World regional geography learning blog

 This week the topic is changes in land cover. When I think about the subject the first thing that comes to my mind is deforestation, especially cutting down the rainforests for farming and for cattle. In Brazil the problem is meat and soy bean production, in Indonesia it's the palm oil industry, or at least that's what I think I started by watching Jonathan Foley's TED Talk about agriculture. I already knew that a huge area of the world is used for food production but it still came to me as a bit of a shock that the area used for agriculture is 60 times bigger than urban areas. The thing that really surprised me and what I learnt most new about was the water aspect of agriculture as well as it's affects to climate change.  The fact that agriculture spends so much water that it could fill up 7305 Empire State buildings every day sounded unbelievable.    I wonder why these things aren't really talked about in media or at school. It's probably - as Foley said - be

 This week's topic is population growth. For me the subject is pretty familiar and I actually kept a lesson about population growth in Finland to a class of 9th graders a couple weeks ago. I still learned a lot from the listed videos and websites. Especially the video explaining population growth with toilet paper rolls was very clever and is something I could copy into a classroom from Hans Rosling. It clearly shows why the population growth won't stop in a long time even though the fertility rate is getting smaller and smaller: because there will be a lot more adults in the future than now and they will have children of their own.   I personally find the subject pretty fascinating since the population has grown so much even in my lifetime but also a bit controversial, since the world can't take anymore people and it would be necessary for the population to stop growing but at the same time Finland is having huge problems because the fertility rate is too low and there are