Preface

This is a story about us. You and me. It is a story about connections. To each other. To the land. To the world we inhabit. Human Geography is fundamentally about our human experience of being in the world. It is a study of the way we organize, inhabit, and utilize the earth. We humans haven’t always had an easy road. We grapple with pandemics and famine. We wrestle with personal decisions, everything from what to eat to how to dress to what to do with our lives – decisions that other animals seem to not have to consider. In an effort to make things simple and easier, we tend to make things more complicated and now face problems that often feel beyond our capacity to solve.

And yet. Here we are. We come from an unbroken chain of human ancestors connecting us back to the first few people to walk this Earth. People who overcame. People who solved seemingly insurmountable problems. And so Human Geography is our collective story.

But Human Geography is not just the story of where we’ve been, it’s an exploration of where we’re going. And that story is going to be written by you. The future of Human Geography is your future. The languages you speak, the beliefs and ideals you cherish, the ideas about how Earth’s resources should be used and managed will all form the backbone of Human Geography in the decades and centuries ahead.

This textbook provides an introduction to the study of Human Geography, offering an accessible springboard into the discipline for novice geographers while at the same time, encouraging readers to dig deeper and widen their understanding. The organization of this text is designed to correlate with the Advanced Placement® Human Geography course structure. This book takes a backward design approach, informed by pedagogical research, focusing on key themes and ideas in the sub-discipline and privileges depth over breadth, presenting a rich story about the way we live on Earth. Very often, the text is written to address the reader directly, and the author’s voice has intentionally tried to remain present throughout the text. Since Human Geography is our story, it is one that is continually evolving, but while specific case studies and examples might change, the foundational concepts remain relatively steady. Thus, this textbook takes a concise approach that is designed to be supplemented with additional readings, articles, books, or films. In this way, the textbook provides students with a deep, foundational understanding of core concepts in Human Geography that can then be applied to more specific case studies. 

This book is written for you. And since it is our story, it seems only fitting that that story should be freely accessible to everyone. Thus, this book has been published under the Creative Commons license, which means its content can be freely used, reused, remixed, and tweaked simply by crediting the author. As I explain in the introduction to my first textbook, World Regional Geography, Geography itself is an open discipline and anyone can be a geographer as long as they are curious about the world around them. You are a geographer. And my hope is that whatever else you might become, you will keep an appreciation and curiosity about the world and our place within it.

Keep telling, writing, and rewriting our story.