FUNDAMENTALS OF POPULATION: LOCATION, DISTRIBUTION, AND DENSITY
CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
No event in human history has equaled the rapid increase in population over the last 10,000 years. This is in sharp contrast to the 200,000 years following the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, during which the earth's human population grew very slowly, its numbers rising and falling in res-ponse to the "traditional" controllers of population: environmental change, disease, and availability of food. As the last glaciation retreated and the Holocene epoch began, the amount of habitable space increased and unprecedented events began to occur in Earth's history.
The study of population is termed demography, derived from ancient Greek words roughly meaning to "describe and write about people." The focus of population geography is on the spatial aspects of demography. The key questions in geography are where and why there? These lead to some penetrating insights into population issues.
Population Growth
The dominant issue in population geography remains growth. The world's population is currently growing at a rate that is more than ten times the total estimated world population at the beginning of the Holocene and the bulk of this growth is occurring in the world's poorer countries. The Earth's environments and natural resources are strained as never before by the needs of a mush-rooming human population, a population that has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Problems resulting from unprecedented population growth became especially acute in the twentieth century. A continued high rate of population growth in the twenty-first century can have a calamitous im-pact, causing irreversible damage to the natural systems on which we depend for our existence and survival.
Population Distribution
From the beginning, humanity has been unevenly distributed over the land and this pattern was in-tensified during the twentieth century. Whether urban or rural, populations tend to cluster in certain areas (see text Figure 4-1) because, as you will recall from earlier discussions, much of the Earth is unsuitable for human occupancy (refer back to text figures 3-4 and 3-5). To handle contrasts of this type on maps, geographers use measures of population distribution—the locations on the Earth's surface where individuals or groups (depending on the scale of the map) are concentrated —and the density of the population figured as the number of people per unit area of land.
Text Figure 4-1 shows patterns of population distribution for the world using the dot method. It shows that the world's three largest population concentrations all lie on the Eurasian landmass —East Asia, South Asia, and Europe—each associated with a major civilization. It also reminds us that the overwhelming majority of the world's population inhabits the Northern Hemi-sphere.
East Asia, centered on China but extending to Korea and Japan, contains about one-quarter of the world's population—nearly 1.3 billion in China alone. The map shows that the population is concentrated toward the coast with ribbon-like extensions found on the basins and lowlands of China's major rivers. The great majority of people in East Asia are farmers.
India lies at the center of the South Asian concentration with extensions to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the island of Sri Lanka. This is one of the greatest concentrations of people on Earth with about 1.5 billion people. It is a confined region (the Himalaya Mountains on the north and the desert west of the Indus River in Pakistan) with a rapidly growing population. By almost any estimate, the capacity of the region to support this population has been exceeded. As in East Asia, the majority are farmers.
Europe, the third-ranking population cluster, also lies in Eurasia but at the opposite end from China. This cluster contains about 700 million people, which puts it in a class with the South Asian concentration, but the similarity ends there. In Europe, unlike East and South Asia, terrain and environment are not as closely related to population distribution. Another contrast lies in the fact that the majority of the European population live in cities and towns, leaving the rural country-side more open and sparsely populated. These contrasts with the East and South Asian clusters reflect the impact of the Industrial Revolution on Europe over the last 200-plus years.
Population Density
Population density can be measured on the basis of several different criteria, revealing contrasting aspects of a country's demography. Text Figure 4-2 illustrates density via the isopleth method. The data in Resource B at the end of your textbook provide area, total population, and density per square mile for every country. One must examine such data with caution, however, since the high cost and organizational challenges of census taking often produce unreliable data. Arithmetic and physiologic population densities are the two most common approaches. These two methods become more meaningful and useful when compared with each other.
