Archive for the ‘countries & regions’ Category
The rise of the Arctic north
We don’t usually think of the Arctic region in terms of geopolitics or economic development. But a new book – “The World in 2050″ -posits that the Arctic will become a global force in the decades ahead, driven both by its untapped natural resources and its impact on climate change.
How geography can become destiny
How much influence does geography have on a nation’s culture? Quite a bit, actually, and not only for the reasons you might initially consider…While pivoting off the current Greek debt crisis, he suggests that Greece’s geography has, in many ways, determined its destiny.
Dreams of Cascadia
Ever heard of Cascadia? Or Ecotopia? This is the geographical and cultural region – both real and mythical at the same time, it seems – that stretches from the Pacific Northwest up through British Columbia and includes such cities as Seattle, Portland and Vancouver. The NY Times recently published a story on the region. And, [...]
Which American states are the happiest?
If you want to be happy, apparently, it helps to be wealthy, to live in a family-oriented community, or to be surrounded by natural beauty. Those are at least some of the conclusions that can be drawn from the recently released study of well-being scores that ranked Americans by state and congressional district. Utah and [...]
United States of Africa?
It may be a bit far-fetched, but it’s a real goal for at least some African leaders, most notably the new chairman of the African Union, one Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. The obstacles to such a union are daunting, but an article in the International Herald Tribune lays out the pan-African dream that Qaddafi and others would [...]
The changing face of America
America is changing. Always. It’s part of the deal in this country of immigrants. And yet, for all of the ways in which immigration has in the past forged new concepts of nationhood, nothing really compares to the present. The United States has become a stunningly multicultural place and is becoming more so with each passing year. [...]
Not countries or cities, but mega-regions
Richard Florida wrote an interesting article a while back in which he suggested that government policy makers would be wise to forge new ideas based on the economic and innovation potential of so-called mega-regions around the world. Much more so than countries or cities, he contends, mega-regions are actually the prime drivers of the global economy. While [...]
The geography of personality
A few months ago, I had a post about the personality traits of cities. Now along comes a study on the personality traits of states, so perhaps there is something to this whole concept. The Wall Street Journal has the story. Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian. [...]
Future of the Middle East
If you’re interested in the intersection of culture and geography with politics, and if you have any interest in the Middle East, then I highly recommend a story from the recent issue of The Atlantic. Titled “After Iraq,” the story written by Jeffrey Goldberg looks at how history, geography, culture and politics have combined to give us the current [...]
The idea of Russia
It’s been two weeks since Time magazine named Vladimir Putin its “Person of the Year.” Now that the holiday craziness has ended, I finally got around to reading that issue of the magazine. In it, there is a fascinating portrait of Putin, but also an intriguing article about Russia itself (“In Search of Russia’s Big Idea”), which is the [...]
The question of Latin America
Is Latin America an integratedÂregion, or a diverse group of peoples and cultures? There are those, such as Simon Bolivar and Che Guevara, who have dreamed in the past of unifying all the peoples of Latin America. That sentiment was given expression again in the 2004 movie The Motorcycle Diaries (a nice travel movie, by the way), when the character of a [...]
Differences within countries
I write a lot about cultural differences between countries, but there are of course also differences between regions of the same country. For proof, one needn’t go further than to compare the average U.S. resident of, say, Wyoming with Vermont, or Alabama with New Jersey. Germany, too, has often been split between Prussian Protestants in the north [...]
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