lost. They could cross foggy channels, navigate under cloudy skies, and venture into open ocean—something virtually impossible with...

 It starts with a root. Not the glamorous kind. Not wheat, with its golden waves and biblical poetry. Not grapes, ripe for wine. No, this is a knobby, dirt-covered tuber growing high in the Andes. A survival food. A peasant’s staple. And like so many world-changing things, it enters history sideways. When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Inca Empire, they were searching for gold. They left with something arguably more valuable: the potato. They didn’t know it at the time, of course. To them it was strange and earthy and vaguely suspicious. But it grew easily in poor soil. It stored well. It didn’t rot on the journey back to Europe. That was enough. From there, the potato began its slow climb to power. It wasn’t an overnight success. For decades, it was treated with suspicion, grown for animal feed, or reluctantly accepted by poor farmers with no better options. In some places, priests condemned it as un-Christian—after all, it wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. In others, people...

 It begins not with conquest, but with curiosity. In a smoky corner of a Tang Dynasty apothecary, an alchemist is chasing immortality. The goal is to create an elixir of eternal life. The ingredients? Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal—ingredients common enough, but when combined, they produce not a potion but a bang. Literally. Instead of staving off death, the experiment nearly causes it. What he’s made is huo yao —fire medicine. And although it won't stop aging, it will in time collapse feudal orders, redraw maps, and help launch the modern state. Gunpowder, from its earliest appearance in China around the 9th century, wasn’t immediately used to kill. At first, it served ceremonial or signaling functions—fireworks, flaming arrows, rocket-propelled darts to frighten enemies more than destroy them. But the recipe, like all good ideas and most dangerous ones, didn’t stay secret for long. As the centuries passed, the knowledge spread—along trade routes, through diplomatic exchanges, w...

Walk into any suburban plaza in America, and you can watch the Dependence Effect in real time. A store window displays high-end yoga pants, a scented candle boasts "aromatherapeutic renewal," and someone exits with a $300 dog stroller. These are not responses to need. These are carefully cultivated desires designed to feel like necessity. This isn’t new. It was outlined with eerie precision in 1958 by economist John Kenneth Galbraith. His concept: the Dependence Effect — the idea that in modern consumer economies, wants are not autonomous. They are manufactured by the same system that exists to satisfy them. "Wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied." — Galbraith, The Affluent Society Galbraith wasn’t against markets or production. He was against myths . Chief among them: the idea that people enter the marketplace as rational beings with clear preferences. In reality, he argued, corporations use advertising, packaging, and social c...

Imagine a country where glittering shopping malls rise beside decaying schools. Where you can buy a smart fridge that talks to you, but you can't find a public restroom that’s clean, open, or safe. Where billboards advertise $1200 phones on highways full of potholes. A nation with $3,000 strollers and collapsing bridges. Now imagine the people in that country believe they are the richest and most advanced society in human history. You don’t have to imagine it. You live in it. And in 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith gave it a name: “Private affluence, public squalor.” 🔍 The Affluent Society: A Book That Never Got Less Relevant Galbraith was no firebrand. He was tall, composed, intellectually elite. A Harvard economist. An advisor to presidents. He wrote in cold, lucid prose. And in The Affluent Society , he calmly dismantled one of the most cherished myths of American life: that more consumer goods equals more progress. He argued that after World War II, America’s economic po...

 You can learn everything about a place by eating what the immigrants are cooking. Not what they’re expected to cook, not the polished versions rolled out for cultural festivals or tourism boards, but the real stuff: street food, family food, worker food. What they eat at 2:00 a.m. after a 12-hour shift. What they serve with pride or sell with resignation. In Germany, that food is Turkish. And the story it tells is bigger than any plate. Walk into any corner of Berlin, Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Wedding, and the döner kebab is king. It’s not just food. It’s a map of everything Germany doesn’t know how to say out loud. Migration. Labor. Class. Identity. Fear. Hope. A warm, greasy, spicy confession, folded into pita and handed over a countertop. But let’s rewind. In 1961, Germany made a deal with Turkey. It needed workers to fuel its post-war boom. Turkey had men who needed jobs. So the Gastarbeiter, “guest workers” arrived by the thousands. Officially temporary. Functionally permanent...

 Humans are, quite simply, animals. This is the foundational insight Desmond Morris offered in his groundbreaking book "The Naked Ape" and the one that should shape how we understand the earliest chapters of world geography. To explain our species without returning to our animal origins is like trying to explain a modern city without understanding the village. Evolution is not just a chapter in our past. It is the very soil out of which our geography, our behavior, and our cultures have grown. Look at the human body. Strip away the trappings of modern life and what you are left with is not a divine sculpture but a highly adapted primate. We walk on two legs because it freed our hands to carry food and children and later tools. Our forward-facing eyes provide depth perception, essential for a species that once leapt through trees or threw stones at prey. Even our strangely hairless skin is not a divine mystery but likely a result of heat regulation during long-distance running...

I went to this geography conference and there was a fascinating panel on the geography of chocolate so I thought I would share the high and low lights as yet another example about how everything connects in this world.  You unwrap a chocolate bar. It melts a little in your fingers. Smells good. Feels familiar. You take a bite. Sweet. Smooth. Comforting. But here’s the thing, you’re not just eating chocolate. You’re biting into three thousand years of history, and at least a few sour centuries. This thing, this treat we love to death, it started in the jungles of Central America. The Olmec, Maya, Aztec, they didn’t eat it the way we do. They drank it: bitter, spiced, dark, maybe with chili, maybe with cornmeal. No sugar. No gimmicks.  You get a bit of this if you get mole sauce on your enchiladas today. It was sacred. A currency. A ceremony. Not a snack. Not a Valentine’s Day placeholder. Then the Spanish showed up. And like everything else they got their hands on, they turned ...

