Nettlecombe 2012

On 15^th March 2012 the year 12 geography group went to Nettlecombe in order to complete 3 days of field work in preparation for our unit 2 AS exam. During our time there we completed numerous surveys such as EQAs; ITIs; Land use mapping and questionnaires as we visited the coastal towns of Minehead, Porlock and Watchet and the further inland village Dunster (where the pasties were very nice!). They all had their highlights and areas for improvement but were generally very attractive. It was a great opportunity to get out and learn geography in a more hands on way. 

Anna 12

Population Control in India

I’ve recently started to read ‘Peoplequake’ by Fred Pearce, and I’ve found all that I’ve read so far really fascinating. Having not previously studied population in detail at school, I’ve found it particularly insightful, because it’s linked population to migration, technology development, food supply and climate change, all which can be found to some degree in the AS/A2 Geography course here at KECHG. One particular chapter which I’ve enjoyed is one about how India has controlled its population, so I decided to do some further reading…

In 1947, India’s population was fast approaching 350 million and continuing to grow at around 2% a year.  This was because of improved health care for both the young and elderly, which improved the life expectancy and reduced infant mortality. As a result of people becoming healthier, women were also having more children, with the average number of children reaching 6.1 per woman in the 1950s.

(Above) Jawaharal Nehru

The Prime Minister at the time, Jawaharlal Nehru, set up the world’s first population control plan but Nehru believed that the country should focus more on food production than on decreasing population. He said…

‘If we increase our population, agricultural and other, (and) if this population is put to work for production then we are not overpopulated’

In Nehru’s campaign he increased agricultural and industrial production, with Indian farmers in 1966 producing 1.7 times the amount of rice produced in 1951. But the population was still increasing. This became a huge problem when in 1965, when the promised monsoon rains didn’t fall. As a result, the amount of food production decreased dramatically, leaving much of the population starving.

(Above) Indira Gandhi

The new Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, asked the USA for food aid. The USA gave a fifth of its whole wheat harvest to India. However the American Prime Minister, Johnson, was noted to have said to his aide…

‘I’m not going to give away food to foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems’

Surprisingly, Johnson found an ally in Gandhi, as she had run family planning propaganda for her father, Nehru, and she planned to put this propaganda into practice. The Green Revolution brought good harvest and more money for some farmers, but many were left behind, again leaving India with the problem of under production and over population. It was at this point that Indira Gandhi turned to population control as a way of bringing economic development to India.

In 1968, the Indian government set a goal of reducing the birth rate by 45% within the next decade. Gandhi set about doing this by declaring a state of ‘Emergency’ in 1975 and in 1976 an approach was adopted which favoured sterilization and contraception. The first mass vasectomy camp was set up at Ernakulum, north of Kuchin, where 90 doctors working in two shifts in 50 cubicles. Men and women were given cash payments for accepting forms of long term contraception. The offer of money in a time of extreme poverty was seen by many to be a great offer and around 15,000 men accepted these payments In many cases the money was equivalent to at least a month’s worth of wages. But the population continued to grow; the 1971 census showed that the population had increased by 109 million in the last 10 years.

Under the pressure to control the population, reports began to emerge of men being taken to vasectomy camps and of police violence against the new family planning regime. For example, early in the morning at a Muslim village south of Delhi all men over the age of 15 were order to wait at a nearby bus stop, where they were then taken to be forcibly sterilized. All across the country, government officials were given targets, and sterilization certificates were needed to receive items such as a ration card, irrigation water and a rickshaw licence. But not all sterilizations were a success, thousands of Indians died from ‘botched’ attempts. But newspapers weren’t allowed to report on this, and when Gandhi announced a general election, many believed she would win. However when the votes were counted, she wasn’t re-elected. Time magazine said…

‘One issue, above everything else, cost Indira Gandhi the election: her mass sterilization campaign’

After Indira Gandhi’s loss at the general election, the IPPF, who had funded the majority of the sterilisation campaigns said…

‘No sterilisation procedure should be performed unless the person concerned has given voluntary, unpressurized, informed consent’

From this point onwards, forced sterilisation was a thing of the past in India and as the years went on the birth rate began to fall. In the 1960, Indian women were having 5.4 children each on average, the lowest on record. And as the health care improved, women began to realise that they could have fewer births and still expect to see their children reach adulthood…

This research and what I’ve read I the book had made me realise that population control isn’t always as simple as some academics may make it out to be. I’d recommend this book to anyone who’s interested in any aspect of Geography, and I’m sure you’ll find at least one thing that you’ll enjoy!

