On November 26, 2020, trade unions in India reported that over 250 MILLION people took part in a strike. What could prompt such massive protest? Farming. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at GMOs, which are organisms whose DNA has been modified in a laboratory, and examine the impact of one GMO in particular, Bt Cotton, in the agrarian crisis in India.

Just like many great duos throughout history, Bulgaria and Germany have a fascinating (though uneven) relationship. In today’s episode, we’re going to take a closer look at the impact of politics on economies as we trace this history of Bulgaria and Germany following World War II, and examine the ways capitalism, and communism, impacted their economic strength today.

Empire, imperialism, and colonialism are all interrelated tactics of geopolitics that are used to achieve similar goals of one state maintaining economic, political, or even cultural dominance over other territories. Today, we’re going to unravel the impacts of colonialism at different times throughout history from Taiwan to Myanmar as we examine the longstanding impacts of these relationships. We’ll also take a look at how some countries today, like Thailand, have taken the control of the narrative through culinary colonization.

Welcome to Crash Course Office Hours! Alizé Carrère and April Luginbuhl Mather answer your questions on human and physical geography, including how rocks form, how melting glaciers impact water resources, and what even is geography?

Chapters:
Introduction
What is geography?
Place, space, and location
Site, situation and scale
How do different types of rock form?
Reducing the impacts of earthquakes and volcanoes
How is a meander formed?
Origin and formation of fjords
How can mountain ecosystems be restore from the impact of development and tourism?
Impact of melting Himalayan glaciers on water resources
What is posthumanism?
Who are significant geographers?
Different types of boundaries
What are the markers of development?
What is in a geography course?
Tips for studying geography
Why do we personally find geography interesting?
How to talk to students about the politics of maps
Displacement of people due to war, natural disasters, and changing coastlines
How do metamorphic rocks form?
Careers for people who study geography
Outro

In our final episode of Crash Course Geography we're going to take a look towards the future, and to do that we'll need to revisit our fundamental geography tools: space, place, and human-environment interactions! We'll talk about the rise of the digital world and virtual spaces, the continued impacts of globalization and the Anthropocene, and even ponder new ideas like geoengineering. As we've said many times in this series the Earth is a beautifully dynamic place, and human innovation and our desire to claim and create our own places will continue to build new landscapes and futures. Thank you all so much for joining us on this journey across our extraordinary home planet!

Chapters:
- space-time
- intro
- virtual spaces
- place and globalization
- the slow city movement
- data landscapes and surveillance
- human footprint
- geoengineering
- series wrap-up
- outro

The Arab-Israeli Conflict, which is the ongoing political tensions and military conflicts between Arab nations and Israel, is one of the longest and most complex disputes in the world. Today, we're going to focus on more recent events, and look specifically at the role groundwater plays in preventing a pathway to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Groundwater makes up the largest portion of available fresh water on Earth, but as we'll see, access isn't always fair and its availability doesn't always line up neatly with political borders.

Today we’re going to take a closer look at cities, examine how these large complex structures are organized, and identify patterns and differences in land use around the world. We'll begin with a quick recap of Central Place Theory, then we'll show you how the Concentric Zone Model can approximate the development of Chicago in the United States. Then, we'll take a closer look at colonial port cities, the development of industrial zones and financial districts, and the patchwork of immigrant communities that often developed around them in cities such as Boston in the United States. And finally, we will end our episode with a look at the layout of some North African cities that are in earthquake-prone areas with hot and dry climates such as in Fez, Morocco.

If you compare precipitation around the world with population distribution we can understand a simple but powerful pattern of human geography: where there is water, there are people. But it gets a little more complicated because where there are people and limited resources, there is often conflict and bigger geographical questions at stake. So today, we’re going to zoom in and look more closely at how precipitation patterns around the Great Plains and the western United States has led to many conflicts involving the use and distribution of water resources.

Today we’re going to talk about the collection of routes known as the Silk Roads, and explore how worldview and other ideas spread along those trade routes. The Silk Roads are responsible for everything from the spices we use when we cook to the cloth we see as beautiful, but today we’re going to focus on religion, and show how these routes influenced the beliefs of billions of people through time and space.

Today, we're going to take a closer look at how the oceans circulate by following the life of a discarded water bottle as it gets snagged in the North Pacific Garbage Patch. We'll talk about what causes the movement of water, called current, both near the surface and much deeper in the oceans, and we'll show how they follow similar (but not identical) paths to the winds. Ocean circulation plays a huge role in cycling vital nutrients within the seas and helps us transport goods on ships across the globe and it's up to us to protect it.

