Environmental Geography

Back to Nicaragua -- Bonus Post 3: Rochelle's Pictures

2012-01-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Geography of Coffee student Rochelle Walbridge for sharing her photos of our recent journey. This collection (when compared to my photo set from many of the same places) illustrates how people traveling together often see different things, or the same things differently. I very much enjoy this series, and Rochelle's vision as a photographer, and I appreciate her allowing me to share them here.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 8 La Corona

2012-01-18T08:34:00.000-05:00

Note: This post is one in a series of daily posts about my January 2012 return to Nicaragua -- the sixth time I have offered my Geography of Coffee study tour, which becomes more interesting and enjoyable each year.

Everyone who participates in the Geography of Coffee study tour agrees that the home stays with families are the most important part of the journey. In fact, for the first program in 2006, it was only this part that I was certain of; the rest of the itinerary has been developed as a matter of trial-and-error as I have learned of other opportunities. And for five of the six years, those home stays have been in La Corona. In 2011 we were in La Pita -- another wonderful community in the San Ramon township -- but I was glad to be back with my friends in La Corona.

A few local dogs were attentive during a brief orientation meeting; one sits here at the feet of a student with notable footwear.

After some introductions at the home of the Rayo family, our true orientation to the community of La Corona began. We started with a visit -- led by my friend Alfredo -- to the large farm from which the community emerged in the process of land reform following the 1979 revolution. In the foreground are the wet-mill facilities of that farm, which was operating at least at partial capacity until recently. In the distance are the shade-grown coffee farms of the community. The coffee itself is not visible, as these are covered by two canopies. One is of bananas and other fruits, which add flavor, and nutrients through the soil while augmenting family food supplies and income. The higher canopy provides shade -- modifiable through pruning -- to regulate the development of the coffee cherry while supplying bird habitat and firewood.

Diversification is the key to reducing the downside risks of dependency of commodities. For coffee producers, education is key to that diversification. The population of La Corona has doubled to 2,000 people since it opened a high school – the first in Nicaragua in a rural community. My favorite librarian poses in front of La Corona’s community center, which includes a library (biblioteca), as well as a very successful program in art education.

After a delicious community lunch and the short tour, our group divided into small groups for the home stays. Because La Corona is a series of homesteads with no central village, our group members were farther apart from each other than we had been for a week of close-quarters learning. Whenever I visit La Corona, I stay at the home of Doña Elsa and Don Alfredo, whose son Alfredo is a teacher and a leader in local and global youth movements. These visits are an ideal way to learn what participation in coffee really is like for small producers. During this visit, for example, my host Don Alfredo explained aspects of both planting and pruning that I had not learned before.

Back to Nicaragua -- Bonus Post 2: Coffee Video

2012-01-16T05:29:00.001-05:00

Just before our arrival at Los Piños (described on the Day 5 post), Sara Corrales sent me a link to this video, produced by Salt Spring Coffee in Canada, which is one of the roasters that features their family's coffee. (In the U.S., Thanksgiving Coffee also features Byron's Maracaturra.)

The video rightly begins where Byron does: the soil. He rejects the Green Revolution's emphasis on soil productivity and even more recent notions of sustainability. Rather, his approach to soil emphasizes evolution, conservation, and protection.

Watching the video as a group on our last night in Nicaragua was a bit of a thrill for the group. Not only did it illustrate how much we had learned about coffee in just a few days, but this farm-to-cup lesson also features several of the people and places we enjoyed along the way.

As this film makes clear, excellent coffee is a partnership between farmers and roasters: each of the 50 or so steps required to make a cup of coffee can either diminish or improve the final result.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 7 El Cua-Bocay

2012-01-15T18:34:00.002-05:00

The main reason we have begun including Peñas Blancas on the study tour is that it provides access to the hydroelectric projects of northern Jinotega that the American engineer Benjamin Linder was developing when he was assassinated in 1987. In El Cuá, we stopped only for gasoline and some snacks. The largest grocery store in this small town reminds me very much of the corner groceries found in the United States nearly a century ago, and featured in a book that is my leisure reading on this trip, Marc Levinson’s The Great A & P. Most of the stock is behind a counter, and is brought to the customer by the clerks.

From El Cuá, we headed to Bocay, where Ben Linder’s legacy is very much alive, both in memorials and in a number of development projects. Our guide Freddy brought a photo out of the project office, which depicts Linder at a campus in the United States, protesting the Contra War and riding his trademark unicycle.

The permanent memorial reads:

Cua-Bocay ProjectIn Memory of Engineer Benjamin Linder
Born July 7 in the Year 1959
With his joy and courage he moved all of these people.
He died on April 28 in the Year 1987
In the Blue Horizon, where Heaven kisses the Sea.
His small figure will never cease to shine.