Jane 13Z

Rare earth elements: What are they and why are they important in today’s society?

There has been a lot of coverage in the media recently about rare earth elements and how the future of the technology industry is at risk from a lack of supply and countries exploiting global monopolies. Items like your phone, your TV, laptops, military grade alloys, new renewable energy sources, magnets, lasers, tinted glass and fake diamonds all use rare earth elements and almost all of them are sourced from one country, China. But what are rare earth elements and how can a group of metals cause the whole world to go into panic mode?

Rare earth elements are a collection of elements in the Periodic Table, namely the lanthanides as well as scandium and yttrium. These elements are important because their compounds form some of the most commercially useful products in the electronic industry. For example, neodymium is one of the elements that make up the most powerful magnets known to man. These very strong magnets are crucial for making the hard drives in laptops and allow mobile phones to have millions of functions while still being compact. These magnets are also essential for generating electricity in wind turbines and hydroelectric dams. In addition, they also make up the components that can turn sunlight into power for solar arrays.

So we have established these elements are important for many modern luxuries but why should we worry about them. Well the rare earth elements are different from other resources like iron, aluminium or coal because of what countries in the world manufacture them. Or rather, which country as China controls over 95 % of the rare earth element market, a figure unmatched by any other global resource. This means that any end product that contains rare earth elements almost definitely has some from China in it. However, it is this strong control that China has over the resource that worries many global economies.

At the moment China currently exports most of its rare earths to Japan and South Korea to be turned into electronic equipment. However in an update of the 5 Year Plan philosophies they have introduced export quota’s that severely restrict international trade but focus on domestic companies. If China were to continue on this trend all investment in the rare earth industry would be forced into China. Evidence for this is that the only rare earth processing plant, where the minerals are purified and extracted, is in northern China, in Bayan Obo, Inner Mongolia. In all this would devastate the industry and critically affect not just major technology manufacturers but the workforces and economies that revolve around this commercialism.

Some of you reading this may think, why does the rare earth industry not just expand into other countries? Well this is happening, albeit very slowly. As of early 2012 there are two sites globally that could take up some of the strain of China’s restraint; Molycorp’s site in south-western California and the Australian company Lynas’s site in Indonesia. However these companies have problems trying to scale up to what China has achieved across many sites using many different mining techniques. In addition certain issues with the environment and worker health have hindered progress.

It may be that you never think of rare earth elements again, blissfully unaware of them in every gadget you own. But if you do remember what they are, remember the on-going power struggle and how our future industries depend on how greedy one country can be.

Alex Owen - Camp Hill Boys - Alex has been researching for an EPQ on the topic of rare earth elements

'Crack in the Wall': My Journey from a Charity Bookshop to the Streets of Hong Kong - Part 1

In spring last year I came across a book in a charity shop that caught my eye.  The title of was ‘Crack in the Wall’, a book about the work of Jackie Pullinger, a Christian missionary who went to Hong Kong with little money and nowhere to stay- just with the desire to spread the Christian message.  Although I found her story inspiring, it was the setting that took my interest- the Kowloon Walled City, an urban slum in the centre of Hong Kong.  It was unlike anywhere I had seen before and quite different from other urban slums such as Dharavi in Mumbai – for starters it appeared to have grown upwards rather than outwards.

The Walled City existed as a military base from 1197 when Hong Kong was part of China, and in 1847 the wall from which the Walled City gained its name was built.  In 1898, after the Opium War, when the New Territories were leased to Britain for 99 years, it was decided that China would maintain jurisdiction of the Kowloon Walled City until the British Colonial administration had been established.  In reality, this did not happen and China maintained jurisdiction of the area.  The issue of jurisdiction was the underlying cause of all of the problems in the Walled City – mainly because the British administration was unable to enforce Hong Kong law there since it was technically Chinese territory and the Chinese did not implement Chinese law either.  So, with regards to why the Walled City grew upwards instead of outwards, if it were to grow outwards it would have gone into British territory and therefore would have become subject to Hong Kong law and housing regulation.

As I read more of the book I discovered that the Walled City had been demolished in 1993 – but in some ways this just added allure. It made me wonder what had happened to the 33,000 people who lived there, and this lead to my research question: ‘What were the consequences of the demolition of the Kowloon Walled City’.  Unfortunately, there are very few books on the subject of the Kowloon Walled City, so I decided that the best option would be to travel to Hong Kong and find much of the information myself.

When asked in an email to describe his perceptions of the Kowloon Walled City, Nick Danziger (the photojournalist who took the photographs published in ‘Crack in the Wall’) summed up the key issues very well.

