A Young Geographer's Insights into the Modern World

Here is my entry for the 2018 Young Geographer of the Year Competition by the RGS. The brief was the uniqueness of the Arctic so I decided to focus on the world's northernmost town. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1--q0cPFVEZhdFncABM4378lIcO5GSytiq3knTpnwnVY/edit?usp=sharing

The silent miracle of human progress. Unspoken, unpublicised and unexpected. World improvements are occurring faster than ever before, but because of the media and the influence of our instincts, less than 10% of people actually know that the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved. Our perceptions of the world need to change. This is a great achievement, so why aren’t we celebrating our successes and broadcasting them for all of humanity to see?    It’s a journalist’s professional duty to present any event, fact or number as an overdramatic worldview. Although we have increasing access to the media, stories about gradual improvements rarely make the front page, even though they occur on massive scales and impact millions of people. Yes, terrorism, overfishing and deterioration of seas, species extinction and sea levels are rising and there are pressing issues we need to deal with before we reach a tipping point. However, there are ma...

Here is an excellent documentary produced by the BBC on why we should cut down our use of plastic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0bmbn47/drowning-in-plastic# However, there are some reasons I have found of why plastics are better: Plastics can be used in cars where less strength is needed to reduce the overall mass and allow lower energy consumption of fossil fuels and production of atmospheric pollutants.  Paul Fahy reports in an excellent article entitled  Plastic Bag Propaganda  published in 'The UK Column' that plastic bags are manufactured from a form of plastic derived from a by-product of the oil industry. If the by-product wasn't turned into plastic bags it would have to be burned off - increasing carbon dioxide emissions. So people who use plastic bags are actually helping to save the planet - not destroy it. T he manufacture of plastic bags consumes less energy than the manufacture of paper bags. Plastic bags generate less solid waste than paper...

On Friday 28th September at 18.03, Sulawesi in Indonesia was hit by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake, triggering a 6m tsunami caused by an underwater landslide. The most affected areas are Donggala, Parigi, Moutong, Sigi and Palu. The death toll on Thursday climbed to 1,424 with thousands more injured. More than 66,000 homes were destroyed and a t least 600,000 children have been affected by the quake, many sleeping on the streets among ruins. The b ridge is completely destroyed, roads are blocked and the airport was closed and reopened soon after. Flooding of turbid water polluting clean water supplies has led to increasing concerns over lack of food, fuel and water. The difficult terrain is making reaching people extremely difficult and it is taking 30 hours to transport supplies from the nearest functioning port, Makassar, to the worst-affected areas. Electricity pylons are also down causing power cuts and a t least 92 people have been arrested for looting goods in areas devastated ...

Phuket is an island, located below the south coast of Thailand. Over the summer, I visited this rainforested, mountainous island and learnt a few things on my travels. In 2017 ,Thailand had over 35 million visitors through the year. This has risen since 2016 and is continuing to rise with damaging effects on the environment. Hopefully by the end of this post you will choose to persue ecotourism in Phuket and not participate in the environmentally damaging activities on the island. Elephant riding is a popular but popular but detrimental tourist activity. Riding elephants forces them to be captured, brought into captivity and treated very poorly. Experts believe there are less than 2000 Asian elephants left in the wild and this is still declining at a rapid rate due to loss of habitat. In order to allow tourists to ride elephants, the elephants have to be tamed. In Southeast Asia, this taming process is carried out when the elephants are very young and is very brutal and is ca...