Ap Human Geography Chapter 1 Summary

The book as a whole covers all gamut of environment and development using three themes of sound science, suitability and stewardship. The chapter 9 deals with the population and development. Chapter starts with a short story about Thailand’s successful experiment with a population control measuring using education, health care and modernization. This case study is a good example that proves economic development is not always necessary to stabilize the population growth. The chapter then provides the some basic concepts in demography such as demographic transition, how countries used different ways to achieve demographic transition in a succinct format. Economic development and population policies are the two competing ideas that are then discussed with a description of how these two schools of thoughts in developed and developing countries have changed over the period. I felt that the details of the population conferences can be shortened and use that space to provide more case study examples. Family size in different economies are appropriately discussed. While the economic and social security concerns leads to large sized families in developing countries, the religious believes also leads to large sized families even in developed countries like the US. This aspect is missing in the chapter.
In any discussion on population, …show more content…
Overall, this chapter is an important topic in the discussion on environment and development. Unlike chapters on environmental issues in the book, this chapter on population and development lacks some of the critical analysis of the topic which are more common in human geography text books. The recent changes in global economy in terms of growth of China and India and other developing countries, war, refugee crisis, political instability etc. needs to be addressed to some extent to give the students the actual picture of the current status of population and