GEOG 6 – Resources and Energy
NOTE: The following is an archive of the class material I offered as a Professor at Hofstra University (1999-2024).
Resources include a wide range of purposes such as natural resources, human resources, capital, as well as energy. In spite of substantial developments in the service and information industries, we still much live in a “physical world”. Resources are fundamental to many activities and much value is attached to their procurement, transformation and use.
Most resources are used to produce economic value, such as providing food, energy, and materials for manufacturing and construction. Thus, they have economic and strategic importance, subject to geopolitical contentions. Additionally, resources are not uniformly distributed, and geography is essential to their procurement and availability on markets.
The main objectives of the course are:
- Students will be familiarized with economic processes linked with the procurement, transformation, and distribution of resources and their impacts on economic, cultural, and social activities.
- Students will learn how resources are regulated and under the jurisdiction of a variety of geographical units and how these relations shape the economic and social space.
- Students will gain a level of understanding of environmental systems linked with resources, such as climate and biogeography.
- Students will be exposed to the nature of physical systems linked with resources such as geomorphologic processes.
- Students will be able to read and interpret resource information on different types of maps.