Agriculture of North America
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
The various peoples who developed North America have made it a world economic leader
and, in general, a well-used and productive continent. Agriculture, though no longer the principal
economic activity (except in some of the southern Latin countries), is still important.
Tropical regions
In tropical areas, the Spaniards made the most of the strong elevational zonation by raising
sugarcane in rainy parts of the low tierra caliente (“hot land”), wheat and cattle on the middle
levels of the tierra templada (“temperate land”), and sheep on the upper slopes in the tierra fría
(“cold land”. Later, orange groves and coffee, cocoa, and banana plantations were established on
the coastal plains and wet windward slopes of the tropical areas; and cotton and hemp were
grown in the warmer and drier basins of the intermediate zone. These remain important export
crops for Central American countries and Mexico, being shipped mainly to the United States and
Europe.
Subtropical and warm temperate regions
An enormous extension of fruit, winter vegetable, cotton, and tobacco farming has
occurred in the subtropical and warm temperate areas of the United States and northern Mexico.
Citrus fruits do well in Florida and the Rio Grande valley of Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico
brings warm tropical air with early rain but much late-summer sun. The Central Valley of
California—guarded from frosts by the Sierras, with winter rain for growth and prolonged
summer sun for ripening—also is a prime area for growing fruit and vegetables (in the early 21st
century, the Central Valley produced about 8 percent of U.S. agricultural output, though it
contained less than 1 percent of the country’s farmland). Drought is a challenge, however, and
has been met only by extensive irrigation. Winter vegetables are widely grown on the sandy soils
of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the southeastern parts of the Atlantic coast, which have a long
frost-free season and ample rain. Cotton has proved a success in areas with less than 60 inches
(1,525 mm) of rain and more than 200 days free of frost Tobacco is concentrated on the sandy
soils of old shores and deltas from Virginia to Kentucky. Many tobacco and cotton fields are
now alternately planted with rye, corn (maize), soybeans, and winter wheat grown as fodder for
cattle or as additional cash crops. These help to maintain the fertility of the soil, which long has
been threatened by the practice of monoculture.
Cool temperate, humid regions
Crops of the continent’s cool temperate, humid regions include hardy fruits grown on the
valley sides of the Appalachians and the Piedmont from Georgia through Virginia, in the Finger
Lakes region of New York, in the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario, on the eastern shore of Lake
Michigan, and in parts of the Columbia River basin in Washington and British Columbia. In all
these areas, aspect, frost, and drainage are important factors.
The zone known as the Corn Belt derived its name from the preponderance of corn grown
in the warm-summer region that extends westward from the Ohio River to the lower Missouri
River, although soybeans have come to rival corn as the leading field crop. In this region winter
snowmelt, rains from the northward springtime surge of tropical gulf air, and early summer
convection showers bring on the plants, while strong late-summer sun and high temperatures
ripen the cobs and bean pods. Most of the corn is fed to fatten pigs and cattle, while much of the
soybean crop is exported.
The Dairy Belt, another recognized division, makes use of a shorter growing season and
cooler summers in New England and the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence region, where clover,
timothy hay, and hardy small grains thrive. Dairying also exploits the lush pastures of the Pacific
Coast’s equable climate in Washington and British Columbia.
West of the Corn Belt, in subhumid regions, lie the continent’s vast wheat areas. The
Winter Wheat Belt, mainly in Kansas and Oklahoma, lies south of killing frosts. As the polar
front retreats in early spring, the sweep of rainstorms brings on the grain sown in the previous
fall. The Spring Wheat Belt—in the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, the Canadian Prairie
Provinces, and part of the Columbia basin—has a severe winter that forces postponement of
sowing to spring. Then the warmth and wetness of the sudden northward surge of tropical gulf
air quickly bring on the new-sown wheat, which ripens in a usually dry, sunny fall. Wheat
farming takes place on an ever larger scale than corn and soybean farming, using more machines
and producing more per acre.
Dry regions
Dry areas in the Great Plains and intermontane basins long were left to ranching. Hereford
cattle brought in from England could feed on the shortgrass prairies, which were unsuitable for
farming homesteaders. Sheep, raised in still drier parts or up in the mountains, have been bred
mainly for wool. Near rivers or in artesian areas, irrigation for supplementary fodder has greatly
helped ranching. Irrigation, however, has been used increasingly for fruit and cotton farming,
resulting in a drain on water supplies.
