Chapter # 5

Geography, Demography,
Ecology, and Society
 Geography
 Geography is far more than the knowledge of
where places are. Geography is a social
science that focuses on the spatial interaction
of human beings with each other and with
their physical environment.
 Geography considers questions such as why

cities are located where they are, how the

environment shapes society’s culture, and
why some areas develop while others don’t.
 Demography
 Demography is the study of the number and
characteristics of a population. It is concerned
not only with the number of people in an area
but also with the factors that may be causing
their number to increase or decrease.
 Demographers classify and count people on

the basis of characteristics such as age,

gender, marital status, occupation, income,
nationality, and race.
 Population Estimates
 When we add up the population statistics for
all countries, we conclude that there were
slightly more than 7.4 billion people in 2016.
 China has the largest population of any

country, with more than 1.3 billion people; and

 Asia, with more than 4 billion people, has the

largest population of any region.

Determinants of Population Growth
 Because two key determinants of the
population of any country are its death rate
and its birthrate, these deserve special
consideration.
 The current world death rate is considerably

lower than in the distant past.

 How much further the death rate will drop in

coming years will depend both on changes in

the age composition of the world population
and on the rate of advance in medical science.
 As death rates decline, the world population will
increase unless birthrates also fall.
 Developing countries have already seen their
populations increase because of their declining death
rates, despite the efforts of some of them to decrease
their birthrates.
 Birth control has been so effective in the United
States, Japan, and Europe that their population
growth has slowed to a crawl or even begun to
decline.
 In less developed countries where children play an
important economic as well as social role in the
family, the population growth has continued at a high
rate despite governmental attempts to slow it down.
The Growth of Population over Time
Why Population Has Grown Rapidly since the 1800s. The great
increase in world population since 1800 has resulted directly
from a continuing decline of the death rate. Two factors are
responsible for this:

 First, great advances in sanitation and health care, and

 Second, a relatively rapid increase in the per capita output of
both food and manufactured goods, so that for large
numbers of people standards of living rose substantially
above subsistence level.
 Principally, however, the increase was a result of the
Industrial Revolution. The great advances of science and
technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made it
possible for the world to support a rapidly rising population.
 Unequal Population Growth since the Late 1800s.
Some of the less developed regions of the world,
such as Asia and Latin America, made substantially
greater gains in population than Europe, the United
States, and Canada.
 However, increases in population in the developing
areas of the world often occurred at the expense of
standards of living.
 Birthrates remained high and production expanded
slowly.
 Since 1900, the population of Asia has increased
substantially; today, more than 60 percent of the
people of the world are found there.
 The Malthusian Theory
 For more than a century, most discussions of the
population problem have started from the theory
of Thomas Robert Malthus concerning the
relationship of population to the means of human
subsistence.
 Malthusian theory is the belief that a population

tends to outrun the means of subsistence.

 He contended that people are impelled to increase

their numbers by a powerful natural urge.

 As a result, if there are no obstacles, population

will increase rapidly and without limit.

 The Malthusian Theory
 By this Malthus meant that if a population could
double in, say, twenty-five years, it would double
again in the next twenty-five years, and so on
indefinitely.
 He believed, that the means of subsistence could be
increased slowly and to a limited extent.
 Consequently, population would always tend to press
against the food supply.
 When the food supply became inadequate to support
more people, any further increase in population
would be prevented by the “positive” checks of
malnutrition, famine, disease, and war.
 The Malthusian Theory
 Malthus’s belief that population growth would
necessarily tend to outrun means of subsistence
was based on the law of diminishing returns.
 In terms of the relationships between land,

labor, and food output, the law of diminishing

returns means that if more and more people are
employed on a given area of land, even though
total output may continue to expand, beyond a
certain point average output per worker will
shrink.
 The amount of good farmland in the world is limited. Once all
the undeveloped regions of the earth have been settled and
cultivated more or less intensively, further attempts to increase
food production will become less and less effective because they
will bring into operation the law of diminishing returns.
 It will still be possible to increase output by employing more
workers on the land already cultivated or by cultivating land that
is less fertile.
 However, assuming no advances in agricultural technology, this
will bring about a decrease in the average output per worker, a
decrease that will become greater and greater as attempts are
made to raise production to higher and higher levels.
 It is possible that advances in agricultural technology might, for
a long time, more than offset this tendency toward diminishing
returns, but they could not do so indefinitely if population
continued to grow. Sooner or later, the amount of land per
person would become impossibly small.
The Concept of Optimal Population