As with the 2011 study group, we visited the hydroelectric plant for which Linder was making field measurements when he was killed. The turbine continues to power the entire town of Bocay, and its building is now decorated with a vibrant mural celebrating Linder.

~~~

I was most interested in visiting the reservoir that in turn powers the turbine. Our schedule had not allowed such a visit in 2011, so we allowed extra time this year. We were surprised to learn that although it is a short distance away, the journey was even more difficult than the waterfall hike of the previous day. A single turbine delivers a remarkable amount of power from a small reservoir connected by a single, eight-inch pipe. The reason it works so well is the great potential energy of water positioned a full 800 feet above the turbine. Connected by a wide but slippery path, it is today an arduous climb.

When Linder was making his measurements, of course, the road was not yet provided. He and two Nicaraguan co-workers -- Sergio Hernández and Pablo Rosales -- were killed just 100 meters beyond the eventual site of the reservoir. His death – two weeks before Pam and I were married – helped to galvanize opposition to the covert support the United States was providing to the Contras, and contributed to the ending of that very destructive war. The story is told in the film American/Sandinista and in Joan Kruckewitt’s book The Death of Ben Linder, and I have included several tributes on my Ben Linder Cafe page.

Although I found the journey to these historic sites rewarding, we agreed that the climb to the reservoir -- even for those who did make it -- was more than we need to include in future tours. Fortunately, our guide was able to find enough information about related facilities in El Cuá, which will allow us to learn about that ongoing work while expanding the portion of the trip we dedicate to the study of cacao.

Back to Nicaragua -- Bonus Post

2012-01-15T15:29:00.000-05:00

I have not yet caught up to the portion of our trip when we visited the community of La Corona, but I have posted an item about our nacatamale culinary experience there on our Nueva Receta blog.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 6 Jinotega

2012-01-15T15:26:00.000-05:00

After another delicious breakfast at Selva Negra, we set off on the next leg of our journey, into the heart of the northern state of Jinotega. Our first stop was the small city of the same name, with its charming central square. Parked on the square was a vehicle I found rather unusual. On Nicaragua’s highways, it is still common to see some of the monstrously large Russian dump trucks that date to the revolutionary period from 1979 through the mid 1980s. And though Cuba is still full of Lada passenger cars from the same period, this Russian economy box is not at all common in Nicaragua. I was therefore quite surprised to see a NEW Lada on the central square of Jinotega, much less one bearing signs for a Lada dealership.

More interesting are the many examples of cultural and political public art in Jinotega, especially those celebrating women. In addition to murals depicting women as both warriors and farmers, a statue honors breast-feeding. As in the United States, this most natural act is sometimes seen as transgressive, and in fact the mother-and-child statue has been subject to vandalism.

Much of the rest of the day was spent on the short but arduous drive to the forest reserve at Peñas Blancas (White Cliffs), where we spent three hours on a hike to its most amazing waterfall. The path is steep and wet, but well maintained, so the climb was strenuous but for the most part feasible.

After cleaning up from the climb, we enjoyed a dinner prepared by the community and some free time with each other and with the children. Everry group of students has found that coloring and simple games with children are among the best ways to participate in the communities we visit.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 5 Selva Negra

2012-01-15T07:43:00.001-05:00

Just as we had ended our fourth day with Eddy Kuhl, we began our fifth with his wife Mausi, whose expertise is in the agronomy and ecology of the Selva Negra 1500-acre estate and reserve. For almost two hours, she drove us throughout the property, describing the many symbiotic relationships among the operations of the hotel, the farm, and the land on which each depends. At the end of the tour, our student Nick said, “My mother [an organic farmer in Massachusetts] would love her!” It was then that I remembered that Mausi had actually had dinner at Nick’s house and visited his family farm – ColchesterNeighborhood Farm, of which my family is a CSA member – during a visit to Bridgewater in 2010.

The social and environmental practices at Selva Negra are a positive model for other mid-sized producers, more than earning the farm’s organic and Rainforest Alliance certifications. In fact, in the current – and controversial – efforts to expand fair-trade certification to farms other than small cooperatives, Selva Negra is among the first mid-sized farms in the world to be considered.

Because water pollution is one of the major environmental concerns related to coffee, the Selva Negra has devoted much of its attention to the reduction of eutrophication. Even on farms where no pesticides or fertilizers are being used, the high concentration of sugar in coffee pulp can result in severe nutrient overloading in surrounding surface water. At Selva Negra – as at some other relatively large, progressive farms – the “honey” water from the fermentation process is captured in underground tanks where it can be used to create not only liquid fertilizer, but also methane gas for cooking. Selva Negra goes a step further, having implemented biogas capture in many other waste streams.

The sale of coffee gathered from 1.5 million trees facilitates a level of social security at Selva Negra that is rare among coffee growers. Housing is provided for the 250 year-round employees, which include some working in their third generation. A recent project provided high-efficiency cooking stoves for fifty households on the property. These stoves have reduced demand for wood, reduced cooking times, and – most importantly – reduced the health risks associated with conventional stoves.

From the tour of La Hammonia Farm (named for Hamburg, Germany), our attention turned to a strenuous hike into the Ardenal Reserve. Our three-hour hike on steep, often muddy trails was rewarded with a much richer understanding of the ecology and beauty of the cloud forest sub-biome. The experience was all the more informative because of our guide Freddy’s understanding of the natural history of many of the forest’s hundreds of plants and animals. He is shown above explaining how a strangler fig tree – an emi-epiphyte – takes over and eventually kills a host tree, without actually drawing any nutrients from it.

Abundant heat, sunlight, and moisture allow some trees to grow to enormous size, creating structures on which many other plants can grow, and providing fun opportunities for group photos. The Ardenal Reserve is known for the several hundred species of birds it shelters, but the only bird who posed for my camera were a pet parrot (parakeet) who was entertaining the chickens and Guinea fowl at a farm located at the far edge of the reserve.

At the end of the hike, we enjoyed a quick lunch at a roadside shop that specializes in bean soup, where we met a pet macaw.

From there, we were on our way to one of the tour’s major highlights. We gathered at Los Piños, the farm of the inimitable Byron Corales and his family. The fourth generation of this family is now caring for the plants, animals, and soil of this farm, with amazing results for coffee quality. With a rare combination of clarity, passion, and science, this “Poet of Coffee” weaves a mesmerizing tale of the care required to produce the world’s best coffee.

As Byron explains, the error of the misnamed Green Revolution is that it focuses on a single attribute of soil and agronomy: the relationship between macronutrients and short-term productivity. The Green Revolution emphasized nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium as the soil constituents best correlated with yields … and perhaps not coincidentally the easiest to sell.

Byron maintains these nutrients by carefully managing compost and manure, and in turn cares for the manure by carefully balancing the organic diet of his cattle. Equally important, however, he managed the microorganisms and enzymes in the soil, and interplants coffee with other fruits that influence the flavor. By allowing the roots of their carefully chosen coffee varietals to share the soil with other, carefully-selected plants, the Corales family creates a coffee that is almost unbelievably delicious. Because it was recognized as a world-wide Cup of Excellence Winner in 2004, an auction determined a price from which Byron has been able to calculate the retail value of the manure from his beloved cattle. (For more on the coffee itself, see the Salt Spring video I posted after our farm visit.)

As if the feeding of our minds and souls were not enough, Byron, his daughter Sara, and the rest of the Corales family fed us delicious fruits and chicken empanadas, in addition to all the world-class coffee we could want.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 4 Matagalpa

2012-01-15T00:45:00.000-05:00

Note: A few photos are included in these blog posts, but I am uploading many more – as bandwidth allows – to Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jhayesboh/sets/72157628744867405/.

We awoke this morning (Saturday) at the hostel La Buena Honda in Matagalpa, the best city I know of for an early-morning walk. As I always do when staying with students in Matagalpa, I announced my intention to take a walk early in the morning, and I was pleased that five students were ready to set out with me at 6:30. A few blocks from the hostel, we climbed a steep street to an even steeper street to an even steeper trail that has been upgraded to a staircase since my earliest visits to the town. I chose this part of town for the great views of the cathedral and the rest of the city center; I chose the particular staircase because I know a scarlet macaw lives in a cage on a patio at the very top – a pet with a better view than most humans!

As we turned toward the stairs, I noticed some people descending toward us, but not just any people: a full mariachi band in bright red, skin-tight suits. Apparently on their way to a gig, they seemed as surprised to see us as we were them, and when I tried discretely to snap a photo of this surreal encounter, their leader said in Spanish, “A picture for the movie! A picture for the movie!” and struck a pose.

We did not have time to discern whether they were delusional or merely very adept kidders. A moment later each group had continued on its way, and we were so taken aback that I forgot to point out the macaw, though I did get a glimpse to confirm it is still there.

We did, however, collect our thoughts in time to turn back toward the downtown area, and our climb was rewarded with a delightful view of a city just waking up to its weekend. Our attention then turned to the hilltop neighborhood itself, where a high degree of spatial heterogeneity creates great visual interest. As with peripheral areas in many Latin American cities, this steep hillside includes a kind of intense variety that results from relatively rapid change. Nice houses, even quite fancy ones, exist next to those that range from modest to deplorable.

This fine-grain variability results in part from the timing of the arrival of each household, relative to prevailing prices at the time. Even more important, however, is the process of in situ accretion, by which simple homes may be established with very basic materials and then improved and expanded over time, as financial circumstances allow. This house provides a very simple example of such an expansion, while illustrating several other points about local geography.

The second story of this house was added as some point well after the house was constructed, a change that is evidenced by very subtle markings on the front of the house but that is very clearly visible on the side. The electrical utility service appears to be closer to standard than is sometimes found in such settings, even elsewhere in Matagalpa, but it does appear that some other-than-formal wiring has taken place. The wires, incidentally, hosts epiphytes – plants that typically grown on other plants. The forests of Matagalpa are rich with such plants, and this biodiversity is evident even on non-organic surfaces in the city itself.

The newly constructed improvements in this hillside community clearly help to improve walking, biking, or driving conditions. The wide ditches along the street indicate, however, that provision of proper drainage – which is much more difficult to achieve than electrical service – may have been an even greater priority. The drainage and access arrangements in the “back yard” of a nearby house illustrate just how precarious the situation can be. Systematic drainage improvements are complicated if they are undertaken after the settlement process has taken hold. Significant public investment may be supported, however, in cases where the improved drainage not only protects the livelihoods of those in such communities. It also may protect down-slope communities from added flood risk.

From the city, we headed upward to El Chile, a community of Matagalpa indigenous who grow some coffee but are better known for weaving. In the middle of the twentieth century, the dictator Samoza was determined to make his own cotton fields near Leόn the monopoly producers. He destroyed the cotton fields cultivated by the Matagalpa indigenous, both to eliminate their competition and to compel them to work for him. The tradition of weaving was nearly lost until an Argentine named Marta came to the area as a volunteer during the Sandinista period. From a few older women in the community, she learned the traditional weaving methods, and adapted them to a looms that she had built on the basis of a Spanish model.

We met Marta during our 2010 tour, when she was contemplating retirement and was concerned about the future of the project. We learned that she had actually visited the project the day before our own visit this year, and she must have been very pleased. The weaving continues, though in three separate groups. In Marta’s former home, Francisca now leads the weaving effort, while other members have been very successful in marketing –promoting the products, finding new sales outlets, and better understanding prevailing prices so that the women actually earn a bit more than they once were.

We went to the second of the three small weaving co-ops now operating in El Chile, and learned how the traditional process works. Where a mechanical loom can produce about three meters of meter-wide cloth in a day, the belt loom is limited to a narrower piece of cloth, produced at about one meter per day. I purchased a few small purses made in this way, and will be offering them for sale at BSU’s Just Trade Fair on April 5 of this year.

After visiting the two weaving cooperatives, we climbed through a nearby coffee farm to the top of a local peak, from which we enjoyed a 360-view of many surrounding valleys and mountains. Of course, such vistas always call for a group photo!

Looking at the view in more detail (see below), geography students were able to discern some coffee fields by color and texture. That is, the coffee fields (a narrow band just above the student’s hat) have darker leaves and a lower, more uniform height than surrounding forest. Although only minimal acreage was visible in this way, we understood that much of what we see in this view is actually secondary forest that shelters shade-grown coffee, including some of the very best high-grown coffee in the world.

From El Chile, we returned to Selva Negra, a famous and historic coffee estate which was our home base for this portion of the journey. There we watched the delivery of one of many truckloads of freshly-picked coffee “grapes” that were being brought in at the end of a harvest day. After every third truck, the intake bin would be flooded, and the water used to carry the coffee through the first part of the processing, in which skins are separated from seeds (beans), and the coffee is allowed to ferment in water for 18 hours (the duration varies somewhat).

We did not get to see the process this time, as we had an appointment with Eddy Kuhl, the engineer, historian, artist, and raconteur who has operated Selva Negra with his wife Mausi Kuhl since 1974.

We spent the early evening being entertained and educated by Eddy, who literally wrote the book on the history of coffee in Nicaragua. He told the story of coffee’s introduction from the point of view of his own family and that of Mausi. As with many young German migrants toward the end of the nineteenth century, these ancestors were attracted by offers of free land from the Nicaraguan government. Such incentives had begun in the 1850s, as Nicaragua witnessed many potential settlers passing through the southern waterways of the country on their way to the California Gold Rush.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 3 Matagalpa

2012-01-07T20:33:00.001-05:00

Revised January 14, 2012

We began our third day (January 6) of the 2012 Geography of Coffee study tour with a quick stop at a mural that we had noticed earlier in our travels around Leόn. Murals are an important part of social and political discourse in Nicaragua, as they are in Mexico and elsewhere. As many murals as I have seen, I had never had the opportunity to speak with a muralist. This new mural commemorates the July 23, 1959 massacre of four University of Leόn students by Samoza’s National Guard. The lead artist told us that he has been surprised to learn about parallel events in other countries, and from us he learned of the Kent State killings on May 4, 1970 (my 7^th birthday).

As we left Leόn, we stopped at the small “hervidores” (boilers) in the community of San Jacinto. These small hotpots and geysers are a reminder of the great variety of volcanic and geothermal features here on the zone of tectonic convergence between the Cocos and North American plates.

Our travels then took us through Sebaco to the city of Matagalpa, capital of the state of the same name, and in many ways the capital of Nicaraguan coffee. I enjoy this city immensely – a vibrant downtown that is just the right size for exploring on foot, surrounded by beautiful mountains. Among the many changes I have witnessed in six years of visiting this city is the new statue to Carlos Fonseca, the intellectual leader of the Sandinista Revolution, and one of its martyrs. It is delightful to see a major public monument of hero holding a book.

Another change over the past half-decade has been the steady improvement of Matagalpa’s Coffee Museum. Some equipment is on display, as are many storyboards that tell the story of coffee in general and Matagalpa coffee in particular. The graphic below is not completely accurate, but provided a great framework for our guide Freddy and I to lead a discussion of how coffee spread from its origins in Ethiopia in AD 500 to the rest of the world, mostly through the process of colonization.

Each of my visits to Nicaragua has included a visit to the grave of Benjamin Linder, the young engineer who was the first U.S. citizen to be killed in the Contra War. With many people of my generation (or slightly older), Ben had come to Nicaragua to support its people during the very difficult period following the Sandinista Revolution. He was assassinated while working to provide hydroelectric power to coffee-growing communities of the far north; we will be visiting those projects in a few days.

Ben Linder’s funeral was one of the largest ever held in Nicaragua, and he was buried with honor in Matagalpa, its citizens insisting that he belonged in the local section of the cemetery. In previous visits, we have been impressed and curious about the ornate appearance of the graves and the activities of local people attending funerals or tending to the graves of relatives. Beginning in 2011, I decided it would be better to participate in some small way than simply to observe and take photos. For this reason I have brought students to the grave of Ben Linder to honor him. Following the tradition usually reserved for El Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), we remove trash and weeds from the area around the grave, bring flowers, and toast the departed with a beverage he or she was known to enjoy in life. On our arrival, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that a ground cover and an orange tree had been added since my last visit, and that a local artisan had been hired by a Matagalpa family to repaint the lettering on the gravestone.

We concluded the day with a visit to CECOCAFEN, a cooperative of cooperatives representing more than 2,600 coffee-farming families in Matagalpa, Jinotega, and Nueva Segovia. It was a tourism project of CECOCAFEN that originally brought me to Nicaragua, and visits to its member farms remain central to the study tour. During a visit to the CECOCAFEN main office, Santiago Dolma spent a couple of hours with our group, with the help of translator Rafael. He began by taking questions from students, which allowed him to bring together a lot of interesting ideas, both practical and theoretical. Given recent news about the “divorce” between the major certification agencies (TransFair and FLO), it was a privilege to have an in-depth discussion with this expert.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 2 Leon

2012-01-06T09:21:00.015-05:00

Updated Jan 7

Our first full day in Nicaragua was full of learning and adventure. In the morning, we visited the office and two projects of the Polus Center, a Massachusetts based NGO that assists and empowers people with disabilities.

The first project we visited is PLUSAA, which produces custom-made wheelchairs and other mobility-assistance equipment. The program sources all of its parts domestically. This commitment minimizes costs and facilitating repairs.

We also visited the prosthetic/orthotic clinic Walking Unidos. Like PLUSAA, Walking Unidos provides physical services, but more importantly, both organizations are staffed by people who themselves live and work with disabilities and can therefore help with emotional and social habilitation.

After lunch, we visited Cerro Negro, the world's second-youngest volcano. At 160 years old, only Mexico's Paricutin is younger.

Cerro Negro has erupted at least 20 times since it first emerged in 1850, including three significant eruptions in the 1990s. The steaming caldera is impressive, and relatively high winds require careful footing around its edge. This was my fourth visit to Cerro Negro, and I was determined to try the sandboarding. I think I'm going to make it a habit now!

Pam joined me for the journey this time, and climbed Cerro Negro. She "walked" down rather than take the sandboard, following the very steep trail in the rear of the photo below. It was just about as arduous as the boarding, but both of us managed well!

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 1 arrival

2012-01-04T22:18:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned previously, I am leading my sixth study tour to Nicaragua, entitled Geography of Coffee. From the first day we have just a brief report: everyone arrived in good spirits despite bone-chilling temperatures at departure and a few ticketing issues. This is a curious, energetic group with a high quotient of geographers! The first day of the trip involves meeting our guides and getting oriented to the idea of using geography to learn about coffee, and coffee to learn about geography. On the first two days, we see no actually coffee cultivation, but we are learning a lot of the fundamentals of physical and human geography that will come into play.