Livestock raising
The combination of favourable environmental conditions and strong domestic demand for
animal products has made the raising of livestock prominent in the North American economy;
but quantity and quality in Mexico and Central America, with their lower purchasing power,
have not kept pace with standards in the United States and Canada. The raising of domesticated
animals for food and a number of industrial raw materials has generated a specific economic
geography for each species. In terms of value, beef cattle are the most important, and their
breeding and fattening are major, often dominant activities in the Great Plains and adjacent
sections of the American Midwest. Demand tends to outrun supply, however, and a growing
proportion of beef consumed in the United States is imported, mainly from Australia, Latin
America, and Canada. Traditionally concentrated in the Upper Midwest and the northeastern
section of the United States and neighbouring portions of Canada, the dairy industry has grown
in importance in the West, especially in California, which, together with Wisconsin, accounted
for about one-third of U.S. milk sales in 2010s. The production of hogs and pigs may be
widespread, but some three-fifths of North America’s commercial output is concentrated in five
Midwestern states. Mutton and lamb never have figured significantly in North American diets
(although kid meat is highly esteemed in Mexico), and so a relatively small number of sheep are
raised primarily for wool; sheep ranching is practiced in the Great Plains, the intermontane
basins, and the Pacific region, most notably in Texas and California. Since about 1970 the
consumption of red meat has declined as awareness of potential health risks associated with it
has grown; large-scale poultry production has expanded sharply in Southern states from
Arkansas to Maryland, where land and labour for a factory-like industry are cheap and abundant.
Water development
Water development is crucial both to circumvent drought and to prevent flooding. More
than 55 million acres (22.3 million hectares) of irrigated land had been developed in the United
States by the early 2010s, with large dam projects and conduits in the Columbia and Snake river
valleys, the Central and Imperial valleys of California, the Salt and Gila tributaries of the
Colorado River, the upper Rio Grande, and the upper Missouri and the upper Platte rivers. In
western Canada a vast scheme has been under development on the Bow and South Saskatchewan
rivers; while in Mexico the lower Rio Grande (shared with the United States), the Fuerte River
basin on the dry west coast, and the Balsas River basin in the south have all undergone active
water development. Water transfer from surplus to deficit areas has been under way for some
time, and interstate water-transfer proposals include those that would convey water from the
Columbia basin to both the Sacramento and Colorado rivers and from the head of the Missouri
system to the Colorado and thence to the Gila River. Flood control has remained a problem in the
Mississippi River basin. The Tennessee valley and the Ozarks schemes have involved building
many dams to redistribute river water.
Energy development
Fossil fuels
During the 20th century, the development of new fuels caused the dramatic displacement
of coal as North America’s major source of energy. Oil makes up more than one-third of U.S.
energy consumption and natural gas between one-fourth and three-tenths. Coal from the
continent’s vast reserves is concentrated mainly in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania,
Wyoming, Illinois, Indiana, Utah, and Alabama. Coal is sent to the power plants and steelworks
of the mid-Atlantic and lower Great Lakes regions. A major advantage that oil and natural gas
have over coal is the ease with which they can be transported. Pipelines carry both fuels from
their remote sources in the offshore fields of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, the
mid-continental fields of Oklahoma, and the fields along the eastern edge of the Rocky
Mountains to the shoreline cities of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Great Lakes. Large
amounts of oil also are sent by tanker from the ports close to the gulf oil fields. The 800-mile
(1,300-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline, opened in 1977, carries oil from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s
Arctic coast to the ice-free port of Valdez on the state’s southern coast, where it is loaded onto
tankers and shipped to the U.S. west coast and the Gulf of Mexico for refining.
Oil consumption in the United States has continued to increaseIn spite of the richness of
the oil fields in California, that state has become a net importer, piping in oil from Texas and
receiving oil by tanker from Middle Eastern and Latin American countries, among other sources.
Similarly, the fields of Illinois, Ohio-Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania, though
important before World War II, have not been able to adequately supply the Great Lakes and
mid-Atlantic regions since that time; those areas now are fed by oil piped from Oklahoma and
Kansas.
Despite the considerable fluctuations in the international price of oil beginning in the
1970s—including periods of sharp price escalations—the United States has continued to meet
much of its petroleum need with foreign imports. In Canada the industrial regions in Vancouver,
and the lower Great Lakes–St. Lawrence area are fed oil and natural gas by pipe from Alberta;
and in Mexico, oil is supplied to Mexico City by pipe from the Gulf Coast oil fields around
Reynosa and Tampico-Tuxpan, and natural gas is piped to Monterrey from gas fields around
Reynosa.
Hydroelectricity of North America
Hydroelectric development has been immense in the United States and Canada. The rivers
of the Canadian Shield, fed from lakes and falling abruptly over the edge of the plateau, provide
many sites, especially in Quebec and Ontario. These are linked to such Great Lakes–St.
Lawrence sites as Niagara Falls and International Falls, which, in turn, tie in to a power grid
developed from Appalachian rivers. The north-central and northeastern areas are thus well
supplied.
The snow-fed rivers from the high Cordilleras, where impounded (as at the Grand Coulee,
Hoover, Glen Canyon, Fort Peck, and Garrison dams), also provide an immense amount of
power. Yet, in the United States, hydroelectric power represents only a small percentage of the
total electricity generated, nearly all the rest coming from coal-, gas-, or oil-fired thermal plants
and from nuclear-power stations.