This is what he said:

‘It is cliché to say, but it is hard to imagine.  My overriding impression was: how could so many people live in such a tiny area?  It was cramped, humid and dangerous from a health and safety point of viewpoint with open sewage and electrical wires everywhere.  There was also the ever present danger of people looking to either protect their own rackets or territory and others looking to pounce on any opportunity to prey on the unwary or most unfortunate inhabitants of the Walled City.’

A key reason why the Walled City was not demolished until 1993 was that the clearance was a politically sensitive issue.  The British government had been pushing for its demolition prior to 1987, but the action had always been blocked by the Chinese government and any attempt to demolish the Kowloon Walled City would be likely to cause serious confrontation with detrimental consequences for Sino-British relations – it simply wasn’t worth it.

At this point my research got trickier as colonial records, that I had been using to gain the information, are only released 30 years after they were written meaning that I had no information about what had changed prior to 1987 to allow the demolition to happen.

To find this out, I arranged a meeting with Sir David Akers-Jones who was acting governor of Hong Kong between 1986-1987 and subsequently Chairman of the Hong Kong Housing Authority between 1987 and 1992 – he was the ideal person to speak to as not only was he a key player in the decision to clear the Walled City, but he was also involved in process of clearance and demolition.  The meeting was to be over lunch at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel – his choice, not mine -  and it immediately became apparent that he was not your average 80-something year old and had clearly had an extraordinary life.

The meeting provided a lot of information that I could not have found elsewhere.  As I mentioned earlier, the Chinese government had previously blocked attempts to demolish the Kowloon Walled City; however in 1984, with the signing of the Sino British Joint Declaration which stated that Hong Kong would be returned to China in 1997, the issues surrounding the status of the Kowloon Walled City changed.  China no longer needed to maintain territory in Hong Kong and in fact it was in mutual interest of the British and Chinese to resolve the problems of the Kowloon Walled City once and for all.  So in terms of political consequences of the demolition, there were none at all; if anything, it could have improved relations between the two countries by promoting further cooperation.

A top-down approach was taken towards the demolition process.  This is an approach whereby decisions and actions are undertaken by those in authority with little input from other stakeholders. In fact, prior to the announcement in 1987, only a handful of people knew about the decision to demolish the Kowloon Walled City. Employees of the Hong Kong Housing Authority were only informed on the day of the announcement, after which they immediately had to undertake a census survey of all households living in the Walled City.

The lack of involvement of the residents may evoke negative images of people being forced out of their homes and bulldozers turning up unexpectedly to knock down all of the buildings, but this was not the case and actually the approach appeared to be successful.  Clearly I could not take Akers-Jones’ word for it so it was time for another meeting.  The meeting was with two representatives from the Kowloon Walled City Kai Fong – the resident’s welfare association.  Neither could speak English so I dragged along a couple of my new friends to ask the questions. I recorded the entire interview on a Dictaphone and I must thank my friend Nancy for spending several hours translating the interview when I got back to the UK. 

One of the residents described the day of the announcement:

‘They did it very well.  If they hadn’t surrounded the place, there would’ve been a lot of people coming in and claiming they’d been living there all along.  1 household would have turned into 20/30 households so in that sense it was successful. We could only move out and nothing could move in, not even mattresses.  I was having a perm when people were coming in saying that they have surrounded the place.’

Also, from another meeting with Ian Lambot, who interviewed hundreds of residents before writing his book ‘City of Darkness’, I found out that most of the residents that he spoke to never expected to stay in the Walled City forever.  Therefore when given the opportunity to leave, improving their standard of living, most of the residents were reasonably supportive.  This combined with information from other sources had led me to conclude that in this case, the top-down approach was very successful and in many ways it challenged my prejudices against this approach to redevelopment.

To be Continued…

Imogen 13W

"Why do we have continents?"

Whilst we were walking to the 6^th Form block my friend paused, then asked ‘Immy…why do we have continents?’

I replied, ‘I don’t actually know’. 

Continents are something we learn of from a very early age.  This makes it particularly peculiar that one would not know the answer to my friend’s question.

Evidence suggests that continents were first described by the Ancient Greeks.  Since then, the continents have increased in number from 3 to 7, but the boundary lines between the original continents have stayed broadly similar, with some changes for political and other reasons.

 

One definition of continents is ‘large continuous discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water’.  This definition is, however, flawed – take the example of Europe and Asia, which are part of the same land mass. 

But can you imagine calling yourself a Eurasian? 