Our marvelous tour operator -- Matagalpa Tours -- works very well with the learning goals and learning approach that I encourage. The company also chooses a good balance of authentic, simple foods (such as we had for lunch) and a few tastes of the haute cuisine that is available in some spots. For our first evening's dinner together, we enjoyed the fare at the cleverly named Cocinartes.

Keep checking this blog and the 2012 trip web page for more news about our travels, but do not worry if we stop posting for a few days. We will be going "off the grid" early next week!

Championing the City of Champions

2012-01-04T00:57:00.000-05:00

I haved lived and taught in Bridgewater -- just south of Brockton -- for fifteen years now. I meet a lot of people who have lived near Brockton for as long or longer than I have, who have never been in the city! (Zipping through the western edge on Route 24 does not count.) The reason, it turns out, is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of racial diversity, fear of being shot.

As one downtown minister pointed out in the aftermath of a Christmas-day shooting, the city's hard-core criminal one percent has managed to overshadow the 99 percent of Brocktonians who go to work or school every day and contribute in many ways to the strength of the community. But that one percent -- or whatever proportion of the populace is responsible for high-profile pathologies -- has a disproportionate influence on perception, particularly among those whose intake of "news" is limited to television, commercial talk radio, or tabloid newspapers. (Even the Brockton Enterprise, which tries to accentuate positive stories about Brockton, also leads with the grimly sensational any day that it can.)

The disportionate fear of crime arises from several factors, but as John Allen Paulos points out early in his book Innumeracy, it is a symptom of a country with limited ability to use and apply math in everyday life. The results can be amusing, if disheartening. A few years ago, a student in my Geography of Brockton course wrote an essay about a Saturday-morning drive around town (what geographers call a "windshield survey") on which I had taken some of the students. This athletic, seemingly confident young man reported relief at surviving the journey and surprise at how normal everything had been. He wrote of people doing yard work and other chores, and how the houses and cars looked better-kept than he expected. Growing up in the region but not the city, he had avoided the area entirely, and his mental map of Brockton was like a scene from Grand Theft Auto. I since realized that thousands of people in this region skirt around the edges of Brockton on a regular basis, envisioning the worst in center of their regional mental map. It is as if the dragons at the edge of an ancient map had been dragged to the center. (Cartographic aside: Peter van der Krogt argues that such maps never were made.)

I do not write this to trivialize the crime that does occur. One reason that this article has taken so long for me to write is that while I was writing, I learned of a database that ranks Brockton's crime rate in the top 100 nationally, while listing my own town of Bridgewater among the 100 safest. Those rankings are somewhat fickle, and shift somewhat depending on details of methodology, but they make clear that the stereotypes mentioned above are not without some basis in fact: dangers in Brockton -- particularly in the center -- are real.

Those dangers need not define the city, however, as Brockton native Mary Beth Meehan makes clear in her work. I have seen some of it, but have not yet taken the time to explore all of it. As shown below and as discussed with Megna Chakrabarti on Radio Boston, Meehan has created a most unusual photographic exhibit. She places photography of the everyday in public spaces, so that Brocktonians and their visitors can see the people who define their community. This celebration of what people bring to the city -- from all corners of the Earth, as it turns out -- can help to recast downtown as a bit more nuanced than headlines and stereotypes would suggest.

Cafe Stories

2012-01-03T23:07:00.001-05:00

In a single section of last Friday's Boston Globe, I found two extraordinary stories about the geography of coffee shops that I will use to introduce my next batch of coffee students to the range of possibilities. The first was a lengthy obituary (culled from the Washington Post) of Leopold Hawelka, who recently died at age 100. His first attempt at opening a cafe was interrupted by World War II, but he did not wait for the partition of his city to be lifted before embarking again. In a city with centuries of café history, his story stands out. From starving artists to the simply starving, Café Hawelka was exactly what a café is meant to be: a place of warmth and gathering. (I include the Sydney Morning Herald tribute and a Wikipedia article, in case the link to the Post item expires; the story of this fascinating place should be read and shared!)

As I turned the page from the sublime pinnacle of café culture, I found this title above a much shorter article, dateline Augusta, Maine: "Suspect denies setting fire to coffee shop." For many readers of the Metro section, this might be the first encounter of the cringe-worthy phrase "topless coffee shop," but cafe geography is sometimes sexy or even prurient. In the story, we learn that a Kennebec County Superior Court judge endured defendant Raymond Bellavance's four-hour-long denial of charges that he burned the aptly named Grand View Coffee Shop, where a former girlfriend worked. According to a subsequent report on WABI-TV, the shop was occupied at the time of the fire, with two children among the seven people present. Bellavance was found guilty and could be sentenced to as much as thirty years.

As I marveled at the extreme variety of cafés and café stories, a friend referred me to the story of Café Riche, two blocks from the now-famous Tahrir Square, where the Arab Spring first came to Egypt. I was reminded of my recent post about Café Slavia in Prague, but the century-plus experience of this Cairo corner shop is if anything even more amazing. As described in The Economist, Café Riche has been a hub of intellectual foment since it opened in 1908 -- both a microcosm of and a critical element in the urban geography of Cairo and the political geography of the entire nation. As the world watches to see what will happen in post-Mubarak Egypt, we would do well to watch this single street corner.

Coffee Addiction

2012-01-03T21:40:00.001-05:00

(Warning: This post links to a site that is unduly laden with advertising, but perhaps still worthwhile.)

Boise is described as a coffee-crazed town;
too bad my only visit there predates my own obsession!

Without cable (or broadcast) television, I miss a lot of programs. Honestly, I do not miss most of what I miss. Fortunately, people who know that I am blissfully isolated in this way look out for me, especially whenever they encounter a program related to coffee. For this I am grateful, most recently to my mother, who alerted me to the NBC (or CNBC -- I don't know the difference) program Coffee Addiction. Apparently it is some sort of occasional series, and as I prepare for my next coffee adventure in a few hours, I do not have time to run down all of its threads.

The show includes several interviews with leaders of major companies and several interesting slideshows, such as one highlighting some cities with great coffee scenes (west of the Mississippi, that is). Overall, the series seems to touch on many of the coffee topics I have been writing and speaking about for a few years ... even including coffee's sexy side. More important than the cafes or even the health issues, it is encouraging, to see a major media outlet grappling with the sustainability and ethics of coffee production and trade.

I am also encourage that my colleagues at Vanderbilt's Institute for Coffee Studies were consulted, and a link is provided on the program's main site, along with the corporate links and a plethora of ads. Many segments of the program are available on Zomobo.

Back to Nicaragua

2012-01-03T18:34:00.001-05:00

Coffee handling at
SolCafe,
photo from 2006

In 2006, I was the official faculty leader of a study tour for the first time, though I had helped to lead similar ventures in the past. That first trip was a "shake-down cruise" in many respects, as nobody was really doing tourism in the coffee-growing areas of Nicaragua yet. The only tour operators we could find in 2006 and again in 2007 were Managua-based companies with no experience in -- or respect for -- rural communities. We learned quite a lot, and after a 2008 hiatus we found that an excellent, Matagalpa-based operator was now available. Additionally, we found excellent reasons to take the tour to some other areas of the country, notably to courrent social-development projects in León and both current and historic projects in and around El Cuá.

Prior to the first trip, I planned to go only once, and then try the same topic in a different country. But I fell in love with Nicaragua -- as did many students -- and as I write this, we are nearing departure for the sixth Geography of Coffee study tour, happily working with Matagalpa Tours for the fourth year in a row. To the extent we have internet access (and this increases each year), I will be posting a few observations from the field on this blog. For now, the 2012 study tour web page includes our basic itinerary and some additional background.

Best of all, my fellow blogger and favorite librarian -- who accompanied me on the first trip -- now gets to enjoy a journey that promises to be even more pleasant and rewarding.

Café Slavia: Redoubt of Ideas

2011-12-22T23:47:00.000-05:00

Credit: Martin Sutovec, via Don in Massachusetts

Ronald Reagan is credited with bringing down the totalitarian regimes of the Eastern Bloc, when in fact it was a writer. Not by himself, of course, but the playwright and scholar Vaclav Havel did more to instigate change with his typewriter and ideas than President Reagan with his bombs and secret wars.

I was reminded of that era of transition from nuclear standoff to popular uprising by On Point Radio's wonderful remembrance of Havel just after his death this week. From one of the participants in that discussion, I learned of the pivotal role of a particular Prague coffee shop in the advancement of Havel's cause. Kavárna Slavia is often cited as the most important of several of his haunts as he was writing and meeting and fomenting change in Czechoslovakia. The web site of Café Slavia (as it is also known) suggests a place much larger than a typical cafe, with an extensive menu and elegant decor that suggest "restaurant" more than "coffee shop." Visitors now flock to Café Slavia, both for its food (though some find it wanting) and for its connection to an important history.

The geography of coffee shops often puts them at the center of the local cultural geography because of their role in fostering conversations of substance. It is for this reason that wise politicians go to coffee shops to listen, opportunist politicians go to be listened to, and politicians who fear ideas seek to shut them down.

Ayn Rand and the neo-Dickensians

2011-12-18T00:24:00.000-05:00

In his AlterNet article "How Ayn Rand Seduced Generations of Young Men and Helped Make the U.S. Into a Selfish, Greedy Nation," clinical pyschologist Bruce Levine writes:

The good news is that I’ve seen ex-Rand fans grasp the damage that Rand’s philosophy has done to their lives and to then exorcize it from their psyche. Can the United States as a nation do the same thing?

Rand was a writer and philosopher of an earlier generation who continues to damage the society in which she thrived. She elevated selfishness to a virtue, and helped make the United States a less caring nation in which poverty and inequality persist to degrees far greater than would be suggested by this country's wealth, Christian heritage, and rhetorical commitment to the value of children. (Even the conservative London Economist writes that the United States is "in a class of its own as the only rich country where women get no paid maternity leave at all.")

Levine describes in some detail the workings and influence of Rand's inner circle, improbably named "The Collective," which either included or influenced many important neocon figures, from Alan Greenspan and Ronald Reagan to Ron Paul and his rather demented son Rand.

The title and opening paragraphs of the article suggest that the influence of Rand came to define an entire generation. Though I do not think he makes the case for a reach that is quite so broad, Levine is right to take Rand's influence seriously. Because some of Rand's staunchest disciples do now have considerable power, his analysis of her most problematic ideas is quite useful to those concerned with today's politics.

Two passages illustrate some of the more pernicious contradictions of Rand and her followers. First, the champion of rugged individualism has helped to put economic liberty above political liberty, and has put individuals in the thrall of corporations. As Levine explains:

While Rand often disparaged Soviet totalitarian collectivism, she had little to say about corporate totalitarian collectivism, as she conveniently neglected the reality that giant U.S. corporations, like the Soviet Union, do not exactly celebrate individualism, freedom, or courage.

Second, Rand has been embraced by many who consider themselves Christian. Not only does this require believing in a Jesus very different from the Nazarene who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, but it also requires ignoring huge swaths of Rand's writing. Again, Levine explains:

In recent years, we have entered a phase where it is apparently okay for major political figures to publicly embrace Rand despite her contempt for Christianity. In contrast, during Ayn Rand’s life, her philosophy that celebrated self-interest was a private pleasure for the 1 percent but she was a public embarrassment for them. They used her books to congratulate themselves on the morality of their selfishness, but they publicly steered clear of Rand because of her views on religion and God. Rand, for example, had stated on national television, “I am against God. I don’t approve of religion. It is a sign of a psychological weakness. I regard it as an evil.”

To be pro-Rand and pro-Jesus requires a politics in which reason and evidence are diminished and even reviled. Unfortunately, even a cursory examination of talk radio and political debates suggests that is very much the world in which our politics now occurs.

For more about Rand, see my Reason Shrugged and Libertarians in Space posts, in which I describe her thinking on public-sector workers and the delusions of independence among fringe libertarians.

Morning Routine

2011-12-14T11:14:00.000-05:00

Boston Globe reporter Lisa Zwirn finds plenty of anecdotal evidence that even in a slow economy, many people continue to splurge on coffee purchased outside the home. She finds that people are remarkably consistent in their habits of location, brew, and flavor, though some customers do have favorite "treat" coffees that they order only occasionally.

The consumption patterns described in the article run the gamut in terms of timing, location, and quality, and provide some interesting insights into the factors that shape the geography of coffee shops.

Best Case Against Green Energy

2011-12-13T00:24:00.000-05:00

Source: Wind Powering America

Every oil field on the planet runs a course from discovery through increasing production to peak production to declining production and eventually to exhaustion. The last drop is never really extracted from the ground; fields can be reopened if the prices rise or technology improves. Nonetheless, just as most of the world's individual oil fields have passed their peak, so also has the planet as a whole. Peak production of the other fossil fuels may not have been reached on a global level yet, but coal and natural gas will inevitably decline, albeit much later than oil has done.

I was reminded of this as I read an article against green energy in an April 2011 issue of Forbes magazine. In The Green Energy Economy Reconsidered, Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren do the great service of describing five important drawbacks to sustainable energy alternatives, with a particular focus on wind and solar power. I call their article a service because it is important to understand the limitations of these sources, if for no other reason than to understand why they have not yet been adopted much more widely.

The authors describe fundamentally geographic reasons that essentially free energy has not been widely adopted in the United States or elsewhere. Low spatial density and spatial mismatches between supply and demand are two of the major obstacles. For Taylor and Van Doren, these are among a handful of reasons to reject government efforts to promote green energy. The article implies at least a faint recognition of the peak-oil problem, but dismisses it as not particularly relevant to questions of electricity production, in which more-abundant coal is dominant. As free-market proponents, they argue that the burdens of green energy are so great that they do not justify market-distorting subsidies.

I would like to suggest the opposite. The limitations of green energy explain why the market has not yet allowed for their widespread adoption, but these limitations do not explain why that initial market response (or non-response) should be accepted. This may be the strongest possible case against green energy, but it falls short in several key respects. First, fossil fuels appear more cost-effective than they actually are, because important externalities -- including but not limited to pollution costs -- are ignored. Second, free markets in petroleum and the other fossil fuels would lead inevitably to the near-exhaustion of each resource described above, but this need not be taken as the only possible future.

Given the extremely high costs of climate change, our current goal should be to leave as much oil, coal, and natural gas in the ground on a permanent basis as possible. Subsidizing green energy in the short term -- though admittedly not easy -- can bring about some of the needed reductions; doing nothing will, of course, achieve nothing.

A Bet Worth $4.81

2011-12-11T20:18:00.001-05:00

I'll bet $4.81 that Mitt Romney wishes he had not suggested a bet to rival Rick Perry in a recent debate. As reported by Glen Johnson, when trying to make a point about his record on health care, he suggested a bet of a particular size -- small enough to be taken seriously, but big enough (for Rick Perry and most of the rest of us, anyway) not to be entered into lightly.

On one hand, Rick Perry should have taken the bet, as Romney was putting bravado ahead of evidence in defending one of his many reversals on health care. On the other, he was correct to demur at the amount, especially since this revealed him to be a bit closer to the average audience member than is his challenger.

Just George H.W. Bush revealed his status in the stratosphere of privilege through his fascination with grocery scanners -- he had never heard of them before a grocery-store tour during his campaign -- Romney has revealed his distance from the average American by suggesting this wager.

Based on the latest figures I could see for median net worth, his $10,000 bet would be equivalent to a $4.81 bet by a person of median net worth. (The mean net worth is much higher, since the numerical space below $102,200 is much narrower than the space above it.) As my favorite librarian has often observed, "The problem with rich people is that they don't understand that poor people don't have money." Next to Mitt Romney, almost all of us fall into that "poor people" category.

And by the way, I lied in the first line of this post. Like Rick Perry, I don't bet. And like Perry, I know that most of the evangelical right doesn't bet, either.

Hull High: Another Case for Regionalization

2011-12-08T07:24:00.000-05:00

Taking Attendance is an excellent report by journalist Johanna Seltz in today's Boston Globe, in which she describes the problems associated with dwindling enrollment at in the town of Hull, particularly in its high school. Anticipating one of my first questions, she is careful to document this as a demographic trend, rather than a shift toward private schools. She then documents some of the reasons for the trend, including changes in available housing. The article also hints at a bit of a positive-feedback, or spiraling affect, as the problems of shrinking schools are to some degree self-feeding: fewer families lead to fewer families.

Shrinking enrollments reduce variable costs and crowding, allowing for a more tranquil and perhaps more productive learning environment. But the fixed costs of maintaining a building are spread over fewer students, the ability to offer specialized courses is reduced, with the definition of "specialized" eventually extending to basics, such as shop and foreign language. In Massachusetts, high fixed costs at the district level are an additional burden, and Seltz reports on the efforts of Hull Superintendent Kathleen Tyrell to address this through regionalization.

As I have written in some of my earlier posts on this topic, only in Massachusetts (and perhaps New Jersey), would the combination of two tiny towns be considered a regional consolidation. Even this, as Tyrell has found, is difficult, especially for a district that is isolated on a long peninsula, limiting its potential partnerships. Even more limiting than the physical situation of Hull, however, is the ideological commitment to "local control" in school districts. It is sadly ironic that school committees and the citizenry at large is not willing to set aside ego in order to cooperate in genuine regional districts at the county level.

The state provides some incentives to regionalize, but it aims too low. Massachusetts has a few hundred school districts, where states of similar size might have a few dozen. Nobody actually agrees on exactly how many -- one has as few as 2 children. (That is not a typo.) Combining Hull with another small town would be an improvement in the short-run, but county-wide districts would be a more reasonable long-term goal.

As illustrated in Hull, the cost of maintaining 351 fiefdoms is simply too high. A regional district could allow for some real creativity, too, perhaps to include magnet schools or shared resources for 50/50 online courses in some subjects.

I understand why Gov. Patrick and Lt. Gov. Murray have been slow to act on the recommendations on this issue from the 2009 Citizens Task Force Report (the relevant section of which I authored). Inertia is difficult to overcome both at the local level and within the state bureaucracies employed to oversee them. But it is long past time for the state to offer stronger incentives to encourage districts that combine the back-office functions not of two or three towns, but of ten or twenty.

As the Globe report suggests, regionalization would not solve all of the problems associated with Hull's slipping demographics. But it would certainly help!

Ho Chi Movement

2011-12-07T13:39:00.000-05:00

Place and movement are among the five principle themes in the study of geography. Both are captured beautifully in a 2m20s video clip comprising 10,000 stop-motion photographs of public areas in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). It comports very well with what my friend Vernon Domingo has told me about his experience in the city earlier this year.

Ho Chi Minh's Wild Traffic

by Sommer Mathis

Political Fetishes

2011-12-07T10:40:00.000-05:00