Nuclear and other sources
Since the 1950s the United States has put dozens of nuclear power plants into operation in
more than 30 states, while Canada has built close to 20. Nevertheless, nuclear-generated
electricity accounts for a relatively modest share of North America’s total energy budget: about
20 percent of all electricity generated in the United States and about 8 percent of all the energy
the country consumes The initial predictions that nuclear technology would assume a much
larger role in the energy economy have not been realized for several reasons: costs of
construction and operation have been higher than anticipated; it has been difficult to find plant
sites that are technically and politically acceptable; plant operation and maintenance have been
subject to frequent problems; and the safe, long-term disposal of radioactive wastes has remained
an intractable problem.
Other considerably less complicated technologies that utilize such inexhaustable resources
as solar and wind power for energy production have been making slow but steady progress,
although they supply only a tiny fraction of the continent’s energy. Tens of thousands of homes
and commercial structures have installed rooftop solar collectors for heating and cooling
purposes; and research and development has continued to enhance the efficiency of photoelectric
cells that convert sunlight directly into electricity, which has potential for widespread use in the
sunnier sections of the continent. More limited geographically is the potential exploitation of
geothermal and wind power, but experimental projects in some favoured localities have
confirmed the practicality of technologies created to utilize these energy sources.
Industry
Coastal sites
The industry of North America is its chief contemporary source of wealth. It first
developed at Atlantic coast and Mississippi River ports, where raw materials transported from
abroad or brought by coastal trade from other colonies could be made into goods for distribution
in the interior. Inland products also could be transformed before being exported from such ports,
where immigrant labour was plentiful and capital brought in or developed locally was abundant.
In many respects the ports still perform these roles. Traditionally, New England cities, New York
City, and the Philadelphia region manufactured textiles, leather goods, petrochemical products,
iron and steel, ships and machines, books, clothes, and foods not only for their own dense
populations but also for the interior United States. In spite of the enormous development of the
interior, coastal sites (including those on the Great Lakes and Pacific coast) have remained
paramount. From Buffalo, New York, to Chicago, the movement of coal from the Appalachian
and eastern interior fields up to the lakeshore, combined with the shipment of iron ore from Lake
Superior and Ungava to the lake ports, historically led to a vast and dynamic belt of ironworks
and steel mills, transport facilities, and machine-making cities. The Pacific ports of Seattle, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles developed from an outpouring of forest, fish, farm, mine, and oil-
well products, partly shipped abroad and partly sent by the Panama Canal to the eastern United
States.
Canada traditionally imported oil, wool, cotton, leather, and food-based raw materials into
the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes ports, such as Montreal and Toronto, and exported iron, nickel,
copper and other metal-based goods, wood products, and flour from the eastern ports and from
Vancouver. These trade activities have resulted in concentrated population at the gateways in and
out of the country. Mexico’s gateway district, at Veracruz, is also industrialized.
Inland sites
Sites in the interior, however, are not without importance. The first to develop were the
fall-line power centres, strung out from the falls of the Merrimack River at the edge of the New
England Upland, then southward along the eastern front of the Piedmont, to the Coosa River
south of the Appalachians. Later, with the advent of steam and electric power, these sites
continued as major textile, pulp and paper, and engineering locations. A major shift inland
occurred with the use of coal for power in the eastern and western Pennsylvanian coalfields
around Wilkes-Barre and Pittsburgh, in the Birmingham (Alabama) coal and iron fields, and in
the Saginaw Bay, Indiana, and Illinois coalfields. Pittsburgh soon used up its local iron ore but
was sufficiently near the Great Lakes to bring in Mesabi Range iron ores, which, in combination
with the vast amounts of high-quality coking coal at hand, formed the basis for a great iron and
steel industry. Except where coking coal is used in the steel plants, the lower-grade Western coal
has been used primarily for electricity generation. Oil and natural gas, however, have become the
base of active petrochemical industries in areas such as Alberta, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and
Texas. Since oil and gas can be easily piped, they have not stimulated the development of
industry on a large scale near their sources but have fueled the northeastern and Pacific Coast
industrial areas. Modern industry has become less tied to sites where fuel and raw materials are
available and more oriented toward the market.
Service industries especially have concentrated in the highly populous areas of Boston–
New York City–Philadelphia, Pittsburgh-Detroit-Chicago, and San Francisco–Los Angeles.
Space-age developments have been supported by science-based industries from Texas through
Louisiana to Florida. Industries to meet the immense demand for travel and recreation have
sprung up on the major highways and in the tourist areas in the Appalachians, in the Cordilleras,
and along the seacoasts. Though industry is more free to disperse—and has done so to a
significant degree—it nevertheless continues to centre on areas of existing urban agglomeration.
In the United States, industrial concentrations are greatest in the New York–Washington, D.C.,
Cleveland-Chicago, and Los Angeles regions; in Canada, in the Montreal-Toronto and
Vancouver districts; and in Mexico, in the Mexico City basin as well as in and around
Guadalajara, Monterrey, Puebla, and León. The major cities of these regions also are the focus of
critical social and economic problems.
More generally, automation is everywhere creating a major problem of technological
unemployment, met in part by reducing working hours and retiring people earlier. These trends,
in turn, have given rise to the problem of the use of leisure time, which has become the target for
much of America’s fastest-developing industries.