Over the millennia, every region on Earth has developed its own successful agricultural ecosystem from flat fields of grain and mountainside rice terraces to coastal fish farms and goat herding. Today, we’re going to break down agricultural systems into three scales: subsistence, small-scale, and industrial agriculture. And we’ll take a look at how a place's history plays a huge role in the system we see today as we follow the story of agriculture in the Philippines.

Today, we’re going to visit Siberia and take a closer look at how temperatures there (and around the globe) impact the way cultures, communities, and landscapes form. Air temperature plays a much bigger role than just helping us decide what we’re going to wear everyday, it dictates the kind of foods we can grow, how we build our cities and roads, and the kinds of industries that can even exist in a location. And in a region like Siberia, where it can get cold, like REALLY COLD, the air temperature has had an incredible impact on life. But before we end this episode we’ll warm up with a visit to Phoenix, Arizona to talk about how they too have to make a lot of decisions due to the extreme heat of a city in the middle of the desert.

From outbreaks of measles in the United States and cholera in Haiti to patterns of lead poisoning near gold mines in Nigeria, medical geographers play an important role in tracking disease in the landscape. Today, we're going to look at strategies medical geographers use to help as many people as possible achieve the highest level of health possible.

While we can’t explore every cultural trait in the world, language is an important system of spoken, signed, or written symbols humans use to express themselves. It’s a major marker of identity that often unites members of the same nation, or people with similar cultural identity.
And it’s a cultural trait that has enormous power because language helps other cultural traits move through the spoken, visual, tactile, and musical word. So today, we’re going to explore how words move, because the activities that prompt that movement can tell us a lot about how ideas as well move around the world.

Cliffs and canyons, beaches and dunes, floodplains and river valleys, plateaus and mountains — these are all products of a restless Earth. In today’s episode we’re going to take a closer look at how landforms greatly influence how people live and derive meaning and a sense of place. From the hills and ponds we see everyday to impressive landscapes like Uluru in Australia or the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia they all have stories to tell.

Today, we're going to talk about how the Earth moves, but to do that, we're going to have to go way back to the early days of the galaxy! Processes that happened before the Earth even formed have led us to the geographic patterns and processes that create Earth's environments and support all living things. We'll talk about how the Earth rotates, the effects of it being slightly tilted, how events like sea ice melting impact how the Earth wobbles, and of course talk about how our elliptical orbit gives us seasons. So many of our life decisions are influenced by the motion of Earth. It guides where we decide to live, what food we eat, or even what weather we experience - which we'll talk about more next time.

Is the world overpopulated or underpopulated? While we worry about there being too many people for the planet to support, we can also worry about how fewer people in a given place may affect the economy, what may happen when there are more elderly people who need care than there are healthcare workers, or even be concerned about how many people are necessary to carry on other aspects of culture. Today, we'll discuss Malthusian and Boserup predictions on the planet's carrying capacity and take a close look at a popular demography tool geographers use to predict population change: the Demographic Transition Model or DTM.

Today we're going to talk about rivers and how these dynamic, delicate, yet powerful systems are able to constantly change the landscape. We'll focus on the Zambezi River in Southeast Africa following its main features from the tributaries that feed into it in the upper course, to the deafening wonder that is Mosi-oa-Tunya waterfall (also called as Victoria Falls) in the middle course, all the way to the delta as the river flows into the Indian Ocean. Along the way, we'll teach you all about why rivers meander, why some rivers have rapids and others are calm, and how we talk about classify and river systems more broadly.

From shipping routes to airplane traffic to even the Internet, transportation planning is all about designing optimal transportation networks to move goods, information, and people around the globe. Today, we're going to discuss industrial geography by tracing the story of the automotive landscape as it formed across the manufacturing belt of the Upper Midwest of the United States, and show how it wasn't just a coincidence that it overlapped with transportation routes and access to raw materials like coal and iron. We'll show you how Least Cost Theory has been used to explain the location of certain industries and how it no longer seems to be holding due to the rise of globalization.

From gnocchi and salchipapas to potato chips and french fries, it seems like every cuisine around the world has embraced the potato! And this humble tuber did not originate in Ireland or France, but near Lake Titicaca near the border of what is now known as Bolivia and Peru 7000-9000 years ago! So today, we're going to trace this history of the potato as we teach you about climate, how we classify it using the Köppen system, and the ways humans have employed their geo-literacy to adapt to their surroundings.