In today's political discourse the difference between actual conservatives and the radical right is that the latter has turned two conservative ideas into radical fetishes.

A generation ago, Grover Norquist pressured conservative politicians to pledge never to raise taxes. His intention was not simply to balance budgets, but to combine balanced budgets with lower taxes in order to shrink government. His objective, he said, was to weaken and shrink government until it could be drowned, metaphorically, in a bathtub. Even before that, readers of Ayn Rand's fantasies became convinced that the private sector is always more efficient than the public sector, and that it is impossible for the latter to ever be productive.

The results have these obsessive thoughts have been profound for the quality of life in America, particularly with respect to education and health care. An additional result is aesthetic, as public spaces are increasingly privatized and turned over to marketers to make up for gaps in public funding, brilliantly illustrated by Morgan Spurlock below.

Sound fiscal policy and a vibrant private sector can provide sure footing for a democracy, but today's bipedal fetishists view the body politic only from the ankles down.

Material World

2011-12-07T09:41:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my favorite librarian for sharing a delightful and thought-provoking video from our friends at the Center for the New American Dream. The High Price of Materialism is not the doom-and-gloom piece that its title suggests. Rather, it is a cheery, geographic, and research-based discussion of ways to reduce the influence of materialism in our own lives and in our communities.

São Paulo Sights

2011-12-06T06:58:00.001-05:00

São Paulo has legendary traffic, which can be avoided in three ways: subway, helicopter, and motorcycle. I was probably in the city six times before I knew it even had a subway, and when I rode it, crowding was minimal, though admittedly I was there very off-peak. Helicopters are pricey.

For quick delivery of packages, then, "motoboys" are the answer. Sitting in traffic with a friend in October 2008, I was amazed by their frequency. On an earlier trip, I had actually seen a motoboy pivot his cycle by grabbing the bumper of a delivery truck. A friend whose sister is an emergency-room physician in the city sees these young drivers all the time. But she is a Paulista who needs to get around quickly, so she herself gets to work on a motorcycle.

The helicopters are expensive, but increasingly common for executives whose companies can justify the expense by comparing the cost of flights to their hourly wages. São Paulo is a city of high rises -- much bigger than Manhatten, for example -- and every one of them is topped with a helipad. The Discovery Atlas program Brazil Revealed is a great survey of the cultural geography of Brazil that includes the story of Clarissa Pinheiro Pereira, a young pilot who is among the very few women pursuing the highest levels of professional pilot licensure.

I was thinking about São Paulo this morning because of something I learned last night from Morgan Spurlock's new film The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, in which the Supersize Me veteran immerses himself in product placement, as he previously did with McDonald's menus. The result is nearly as toxic, as he documents the way that school budget-cutters have turned over student eyeballs for rental to marketers through Channel One, school bus ads, and the like. But the ray of hope comes from a change in São Paulo that I had somehow missed: outdoor advertising in almost all its forms has disappeared. As one shopkeeper told Spurlock, this has meant refocusing on the quality of products and customer service to attract attention!

Prices of Progress

2011-12-05T20:21:00.001-05:00

Today in my Geography of Latin America class, we read a report from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs entitled The Price of Civilization, which the impact of large-scale resource developments in Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia.

I divided the class into groups, asking first that individual students answer "Who?" questions about the projects: who stands to benefit and who stands to lose something? I then asked them to work in small groups to address "Where?" questions about the location and scale of the projects and the affected communities.

Below are some quick links to what they found, posted here primarily as a way to facilitate our discussion later this week.

Brazil
Map from Coastal Care
Square Kilometer - Acre Converter (useful for all sections of the article)
Defending the Rivers of the Amazon (a GoogleEarth 3D movie with narration by Sigourney Weaver)
Another map:

Rendering of the dam itself:

Protests:

Chile
Map of Chile
Anger over proposal, reported by BBC in May 2011
Court suspension of project, reported by BBC in June 2011
BBC maps of proposed dams
Patagonia's Rivers at Risk
Project map from Glacier Change
Damming Patagonia: Simply Concrete? from Pedal for Change

Bolivia
Protesters marching to dam site
Highway route map from Intercontinental Cry
NGOs Wrong on Morales from the Tlaxcala blog
Morales Halts Amazon Road After Protests from AlterNet, with photo of protest clash
Project route and community maps from Flickr user Oscar Salgado

Using these images and maps as a starting point, I then asked the students to answer questions about where the projects themselves and the benefits and dis-benefits are likely to be located. From the answer to the locational questions, I hoped that the students would find their way to interesting discussions of how and why questions, and from the preliminary conversations, it seems to have worked!

As we left class, I gave students a copy of "What a Difference a Century Makes," my contribution to a collection of essays about the Amazon region published in Brazil nearly a decade ago. In it, I invite the reader to compare frontier developments of the twentieth century -- which we sometimes find morally dubious or even horrific -- with those of an earlier time much closer to home.

I will also speak of a specific example of a hydroelectric plant I visited in the western Amazon. It is in the Municipio of Candeias do Jamari (shown below). I should not have been surprised that this town -- whose population I saw explode between 1996 and 2000 -- now has a blog!

View Larger Map

Garrett Hardin's influential and controversial 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons may provide some insight into the trade-offs between individual and universal costs and benefits.

The Invention of Necessity

2011-12-05T19:30:00.001-05:00

I rely on my students to bring me the best lessons, and today a student from South Africa -- where yacht-building is a big part of the economy, by the way -- sent me an advert (as they are called in those places that speak the Queen's English) that seemed at first to be a parody.

I checked the link in the ad, however, and either this is an elaborate ruse or Hargrave Custom Yachts in Ft. Lauderdale really did create it. Hargrave -- which has the chutzpah to use a non-profit *.org address -- has really taken a surreal turn by arguing that such yachts are a necessity. A necessity!

In addition to providing jobs for the boating industry, the yachts provide a means for entrepreneurs to escape from "every two bit politician" [sic -- Hargrave apparently could not afford an English major to hyphenate that compound modifier] who might try to shut down their business or tax their self-made wealth.

The yacht shown, incidentally, is being offered for $19 million, which would buy my entire middle-class neighborhood. A single fill-up of its fuel tanks would cost about as much as my car, and would allow me to drive it around the world -- with a heavy foot -- four times!

This copy was written at a time of record-high wealth concentration and record-low (for the past half-century, at least) taxation. It is a valuable insight into the spirit of entitlement among the super-rich who really feel their wealth arises entirely from their own hard work and brilliance, not realizing the extent to which they depend upon market manipulation, the toil of the poor, and someone else to bear the cost of their pollution.

Geography of Coffee Storage

2011-12-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

The coffee fiends who write Adam@Home are at it again! Readers of the strip know that Adam is a work-at-home guy (I keep forgetting the actual job) who as often as possible finds an excuse to be a work-at-cafe guy. This has been inspirational, both as a lifestyle to envy and as fodder for my work on the geography of coffee shops.

In Friday's strip, cartoonists Bassett and Harrell kicked the coffee connection up a notch. More precisely, they moved the discussion a couple of steps up the commodity chain, with barista Andre discussing important aspects of the geography of coffee care. The timing and location of coffee storage between roasting and brewing is geographic, in that choices about how and when to store the coffee are closely intertwined with choices about where to store it.

Because light, oxygen, and time (after the first 12-24 hours) are the enemies of roasted coffee, the distance between roasting and brewing has a tremendous impact on the quality of the brewed product. This, in turn, has implications for farmers, as they are less likely to be compensated for their care in cultivation if people further down the supply chain obscure their good work through sloppy handling.

Strength in Diffusion

2011-12-01T23:20:00.000-05:00

When we take our EarthView geography program to middle schools, one term we always discuss is archipelago, because students are able to see so many more Pacific island groups than they usually notice on maps or smaller globes. I am always reminded that I first learned the word when I was in high school, and that I first saw it used in a figurative sense, in The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn's grim report on the work camps that were scattered throughout the former Soviet Union.

It was probably my frequent reflection on Solzhenitsyn's brilliant phrase that led me to coin the word occupeligo in October, upon hearing a few interesting stories about the spatial configuration of what is more commonly called by the oxymoron "occupy movement." Since the entire point of the demonstrations is to be a fixture in public places, the idea of movement is not entirely sensical to me, though of course the occupations are spreading to a growing number of locations -- hence occupeligo.

Today Radio Boston's Dan Mauzy held a fascinating discussion with Professor Timothy McCarthy, who teaches about human rights and social movements, and Philip Anderson, an Occupy Boston protester who is quite consciously diffusing the movement from the core urban areas to which it has been largely confined to date. Listen to Can Occupy Boston Continue Without Dewey Square? for a really intriguing discussion of the great complexity of the relationships between the uses of physical space and the exercise of political rights such as assembly, association, and speech.

Anderson's diffusion efforts are presented on We Can Occupy, which rejects the notion that the occupeligo has no clear objectives. The site encourages much broader participation in promoting a cause that is actually not vague at all. We Can Occupy argues for the physical decampment of the occupeligo with these assertions:

You don’t have to sleep in a tent to understand what’s wrong with our economic and political system. You don’t have to march in the streets to believe that we should have a healthy economy for all and a government that serves the people. You don’t have to get pepper-sprayed to change the direction of our country.

AP Photo via Radio Boston

Founding Principles

2011-12-01T08:47:00.001-05:00

Many thanks too Richard Latimer of Falmouth, for his brilliant letter to the Boston Globe this morning. I am taking the liberty of copying the entire piece here, because it is short enough to fall within Fair Use and because it is important enough to have a life online after the usual expiration of online letters sections.

It ran on today's Editorial page under the title

Anti-tax pledge drove Republicans from duty to serve

JOSHUA GREEN attempts to blame the Democrats for Republican obstructionism in assessing the budget impasse (“Picking up pieces after ‘super’ fail,’’ Op-ed, Nov. 24). Try reading both the congressional oath of office and Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge before laying blame here. Governing a democratic society is necessarily about pragmatic compromise, where many diverse interests must be harmonized.

“We the people,’’ contrary to the libertarian ideology of rugged individualism, is a collectivity, as are the common defense and general welfare listed in the preamble to the Constitution. That collectivity is what every member of Congress is sworn to serve when taking the oath of office, to “bear true faith and allegiance’’ to the Constitution, and to do so “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.’’

The mindless Norquist pledge, however, requires both a mental reservation and ideological evasion as it pertains to Congress’s fundamental duty to pay the national debt by raising revenues, as stated in Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution. Ideologically driven Republican intransigence against this clear congressional mandate is what drives the budget impasse.

Richard K. Latimer
Falmouth

The essential message here is that the Constitution should guide members of Congress, all too many of whom seem to be guided primarily by Norquist's political playbook and Ayn Rand's fantasies. Libertarianism as currently practiced is closer to anarchy than it is to conservatism and closer to nihilism than to patriotism. Actual conservative Republicans (and many millions still exist) who wonder why their party is increasingly distrusted and even reviled should consider how far certain "movement" members of their party have departed from the country's founding principles and from the ideals of the party's great leaders, from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Eisenhower.

Amazon Perspectives

2011-12-01T00:15:00.000-05:00

This entry is intended to supplement a short presentation on Amazon deforestation that Diana Ramos -- president of BSU's Students for Sustainability -- and I made as part of the Brazil Magic Event. The event, organized by another student group, La Sociedad Latina, is a chance to celebrate and learn about a country of great and growing importance to Southeastern Massachusetts. The celebration takes place just days before BSU's president accompanies Governor Deval Patrick on a trade mission to Latin America's largest country.

"The Amazon" means several different things. It is the name of the world's greatest river -- perhaps even longer than the Nile and by far the river with the greatest discharge, at 20 percent of the world's total. The Amazon also refers to the watershed of that river -- a massive drainage basin containing a thousand named tributaries, a dozen of them more than a thousand miles long. Finally, the Amazon is the world's largest rain forest, home to the greatest concentration of terrestrial biodiversity, the greatest source of oxygen, and the greatest biological sink for carbon dioxide on the planet -- the "lungs of the world" as it is sometimes called.

The Amazon -- particularly the rain forest -- is the place that made me decide to become a geographer. More specifically, the destruction of the rain forest had that effect, leading me to switch disciplines (from linguistics), learn a new language, and dedicate years to learning about the complex interplay of river and forest, settler and rubber tapper, rancher and logger. Much of what I learned is presented in Rondonia Web, a part of my web site that remains one of the few English-language resources about the Arizona-sized state in the southwestern part of Brazil's portion of the basin. (Most of the other South American countries control some part of the Amazon basin and rain forest, leaving Brazil with half of the total.)

For the presentation, Diana and I are showing one video, with a promise to provide a link to it and to a couple others. Each video presents a part of the current and continuing story of deforestation in the Amazon: logging, violence, and cattle ranching. In my view, no single story of the Amazon is the complete story, just as no fundamental shift in the geography of a place can be explained by a single factor. The three videos collectively provide, however, a good point of departure for understanding the region.

Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest describes a transect across the Amazon basin by a geographer who studies the impact of logging and who suggests that a herringbone pattern of clearing would be less destructive than the random pattern he encounters. He offers no support for this assertion, which in fact tends to be contradicted by the experience of Rondonia, where a herringbone pattern of land give-aways led over a million people to settle in a program that was expected to attract ten thousand. Broken Promises for the Amazon is a Greenpeace video focused on cattle ranching as a driver of deforestation. Environmentalist Slain for Protecting Amazon is a reminder that the ecological destruction is accompanied by violence against those who might object. In this case, a victim of that violence predicted his own demise, just as Chico Mendes had done a generation earlier.

The videos are a reminder that this region is not only vast, dramatic, beautiful, and imperiled; it is also complex, experiencing both a variety of threats and an equally varied array of opportunities. In fact, one of the most rewarding EarthView experiences in recent months was our visit to a school where students had been assigned to about a half-dozen different roles -- logger, settler, indigenous person, rubber-tapper -- each of which has a particular cluster of interests. Brazilian colleagues and I actually published a small book in 2003, documenting not only varied interests in the region but also varied perceptions of what the place represents and what it is experiencing.

Gaita in the Neighborhood

2011-11-30T22:48:00.000-05:00

One reason I teach is so that I can keep learning! Many thanks to my student Rosie for introducing me to yet another genre of Latin American music with which I was not yet familiar. Like Rosie, I am not yet a fan of the La Gaita sound per se, which we both find a bit tinny and repetitive. Music is important in its own right, however, and is also a gateway to other aspects of cultural geography. This particular music video offers an intimate look at neighborhood life on one street corner in Maracaibo, in the far northwest of Venezuela. The on-screen comments in English help to illuminate the role of the music in the community, and help to make some of the inside jokes accessible to outside viewers.

EZILON map

For more information about La Gaita, see:

Carruyo, Light. 2005. "La gaita zuliana: Music and politics of protest in Venezuela." Latin American Perspectives 32.3: 98-111.

Gathering in eThekwini

2011-11-30T01:30:00.000-05:00

See my CLIMATE page

The South African municipality of eThikwini is best known by the name of its major city, Durban. This city on the Indian Ocean is the focus of worldwide attention this week, as representatives of 190 countries meet to discuss the next phase of cooperation -- or intransigence -- on climate change. I had actually hoped to be part of the meeting, because of a connection to the host city and because of the real urgent need to involve farmers -- particularly coffee farmers -- more directly in the meetings. Although I did not make it to Durban, I'm pleased to see that a small Occupy Earth movement is present, as reported by 350.org. Meanwhile, Mr. Pushpanath Krishnamurthy is walking across India to draw attention to climate justice; follow his progress on GoPushGo!

My heart is with those who have so far been marginalized in the discussion, but I need also to wrap my head around what the actual negotiators are doing, since our fate -- so far -- rests in their words and deeds. Two stories on the November 29 All Things Considered program serve to outline the major considerations in some detail. As Kyoto Protocol Ends describes the limitations that were inherent in the Kyoto agreement, which is binding, but only on countries representing 20 percent of carbon emissions. Of the major polluters, only the European Union is actually following the agreement. The subsequent interview with Todd Stern may cause some alarm. This U.S. climate negotiator does not consider success an option, if success is measured as a binding treaty, but he does count non-binding agreements announced in Cancun as successes.

To his credit, Stern does recognize that the United States is increasingly isolated; in the rest of the world people might disagree on how to share the burden of climate remedies, but the need to act is widely accepted.

Ditching EPA

2011-11-27T09:44:00.001-05:00

If those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, then those who ignore history are determined to do so. Dallas Morning News columnist Dale McFeatters recently described the efforts of 16 senators who are trying to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency.

As he points out in Return With Us Now to Those Pre-EPA Days (Nov. 25), some of the senators -- such as Sen. Orin Hatch -- should know better. The EPA was proposed and approved by President Richard Nixon precisely because a patchwork of local environmental rules (often none at all) had failed to protect both human health and the environment, and market forces showed no signs of doing any better.

The powers of the agency may seem draconian when described in the abstract, but in cases such as Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York -- where Hooker Chemical filled a ditch with thousands of tons of toxic waste -- the ability to regulate, penalize, sanction, and purchase or seize property proved essential, just a few years after Nixon's creation of the agency.

Toxic waste in a residential neighborhood.
Photo: AEG

Love Canal is admittedly an extreme case, but hardly an isolated one. The EPA has caused hundreds of similar sites to be cleaned up and returned to productive use, while continuing to monitor hundreds of others. Meanwhile, during the presidencies of Clinton and George H.W. Bush, the agency greatly streamlined its regulations and improved its ability to cooperate with the industries it regulates as it works to prevent similar disasters. Without the onerous authority granted by President Nixon and the Congress in 1970, however, Americans would not enjoy the level of environmental protection we now enjoy.

Evolving Illiteracies

2011-11-25T16:44:00.003-05:00

Recently I was lamenting the state of geographic illiteracy with a colleague. It is an increasingly common condition that was most famously exemplified by Miss Teen South Carolina (above) and Kellie Pickler (below).

The colleague responded that he was beginning to think that discipline-specific illiteracies are proliferating, as people emerge from years of education without rudimentary command of geography, chemistry, math, or even their own religions. This could mean that disciplinary illiteracy is a sign that we overestimate the importance of our own fields and of what constitutes "basic" knowledge. It could also mean that we are generalizing from small samples of unusually ill-informed celebrities. After all, the Miss Teen South Carolina video has had 8 million online views because so many people find it appalling.