Open your news feed today, and a familiar, unsettling image appears: migrants portrayed as criminals, invaders, threats to society. Short clips and incendiary headlines frame these individuals as figures of disorder, stripped entirely of context, dignity, and humanity. They become mere symbols, presented in isolation, devoid of history, culture, or personal struggle. Now consider a starkly different lens—a way of seeing introduced by John Berger, one of the most insightful cultural critics and writers of the 20th century. Berger, a writer, artist, and humanist thinker, dedicated his life to exploring how images and words shape our understanding of the world. Among his many influential works, A Seventh Man stands apart as a deeply empathetic and illuminating exploration of migrant workers in Europe. It is also one of my personal favorites for the way Berger combines narrative, philosophy, poetry, and photography into a singular form of compassionate storytelling. Published in 1975, A S...

  In the 19th century, newspapers learned a simple rule: if it bleeds, it leads. A dramatic headline. A bloody crime. Preferably with a photograph. Circulation goes up. Advertisers are pleased. And society gets just a little more afraid of itself. Now fast-forward. Today, we no longer wait for the newspaper. We scroll. And we don’t just consume headlines—we train them. With every pause, every click, every angry reply, we teach the machine what makes us twitch. What we can’t look away from. And the machine learns fast. Not what’s true. Not what’s good. But what keeps us engaged . Or more accurately, what keeps us emotionally aroused—outraged, afraid, suspicious. And here’s where it gets ugly. Because for centuries, Western societies have been conditioned to view Blackness through the lens of fear and violence. From slave-era propaganda, to Reconstruction-era lynching postcards, to 1990s superpredator myths—it’s an old story. The visual grammar was set long ago. Now? The alg...

  You unwrap a chocolate bar. It melts a little on your fingers. Smells sweet. Comforting. Familiar. But what you’re holding isn’t just candy—it’s geography. History. Power. Because the story of chocolate doesn’t start in the checkout aisle. It starts in the tropical rainforests of Central America, over 3,000 years ago, where the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec civilizations treated cacao not as a treat, but as sacred. A gift of the gods. They drank it bitter, spiced with chili, sometimes thickened with cornmeal. No sugar. No foil wrapper. It was medicine. Currency. Ceremony. And then the Spanish arrived. The cacao tree was shipped across the Atlantic, replanted in colonial soil, and like so many other things in the New World, turned into profit. The seeds that once paid priests and emperors were now fueling empires. And like sugar, tobacco, and cotton, cacao flourished in one very specific condition: forced labor. Over time, cacao spread to Africa, especially West Africa, where the soi...

 If you’ve been online lately, you might’ve seen the complaints. Superman, some say, has gone “woke.” They’re upset that the newest version of the Man of Steel is being described as an immigrant, a refugee, an outsider trying to find his place. But here’s the thing: that’s not a new spin. It’s not a modern rewrite. It’s the oldest part of the story. It’s where Superman comes from —literally and symbolically. To understand how we got here, you have to go back. Not to Krypton—but to Cleveland, 1938. Two young men—Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster—sons of Jewish immigrants, created Superman during a time when the world was teetering. Europe was slipping toward fascism. In America, antisemitism was rising. Immigration was tightly controlled. Refugees fleeing Hitler’s regime were being turned away at U.S. ports. The “other,” the outsider, was feared, vilified, shut out. And into that came Kal-El. An alien, cast off from a dying world, sent by his parents to survive among strangers. Raise...

  Let’s talk about something that changed your life—and you probably didn’t even know it. In 1965, Congress passed a law. It wasn’t flashy. No parades. No fireworks. Just paperwork, tucked into the fabric of American bureaucracy like thousands of other policies. It was called the Immigration and Nationality Act. Sounds dull, right? Except it completely rewired the demographics of the United States—and by extension, your neighborhood, your favorite food, the music on your playlist, the faces in your classroom, and maybe even the job you’ll have one day. Before that law, immigration to the U.S. was based on quotas. Not skill, not family ties. Quotas. And those quotas? They were designed in the 1920s to keep the country white. To favor Northern and Western Europeans—Britain, Germany, Scandinavia—and keep out everyone else. Southern Italians? Jews? Too ethnic. Japanese? Chinese? Nope. Africa? Forget it. But the world had changed. It was the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement was res...

  “Power Lines – The Sahel at the Edge of Change” t he Frontier of Survival On this narrow band of Earth, the desert advances and retreats like a vast, indifferent tide. Here, at the hinge between the green and the tan, humanity rehearses its oldest drama: adapt or perish. The Sahel is neither savannah nor Sahara but the uneasy handshake between them. It is a living experiment in resilience, carved by wind, tempered by heat, and overseen by a sky that withholds more than it gives. To study it is to confront the moral arithmetic of geography: where a single centimeter of rain may draw the line between feast and famine, between permanence and flight. Planetary Clocks and Shifting Sands From orbit, the Sahel is a pale ribbon that expands and contracts with the planet’s slow-beating climate heart. Tilt the Earth a fraction, and this band migrates. Alter the oceans’ temperature, and clouds change their allegiance. The Hadley Cell circulations loft moisture into equatorial thun...