CHAPTER QUIZ
MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
1. Demography is the study of:
a. physical geography
b. population
c. animals
d. climate
2. Which country has the highest arithmetic density of people.
a. Japan
b. Bangladesh
c. India
d. Netherlands
3. Physiologic density of a country relates the total population of a country to the:
a. number of people living on farmlands
b. population divided into total acres of farmland
c. acres of farmland available
d. population living in villages and cities
4. About ? of the world's population lives in East Asia.
a. one-half
b. one-third
c. one-fifth
d. one-fourth
5. One of the greatest concentrations of population, according to your text, is:
a. in Argentina
b. on the Ganges River plain in northern India
c. in Bangladesh
d. on the Nile River
6. In Germany ? percent of the people live in cities.
a. 85
b. 90
c. 50
d. 75
7. In the United States, the largest urban complex, called a megalopolis, lies:
a. in Florida and north to South Carolina
b. along the Pacific coast in Southern California
c. in Chicago and its surrounding area
d. from Boston to Baltimore
8. Southeast Asia has ? clusters of population.
a. contiguous
b. few
c. discrete
d. large
9. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa is nearly:
a. 200 million
b. 350 million
c. 400 million
d. 650 million
10. Geographically, the spatial distribution of population in Australia and South America is:
a. very scattered
b. concentrated in the interior regions
c. peripheral
d. concentrated on plateaus
TRUE/FALSE QUESTIONS
1. In the poorer countries, people tend to cluster in the urban areas because there is little farmland. (TF)
2. Population distribution dot-maps are used primarily to show where people live. (TF)
3. Physiologic density maps more accurately show population densities because they are based on urban land clusters. (TF)
4. In China, farmers far outnumber people living in cities. (TF)
5. The country of Bangladesh has a population of nearly 133 million people living in an area about the size of Iowa. (TF)
6. In contrast to East and South Asia, Europe's population centers are not closely related to terrain and environment. Instead they are related exclusively to the coal-fields. (TF)
7. In the United States the largest urban agglomeration is located along the Pacific coast. (TF)
8. Southeast Asia does not have large contiguous urban areas because it is made up of islands. (TF)
9. In Africa, there are no agglomerations comparable to those in Asia. (TF)
10. With land reforms it would be possible for South America to support a much larger population. (TF)
STUDY QUESTIONS
1. List and explain the problems high population growth rates are causing in the world today.
2. Define and discuss the difference between arithmetic and physiologic densities. What is lacking in each? Why aren't either of these completely accurate?
3. How does the spatial distribution of population of North America and Europe differ from that of East Asia and South Asia? How are populations spatially distributed in South America and Australia?
4. How does Japan support its large population? What special problems does this country have that are not faced by the other developed nations?
PROCESSES AND CYCLES OF POPULATION CHANGE
CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
Population does not increase in an even manner from country to country. The differences include age, gender, life expectancy, and geographic distribution, and may be identified between countries but are more significant internally. A country that has a large percentage of its population at 15 years of age or below will have enormous needs for education, jobs, and housing in the years ahead. A country where the population is "aging," such as the United States or France, can face shortages of younger workers and problems with their retirement systems. The list goes on but you get the point: a population is far more than mere numbers. This is an extremely important chapter, and when you have studied it, you will have a much better understanding of the complex issues of world population.
Population Trends
Never before in human history have so many people filled the Earth's living space, and never has world population grown as rapidly as it has during the past 100 years. The population explosion of the past 200 years has increased the world's population from under 1 billion to approximately 6 billion. It took from the dawn of history to the year 1820 for the Earth's population to reach 1 billion. It now is taking only a decade to add each new billion. It is still possible that there will be 10 billion human inhabitants on the planet by the middle of the twenty-first century.
Population Growth Rates
Rapid population growth varies over time and space. Europe's rapid growth occurred during the nineteenth century, the result of the Second Agricultural Revolution. At this time better farming methods and improved organization resulted in increased food supplies, especially to cities and towns. This was immediately followed by the Industrial Revolution, during which sanitation facilities made the towns and cities safer from epidemics, and modern medical practices became wide spread. Disease prevention through vaccination introduced a new era in public health. Death rates declined markedly—by 50 percent between 1750 and 1850—while birth rates remained high. The change is especially spectacular when viewed in the context of doubling time—the number of years it takes a population to double—which was 150 years in 1750 but only 35 years in 1850.
One effect of this increase in the rate of natural population growth was increased migration. Millions of people left Europe to emigrate to other parts of the world—North and South America, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere. When European colonization began in earnest during the nineteenth century, Europeans brought with them their newfound methods of sanitation and medical techniques and death rates in Africa, India, and South America began to decline. Indigenous populations began to grow, and at ever-increasing rates. Today, South America's growth rates have declined, but Africa's remain high. As mentioned previously, the fastest-growing populations to-day are invariably taking place in those poorer countries that have the greatest difficulties providing the basic amenities of life for their citizens.