Perhaps a simpler explanation is in order, though. Perhaps learning really has declined as decades of "reform" have reduced education to whatever is easiest to measure. Short-term gains in a few narrowly-defined areas of knowledge come with at least three significant kinds of costs. The first is that short-term drills to boost test scores will not be sustainable. No Child Left Behind has elevated "cramming" for a test from something the best students avoid to a blueprint for running entire schools. The second is that educators have to teach in ever-narrow bands of information, some subjects get left out. Third, conveying of that information becomes more important than the art of teaching and the skill of learning, until eventually a school becomes a building full of people simply going through the motions.

But I digress. The impetus for this post is a breath-taking display of scientific literacy at another beauty pageant. As reported on Snopes.com, when the 2011 Miss USA contest included the usual question-and-answer period, it uncovered a wide vein of scientific illiteracy. Relatively affluent young people from each of the United States revealed that they had not learned even very basic things about science and about the meaning of a democracy. Snopes is a web site that evaluates urban legends, and first became involved when its readers asked about the veracity of this video:

Aside from the fact that the actresses in this video appear several times each, with different sashes, it was apparently difficult to discern that this was a parody of the way real pageant contestants responded to a question about the teaching of evolution. Even the very few who exhibit some support for science are surprisingly willing to allow conjecture, opinion, and myth to share equal time in science classrooms:

This is more horrifying than amusing, as contestant after contestant reveals breath-taking scientific illiteracy. Opponents of science education have succeeded in shifting the debate toward some vague notion of fairness, rather than accuracy, as all views of the evidence are seen as somehow equally deserving. It is interesting that this kind of relativism comes from the far right, which in other contexts insists on absolutism in teaching. Most of the contestants also exhibit a lot of confusion between moral and scientific questions. Questions about how the world works are not moral questions, just as questions about how we should treat our neighbors are not scientific questions. I was also reminded of my colleague's concern about multiple illiteracies, since most of the responses fail in several dimensions: science, logic, and grammar.

In the actual interviews, Miss Vermont shows the best understanding of the issues, arguing that our understanding of short-term processes involving bacteria and disease only make sense in the broader context of evolution. In the parody, sadly, Miss Vermont is shown as the least gorgeous contestant, in a flannel-and-glasses stereotype. Of course, one can be both beautiful and capable in science and math, as Danica McKellar teaches young women through Kiss My Math and other books.

It is also too bad that the videos do not show how the non-voluptuous and non-female can be equally illiterate or inumerate. Examples abound, of course: just today a middle-aged man approached our car on his motorcycle, treating the double-yellow line as a lane rather than a divider, as if he and his Harley had zero width.

But I will close this post with one from Harvard University. It is a favorite among geographers, because Harvard closed its geography department in the 1950s and seems not to have recovered. The clip below is part of a longer project about science education known as A Private Universe.

The Original Off-Season Lodgings

2011-11-25T15:32:00.001-05:00

Yesterday we enjoyed a very pleasant and fairly traditional Thanksgiving dinner with friends. Living only a dozen miles or so from Plymouth Rock, we cannot help but give the holiday a lot of thought. It is one of our favorites, despite knowing all too much about the myths and realities of the original feast.

Map: CapeCodTravel.com

One thing that is often forgotten is that although the Pilgrim's first feast was in Plymouth, it was not the first place they tried to settle upon arrival in what would become the Bay State. As comedian Jimmy Tingle explains, they first tried the other side of the Cape Cod Bay, in Provincetown, which was no easier to book then than it is today. His riff beautifully captures many Bay State nuances that help to define our sense of place.

It comes as The New Yorker also sends up the Pilgrims in a mockery of today's immigration discourse and as a Jimmy Kimmel overlays a snippet of that discourse on the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special.

Today, by the way, is not just Franksgiving Day, but also the anniversary of a very significant event in the history of Bay State waters -- the rescue of 29 sailors during a ferocious storm in 1888. The rescue took place in Hull, just a bit north of Plymouth and Cape Cod Bay, but the U.S. Lifesaving Service is most closely associated with the Cape itself, where at least 3,000 shipwrecks have occurred.

Discord and Connections

2011-11-21T11:23:00.001-05:00

When we think of music, we do not always think of the stuff that makes it possible. A Gibson guitar, for example, is as much an idea as an object. (See the wonderful film Herb & Dorothy for an exploration of this approach to art.) Even a Les Paul guitar, however, comes from somewhere, and efforts to ensure the social and ecological sustainability of timber harvesting in those distant "somewheres" has created a cultural and political backlash, according to Bruce Gellerman's report on efforts to undermine the Lacey Act.

Another segment on the same broadcast of Living on Earth reports that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences now recognizes the importance of integrating social science with STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines if progress on environmental problems is to move from academic circles to the real world. Fortunately, the National Science Foundation has been recognizing such a need over the past several years and has expanded NSF geography programs within its Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences -- not a perfect fit, but one that is helping others to understand how geography does connect to many other fields.

Location, Location, Location. Plus Timing

2011-11-21T10:38:00.000-05:00

I spend a lot of time thinking about coffee and coffee shops. Not only do I visit a lot of shops to see what they are doing for coffee and how they fit into their communities; I also assign my students to do the same, and I have even investigated starting a few different kinds of coffee shops, though none has become a reality just yet. If I find something I do not like in a shop -- unless it is truly one of the bad guys -- I follow the addage, "If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all." But Saturday's experience was so instructive -- and geographic -- that I decided to share it.

We were headed to New Bedford to visit Travessia Urban Winery, the last stop on our Coastal Wine Trail we had pursued as an intermittent staycation over the past six months or so. Travessia is the only one of the nine wineries on the trail (from Southwest Rhode Island to the tip of Cape Cod) that does not grow its own grapes, but this three-year-young winery uses grapes from some of the others, and is already producing better wines than others. (More on the geography of this transect of wineries in another post.)

About a decade ago, I helped to organize a region academic conference in New Bedford, and became quite interested in the renewal that was just starting to take place there. Local investment in the Zeiterion Theater (to which we have returned many times for a variety of terrific performances) combined with federal investment in the National Historic Park (naturally, a BSU geography alumnus was involved in that) and a lot of other leaps of faith to create a vibrant downtown, in the midst of a city that is on its way back. In an earlier post, in fact, I shared the nationally-acclaimed work that another BSU graduate has done with the National Park Service and local youth to exhibit and cultivate a sense of pride among youth in the city.

Back to the coffee shop. When we planned our outing to Travessia, we decided to visit the Ocean Explorium to see its Science on a Sphere. While there, we planned to visit one of the area's new coffee shops. The first choice had been Celtic Coffee, because I had heard good things about it from several students, but when we found several others independent shops even closer to our destination, we decided to save Celtic Coffee for another time.

Instead, we decided to try Green Bean, because of the cool sign and the promise of ethical and sustainable product. We had noticed the cafe from the south, corner entrance, but we actually entered from the north side of the shop, through a side door facing a small lobby shared with the winery. This turned out to be a very important distinction. We entered the shop and were pleased -- as have been some other reviewers -- with the light, spacious ambiance. With a varied menu -- even including several single-origin coffees -- plenty of seating and an inviting atmosphere, it seemed the perfect cafe. Surrounded as it is by a number of thriving attractions where plenty of other entrepreneurs are now happy to invest in businesses both similar and complimentary, we were expecting an excellent cafe experience.

We were wrong, and we were reminded of three factors that are essential to success in an independent shop, even if all the other ingredients are in place. First is customer service. We were not greeted at all, and our orders were taken and prepared grudgingly by the younger of two women working at the time. The other employee then turned off the lights, and though the sunlight allowed us barely to notice the change, this was our first hint that we were about to learn about the second factor. It was 2:00 on a busy Saturday afternoon, and this cafe was closing. In fact, it was closing as we walked in the door, but this had not been communicated. We were advised that the time was posted on the door -- and we advised (very politely given the circumstances) that the door through which we had entered IN PLAN VIEW had no such sign.

The closing time was bizarre, given the fact that the entire neighborhood was bustling. While we were inside, many people were walking the neighborhood while others struggled to find parking. Both Travessia and the Ocean Explorium across the street had groups of visitors, many of whom might have welcomed a coffee, but the cafe was closing earlier.

This leads to the third factor, which is a failure to pay attention to one's surroundings. Although the location of this cafe must have been chosen on the basis of surrounding businesses and institutions, its hours of operation -- and orientation toward customers -- was not affected by changes in this dynamic downtown. The staff were only vaguely aware that the business next door -- which shares a common entrance -- had recently expanded, and had not therefore considered the positive implications for their own shop.

Of course, I do not entirely blame the workers themselves, at least not entirely. Their behavior was unlike anything either of us has done in food or retail work, but the real culprit is a manager who has clearly failed to cultivate a spirit of pride in the establishment and focus on customers.

As a geographer, I often repeat that location matters. But it offers no guarantees, either.

Shop hours are scrawled on a cardboard sign on the main
entrance, but not posted at all on the second entrance.

Blogdog

2011-11-19T09:32:00.000-05:00

Our family does a lot of blogging. Our dog, Perry the spirited minpin, helps. So much so that we decided to hop on the branding bandwagon and put her on all the blogs. As I write this, in fact, Perry is in her accustomed position, laying alongside me in the comfy chair, staying out of trouble and letting us think, read, and write.

Some of the blogs to which Perry contributes in ways great and small:
This one, Environmental Geography
"Library" Books
Celebrating the States
Una Nueva Receta Cada Semana
My Year of Reading "Year of Books"
The Bridgewaters Project
Paloma Helps
BSU Geography
BSU EarthView
Teaching Geography
First Parish Bridgewater
Meaning Not Dogma (no pun intended)
Wiley GeoDiscoveries
Bridgewater Center Neighborhood Association
Fair Trade BSU
Fair Trade Bridgewater
Help. Hope. Haiti.

Where are the Humans?

2011-11-19T01:01:00.002-05:00

It is hard to know what counts as a human being any more. As the Occupeligo has helped a much broader part of the population understand, it is not necessary to be a person at all, in order to be human, as many corporations could tell you. If they were people, that is.

As I wrote in my Human Sieve post last year, an increasingly greedy and xenophobic nation wants the labor of immigrants but not the immigrants themselves. Though most Americans do not yet take this as far as Mitt Romney has, there is a growing interest in narrowing the definitions of "person" or "citizen" to include only one's self and one's closest associates.

I was a fan of the Saturn car company from its inception to its untimely demise, only because it seemed genuinely to be working toward human-to-human relationships among people with many different roles, from designing and assembling the cars to selling and buying them. A formative experience for me, in fact, was watching a Saturn training video in which a man explained that he was so glad to have come to Saturn from a previous employer (another General Motors division) where he was "hired from the neck down." At Saturn, he brought not only his arms, legs, and back to work, but his mind and soul as well. Unfortunately, the room for such a brand in the GM stable appears to have been limited.

Just as it can be disheartening to be considered a one-dimensional worker, so, too, is it problematic to be thought of solely as a consumer. At some point after World War II, consumerism grew from being simply a lot of consumption into being a genuine -ism, which is to say a world view that is wrapped around consumption.

At some point the meaning of "shopping for the holidays" shifted -- for an alarming number of people -- from "shopping as part of the preparation for enjoying the holidays" to "shopping as a holiday." When the shift from "person" to "consumer" has gone this far, it has in fact gone too far.

As with many things in the U.S. these days, the trend seems to be bifurcating. Despite an economy that is foundering and environmental systems that are becoming unraveled, many people find themselves in a race to consume ever-more stuff, though they might not even have a place to put it all. Others, however, reject the idea that they should participate in their own objectification, and refuse -- as my family has done for two decades -- to purchase anything at all on Thanksgiving or the day after. These are days for feast and famine, and maybe a film and some music, but in our house, the day after Thanksgiving is BUY NOTHING DAY.

All the world is a stage, they say, but we might not even be players. The consumers who choose to play in the arms race of ever-earlier holiday openings and the workers who are forced to play along are more puppet than actor. When the invisible hand of the market is not pleasuring itself under the sheets of the global economy (as Carl Safina has so artfully written), it is busily working the strings of a marionette show whose point is increasingly obscure and whose ticket price is ever-growing.

Accountability and Community Colleges

2011-11-19T00:18:00.001-05:00

As often happens, two stories appeared in the press on Friday that are essentially unrelated, but with contrasting elements that reveal something about our times. In this case, it is about the disparate expectations of accountability among public employees.

Mitt Romney -- though in many ways the least public-minded person in the country -- as been a public-sector worker and is seeking an even higher position as a government worker. Yet the "accountability" he and his ilk insist upon for others is something with which he cannot be bothered. He airily dismisses any questioning of his decision to erase most evidence of electronic communications from his term as Massachusetts Governor, and literally to buy the rest.

Meanwhile, "reformers" continue to push so many "accountability" measures on educators that it becomes increasingly difficult for them to educate. Any negative results, however, are assumed to be the fault of the educators, since the reformers themselves are never asked to account for themselves. Today's second story is about the most recent calls to squeeze even more out of the state's community colleges. Boston Mayor Menino suggests that educators -- whose work he cannot begin to understand -- be "taken to task if they don't perform."

Everyone consulted for the story -- which did not include the educators or even the administrators involved, incidentally -- conceded that the community colleges are underfunded and already do quite a lot with quite a little. Massachusetts, after all, is behind nearly all other states in the funding of public higher education -- some years ranking 50th, some years as high as 48th -- and community colleges have received the worst fiscal beatings. Some of the "reforms" suggested are simply ways to make the community colleges more effective at lobbying the legislature. For a legislative leader to insist on such a necessity is to shift the blame from the perpetrator and toward the victim.

Also mentioned in the article is the fact that community colleges have to accept any high school graduates who come their way. These graduates are a nearly pure sample of MCAS victims. That is to say that college readiness of arriving students continues to diminish as teaching-to-the-test becomes pervasive. It being too difficult to hold the promoters of MCAS accountable for their mistakes (and too costly for those receiving those testing fees), accountability is simply moved downstream, to the professors. Professors, incidentally, who teach ridiculous course loads, again because the governor and legislators are not held accountable for their unconscionable neglect of public higher education.

The same meager funding that lengthens the teaching day beyond what is reasonable also shortens the learning day, as students who pay ever-higher fees must work long hours flipping burgers or waiting tables, rather than focusing on their studies. Educators know that time on task is a crucial variable in achievement, but when time on task is reduced because the public has not supported its young learners, it is inevitably the learners and their teachers who are blamed.

Aside from misplacing accountability, those who would reform community colleges make an even more fundamental mistake by failing to understand the dual mission of community colleges. For certain students in certain circumstances, a community college is a place to get prepared for a particular trade or career. For other students in different circumstances, however, it is a place to get prepared for further learning at a four-year institution. For many students, community colleges serve both functions, one for a near future and one for a farther future.

The Boston Foundation should be aware enough of the dynamism of the world economy to realize that an education that is focused too narrowly on certain vocations is not an education for the future. The governor and legislature could more credibly improve community colleges by unshackling K-12 teachers from the MCAS and fairly funding the community colleges so that the teachers could be freer to teach and the learners freer to learn.

An op-ed published in the Globe on Sunday addresses the shortcomings of the "reform" movement from a different angle. University of California Vice Provost Russell Rumberger describes How College Prep is Killing High School, arguing that the emphasis on academic subjects poorly serves the one-third of future workers who will need other skills that were once taught in high school. He cites Thomas Jefferson, who stated in 1818 that "stated that the purpose of public education included giving citizens information for transacting business, the ability to express ideas in writing, and an understanding of duties to neighbors and country."

Rumberger's complaint is not limited to the amount of emphasis on college preparation; he also complains that the simplistic manner in which this has been done is leading to systemic failures for which the reformers are not being held accountable. High-stakes testing is associated with record low rates of graduation and a measurable decline in so-called soft skills -- a crisis, really, in the availability of even minimally prepared workers.

Moreover, all of this misplaced effort is not even achieving its stated objective: Rumberger confirms what those of us who teach at the college level have been seeing: standardized tests are making students less capable of college-level writing and critical, integrative thinking.

Geography Awareness

2011-11-17T08:24:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Jack Ohman, The Oregonian

It is fitting though sad that pizza magnate Herman Cain's presidential ambitions should be crashing on the shoals of his geographic ignorance during Geography Awareness Week. All that he could say for sure about Libya was that Obama's policy there was wrong, because he is Obama. The pause as he tried to remember anything -- anything at all -- about a country that has been in the news constantly for the past few months was excruciating. War is how Americans learn geography, if at all, but even war will not always do the trick, apparently.

Map of insurgent state in Libya as of February 2011,
from the National Post in Canada.

The lapse was embarrassing, even for the journalist asking the question, though it was a boon to comedian Jon Stewart. Political blogger Ana Marie Cox finds his demeanor about the incident even more troubling that the geographic ignorance itself.

For me, though, the greatest significance of the incident is that the ignorance we may mock in a politician is all too common in our own schools and workplaces. When I visit Nicaragua -- the second-poorest country in this hemisphere -- I notice that almost any kind of office or place of business has a couple of maps on the wall, as do most homes. In a contest over geographic knowledge, a high school graduate in almost any country of the world can run circles around most U.S. college graduates. Not just place-name geography, either, but where things are, why they are there, and how it matters. These things are much better taught in countries where progressive education did not mean getting rid of the geography teachers, as it has in too many parts of the United States.

In Massachusetts today, it is actually illegal to become a certified geography teacher at the secondary level. Fortunately, my colleagues and I have found allies in the State House who are interesting in changing this. If Senate Bill 182 -- which would simply restore geography to its previous position in the curriculum and teacher preparation -- becomes law, perhaps we could open a seventh-grade classroom for presidential hopefuls. Incidentally, the bill has both Democratic and Republican sponsorship; such a classroom would be open to candidates from any and all parties!

Injustice Rising

2011-11-16T17:36:00.014-05:00

Earlier this year, I posted two items about Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point, which may be the best environmental book since A Sand County Almanac, a good environmental book being one that celebrates and explains the world as it is and warns gently but deeply about the consequences of our disregard for it. The first post was simply to alert my readers to the book and Safina's beautiful writing; the second was to share Safina's cogent comparison between our exploitation of whales a century ago and our exploitation of oil today.

