Penjelasan:

7 How Is the Movement of People, Goods, and Ideas Transforming the World?

Without the movement of goods, people, and ideas, cities falter, economies wane, and societies wither. As local economies and their associated land uses have become more specialized, mobility has grown ever more central to the sustainability of human activity. Economic specialization, which has fueled productivity growth and propelled the dispersion of interlinked activities worldwide, is premised upon various forms of mobility, including the migration of labor from low-wage to high-wage places, the daily travel of workers from their homes to workplaces, the movement of materials to worksites, and the distribution of finished products to markets. When mobility ceases, as in the case of a natural disaster, not only do workplaces fall idle, but also people cannot get emergency medical attention, families cannot obtain food, and social gatherings of all sorts are canceled or postponed.

The increasing importance of mobility to local, regional, and global economies and to everyday life is reflected in data showing the relentless increase in many measures of the movement of people and goods (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). In the United States, the movement of people and freight has been steadily increasing.1 At the international scale, human migration more than doubled between 1970 and 2000, with the largest proportion of migrants moving to countries in the developed world (Figure 7.2; Clark 2006a), and climate change is likely to accelerate these trends (see special issue of Forced Migration Review, 2008).

The evidence of steadily increasing mobility runs counter to the claim that distance—and the movement required to overcome it—no longer matters because of high-speed information and communication technologies (ICTs; e.g., Cairncross, 1997). If ICT has rendered distance irrelevant, as suggested by the death-of-distance hypothesis, then people and businesses should have little reason to incur the time and money costs involved in moving themselves or goods over increasingly greater distances. People would rely primarily on the keyboard and mobile phone to reach destinations of interest, and measures of mobility would fall. Although ICT has had impacts on physical movements at the scale of daily travel and may have affected migration streams (e.g., via the outsourcing of software development and call centers to India), the nature of the impacts is complex and generally has not conformed to predictions associated with the death-of-distance hypothesis (Mokhtarian, 2003; Janelle, 2004).

Persistent upward trends in mobility reflect rising affluence in some cases (as in the United States) but can also exacerbate differences among places (as when people move from rural areas to cities); in addition, rising mobility is associated with escalating conflict in some instances (as in refugee flows) and can produce high levels of urban congestion. Because of the strong links between motorized movement and petroleum consumption, ever-increasing mobility also raises concerns about greenhouse gas emissions.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2010. Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

SEMOGA MEMBANTU, MOHON MAAF JIKA SALAH :V