Disease and famine were the major controllers of population for the world as a whole until the last 100 years. Diseases still kill millions of people each year, especially infants and children, but the overall effects have been reduced, at least in many countries.
Reduction of Growth Rates
Reducing population growth rates is a complicated and sensitive issue. In the richer, more developed countries, general modernization and education has resulted in lower growth rates. Therefore, these countries total populations do not approach those of the poorer countries. The benefits enjoy-ed by the wealthier, developed nations that have led to their slower rates of population have not been shared by much of the world. A key issue to the reduction of population growth rates is to improve the status of women and to secure their rights in society. In the Muslim countries of South- west Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, two of the regions with the highest rates of population growth, women often live in near-Medieval conditions or, at best, as second-class citizens. Tradition plays a powerful role, but the barrier to better education for women is the real key. In places where women's education levels have risen, there has been an accompanying decline in population growth rates; not to mention a general improvement in the well-being of the population.
The demographic transition model, which compares birth and death rates in a population over time, suggests that the world's population will stabilize in the twenty-first century, but the model may not be universally applicable. The sequence of stages of the demographic transition has been observed in several European countries, but what transpired economically and socially in Europe may not apply for the rest of the world. It may be unwise, therefore, to assume that the demographic cycles that have occurred in already-industrialized countries will eventually spread to the rest of the world.
CHAPTER QUIZ
MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS
1. At the present time, about million people are added to the world's population each year.
a. 150
b. 100
c. 90
d. 80
2. Today, Russia is experiencing a population growth rate.
a. rising
b. declining
c. negative
d. stable
3. Africa’s rate of natural increase in population is still high but its population faces the grim prospects of:
a. a decade or more of drought
b. increasing ethnic strife in all countries
c. the AIDS epidemic
d. increasing military conflict
4. The continent with the lowest birth rates is:
a. Europe
b. North America
c. Southeast Asia
d. Antarctica
5. The total fertility rate of a country measures the total number of:
a. women able to have children
b. children between 1 year old and age 10
c. women between 13 and 45
d. children born to women of childbearing age
6. Crude death rates are highest in:
a. tropical Africa
b. China
c. South Africa
d. South America
7. Which of the following did not have an effect on keeping population growth rates down before 1820.
a. the Little Ice Age
b. wars
c. plagues
d. advances in medicine
8. The actual demographic transition is represented by which two of the four stages of the demographic transition model.
a. 1 and 4
b. 2 and 3
c. 3 and 4
d. 2 and 4
9. It is thought by some that perhaps today's developing countries will of the demographic transition model.
a. not go through all four stages
b. have to go through all four stages
c. not follow any stages
d. only go through stages two and three
10. As a tool for development, the demographic transition model is most useful in one place.
a. United States
b. Europe
c. Japan
d. Canada
TRUE/FALSE QUESTIONS
1. Because of the world's falling population growth rate, there is no longer fear of a population explosion. (TF)
2. Population growth rates are rising in the Muslim countries of North Africa and Southwest Asia. (TF)
3. Not all of the countries with low birth rates are wealthy. (TF)
4. Thomas Malthus thought the world's population growth would be slowed by disease. (TF)
5. By 2030, people in Germany over age 65 will account for close to half the adult population. (TF)
6. Population geography is the spatial component of demography. (TF)
7. Japan’s population is projected to begin expanding rapidly in 2007. (TF)
8. Crude death rates decline more rapidly than birth rates. (TF)
9. In Between 1348 and 1350, almost half the population of England died from bubonic plague. (TF)
10. Most countries in the world are at the same stage of the demographic transition model. (TF)
STUDY QUESTIONS
1. Look at text Figure 5-1. Note where the high population growth rate countries are. Do you see a pattern?
2. Even though the world's overall population growth rate has slowed, why is there still concern about another population explosion? Explain exponential growth and why the base population is so important worldwide and by country. Use text Figure 5-2 to help you. What kinds of problems can you foresee for those countries that have a high rate of growth today?
3. Study text Figures 5-4 and 5-5. Explain what you can learn by looking at these age-sex pyramids.
4. Study the section under the heading Demographic Cycles. Write down all the terms and their definitions in this section.
5. After studying the demographic cycle, do you understand why the four stages might not apply to today's developing countries? How did European colonization affect these countries?