Pam and I finished reading the book last night, and it is full of post-it notes on passages that one or the other of us found particularly powerful. (See Pam's marvelous review on her "Library" Books blog.) As I hinted in my first post almost a year ago, this might be the new text in my "flagship" Environmental Geography course, though the text I have used for more than a decade was written by close friends and mentors. Lazy Point is just that good as an introduction to what is going on with planet Earth these days.

A recurring theme in the book is rising water, an inexorable process that we will see increasingly in the news, starting recently and for the rest of our lives. Even as I give a talk this evening about the drought gripping East Africa, the places that do not have too little water seem to have far too much.

As the UAE's Khaleej Times reported this week, Climate-vulnerable countries are meeting in Bangladesh out of a shared concern about rising sea level. Melting ice and thermal expansion are combining to put countries with low-lying topography at the front lines of climate change that is well underway. Even before such countries are thoroughly inundated, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to occasional high water from storms, tsunamis, or even routine tidal fluctuations. Because those who have contributed the least to atmospheric carbon-loading are among those who are suffering the most, former UN Human Rights High Commissioner (and former Irish President) Mary Robinson has made Climate Justice the new focus of her work. She met leaders of vulnerable nations in February, also in Bangladesh.

The South Asian nation (formerly East Pakistan) is the largest critically vulnerable country, already losing thousands of people annually in floods that result from a combination of deforestation at a regional scale and climate change on a global scale. Many of the other extremely vulnerable nations are small, low-lying islands, many of which are members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), about which I wrote for Wiley GeoDiscoveries last winter. One such state is Maldives, whose cabinet famously held a meeting underwater in 2009 to draw global attention to its plight.

Because small islands are so much more visible on our giant EarthView globe than on most maps or globes, this middle-school outreach program has led me to take a much greater interest in the island nations of the world, and a number of my EarthView blog posts describe various aspects of their geography.

Reason Shrugged

2011-11-14T08:00:00.002-05:00

This week NPR's Morning Edition is exploring some of the influential thinkers who have influenced the current generation of politicians. It is fitting that the discussion begins with Ayn Rand, whose Foundtainhead and Atlas Shrugged loom large in the formative thinking of the libertarian wing of the Republican party.

Andrea Seabrook begins her story on Ayn Rand with excerpts of an interview between Rand and Mike Wallace, in which her ideas are contrasted with the conservative thinking of the day. Rand advocates a politics far more conservative than Eisenhower, who was president at the time.

Having emerged from the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War, she equated any government role in the economy with the totalitarian approach taken by Stalin. She retained the Soviet aversion to religion, arguing for a reliance on pure reason, rather than faith or even altruism.

Replacing faith in God with faith in the "invisible hand" of markets, Rand argued that only entrepreneurs are productive, and that any level of taxation and regulation are inherently destructive, because they victimize those on whom the rest of society relies for economic growth.

As Seabrook explains, Rand was considered a fringe thinker for many years, but now such assertions are an article of faith. That's right: faith in the private sector has become a new fundamentalism. A million-dollar birthday party for an executive is a productive use of shareholder money, but a million-dollar library is not a productive use of taxpayer money. Hedge-fund managers need protection from teachers and firefighters, the latter being parasites on the former. By definition, no parasitic worms inhabit Rand's private sector, and all public work is wasted effort.

Of course, even those who most adoringly quote Rand are selective in their application of her reason. Government spending in the military sector (especially for hardware, not so much for soldiers and veterans) is a glaring exception, as is government intervention in matters of sexuality, a contradiction to which Rand the atheist would surely object.

Incidentally, after posting this I remembered the last time I mentioned Ayn Rand on this blog was in the summer of 2010, when one of her devotees inadvertently revealed his dependence on government programs. See my "Libertarians in Space" post for an explanation of the many ways in which the libertarian message below was subsided by taxpayers.

Coffee Sense-ations

2011-11-12T16:54:00.000-05:00

In a new Atlantic article Coming to Your Senses, Illy coffee expert Giorgio Milos explains the multiple sensations of coffee enjoyment. It can be a full-body experience befitting what is sometimes seen as a sensual beverage. For this reason, Milos is cited -- along with Sal at Lavazza -- at the top of my newly revised and expanded Coffee Romance page.

Romney School of Business

2011-11-11T13:28:00.000-05:00

Today's installment of Tony Carillo's Bliss comic put me immediately in mind of presidential candidate Mitt Romney. People who have been paying close attention to the Occupy movement know that the creation of wealth and the creation of jobs are not the same thing. And when wealth is merely concentrated rather than created, the difference is even greater.

A common sleight of hand in politics, however, is to equate the two. Few politicians have done so as effectively in recent years as Mitt Romney, about whom I have written much on this blog in the past. Most rich people earn their money the old-fashioned way: they got poor people to earn it for them. Romney has taken this a step further. By mastering the liquidation of productive companies, he earns his money from the creation of poor people!

Farmers Markets: What's Cooking

2011-11-10T06:36:00.000-05:00

I do a lot of writing and teaching about problems in the global food system. As recently as yesterday, I posted a link about the McRib sandwich, a near-perfect embodiment of the brutal efficiencies of a food system that disdains both its producers and its customers.

But later last night, I wrote about a growing movement to do things right. Farmers markets bring people together around fresh, local food. Supply chains are shortened, processing is minimized, and the environment benefits in any number of ways. The food actually looks, smells, feels, sounds, and tastes like food, so I posted my comments about the film To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Pig on my family's cooking blog: Una Nueva Receta Cada Semana.

Offal and Arbitrage

2011-11-09T17:00:00.004-05:00

The sandwich in this box is not merely a sandwich. It does not merely represent the absurd and growing distance between farm and fork, or even the disdain of the food-industrial complex for its porcine and human participants. No, this sandwich is much more: it is a hedge fund on a bun.

As Willy Staley writes in The Awl, the McRib is a very peculiar market manipulation, made possible only by the absurd scale of McDonald's, a corporation so big that its menu decisions -- something as simple as adding celery to a recipe -- "quickly become global agricultural concerns."

As nasty as the McRib may be, it has its fans, and they are frustrated by the shifting regional geography of its availability. By comparing the timing of McRib releases to fluctuations in pork commodity prices, Staley makes the case that McDonald's is able to use its mammoth purchasing power to shift a significant portion of the world supply from one market to another when the difference between the two is greatest.

This just in: more geography of McDonald's. The Huffington Post reports that "artist and scientist" Stephen Von Worley has found the point in the contiguous United States that is most remote from any McDonalds, and in fact has mapped the entire country according to its distance from McDonald's. I put "artist and scientist" in quotes because for me this really captures what a geographer can be!

A Very Boss Cake

2011-11-08T06:53:00.001-05:00

Buddy Valastro is known as television's Cake Boss for his elaborate cake designs and his ability to transport unusual cakes from his shop in Hoboken to wherever they might be wanted.

Episode 15 of Season 4 is entitled Houses, Help and Hitting the Road. It is the story of Valastro's biggest challenge to date: feeding 4,000 guests at the 40th anniversary party of Century 21. Not only is the realty network focused on location, but its membership is truly global, inspiring Valastro to concoct a truly global creation reminiscent of our own EarthView. (Big as this Rice-Krispie-filled decoration is, its volume is only 1/500th that of our inflatable globe, though undoubtedly much tastier.)

Much of the episode is dedicated to the logistical challenges of making, transporting, and serving such a colossus. The geography of vernacular landscapes throughout the world is reflected in the parts of the cake that represent various kinds of houses.

For geographers, though, the most dramatic moments arise when Valastro realizes that a rather significant land mass is missing from the design. His indignation is endearing ("Where's Asia? You gotta fix Asia!"), as is the reference one of his staff members makes to Pangaea as they discuss remedies. In reality, none of the former continental configurations quite match the erroneous cake decoration, but the final result is magnificent.

View the episode in two parts on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2.

Girls Grow

2011-11-08T00:46:00.001-05:00

National Geographic Special Series: 7 billion

It seems only a few years ago that I was in a classroom, telling students that the world's population had just reached 6 billion. In fact, it was 1999, and that classroom is now gone. Still, the time between that milestone and last week's estimated arrival at 7 billion was short. With any luck will have been the shortest such interval, a quick decade of growth in what E.O. Wilson has called the Bottleneck century. Between 1950 and 2050, the world population will have roughly tripled, and though the earlier predictions of Paul Ehrlich and others were of a J-shaped curve that would rocket us toward oblivion, the sigmoidal (S-shaped) curve on which we are embarked is no global picnic. Somewhere, we need to find the resources to feed, clothe, and -- increasingly -- entertain three people for every one person who was on the planet at the end of the second Great War.

Given the attention generated by this milestone, it is timely that scholars at the University of Chicago released Girls Grow, a report on the importance of supporting women and girls in rural communities. Equity in the education, health, and nourishment of girls in underdeveloped rural areas worldwide is a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Cultural relativism goes too far when it allows generations of women to be marginalized, sometimes brutally. Not only are the results inhumane, but failing to invest in the human capital of girls contributes to the perpetuation of poverty. The importance of investing in the capacity of girls is captured in the subtitle of the report: A Vital Force in Rural Economies.

Some economists continue to suggest that population growth should not concern us at all, partly because of their propensity to assume resources not in evidence and the failure of many in that field to realize the fundamental difference between open-ended, linear processes that characterize many human endeavors and the closed-loop process that define the natural systems of which our economy is only a subsidiary part.

Another commonly-cited cause for optimism, however, is that greater numbers of people mean greater potential for innovators. It is true that Kenya environmentalist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai was born in a high-growth country. In creating future leaders, however, the care taken in the education and encouragement of girls is far more important than overall population numbers.

Nuclear Coffee

2011-11-04T06:57:00.000-04:00

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE or
GO TO GOCOMICS

I recently wrote about weapons-grade ratatouille on our recipe blog; my hero Adam @ Home has gone one better: Nuclear Coffee!

People often ask me, by the way, about what coffees are "stronger" and I rarely have a good answer. High-quality arabica coffees are actually lower in caffeine than the robusta coffee used in cheaper blends, such as Maxwell House. And the darker the coffee has been roasted, the lower the caffeine will be.

Of course, high "dosing" -- spoons per cup prior to brewing -- can make a difference, as can adding multiple shots of espresso in a single beverage. Each serving of espresso has less caffeine than a standard cup of coffee, but some coffee drinks might have four to six servings!

Read more in my June 24 Coffee Comics post.

Los Muertos: PRESENTES!

2011-11-01T23:49:00.005-04:00

Almost every January since 2006, the city of Matagalpa in northern Nicaragua has been the gateway to the coffeelands of the states of Matagalpa and Jinotega that I visit with students as part of my Geography of Coffee study tours. Starting with that first visit, we have always taken the time to see the grave of Benjamin Linder, an engineer who was among the many volunteers who came to Nicaragua to support the revolutionary project of the 1980s and found themselves at odds with a U.S. president determined to crush that revolution, through the illegal support of the Contra War.

We learned from our guide that Linder had in fact been killed by insurgents who were funded by his own government, and that he was so well loved by the Nicaraguan people that he was buried with honor in the city's main cemetery, even though an alternative cemetery for foreigners who died in the region. I recall being impressed that Linder's family allowed him -- a young man -- to be buried so far from home.

My student Nikki took the photo below during my 2011 study tour; it is a view of Matagalpa from the Ben Linder grave site. When she forwarded it to me today, she commented that she had already forgotten how beautiful the cemeteries are. That may have been part of the Linder family's decision-making: not the physical appearance itself, but the attitudes towards the dead that lead to such special care being taken.

Credit: Nikki Sauber 2011
All photos: Click to enlarge

We were thinking of all this in preparation for an event on our campus during the day of Halloween, in which we explored the traditions associated with death in Latin America, particularly the Day of the Dead (El Día de los Muertos, sometimes pluralized) as practiced in Mexico. The Day (or Days, as both November 1 and 2 may be celebrated) is well known as the time when the veil between the living and the dead is considered thinnest, providing the best opportunities for the relationship between the two to be celebrated.

It would be a mistake, though, to view these two days in isolation, as some kind of departure from the norm, as Carnival so often is. The Day of the Dead, in fact, is just the most exuberant manifestation of a special regard for the dead and departed that is felt throughout the year. And although this finds its greatest expression in Mexico, throughout much of Latin America, death is treated quite differently than it is in the United States or Europe.

When asked to share something for the day, then, I turned to my experiences at Ben Linder's grave in Matagalpa. As I mention above, I have visited for five of the past six years, but over time the visits took on more meaning for me, as I became more familiar with Linder, his work and sacrifice, and the regard in which he is held in Nicaragua. His death had occurred just a couple of weeks before my own marriage, and in retrospect I have to admit that great many changes we were undertaking at that time dimmed my recollection of a story that I surely followed to some extent at the time.

My interest began to deepen as I prepared for the 2009 study tour, when I learned that a BSC alumnus (from before my time, so I can claim no credit for his many achievements) had worked on a partnership to create a very special café in León. As described by Dean Cycon in Javatrekker, veterans of the war on both sides -- were brought together to form a number of projects by which they help themselves, each other, and other people who have suffered limb loss or other serious injury. When given a chance to name the cafe that they would operate in order to support the other projects, veterans of both sides chose to honor Ben Linder.

In January 2011, we worked with Matagalpa Tours to include a portion of the tour in the FAR north of Nicaragua so that we could visit the small hydroelectric plant that Linder was working on at the time of his assassination. More than two decades after his death, this renewable energy project sits in the center of the now-bustling town of Bocay.

Linder worked in the tiny villages of El Cuá and Bocay, which had been long neglected by the US-allied Samoza regime. The Contras (which means Those Who Are Against) were determined to undermine (and often literally to mine) any positive developments that could be associated with progress for the new Sandinista government.
The covert war funded by Ronald Reagan killed many Nicaraguans and just one American, Ben Linder. To this day, his sacrifice is honored on the anniversary of his death, though the banner below remained prominent in Bocay many months after the most recent commemoration. The word "PRESENTE" is capitalized deliberately, for the same reason it is often set off with exclamation marks: ¡Presente! When activists meet to protest US-funded political assassinations -- which are ongoing in many parts of Latin America -- they often call the roll of victims, to which the crowd answers ¡Presente! meaning that these martyrs are in some very important sense still with us.

Our study tours to Nicaragua coincide neither with the anniversary of Linder's death (April 28, 1987) nor with El Dia de Los Muertos, but beginning in 2011, our visits to his grave include some of the rituals associated with the care of grave sites. In addition to a brief retelling the story of his life and death (see video part one and part two and is told much more richly in the 2008 documentary film American/Sandinista), this time we decided to honor the memory of Ben Linder by cleaning up the site, leaving some flowers, and drinking a toast in his honor.

On the way to the cemetery, we stopped with Freddy, our most excellent guide, to purchase flowers. These flowers are grown locally, part of a substantial flower-growing industry in the region. This area is historically quite isolated, but modern transportation and communication systems mean that flowers picked this afternoon in Matagalpa can be at a flower wholesaler in Boston at dawn tomorrow.

Credit: Nikki Sauber 2011

Linder's grave indicated that he was an internationalist whose light will always burn brightly. Between the dates of his birth and death is shown a unicycle: Linder was celebrated as much for his play with children as a self-taught clown as for his work on the civil engineering projects for which he was hired. Above the motorcycle is a dove in a circle of stars.

At Bridgewater State University, I worked with faculty, students, staff, administrators, and off-campus collaborators of many kinds to develop a proposal for a café that would have been named after the original Ben Linder Café in Nicaragua, honoring both the healing work of that project and the life of the man for whom it was named. Building on the concept of the original BLC, the intent would have been to create the best possible campus coffee shop, a model café with a commitment to continuous improvement in social and environmental sustainability.

The proposal has not been approved, but as the community of Bocay has done, so also will Bridgewater recognize the anniversary of Ben Linder's death -- specifically the 25th anniversary coming up on April 28, 2012. Nicaragua Nexus will be an opportunity for academic, religious, and other groups in and near Massachusetts to gather in Bridgewater, simply to compare notes about the many different kinds of partnerships and projects undertaken in Nicaragua by people from this region.

Ben Linder. ¡Presente!

Helping and The Help

2011-10-29T21:37:00.001-04:00

Insights from Taylor and Stockett

This summer's film The Help is based on Kathryn Stockett's novel of the same name. The novel, in turn, centers around the writing of another book, also of the same name. So it is a work of fiction about a fictional work of memoir, but it is permeated with uncomfortable truths.

My favorite librarian recently devoured the book over teh summer, and has written about the book's subplots regarding libraries. She was enthusiastic about seeing the film, which we very much enjoyed, even though libraries were among several important threads of the story that were dropped in the film adaptation.

Because it marches boldly into such delicate terrain, the book and especially the film have generated quite a bit of controversy, mainly around two questions: First, why did actresses such as Viola Davis accept roles as maids, which represent the marginalization of African Americans in and by Hollywood? Second, why is this story of African Americans told by a white author through the eyes of a white protagonist, herself a white author?

When Viola Davis addressed the first question in an NPR interview, she emphasized the heroism of her character, Aibileen Clark. This is a work of fiction whose heroes echo the real heroes of the period, and they included maids. (The dismissal of the role is itself a symptom of a pervasive bias against working people that I have addressed in other posts.) I also notice that throughout her stage and screen career, Viola Davis has played quite a variety of roles, many in law enforcement, so she does not have anything to prove about "accepting" stereotypical roles.

Because Stockett's book is about a white author helping to tell the story of her black neighbors, questions about the legitimacy of this role are an important part of the book, though they are not addressed so directly in the film. The question is inherent in the film, and for me the answer is in the character of Skeeter, the young idealistic writer who wins the trust of two of the maids she knows, who in turn bring a larger group of their peers into the writing project. Skeeter is brave, eventually putting her privilege on the line and even taking on some personal risk.

It is essential that Skeeter knows she is not as brave as the women who tell their stories through her. She knows that they put themselves at even greater risk by cooperating with her, and it is they who must decide for themselves whether those risks are worth taking. This aspect of the story vividly reflects the reality of this and so many other struggles for civil rights: allies in the fight are never as important as the principals, nor do they usually risk as much. But in Mississippi and elsewhere, some white allies did take risks, some fatally so. The efforts of such allies are never alone sufficient, but they do have meaning.

Whether or not the answers to these questions are adequate, the fact remains that The Help tells an important and nuanced story, and tells it well. It may be because my own upbringing was in many ways just on the periphery of this story that I find it especially compelling. I grew up in a social class a bit lower than that of the Junior League characters in the film, in a state a bit further north, and in a period just a few years later. (I grew up, in fact, very close to the story told by another important movie: Mr. & Mrs. Loving.) So while nothing feels exactly like home in this film, much of it strikes very close to home!