 The optimal population is the population that

would maximize welfare for its members.
 What, then, is the optimum, or best, size of

population from the standpoint of maximizing

welfare?
 For any country, there is likely a point beyond

which an increase in population would strain its

resources and reduce average output per
worker, and hence reduce standards of living.
The Concept of Optimal Population

 Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource, who

argued that people are the ultimate resource and
that there can be no such thing as too many people.
 People create ideas, and as they do they create the
technology by which the world can support an ever-
larger population.
 Most demographers do not share Simon’s optimism.
 They believe that India, Pakistan, and China have
already exceeded their optimal quantity and that the
United States and western Europe have reached
theirs.
 Ecology: The Interaction of Geography,
Demography, and Environment
 The environment is the sum of all the
external influences that impinge on the
human organism.
 These influences exert their effects through

physical stimuli that produce sights, sounds,

tastes, smells, and other bodily sensations.
 These sensations make us aware of our

environment, and through them we are able

to interpret our environment and react to it.
 Social and Natural environment
 The social environment is composed of the elements
in our surroundings that are human or of human
origin.
 The general character of our social environment
depends chiefly on the culture of the group to which
we belong.
 The natural environment is composed of the
nonhuman elements in our surroundings.
 The character of our natural environment depends
primarily on the climate, water resources, soil,
geography, plant and animal life, and mineral
resources of the part of the world in which we live.
Ecology
 Ecology is the science concerned with the
interactions between living things and their
environment.
 The environment of each species of organism

includes not only the inanimate world but

also all other living species that affect it
directly or indirectly.
 Human ecology is the part of ecology that

deals with the way in which human societies

adjust to their environments.
The Ecological Balance
 Ecological balance is the term applied to the
state achieved when each plant or animal
species, with its own characteristics and
needs, has adjusted to its environment and
survived, and when other species, which have
likewise adjusted to the environment, prevent
it from expanding indefinitely and from
crowding them out.
The Ecological Balance
 Modern times have brought rapid changes in
the ecological balance in many parts of the
world.
 Sometimes, the results have been good from

the human point of view, but sometimes they

have been almost disastrous.
 E.g. When rabbits were introduced into
Australia, where they had no natural enemies
and multiplied by the millions, they became a
national problem.
The Ecological Balance
 Examples of threats to the ecological balance
are many: global warming, industrial
pollution, smokestack emissions, acid rain,
depletion of water tables, and paving over of
fertile soil and plant and animal habitats.

 Some scientists predict that, in that same

way, the migration of viruses will spread
nearly untreatable diseases far from the sites
to which such viruses were formerly confined.
 Pollution
 A major concern of ecologists is pollution—the
destruction of our natural resource base by the
productive process.
 Over the past fifty years, there has been extensive
pollution of rivers, lakes, and forests by sewage and
industrial wastes.
 Pure air also has become scarce in many of our
urban centers, where the inhabitants often must
breathe a mixture of air combined with auto fumes,
dust, and various waste products from trash fires,
incinerators, and the smokestacks and flares of
industrial plants.
 Pollution
 Improperly disposed toxic chemicals and
various toxic waste products have invaded
the soil in some areas, and sometimes whole
communities must be moved while their
former home sites are cleaned up.
 In other communities, people suspect that

various illnesses are caused by this kind of

problem, but no cleanup seems immediately
practical.
 Conclusion
 This chapter has reviewed geographic, demographic, and
ecological problems that society faces and has shown some of
the ways society meets them.
 The geographic problems are the most constant, but with new
technologies even these can change.
 Demographic problems are constantly changing: As societies
become richer, their population growth generally decreases on
its own.
 Nonetheless, population problems play central roles in many
countries’ social problems.
 Whereas demographic problems generally decline as a country
gets richer, ecological problems often become more severe.
 But the wealth of society also gives it the means to deal with
those ecological problems.