"Geography is for life in every sense of that expression: lifelong, life-sustaining, and life-enhancing," declares the executive summary for the National Geography Standards.
While this website focuses on East Asia — China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam — it is inevitable that linkages, interconnections, and issues arise for both teacher and student that course across Earth space as well as chronologic time at various scales, ranging from the personal to the truly global.
In terms of acquiring and mastering knowledge, skills, and perspectives, the path to geographic competency leads to increasing understanding of complex issues such as cooperation and conflict, international trade, human migration, economic development, energy interdependence, ecosystem stress, biodiversity, consumerism, natural disasters, sustainability, among a host of other contemporary themes that cannot be confined within the boundaries of a single nation or region.
Whether looking at the countries of East Asia in the past or the present, as the earlier Standards emphasized, leads inescapably to a desire to understand them as they and the rest of the world moves toward the future.
LINK: World in the Balance [NOVA, PBS]
Examines the various threats facing human populations and national economies in terms of the environmental implications of countries undergoing industrialization as well as global climate change. Employing sophisticated graphics, including vivid interactives, the website includes much content relating to East Asian countries. [Image: Map of world population in 1987, from the Human Numbers through Time interactive]