Monday, October 15, 2012

Remembering Von Thunen

On Saturday, this past weekend, my wife and I visited our undergraduate college specifically so we could attend the reception they were holding.  It was Homecoming weekend, and the geography department was celebrating the coming together of three events:  the 60th anniversary of the department, the 50th year of my advisor first teaching, and the 40th anniversary for the second professor who was teaching in the department at the time I earned my degree in geography in the late 1970s-beginning of the 1980s.

And so I had geography on my mind during my drive home to Dubuque from the place where my wife now lives.  Two months ago my wife took a new call as a pastor at a church four hours away, in far north-central Iowa, which means we now have two homes we occupy.  And so I spend most weekends driving the four hours each way to stay in this new community and be with my wife.

This time as I drove through the cloudy, rainy terrain that represented the weather this weekend, and looked out at the mostly harvested corn and soy bean fields, endless miles of them, broken up by small pockets of trees, that mark modern Iowa, I remembered back to some geography I learned more than 30 years ago now authored by Johann Heinrich von Thunen in 1826.  Von Thunen observed that land use around communities was divided into rings of activity which seemed to be controlled by the economics of transportation and other factors.  Closest to the town were the fields of vegetables and dairy, items that are both perishable and heavy (and expensive) to transport to market, followed by a ring a bit further out of woodland for firewood.  Beyond the wooded ring were first rings of crops of various types, again differentiated by their lower costs to transport and longer times they can exist before becoming unusable.

Here is one rendition of von Thunen's model, an image that has been reproduced on several web pages on the internet, such that I don't know the particular source:


Here is another image of the von Thunen model, illustrating the graphing that one does in calculating "rent" (profit) against distance and costs:
The idea is that the particular land use at each incremental distance represents that use that is most profitable among the choices.

There is a logic to this model, although I don't necessarily like the particular emphasis on economics alone, and would rather think of other measures and determinants.  It clearly does not mimic the world of today, much affected by our cars, trucks, modern pricing, tractors, specialization in farming, mono-cropping, and so on.  And it is clearly an illustration of how different our world has become from that of a earlier, pre-industrial view.


Cast forward to a future world without automobiles, trucks, and ready means to move about, I began to image a similar pattern needing to re-emerge on the Iowa landscape, and every landscape for that matter, as land use once again needs to match the means of transport by foot, by water, and by animal-drawn carts.  Individual farmsteads will need to diversify again to meet their own food needs, once again having having vegetable gardens, with animals and their own individual wood lots.  Some farms will no longer be growing crops, but will need to switch to being tree farms to eventually produce trees for the local community.  All kinds of changes that will no longer be mono-crops fed by large machines.

The thinking I went through yesterday reinvigorated my mind, as images flooded past of a much different landscape, one that by no means appeared scary.  My mind was reawakened to geography, something it hasn't been for a few years now.  I began picturing a new map for Iowa.  It was exciting yesterday afternoon, and still is today.  I hope to flesh these thoughts out some more in the future.  But first I need to do some more reading, to remind myself of the details and concepts I've forgotten over the years.

From Dubuque,
Kevin Anderson