Although both tea and coffee are consumed over most of the world, there is little overlap in the lists of the top tea and coffee consuming countries. This pattern is easily seen on the map posted below, which shows the world’s 16 top tea and coffee consuming countries on a per capita basis. Only the Netherlands makes both lists. Screenshot The top tea consuming countries are more geographically dispersed than the top coffee consuming countries. High levels of coffee consumption are found primarily in Europe, particularly in the Nordic countries. Outside of Europe, only Brazil and Canada make t ..read more

Almost all data sources rank Turkey (Türkiye) as the world’s top tea-drinking country, and by a considerable margin. According to Wikipedia’s article on the subject, annual per capita tea consumption in Turley is 3.16 kg (6.96 lb), far overshadowing second-place Ireland’s 2.19 kg (4.83 lb). Yet according to a World Population Review article that lists 2024 tea consumption by country, the people of southern South America drink much more tea than those Turkey. Here the per capita tea consumption of Argentina is mapped as seven times greater than that of Turkey. What gives? Sc ..read more

Maps of alcohol consumption in the United States reveal several regions with very low drinking rates. The most prominent is the LDS (Mormon) cultural region focused on Utah and eastern Idaho. The so-called Bible Belt of the southeastern and south-central states is also clearly visible, although most of its coastal counties are excluded. More surprising are several heavily Native American counties in the northern Great Plains and Southwest. Many tribal governments restrict alcohol sales, but actual consumption rates may be higher than the map indicates. Comparing the maps posted here, several i ..read more

I am currently teaching a class for Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program on the history and geography of natural psychoactive substances. Over the next nine weeks, I will be posting GeoCurrents articles derived from these lectures. I have mapped the global distribution of each substance under consideration at the beginning of the early modern era (circa 1500). Creating these maps was tricky, and I cannot vouch for their accuracy. In many cases, the only information I was able to find was through ChatGPT. The responses that I received from the chatbot the were often too vague to be ..read more

Dear Readers, After much consideration, I have decided to disable the comments section (Disqus) on GeoCurrents. Relatively few constructive and engaging comments are received, minimizing the utility of the function. I also find the occasional insults from offended readers quite dispiriting, especially when they focus on something that I have merely quoted rather than advocated. Readers who want to engage in serious discussion about GeoCurrents posts are welcome to email me at mwlewis@stanford.edu. Just before disabling Disqus, however, I received a constructive comment from Pete Morris, which ..read more

Dear Readers, I have posted two essays on environmental philosophy and politics under the “Featured Essays” drop-down menu located above and to the right of this post. They were initially designed to be the introduction and first chapter of a book that would be called Middle Path Environmentalism: Taking Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems Seriously without Crushing the Working Class and Undermining Rural Life. But after circulating these essays among a group of friends and colleagues and receiving almost no encouragement [1], I decided to put the project on indefinite hold. Writte ..read more

Dear Readers,  GeoCurrents has been on hiatus for the past two months as I have redirected most of my efforts to writing a book on environmental philosophy, politics, and policies. This work is tentatively titled Middle Path Environmentalism: Taking Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems Seriously without Crushing the Working Class and Undermining Rural Life. I have finished writing drafts of the introduction and the first chapter, which I intend to post on this blog later this week or early next week. These writings will be put up as regular posts, even thoug ..read more

Cannabis legalization at the state level in the U.S. continues to gain ground, even though federal law still classifies “marijuana” as a Schedule One drug, meaning that it is absolutely banned and has “no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.” The resulting discrepancy between state and federal law presents a highly curious situation. It makes a mockery of the supposedly fundamental principle that federal law trumps the state law, with ultimate sovereignty vested in the United States rather than in the individual states. How could a substance possibly have “no curre ..read more

GeoCurrents will be on winter break until January 2, 2024. It will resume with a series of posts that will reproduce and extend a keynote talk that I gave at an academic conference on the Back Sea that was held in Batumi, Georgia in May 2023. My presentation was entitled “Eurasian Pivot or European Periphery? The Black Sea Region in the Geo-Historical Imagination.” I argue that the larger Black Sea Region, which includes the Caucasus and extends to the Caspian Sea, is best viewed as a Eurasian pivot, and that it has played a surprisingly important but generally ignored role in world history ..read more

The Antiplanner blogsite recently ran an interesting and controversial post arguing that South Korea’s extraordinarily low fertility rate is linked to its prevalence of high-rise housing. As the author put it: South Korea’s high-rise housing and low birthrates are closely related. People don’t have children if they don’t have room for them. High rises are expensive to build so living space is at a premium. Birth rates are declining throughout the developed world, but they have declined the most in countries like South Korea, Russia, and China that have tried to house most of their people in hi ..read more