Others argue that continents are a way of dividing the world culturally.  Yet, are countries such as Pakistan and Japan truly culturally similar?

This generalisation may have worked in years gone by when people knew very little about those on the other side of the globe;  however, today, in our ever more globalised world, when we are ‘Skyping’ our friends in China and we can watch in real time the events in Syria unfold, it has very little meaning.

So having given my friend’s question some thought, I have concluded that today we have continents as a way of explaining the different parts of the world to small children. It is now much more useful to use different and more specific groupings of people and places as these better reflect the needs of the world today rather than those of Ancient Greece.

Imogen 13W

Ice Ice Heist!

The conventional explanation of why glaciers are melting is due to global warming, but now it may be due to theft of ice from glaciers!

Last Friday (27^th January) police in Southern Chile arrested a man driving a refrigerated truck which contained 5 tonnes of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region of Chile. It was thought to be going to be used for designer ice cubes in bars. This was thought to be because in the capital, Santiago, tourists are served drinks chilled with glacial ice, directly from glaciers. The ice was estimated to be worth £3,900. Police have charged the driver of the refrigerated truck with theft and considering charging him for violation of national monuments.

At the moment, the Jorge Montt glacier in Chile is retreating by half a mile a year and as a result is one of the world’s fastest shrinking glaciers. It's in the Bernardo O’Higgins National Park which is the largest protected area in Chile. There are a wide range of explanations for climate change, but up until now theft wasn’t one of them!

Jane 13Z

Moving to South Korea

In early February 2011 I left the country I grew up in and headed to my home country- Korea. Everything was new to me in Korea as I didn’t have many memories but I was looking forward to starting a new life there.

 

There are lots of differences between England and Korea starting with how we look. I guess the biggest difference is culture and education. If I introduce briefly about Korea; basically Korea’s capital, Seoul, is a really small city packed with approximately ten million people and as it’s so packed nearly all of us live in apartments. There are lots of schools around the apartment and unlike the schools in England; we have to sit on wooden chairs and wooden tables which are really small. Also in Korea, we have four important tests in a year and when the results come out they give us a rank and that decides our next few months. For example, if I was given 1^st then I would be loved more by the teachers and friends than someone who came 50^th, like the Olympics. I personally don’t like this education system as it’s teaching us that we have to race with each other to get good grades but I suppose it’s the only way to get approved by the others.

Moving on to culture, we have a special day called chu-seouk in September,which is a bit like memorial day plus thanksgiving day. It’s a day to remember our ancestors and remind ourselves that we are living a perfect life. All of the families get together to have fun while teenagers and kids get money from grandparents.  It’s a great day to have fun and eat a lot of foods!!

Korea has a wonderful culture and hard-working students except the strength to unify. The tension between the North and the South is really huge as everyone knows but having Kim Jong-Il found dead a few days ago, the tension either broke or built another tension. It was a shock to the whole and most of the South Koreans were thrilled and suspicious by the news, nobody knows what will happen but people are certain that this will bring a big turning point to both countries. I really do hope we unify really soon and show our exquisite culture to the world.  

Hayan - Left Camp Hill in Year 8 

Happy 10th Birthday to the BRICs!

(Image source: Reuters)

Last week marked the 10th anniversary of an economist from Goldman Sachs, Jim O'Neill, coining the term BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), to describe how he believed that these four countries would drive economic growth in the future.  It's strange to think that this presumably informal designation of that time has become so prevalent in Geography, especially in terms of how we look at the world's economic and political development today.

India and China have certainly come a long way in the past ten years, and  will no doubt continue to change the face of the world's power structure in the future.  Russia seems to have remained a hydrocarbon-power in the world, whilst Brazil has perhaps developed its regional dominance over South America.  Either way you look at it though, it's been an interesting ten years and no doubt the acronym will crop up even more in the future.  We'll just have to wait and see as to what the next ten candles on the cake will bring.

Mr. R.

Plenty of Environmental Impacts in the Bay of Plenty

When the Liberian-flagged freighter began to leak oil on 11 October, many scientists and environmentalists were worried about the impacts this would have on the environment. Now that several days have passed we are now beginning to see the true extent of the oil spill.

The Bay of Plenty is one of New Zealand’s most prized areas of natural beauty and the estimated 300 tonnes of oil which have been spilt will be extremely damaging. It has been noted that clumps of heavy oil have washed up on beaches such as Mt Maunganui and Papamoa. These affected beaches have been closed, and officials have warned locals not to move the clumps, as this may only make the environmental problem worse.