White-Collar Holler

2011-10-29T20:20:00.001-04:00

In the October 24 issue of The New Yorker, cartoonist Emily Flake perfectly captures the angst that has driven many Americans to the streets. The scene she creates resembles those examined so brilliantly in T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtain, but populated by a different cast of desperate workers.

I was reminded of Nigel Russell's "White Collar Holler," the IT chain-gang song made famous by Stan Rogers. As Wall Street speculators and their political allies continue to eviscerate the work force, few have the luxury of complaining about dull work any more.

I see one ray of hope in the reality that Flake's cartoon so eloquently captures. A growing number of working people are beginning to understand that they are ill-served by policies designed by and for the super-rich.

Occupeligo

2011-10-25T09:42:00.004-04:00

A week ago Saturday evening, when I mentioned taking my daughter to "my building," a new acquaintance asked whether I am an architect. No, just a geography professor. But architects and geographers have a lot in common, as space -- as it is used, modified, and even thought about -- is central to both disciplines. I was pleased, therefore, the very next day to hear an interesting radio piece that brings the two subjects together.

On the Studio 360 program that aired the following Sunday, architect Micheal Kimmelman describes how Private Space [has] Gone Public in the Occupy Wall Street movement. The neologism I use for the title of this post signifies the world-wide distribution of the spaces created by the movement.

The map above signifies the distribution of protests in the October 15 movement, with close to 1,000 gatherings in 82 countries. The dots are disproportionate, of course, to the physical scale of each event, but Kimmelman's analysis of the details suggest that this might be a reasonable representation of the conceptual scope of the movements. Listen to Kimmelman for an explanation of how why this might be.

The main purpose of the DC Douglas video above is to clarify the reasons for the Occupy movement. The powerful montage in the final half minute powerfully illustrate Kimmelman's description.

Demagoguery Meets Demography

2011-10-24T08:58:00.000-04:00

Source: Prof. Peter Catapano, Immigration History

My recent "jockeying" post focused on the hypocrisy of most of the Republican presidential candidates, as they ramp up anti-immigrant rhetoric while engaging in practices and promoting policies that increase immigration. It was only a couple of days later that journalist Ann McFeatters published "White House Watch: GOP Views on Immigration," which details the demographic constraints on demagoguery.

First, let's be clear: scapegoating immigrants is a bipartisan sport, and long has been. Democrats and Republicans play it differently, but both play. President Obama has become Deporter-in-Chief, as McFeatters points out, having sent 400,000 people packing for paper lapses.

In recent decades, legislative redistricting has often focused on "majority minority" districts, but as early as 2042, the entire country will be in this category. That is, non-Hispanic whites will be less numerous than people formerly dismissed as "minorities" in this country. What is a politician to do in the face of such profound demographic change? McFeatters explores the options and finds the current campaigns very much lacking.

She clearly shows that over time, even the most xenophobic politicians will have to recognize the need -- as Rick Perry currently does on his good days -- for everyone who lives in the our society to be an educated and contributing member of it. Long before US-born whites become a minority in the population as a whole, they (we, in my case) will be a minority in the working-aged population. In her words:

Instead of embracing inevitable demographic change as a golden opportunity, we are trying to kick people out or make their lives miserable. The truth is that we are rare among developed nations in getting the gift of young workers (and consumers), who, if properly educated and motivated, will save us.

Of course, not all undocumented workers are Hispanic, but McFeatter is not mistaken in noting the rhetorical connections between race and migration. It is well known in the Northeast that thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of undocumented workers from Ireland, Australia, or Eastern Europe go unnoticed while Hispanic workers and even their children are increasingly likely to be harassed, regardless of status.

Source: Prof. Peter Catapano, Immigration History

Jockeying for Advantage on Immigration

2011-10-20T23:01:00.000-04:00

The subtitle of Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman's "Out of Line" series is "A notebook of graphic disobedience," a distinction that is well-earned in this doubly transgressive send-up of the discourses surrounding immigration in the current presidential debate.

With Pavlovian precision, much of the political center has moved to the fringes on immigration. During boom years, nobody cares, but scapegoating the poor inches up quite predictably with each downward stumble of the national economy. Political survival in down times requires candidates to pretend that immigrants -- documented and otherwise -- did not contribute to prosperity in previous times.

For a candidate who is also a venture capitalist at the very top of the economy, this is especially challenging. His rhetoric needs to be insistent and fiery enough to overshadow what he has gained from migrants, which has come in several forms. In addition to the generalized benefits we all gain from migrants -- legal and otherwise -- Romney derives several specific benefits as a major player in Dunkin' Donuts coffee. Commodity coffee is often exported at prices very close to -- or even below -- the cost of production. In conventional trading systems, individual farmers are likely to receive far less than the export price, driving migration from coffeelands, first into nearby cities and later into other countries. A majority of Nicaraguan families, for example, now have at least one family member working abroad, and many of these are people who would work in coffee if they could earn enough to survive.

During the most recent candidate's debate, Gov. Rick Perry called out Romney for his previous employment of undocumented workers through a landscaping contractor. His denial was interesting in several ways. First, he said that he personally had not directly hired anybody. This is both specifically true in the case of hiring a landscaping contractor and generally true among the truly powerful, whose hiring practices are often buffered by layers of contracts and subcontracts. This means that not only can Romney deny responsibility for the legal status of his gardener, but he can also deny it for hourly workers at Dunkin' Donuts, who are hired by franchise owners who under enormous pressure from their "investors" at Bain Capital.

Romney's reply to Rick Perry centered on the claim that he "fired" the landscaping company as soon as he found out about its hiring of undocumented workers. In describing the termination of the contract, he admitted mentioning his own status as a political candidate to the contractor. He failed to mention, however, that he did not terminate the relationship the first time he learned of the hiring, but only after the second Boston Globe story on the subject, a full year after the first!

I conclude this post with a comment on the Wasserman cartoon itself, and my use of the word "transgressive," which I usually use to refer to artistic license that is taken at the expense of societal norms that I think deserve to be challenged. In this case, however, the art transgressed against two of my own norms. First, as someone who grew up on the spatial and temporal edges of the Old South, I find so-called "lawn jockeys" a disturbing symbol of white privilege. Second, the word "illegal" is problematic even when used as an adjective, and doubly so when used as a noun to refer to a person. It is not generally applied to those who commit other crimes, so that a murder is illegal, but the murderer is not, so why does it apply to those who cross borders, overstay visas, or violate the terms of visas?

Dignity Desert

2011-10-17T07:04:00.001-04:00

One of the blessings of not having television in our house is that I am blissfully unaware of most developments in fast food and the marketing thereof. Some of the more interesting aspects do bubble up through NPR, though, is did the existence of the KFC Famous Bowl. It was from comedian Patton Oswalt's appearance on the Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me that I learned of this and several other culinary horrors.

Be advised that Oswalt's language is rather vulgar, but the obscenity of his comedic rant is appropriate to the topic, just as the film Fast Food Nation is rated "R" and the film Super Size Me should be. (Note about how we teach our children: Sporlock's documentary is available in a sanitized, PG version that is called "educationally enhanced," a designation that would make Orwell proud.)

Anyway, Oswalt takes two and a half minutes to describe the experience of ordering the inexplicably named Famous Bowl from KFC and its meaning for the target customer. (That is the real name of the company now, as it got rid of the word "Fried" in order to healthify its image.) It is hilarious, and seems like hyperbole. In fact, however, he actually leaves out one ingredient in this, the most artery-clogging item on the KFC menu, with more salt and fat than one can imagine fitting into a small bowl.

If ever an ad were a parody of itself, it is the original Famous Bowl ad, which is just a shorter, sexier version of the original -- with a wink and some extra cheese. The customer in the ad does not look as pathetic as Oswalt (or I) might, but the wiles of the server leave nothing to chance.

What does all this have to do with the geography of food? Quite a lot, actually, as it is an extreme manifestation of the broader problem of access to healthy food. We may be responsible for our food choices, and as a hard-working, low-income friend of mine has pointed out, with a some effort and awareness most people can find their way to healthy food habits. But the combination of geography and marketing make it more of a challenge than it should be. It is often necessary to traverse both perceptual gulfs and food deserts to get back to anything like real food.

Mother Earth

2011-10-03T19:35:00.001-04:00

Fuller Craft Museum is one of the jewels of our neighboring city of Brockton. When our daughter was younger, we were members and visited frequently. It surely was part of what made her the great artist she is today, though it failed to have a similar effect on me! It has, however, deepened my appreciation for art and craft, while making me less certain of the difference -- if any -- between the two!

The museum is very active, with several new exhibits at any one time, and frequent additions to the permanent collection from these exhibits. One excellent case in point is Seated Lady by "Junk Sculptor" Leo Sewell. This diminutive adult female is an arresting figure composed entirely of found metal and plastic objects. She sits near the museum entrance, welcoming each visitor to the visual feast that the museum as a whole has to offer.

As a geographer, I could not help but notice the creative use of a small globe -- and wonder whether the scale of the entire sculpture was to some extent determined by the availability of a globe just this size. The Southern Hemisphere is in pleasing proportion to the entire 51-inch figure. The Northern figure is, ahem, less clearly visible in her seated position.

See Leo Sewell's site for more amazing sculptures!

And if you are in the Brockton area, please visit the Fuller Craft Museum -- they are very nice and value teachers more than those big museums in Boston. Fuller Craft has reasonable admission costs, which are waived for MTA members. And after you visit the museum, have a stroll or drive through the D.W. Field Park, one of Brockton's other treasures!

Waterways

2011-10-02T17:57:00.006-04:00

Thanks to my student Sebastián for pointing me to Mark Drajem's recent article on Bloomberg: EPA Boosts Water Policing as Farmers Say Worst Fears Realized. The article describes efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to expand their jurisdiction over smaller waterways.

The article focuses on the "fears" of inconvenience and possible limitations on economic activities that may be environmentally destructive. Little context is given for the current proposals. The Clean Water Act built on laws initiated in 1948, was reorganized and signed by President Nixon in 1972 and given its present name under further reorganization in 1977.

The practical impetus for the laws was a wide array of environmental problems resulting from the abuse of waterways throughout the United States, which reached untenable proportions in the mid-20th Century. The constitutional basis for the laws, however, is the Commerce Clause in Aricle I, Section 8, whose very early interpretation gave the Army jurisdiction over navigable waters.

It was found much later that the protection of the waterways themselves requires the protection of adjacent and contributing wetlands. The Drajem article does not make clear the importance of these waterways, echoing the all-too common misconception that streams that do not flow constantly must be unimportant. It is unfortunate that the "fears" mentioned in the article are those of convenience and economic cost; the word "flood" is not used at all, though it should qualify as a concern for any farmer.

The Drajem article does mention the economic benefits of the kinds of regulations being contemplated, but only obliquely. More explanation of these benefits should be given, and also to the ecological context in which the proposed rule-making takes place. As we dramatically simplify both the hydrology and biology of large swaths of farmland, we increase the risk of floods and exposure to crop pests.

As Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day has written, "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around." Those who look at environmentally destructive economic activity as some kind of inherent right exhibit a lack of understanding of the natural systems on which they depend.

In Massachusetts, the Department of Environmental Protection has primary jurisdiction over enforcement of the Clean Water Act and other federal environmental programs. The Environmental Protection Agency allows much of its day-to-day enforcement activity to be carried out by DEP, as it it does with state-level agencies throughout the United States.

In Massachusetts, however, the initial point of contact is usually with volunteer-led conservation commissions at the community level. The Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissioners -- of which I am a member -- provides educational services to the volunteers and to the professional conservation agents that some of them hire. It is also a place for developers, regulators, consultants, and vendors to stay abreast of both legal and technological developments related to the protection of natural resources. As far as I know, no other state has so much community-level involvement in the enforcement of the Clean Water Act and related statutes.

Every two years (next up: spring 2012), I have the opportunity to teach an upper-level geography course entitled Environmental Regulations, in which we explore the development, implementation, and interpretation of environmental regulations of all kinds. I also teach a course every other autumn (but not again until Fall 2013) that focuses more on land-protection strategies other than regulations, such as conservation easements. Many of the people who take that course (with the awkward title Management and Preservation of the Natural Environment) go on to work or volunteer for many of the commissions, organizations and companies related to MACC.

Choosing Headlines

2011-10-02T17:07:00.001-04:00

A friend recently shared this story about the spending and occasional misspending of welfare benefits, and it got me thinking quite a bit. The report, of course, generated a lot of ire, but some of that is misplaced.

The article -- with the headline Massachusetts Welfare Money Spent on Resorts, Nail Salons -- is a bit of investigative journalism that shows gaps in the accountability for money intended to help people in need. Since benefits are expended electronically, it is possible to track where the money goes, by business name and address. The journalists rightly point out that the agency that should be using this information to hold recipients accountable is not doing so. They report that more than two million dollars in benefits were expended out of state, and they find that some of the money intended for basic needs was spent on luxury items.

The story illustrates something that has gotten too little notice in the post-2001 period, in which surveillance of citizens increases out of all proportion to necessity, and in fact out of proportion to anybody's ability to use the data effectively. The agencies that are in a position to monitor this spending have not done so, raising the question of whether agency has enough staff and training to keep up with the data it collects. Given recent trends in public institutions, and the fact that many Federal "intelligence" agencies cannot keep up with their data collection either, I rather doubt it.

I headlined this piece "Choosing Headlines" because it is clear that the headlines in the original article were chosen more to agitate than to educate. In addition to the main headline that emphasizes a kind of spending that is not shown to be pervasive, a sub-headline mentions a geographic fact: Mass. Welfare Recipients Spent $2.3 Million Out of State. No mention is made of whether this violates any specific conditions of the assistance, but the implication is clear that anybody who can afford to be away from home should not receive assistance.

Deeper in the story, it is revealed that half of the out-of-state spending occurs in neighboring Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The reporters do not explain their reluctance to account for spending in other neighboring states. It is also admitted that some people might have family connections or obligations that explain the travel to other states, though they could not resist the suggestion that "sunny" states were necessarily luxury travel. (Clearly, the authors have not seen the parts of Florida that I have!)

The reporters also use the phrase "specialty grocery stores" to describe both Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. The implication is that poor people should eat food from "regular" grocery stores or "convenience" grocery stores, even if lower sticker prices belie poor value in terms of nutritional return per dollar spent. The implication is especially misplaced in the case of Trader Joe's, which does offer nice food, but does so at sometimes surprisingly low prices. The reason is that the chain has made a study of the economic geography of grocery stores (which I describe briefly on one of my geography-education blogs). As a result, for example, I buy organic apple sauce at Trader Joe's for less than I would spend on the chemically-enhanced stuff in my local grocery. Why should poor people be berated for doing the same?

Now back to the outrage: of course those who receive public assistance should show their gratitude by earning what they can and spending carefully. Those who received support for food and shelter but spent it on luxury items should be held accountable. Deep in the story, we learn that all of the "suspect" spending amounts to less than one percent of total aid. But the headline "More than 99 Percent of Welfare Spending Not Suspicious" would not adequately tap into current biases against the poor and the government.

Conveniently Remote

2011-09-29T08:04:00.000-04:00

Although I think there is a lot more to geographic education than learning place names, I have been trying for the past year or two to master place names, often using geography games to help me during otherwise idle minutes. It is much easier to remember the basic facts about a place, however, if stories about the place are known.

My friends at geography.about.com are very helpful in this regard, as they are geography completists, striving to include every place they can in their guide to the discipline. During the summer, for example, I noticed an interesting article about the principality of Andorra (capital: Andorra la Vella), a tiny country with a population smaller than our neighboring city of Brockton.

I drew on Amanda Birney's article about Andorra to write a short post on the Wiley GeoDiscoveries blog, explaining how Andorra is a sovereign nation whose sovereigns (plural) are not residents, and why the chances of finding an Andorran at random in Andorra are not as good as getting the 00 on a roulette wheel.

Freetown and Beacon Hill

2011-09-28T01:37:00.001-04:00

Credit: Ashley Costa

Many readers will know that over the past three years, our EarthView team has had the privilege of setting up our 20-foot inflatable globe in dozens of school gyms and providing brief but memorable educational experiences to nearly 30,000 individuals -- mostly middle schoolers.

As much as we enjoy working directly with students and their teachers, we know that we can teach and energize only a tiny percentage of the young people in the Commonwealth who need -- and for the most part are denied -- a sound geographic education. For this reason, we sometimes use EarthView in unusual ways to generate interest in promoting the teaching of geography.

Particularly effective, as it turns out, have been our visits to the State House in Boston. Thanks to our friend Senator Brewer of Barre, we have set up EarthView two times for legislators, staff members, and visitors (the beautiful building itself is a major tourist attraction, so we have met people from all over the world there). Some legislators have been very surprised to learn that geography is taught only at the 4th and 7th grade levels (U.S. and world, respectively) and that it is no longer possible for high school teachers to obtain certification in the subject. We have spent more than a decade arguing the obvious on both counts, and are very glad that several members of the legislature are now willing to champion the cause.

Senator Brewer, in fact, introduced a geography education bill, with Representatives Gobi, Alicea, and Smola as co-sponsors. We are very pleased to have the support of this bipartisan group, and especially of Rep. Smola, who is the only geographer in the General Court (as our legislature is formally known). Having earned a degree in geography and regional planning from our sister institution in Westfield, he is well aware of the value of a sound geographic education.

Earlier this week, as we climbed Beacon Hill -- just a couple of geographers without a giant globe -- we noticed a knot of people, excitedly awaiting the arrival of someone. One man was wrapped in a flag, and though this should have been a clue, this vexillologically challenged pair inquired of the crowd and quickly learned that they were awaiting the arrival of Ernest Bai Koroma, the president of Sierra Leone. As reported in Cocorioko, President Koroma, though graciously received by Governor Deval Patrick, was in Boston primarily to speak with members of the local Sierra Leonean community. He and his delegation -- along with First Lady Sia Nyama Koroma -- made similar visits to West Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia.

