A Young Geographer's Insights into the Modern World

An incredible video to watch if you are interested in cultural communication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=488ZBeaGo6s

Life during the COVID-19 pandemic is completely different for each individual. Its impacts depend on individual circumstances but there is no doubt that it has had a global impact. I thought I would share my experience of lockdown and what I have been doing to adapt and change to this new world. During this period of COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, I have found myself very busy. I began by signing up to a french language course to keep myself busy and learn a language. I also had online exams which were 24 hours and open book so lots of time was spent preparing for them. Now, I have finished my first year of university and have some more time on my hands.  I have found myself keeping very active trying new workouts and the couch to 5k challenge. My usual dance classes moved online and I also tried out some other online classes, even teaching some of my own. I have recently discovered yoga as I find it a great way to stretch sore muscles, improve flexibility and calm the mind...

Welcome to the  iGeo Team UK Blog ! Over the coming months, we look forward to sharing with you our experiences at  iGeo 2019 in Hong Kong . Keep an eye out on this page for more updates as we continue to write away! Just over a week ago, on the 29th July 2019, we travelled as Team UK (comprised of Zachary Elliott, 18; Freya Ruparel, 18; Alex Teeuw, 17; and Naomi Gammon, 17) to participate in the 16th International Geography Olympiad - this year based at EdUHK in Hong Kong. Competing against over 160 students from 43 countries, we participated in a written response test, fieldwork exercise and multimedia test. Team UK with their medals at the Closing Ceremony of iGeo 2019 This year, we were delighted that, as Team UK, we were collectively ranked 3rd overall. We were also thoroughly pleased with our individual results: winning a Gold (Zachary being placed 2nd place - the UK’s highest ever ranking), Silver (Alex being placed an incredible 19th place) and 2 Bronze medals ...

Friday 15th March Climate Protest JOIN US IN WESTMINSTER - SAVE OUR PLANET THE CLIMATE CRISIS OPEN LETTER We, the young, are deeply concerned about our future. Humanity is currently causing the sixth mass extinction of species and the global climate system is at the brink of a catastrophic crisis. Its devastating impacts are already felt by millions of people around the globe. Yet we are far from reaching the goals of the Paris agreement. Young people make up more than half of the global population. Our generation grew up with the climate crisis and we will have to deal with it for the rest of our lives. Despite that fact, most of us are not included in the local and global decision-making process. We are the voiceless future of humanity. We will no longer accept this injustice. We demand justice for all past, current and future victims of the climate crisis, and so we are rising up. Thousands of us have taken to the streets in the past weeks all around the world. Now w...

Water is a renewable resource that is essential for all living organisms so humans have only been able to develop easily where water is available. The Aral Sea used to be the 4th largest lake in the world, its water sources being the Syr Darya and Amu Darya which flow through central Asia.    Since the 1960s, huge irrigation schemes in Kazakhstan used water to irrigate rice crops and cotton. Now the area of the lake has been reduced by 90% and is polluted by pesticides, fertilisers and industrial waste causing serious problems. Globally, we're producing over 100 billion new garments from new fibres every year and the planet can't sustain this. It can take over 15,000 litres of water to grow the cotton to make a pair or jeans and the majority of this often comes from the Aral Sea. We need to stop buying so many used clothes and start buying more second hand ones to stop the over exploitation of rivers and lakes around the world. Fashions Dirty Secrets  - Click on me ...

Just a shocking photo taken from National Geographic March 2017 showing how different food cultures are.

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...

The media uses the same techniques time and time again to appeal to our emotions and instincts. It is their professional duty to entice people to read stories and frequently exaggerate to do so. Stereotypes are an easy way for the media to communicate using categories that we already have an immediate reaction to. Journalists know it is almost inhumane to look away from a person in pain or in need. The media picks up the negative and disastrous stories and rarely reports the good. In fact, our surveillance of suffering has improved making us more likely to see these events occurring in the past. Stories of gradual improvements would not make the headlines so statistics are often used in a dramatic way for political purposes. The media provides us with important news and information but is very selective in the stories it chooses and the way it reports.

Thankfully, one of the many small environmental problems is beginning to improve. All thanks to Sir David Attenborough. 14.01 million people tuned in to Blue Planet II , narrated by Sir David Attenborough. The series particularly brought to light the issue of plastic in oceans. Inspired, many people began to campaign and protest leading to large changes in public perception. People demanded improvements yet the government are still slow to do anything. England's 5p plastic bag charge was introduced in October 2015, a year before Mauritius began to fine the use of plastic bags at around £250 per use. Plastic bag use in England has dropped by 83%, yet still, 8 million tonnes of plastic are being dumped in oceans each year. The world needs to do more. Not just about this small issue but about the countless number of other environmental issues if the world aims to be sustainable . Small changes can have massive impacts.   “One planet, one people. As long as we remember that we ...