Many charities and authorities in the local area have reported treating animal and marine life such as blue penguins that have been covered in oil. To care for the animals which have been hurt, the Department of Conservation have created two wildlife rescue centres and dispatched teams to search the beaches and surrounding islands for animals and birds. One of these in in Te Maunga and so far they have reported recovering eight oiled birds. These birds have been covered in ‘sticky black gunk’ which matts their fur. Many birds have ingested this, making them anaemic. So far more than 900 dead birds had been identified, comprising 23 species. These included 458 diving petrels, 198 fluttering shearwaters, 92 Buller's shearwaters, 38 white-faced storm petrels, 20 little blue penguins and 2 shag birds. This could be devastating for species such as the blue penguin, as many of these breed have been affected. For many animals, such as the native birds, the oil spill has occurred in the middle of the breeding season. Also, the oil spill could affect the whales and dolphins that calve in the area, and also the babies which they give birth to.

The damage to the environment will also affect the tourism in the area. The area is known as a particularly good place for fishing, diving and aquatic wildlife. The oil spill has killed and damaged the fish in the area, which will cause the quality of the fish to degrade. If the oil isn’t completely cleaned up, then diving may not be able to done in some areas, as the quality of the water may be dangerous to humans.

Even though the oil spill is occurring as we speak, it is likely that the effects of the oil spill will be felt for many years in the future. This is because many birds which are breeding locally will lose both this breeding season and the next as the birds are likely to be in bad health, damaging breeding ability.

Jane 13Z

Anthropocene - A New Geological Epoch?

You may have heard of the Holocene epoch but have you heard of the Anthropocene, the so-called new epoch of geological time?  The Anthropocene can be defined as the epoch in which human activity has been shaping the earth.

The idea was first proposed in the 1870s by an Italian geologist called Antonio Stoppani but his theory was rejected by other scientists because they thought it was unscientific.  This may have been because the impact of humans at the time was localised and the impacts of anthropogenically caused climate change were not yet known.  In the year 2000, however, Dr Paul Crutzen suggested we are now in the Anthropocene and many scientists took him seriously; the proposal of a new epoch was presented to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is the organisation that decides when geological epochs start and finish.

Evidence of the Anthropocene?

Fossils

The main way of identifying periods of geological time is to examine fossils.  Many scientists say that the fossils we leave behind will be vastly different from those of the past.  For instance, because of human land use in the UK, there will be a decrease in fossils of the country’s climax community (deciduous forests) and an increase in agricultural related fossils.  Some scientists suggest there will even be fossils of cities, but others say this would be highly unlikely as cities are built on land, where erosional processes have a greater influence than sedimentation, which normally leads to fossils being created.  Nevertheless, Dr Mike Ellis says that cities may be buried due to sea level rise – he may have forgotten that not all cities are on the coast!

Climate Change

In recent times anthropogenically caused climate change has played a significant role in the shaping of some landscapes.  For example, the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas is now widely believed to have been contributed to by greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming.  This melting has led to increased erosion of the earth’s surface.

Nitrogen Cycle

The Nitrogen Cycle has been severely affected by humans, in particular through the production and use of fertiliser.  This is needed for farming because when crops are harvested, it interrupts the natural recycling of nitrogen (which would normally occur when plants decompose).  Fertiliser leaches into river systems causing algae blooms and this can result in fish being starved of oxygen.  More importantly, the use of fertiliser has allowed the human population of the planet to expand, reaching 7 billion this week. 

However…

Some scientists argue that we cannot just decide when a new epoch has started.  Geology is a historical science therefore an epoch cannot be determined based on predictions.  Moreover, no one can even decide on a start date for the Anthropocene, with different disciplines arguing different dates depending on the particular evidence they have studied.  For example, some ecologists may claim that the Anthropocene began with the development of agriculture around 8,000 years ago; whereas scientists interested in recent climate change may suggest that it began with the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s.

Does it Matter Anyway?

As many of the processes occurring today do not resemble the Holocene (the epoch we may still be in if the Anthropocene does not exist), it may be useful for many scientists to use the word ‘Anthropocene’ to indicate the period of recent time in which humans have had a significant impact on the earth’s surface.  Some even argue that it is important because it helps emphasise the severity of human impacts on the world and may encourage people to change their behaviour.  Personally I do not think that the International Commission on Stratigraphy should formalise the Anthropocene as a new epoch when we cannot yet be certain of whether or when it has actually started.  It is for future generations to decide when all the evidence is present – that is if humans are still around by then!

Imogen 13W