How has the Geography of the West shaped who we are?

Before we are able to answer the driving question, “How has the geography of the West shaped who we are?” we have to understand what geography is. We will be doing this through:
The 5 Themes of Geography!

The five themes of Geography are:
Place, Location, Movement, Region, and Human-Environment interaction.

On the next 2 pages there are graphics of each theme. On the page after those two, just in case it isn’t apparent, I will explain how each photo is representing the theme and clarify the themes definition.

Place

Region

Movement

Within this project we are defining Place as the cultural and physical characteristics that define a destination.
My example represents place because Larches (the trees in the photo) only grow in certain areas and are only yellow for two weeks per year. Making Larch Valley a unique place.

Regions can be one of three categories formal, functional, or vernacular. Formal meaning defined by government. Functional regions are defined by commonality, such as a group of glaciers being described as a glacial region. A vernacular region would be the most commonly spoke language in an area. This is a display of formal region because this cairn represents all of Canada because it has a stone form every province.

This train shows movement and the movement of the CPR which introduced transferring goods, people, and ideas across Canada.

Human-environment interaction

Location

This glacier photo represents human environment interaction for two reasons. One, because human activities have caused glaciers to melt. The glacier in the photo will likely not exist in 30-60 years. And two, scientists from NASA are doing research on the glaciers currently, and also have done so in recent years. They suspect that there are similar glacial environments on Mars and are interacting with our world to better navigate others.

Location is either absolute, or relative. The pillars in this photo are representative of location as they are a very recognizable and easily describable landmark.

The following pages will be formatted with a page showing 1 photo of a location followed by reflection page(s) on the location shown in the photo.

Each reflection will answer the three same questions:

How does this photo represent at least 1 of the 5 themes of geography?

What is the significance of this photo and its physical environment, historically, politically, socially, or economically?

How do I connect to or interpret this photo?

Photo 1: The Last Spike