'Love Island' is undoubtedly one of this summers most watched programmes, but what is the philosophy behind it? 'Love island' is a reality show where people compete to be the best couple to win money. Although the idea is to find love, few apply for this reason alone. In philosophy this is called means to an end. You apply for a popular show to find love, to become famous, to win money and eventually to have a better life. This may be for some the supreme Good or eudaimonia.  Utilitarians foundation of their consequentialist moral theory is psychological hedonism. Psychological hedonism is the empirical idea that humans persue pleasure and strive to minimise pain. This in turn is the utility principle which is what contestants on 'Love Island' persue.  The contestants are often accused of playing a game in order to win the show and to discuss this we must first understand Kantian Ethics. In Kantian Ethics the emphasis is on the motive of the acti...

Many politicians adopt 'green' policies to achieve mastery over nature and subdue it for their own purposes. Environmentalists are uneasy about any anthropogenic premises and suggest that the eco-centric approach is an arrogant form of speciseim which seems to suggest we have the right to be in control. Nature needs to be nurtured, preserved and protected for its own sake, not just out of concern for our own interests. A famous response made in 1855 by a Red Indian, Chief Seattle expounds an environmentalists views: ''How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?  We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The  Earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on....

http://worldwaterday.org/ In July, 'Day Zero' will come to Cape Town, South Africa where millions of homes will no longer have running water. The 22nd March was World Water Day and the UN's focus was on 'The Answer is in Nature'. Cape Town is not the only city facing a water crisis, in the UK, one day we will face one too. The future of water will soon be the main issue in our society so we need to prevent it before we too have a water deadline of day zero. Our consumption of water is increasing due to our ever growing population and the developing nature of our industries. There is a strong correlation between water consumption and affluence and as UK citizens we use an enormous excess of water. I'm not saying we need to change major factors of our daily life but simple things like turning the tap off when we brush our teeth, installing dual flush toilets or using the eco-wash on dishwashers and washing machines. By changing these few simple things in ...

'A street cat named Bob' is an inspiring film that follows a true story of a homeless man from poverty to success. It makes you realise how bad conditions living on the street are and how we need to give as many people emergency housing as possible.

When is enough, enough?   The  Amendment Right to Bear Arms in the USA was created to prevent the new Federal Government  (1789)  from disarming the state militias and ousting them with a Federal standing army.   So far, in 2018, there have been 18 U.S. school shootings.  Trump's plan is to force some teachers to be armed with  guns  in classrooms to prevent further  occurrences   such as  the shooting in Florida High School.  Why is the solution to  gun  problems to arm  more  people with  guns ?  Who's to say the  teachers  will be  more  sensible with  guns  than anyone else? As a student I would feel  more  unsafe going into school with an armed  teacher  than the fear of a school shooting.  Teachers would have to have gun training meaning more people would learn how to wield a gun.  Some blame the use of guns as a solution...

Dharavi Slum is Asias largest slum. In the documentary provided Kevin Mcloud explored the slum and discovers a sustainable recyling method involving physical labour.    Everyday the occupants of Dharavi slum wait for the rubbish to come in from the surrounding areas and they each search for a specific material. These materials get sorted and more than 80% of plastic waste is recycled. People live in extremely poor living conditions but still manage to sustainably recycle their rubbish.   Why can't the UK as an MEDC find a similar method to recycle whether that be through physical labour or sorting machines. It is an embarrassment that one of the poorest areas in the world manages to do this much better than us. This needs to change.

Theresa May's Cabinet Reshuffle - Equality https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/09/theresa-may-reshuffle-brings-on-more-women-and-ethnic-minorities My views... Equality is incredibly important in today's society... Almost too important.     Theresa May based her cabinet reshuffle on promoting females and ethnic minorities to make the government 'look more like the country it serves.' But surely the people in power should be the ones with the most experience, qualifications or the people who are right for the job? Apparently not.     People in power are too concerned about how their team looks from the outside rather than how it runs from the inside. The correct decisions should be made to insure our country is run by the best candidates instead of placing people in power based on their looks. Genetics should not be allowed to decide the opportunities you are given but instead hard work and accomplishment should. The whole point of equal...