Here's How America Uses Its Land
The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures.
Source: www.bloomberg.com
This set of 15 maps on how land is used in the 48 contiguous U.S. states is a phenomenal resource to visualize how we use our land (admittedly this does exclude Alaska and Hawaii, but given that Alaska's land use patterns can skew the patterns considerably). This is especially useful in agricultural units, but has many other applications.
Scoop.it Tags: agriculture, food production, land use, rural, USA.
WordPress TAGS: agriculture, food production, land use, rural, USA.
The Sling Shot Man
This is the story of a man who makes sling shots and shoots them like an expert marksman.
While I don't think that the folk/popular dichotomy is the most important way to conceptualize differences in culture traits and groups, it is still how many textbooks arrange their cultural chapters. Given that, I love showing this clip–this man is the embodiment of folk culture and his story shows the elements that differentiate folk culture from popular culture.
Scoop.it Tags: culture, rural, folk culture, the South,
WordPress Tags: culture, rural, folk culture, the South.
Welcome to Monowi, Nebraska: population 1
Eighty-four-year-old Elsie Eiler pays taxes to herself, grants her own alcohol licence and is the only remaining resident in Monowi, Nebraska.
What is it like living in a town with a population of 1? Would you stay as the last remnant of your withering town? This case study is absolutely fascinating since it defies what we consider the minimum threshold of what is required for a city or a town. However, the other compelling geographic story is how a once, low-order central place in rural Nebraska, has been (almost) completely abandoned.
Tag: rural, migration, USA.
How Dollar General Is Transforming Rural America
"Dollar General stores thrive in low-income rural towns, and the deep-discount chain has opened hundreds of new shops in the past year."
Dollar General is set to open 1,000 locations this year, for a total of more than 14,000 stores. It will have more stores than McDonald's has restaurants in the entire country. That includes plenty of urban locations, but the chain's bright yellow and black signs pop up about every 10 miles along many remote state highways. Like Walmart, it has rural roots. Dollar General started in small-town Kentucky. Al Cross, who runs the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky, says Dollar General competes with the world's largest retailer on price and convenience.
Tags: rural, retail, podcast.
Walmart Nation: Mapping the Largest Employers in the U.S.
Walmart employs 1.5 million people across the country – and the retail behemoth is now the largest private employer in 22 states.
In an era where Amazon steals most of the headlines, it's easy to forget about brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart.
But, even though the market values the Bezos e-commerce juggernaut at about twice the sum of Walmart, the blue big-box store is very formidable in other ways. For example, revenue and earnings are two areas where Walmart still reigns supreme, and the stock just hit all-time highs yesterday on an earnings beat.
Tag: rural, retail, labor, economic, industry.
Source: www.visualcapitalist.com
In The Mountains Of Georgia, Foxfire Students Keep Appalachian Culture Alive
For 50 years, high school students in Rabun County have chronicled their region's disappearing traditions and mountain people, from blacksmiths to moonshiners, in publications and a living museum.
This is an excellent, rich example of preserving old elements of rural, folk cultures that are rapidly disappearing. The project ties local students to the region to appreciate past more and creates a remarkable archive for the future.
Tags: culture, historical, rural, folk cultures, the South, podcast, unit 3 culture.
'Normal America' Is Not A Small Town Of White People
"The sense that the normal America is out there somewhere in a hamlet is misplaced: it's not in a small town at all. I calculated how demographically similar each U.S. metropolitan area is to the U.S. overall, based on age, educational attainment, and race and ethnicity.1 The index equals 100 if a metro's demographic mix were identical to that of the U.S. overall."
Source: fivethirtyeight.com
We often do imagine that your typical American is from the Heartland, and that very term, strengthens that connotation. 100 years ago that was true that your average American was one a farm or a small town, as 72% of Americans lived in rural areas. Today, that is decidedly not the case but we still sometimes think (and act) as if it were (84% today live in urban areas). The United States is urban, diverse, and bi-coastal in it's primary demographic composition.
Tag: rural, migration, USA, census.
GPS technology maps land rights for Africa's 'forest people'
Via Scoop.it – Geography Education
In the lush rainforests of Africa's Congo Basin, hundreds of thousands of indigenous people live as hunter gatherers, depending on the forest's natural resources for their survival.
The "Mapping for Rights" program trains people in the Congo to map the land they live on using GPS and other geospatial technologies. This can assist the to produce documents to politically protect their land from encroachment and preserve their access to the forest. Globalization can blur many of the modern/traditional narratives as the world becomes interconnected in complex ways.
Via edition.cnn.com