We got only a glimpse of the visiting president, but while waiting in a longer-than-usual security line, we had the great privilege of meeting a few other Sierra Leoneans, and especially of talking with a man named Josiah, who is a community leader and educator who has been in Boston for over three decades. He also has a restaurant in Dorchester that is on my short list for a visit!

Dr. Domingo with a member of the Sierra Leonean community
whose clothing represented her country's flag.

Josiah confirmed what we already knew, which is that a high school student in Freetown is likely to learn more geography than his peers in Boston! As we continue to push for more geography education, we make the point that we are behind not only other rich nations, but just about every country in the world, in our commitment to geography education. Our new friend Josiah is one of many who inspire us to continue pushing to make Massachusetts stand out as a leader in geography education.

Thank the Farmer

2011-09-25T09:43:00.002-04:00

At Casa Hayes-Boh, if someone is thanked for a meal, the "you're welcome" is followed by "Thank the Farmers!" In fact, when the giant coffee cups at a favorite bookstore/cafe inspired us to commission our own, we asked the artists at Just Claying Around to include the phrase on the cup we use as a planter in our living room. (So far, our dream of growing coffee has not been realized.) I also use the image in all of my coffee presentations, and we apply the phrase to food from the many other farmers upon whom we rely daily.

This week, though, the phrase has been shortened by one letter, to "Thank the Farmer!" One of the great problems in the conventional coffee industry is that producers are separated from consumers by many layers of middlemen (and they are mostly men, often called coyotes, and with good reason). In addition to the interference of layers, the connections are blurred because coffees are usually blended from all over the world to get a consistent flavor year to year. Fair Trade reduces the layers, increases transparency, and brings consumers and producers closer together.

CoffeeCSA is a company that goes even farther than fair trade in vertical integration -- the farmers own the entire business! Using the model of Community Supported Agriculture, customers are able to subscribe to the company's production, receiving coffee directly from an individual farmer each month. We have enjoyed supporting (and being sustained by) a local farm under a similar model for a few years, and we are always looking for new coffees, so I decided to give it a try.

Somehow, it was from the second shipment that I became deeply aware of the difference in the geographic connections. Even most Fair Trade coffee is blended from many regions; even "Single Origin" coffee is blended from the farmers in a given area. The only coffee I routinely purchase from a single farm is from Selva Negra -- one of my favorites, but still at an estate scale. The coffee I am drinking as I write this is from a single, small farm in southwest Guatemala. And the farmer has a name: Catarina. So while we have this coffee in the house, her photo is on our table to remind us of her contribution to our far-too-comfortable life, and of the millions of other individuals who work to produce the coffee, cacao, tea, and other crops we enjoy.

So for now, the phrase is: "Thank Catarina!"

Timely Tableau

2011-08-31T07:17:00.218-04:00

Tuesday, while preparing for our daughter's move to her new school, we found a nifty café in the vicinity. Technically, I suppose, it is not a café, but it includes many of the key elements, especially decent coffee.

First, the New Breadsong Corner Bakery has decent coffee. Given that this was a summer visit, I appreciated the bakery's use of coffee ice cubes in the iced coffee. This reduces the need to brew extra-strong coffee and ensures that melting ice will not dilute the coffee. Given the good flavor and the care that went into this preparation, I was disappointed that the staff -- at least the staff present -- did not know anything about the coffee itself, other than a vague notion that it is "strong." So, decent but not excellent, and with no clear connection back to the farmers.

Second, though, the presence of highly decent coffee is a bonus when the main business is the bakery, and the bakery is so wonderful. We exercised restraint -- since we were on our way to get yogurt -- but the entire case looked scrumptious, as online reviews verify. We decided to share a delicious pumpkin muffin, complete with pumpkin seeds on top. Perfect for a light snack for two. It is not all about decadence, though: plenty of healthy, hearty loafs are offered as well -- the background on the bakery web page hints at the bounty of goodness.

Third, this location is quite an amazing combination of a good site and a good situation.

The situation has a number of advantages: the shop is on a corner, easily visible from several directions, with plenty of on-street parking, both free and metered. It is surrounded by walkable residential streets, so that hundreds of potential customers are within a convenient distance. And as the map above (available through the review already mentioned) makes clear, this charming neighborhood is accessible to city, state, and federal roadways -- and best of all -- a commuter-rail station.

The site leads to my use of the word tableau, in the sense of "a picturesque grouping of persons or objects; a striking scene." That is to say, not only is the bakery situated in a way that conveys several advantages, the place of which it is an integral part has a number of advantages. The building that houses the bakery is a nicely maintained example of mid-century mixed use, with apartments above and retail or offices below. Such developments -- long made impossible by zoning -- are making a comeback as an antidote to sprawl. The center of our tableau, as we enjoyed the aforementioned muffin and coffee, was a park in the center of a rotary. Such public spaces are what make civilization so appealing! On our other side, completing the tableau, is the Auburndale Community Library, whose interesting tale Pam will be sharing on her own "liberry" blog. As if on queue to tie the moment together, a woman walked by hand-in-hand with a young girl of six or so, gleeful about going to the library and sending us down Memory Lane to many similar outings closer to home.

A well-treed library!

And the library connection brings me to my use of the word timely. We made these discoveries just hours after my favorite librarian was sworn in as a trustee of the Bridgewater Public Library. It would have been even more timely had power outages caused by Tropical Storm Irene not led to the postponement of her inaugural meeting.

The BPL has been through some very rough times, often blamed on the recession but more accurately blamed on voters who did not understand the importance of community resources of this kind. The recession, in fact, has made some "rugged individualists" a bit more aware of the value of cooperation; as often happens in a recession, library budgets are cut just as people need to make more use of libraries.

Pam joins a remarkable triad that has kept our library going -- the friends organization that raises funds and provides a lot of voluntary effort, the trustees who do the detailed planning and make the tough decisions that have brought the library back from the brink, and -- most of all -- the library employees who have shouldered the burdens of repeated cuts with amazing grace and dedication to their public mission.

Incidentally, I encourage those in and near Bridgewater to support the library -- and coffee and cacao farmers -- by ordering coffee and cocoa through its ongoing Cuppa Joe fundraiser. I first learned about my friend Dean Cycon and Deans Beans Coffee from a similar fundraiser at the M.N. Spear Memorial Library in Shutesbury. This is a classic win-win-win program: good coffee and cocoa, good treatment of the land and farmers, and good money for the libraries! I am delighted that the Friends of the BPL volunteers keep this program going.

FEV Fever

2011-08-25T18:30:00.001-04:00

In a interdisciplinary meeting with other professors this afternoon, I mentioned ecotourism as part of my discussion of an article I was writing on coffee in Belize. (The article will be short, and I am thankful to the colleague who suggested the term "the province of hobbyists.") One colleague asked if ecotourism is really a word, and then asked for a brief definition. It is a term I've been hearing for a couple of decades now, and I have even participated, but it is not yet in wide circulation, as evidenced by his question and by the red, squiggly lines that Blogger is putting under the word as I write this!

Anyway, I suggested a working definition of the concept, which was familiar to some in the group but not others -- encouraging sustainable development by using ecosystems as tourist attractions. The challenge is to attract enough visitors to provide livelihoods that are at least as remunerative as resource extraction would be, but few enough to keep the ecosystems intact.

Imagine my surprise when I got home and found an article on ecotourism in the daily mail, the cover article in our denominational magazine. Imagine my further surprise that the focus of the article is Finca Esperanza Verde, a mountain-top coffee farm that I have actually visited with Pam and with two groups of students during my Nicaragua coffee tours.

Both times I have arrived there, it has been with students who were apprehensive about a two-day stay with extremely limited electronics and only healthy food. Both times, the beauty and tranquility of the place has made them reluctant to leave! The ecological value of the reserve (whose name means Green Hope Farm) is continuously documented by my blogger friend on Coffee Habitat, who also frequents another ecotourism favorite of mine, Selva Negra. The latter is a very different model pursuing similar goals.

Photo credit: The amazing
Matt Kadey

I knew that FEV (as we like to call it) was connected to a church in North Carolina -- home to many great cafes and the indispensable Counter Culture Coffee. Only last week did I learn from a nearby UU minister that a Unitarian Church was involved, so I am delighted to have the full story now, and to know that my fellow UUs will know about this amazing place.

Incidentally, because these places -- along with my home-away-from-home, Finca Mil Flores in nearby La Corona -- also include productive farming in the balance with tourism and ecology, they are examples of agroecotourism. I am glad that a search on that term brings up the Fresh Cup article about my second journey to the region.

Beyond Fair Trade

2011-08-25T10:42:00.000-04:00

I spend a lot of my time promoting Fair Trade in coffee and other products, because so-called free trade is so destructive, as I have explained in many ways throughout this blog. Increasingly, though, I see fair trade as transitional, something I hope will not be needed 20 years from now. I am beginning to work with some of my coffee students on this question, and will explore it with farmer friends during my 2012 sabbatical.

My friend Dean Cycon -- a leader in fair trade -- says it best in the first paragraph of the Epilogue to his masterpiece, Javatrekker:

"Our understanding of justice, in trade and society in general, cannot be confined to a formula. Fair Trade, or any movement that is intended to improve the quality of life for people, is more accurately seen as a process. The more we work with the peoples in this book and beyond, the deeper we plunge into the dynamics of their societies, their ecologies, and their economies. Each layer reveals a more profound set of relationships that we must consider as we evolve toward more humane and just relationships. Being open to the experiences of each culture not only makes us more aware but also makes our lives richer. Thus the tales in this book are only footsteps on a long and continuing trail."
... and from the last pararaph:
"For me, Javatrekking is ultimately about personal and societal exploration. I have never been fully comfortable with what it is, when I know in my heart that things can be better, more respectful, more loving, and, frankly, more exciting. It pains me deeply to see cultures crumble and blow away under global pressures (or simply for lack of water), or kids' lives go unfulfilled for want of a pencil or notebook. Javatrekking allows me the vehicle to explore my own relationship to these things and to take responsibility where I can. These may be small contributions in the greater scheme of things, but as an old Indonesian farmer advised me, quoting Arjuna's words to Krishna on the eve of battle, 'Add your light to the sum of lights.'"

Most of us in the West will continue to live a life that is enriched by the impoverishment of others. Most of us will never journey to see that impoverishment with our own eyes. Those connections are real, and certifications -- Fair-Trade, Sweatshop-Free, Bird-Friendly, and so on -- do matter and do help. They are a meaningful step above doing nothing. But somewhere between certifications and Javatrekking is a whole world of possibility for doing more.

Good Night, Irene!

2011-08-24T12:11:00.000-04:00

At the end of a long evening of dancing, an audience favorite for my band is the folk standard Good Night, Irene. We might have occasion to sing it a lot in coming days, as my friend and hurricane guru Dr. Phil just advised us that Irene might be the "real deal" for our region.

The images below show two things, as of this posting at noon on Wednesday, August 24, 2011. The first is the predicted path of the hurricane. The path gets wider in successive days as the uncertainty is greater. The range of error is much narrower in the immediate future.

The second map indicates the likelihood of tropical-storm winds being sustained at the surface for at least one minute. Again, this is a near certainty in a narrow band ahead of the storm, with decreasing likelihood to either side of the path and in higher latitudes.

NOTE: These maps are static, go to the Irene page at the National Hurricane Center for the latest information, updated maps, and advisories.

Perrymander

2011-08-21T14:31:00.001-04:00

Politicians who claim to know and care about the original intentions of the Founding Fathers (aka the white guys who wrote the US Constitution) seem to care little about the purpose of Article 1. At the very heart of their framework for the new nation is the creation of the Bureau of the Census, whose purpose would be to ensure that Congressional representation would remain proportional to population. (Of course, the same article counted slaves as 3/5 of a person each, so I am not among those who view their work as anything but a pragmatic series of compromises.)

As I wrote in my Article One post last December, it took only two electoral cycles for politicians -- beginning with Elbridge Gerry in Massachusetts -- to subvert the Article's intent. The term "gerrymandering" commemorates the salamander shape of the district he created on the North Shore.

Elkana Tisdale's cartoon did not shame the pols of his day, and in fact politicians continue to defy logic and court scorn and ridicule in their efforts to choose voters, rather than be chosen by them. Although this is a bipartisan activity, as I mention in the above-cited article, the neologism "Perrymander" captures the audacious efforts of Texas Republicans, led by their latest presidential hopeful, Gov. Rick Perry.

Even some of the governor's allies are now concerned, however, that the Legislature's current proposal might stretch even the most hallucinogenic interpretation of "compact and contiguous." Allies such as George Will extol Perry's personal commitment to racial fairness, and this might even be the case. His partisanship seems to be an even higher value, though, and a congressional map that would deliver 26 of 36 seats to his party raises serious concerns about disenfranchising voters along lines of race and ethnicity. Writing in National Journal, David Wasserman examines this overreach in some detail, and describes a more balanced map that might be imposed by the courts.

Perry, Perry Quite Contrary

2011-08-21T10:56:00.003-04:00

We might need to rename the family dog. Perry was named, at our daughter's suggestion, for Perry the Platypus, who is some sort of egg-laying mammalian secret agent on something called Phineas and Ferb. (She is not, by the way, named for Commodore Perry, about whom I wrote an encyclopedia article a number of years ago.)

We got the dog last year, and were excited to see bumper stickers with her name shortly thereafter. We even picked one up, thinking it would be cute on her dog box. Then we learned more about Cape Cod politician Jeff Perry, whose stickers they were. In a right-leaning year, he lost his bid for the U.S. House, largely because of his role -- as a police supervisor -- in allowing strip-searches of teenage girls. He then went on to fill a vastly overpaid patronage job, in open mockery of the fiscal conservatism he had espoused in the campaign.

Just as our local Perry was fading from the headlines, an even scarier Perry is popping up all over. Texas Governor Rick Perry is not scary in the creepy way that Jeff Perry is, but he is all the scarier because of his widespread popularity among vote-before-you-think Tea Partiers and the slim but real possibility that he could become president of the world's most powerful (for now) nation.

The first -- well, only -- time I met Rick Perry, I liked him. It was about 15 years ago, when I worked in specialty food in South Texas and he was the Texas Secretary of Agriculture. As Dale McFeatters has recently written, nobody can work a room like Perry. He remains unfairly handsome, and I am sure he is as likable in person now as he was when I met him in the 1990s. In fact, I still sometimes use a conversational gambit I learned from him. In getting to know people from all walks of life and varied interests, the agriculture secretary had a habit of asking, "Where did you go to school?" This was a good opening for conversation with someone with any level of education, and could lead the conversation toward childhood memories, Texas football, or really anywhere.

Anywhere but the subject of science, apparently. The governor recently underwent a stem-cell procedure that cannot even be described as "experimental," apparently because ideology is more important to him than science. It seems an almost inevitable error for someone who considers the theory underlying genetics to be a matter of opinion. A governor who will consign his own body to medical quackery is frightening as a president in a time when scientists need to be consulted, not scorned.

More specifically, Perry asserts that scientists fabricated climate change in order to collect grant money. Ignoring the billions and trillions made by the deniers of climate change, he castigates those who earn thousands or millions studying the problem. Here he parts company with other Republican governors who recognize the threat climate change poses to their state economies. He is even at odds with his own past as Texas director of the 1988 presidential campaign for Al Gore, whose position on anthropogenic climate change was already well known.

The problem with the ad hominen approach Perry is taking is that it distracts him from seriously exploring the evidence. Washington already is moving too slowly on climate change, though both active-duty and retired military officials are now see climate change as a threat multiplier and a threat to military infrastructure. Perry is not fit to be Commander-in-Chief in such circumstances.

Because of economic fears, some might wish to set all this aside, because Gov. Perry fixed the Texas economy, or so he claims. In his recent adulatory essay, George Will repeats the cherry-picked statistics about job creation in Texas. Renée Loth sets the record straight. The jobs are almost entirely low-wage, giving Texas the largest population of working poor. The eviscerated social safety net leaves "pro-family" Texas providing the lowest standard of care for expectant mothers. And most of the economic growth that has occurred comes from two sources, one of which Perry actually worked against: oil revenues and Bush-Obama stimulus money.

Despite of -- or perhaps because of -- his earlier life as a Democrat, Perry has become such a shameless partisan that the abuse of his redistricting authority has resulted in the coining of a new word, which is explored in my Perrymander article (with thanks to Perrymander.com).

Back to that rascally min-pin of ours: her name will be Perry, though we won't be getting any bumper stickers for her box any time soon.

Even WalMart is Hurting

2011-08-16T19:00:00.000-04:00

In the midst of story about WalMart's latest stock price, revenue, and sales figures, was the revelation that the company is slipping just a bit. Not that the billionaires at the center have anything to worry about, but U.S. sales are actually shrinking, quarter after quarter.

WalMart is continuing to grow, but only through its overseas expansion, taking its job-killing model to sub-Saharan Africa, where it is needed the least. Sales are slipping in the United States, because of high gas prices (WalMart leveled local shops, so people have to drive pretty far to their stores) and poverty (see: leveled local shops).

Henry Ford and GM (pre-Roger Smith), for all we might disdain about them, understood that they would only prosper if their employees earned a reasonable living. The disparities were great, but it was understood that ever-growing disparities could not be sustained. As income gaps grow in the United States, and even middle-class people (in the Tea Party) push for policies to make them grow even more, ripple effects will continue.

Redeeming Rachael Ray

2011-08-12T01:00:00.001-04:00

As a foodie without cable TV, I was only vaguely aware of Rachael Ray before she became embroiled in a brief scandal related to Dunkin' Donuts. I describe her inaction on my Coffee Hell page, and I remain convinced that she should have taken a stand against xenophobia in that incident.

Recently, however, I learned of a project she undertook that reflects her involvement not only with food, but also with education and to social justice. When researching the work of food educator Wilma Stephenson for our Nueva Receta blog, I found that she appeared on Rachael Ray's show, and that the appearance went far beyond a simple interview: Stephenson's beloved Room 325 was made over for the show, and a bistro was added so that students could practice serving in an elegant environment. I am not the only one to have had a change of heart -- I first learned of the RR-DD scandal from the Huffington Post, a site that now carries a glowing description of Rachael Ray's projects with Wilma Stephenson (although some user comments reflect a reasonable dose of skepticism).

Motoboys

2011-08-07T16:39:00.004-04:00

São Paulo has legendary traffic, which can be avoided in three ways: subway, helicopter, and motorcycle. (A 2009 article describes a contest in which a bicycle proved to be the fastest route across town, though the prospect is daunting.) I was probably in the city six times before I knew it even had a subway, and when I rode it, crowding was minimal. Helicopters are pricey. For quick delivery of packages, then, "motoboys" are the answer. Sitting in traffic with a friend Ayr in October 2008, I was amazed by their frequency. On an earlier visit, I had actually witnessed a rider reaching out to grab the bumper of a truck, so that he could use it to pivot his bike for a lane change.

How is the traffic now? Have a look.

The Poor Make Us Rich

2011-07-30T17:46:00.004-04:00

No illegal immigrant could
be as harmful!

Ronald Reagan had it wrong, of course. He defended his promotion of government on behalf of the wealthy by repeating the words "trickle down economics" until they seemed like a legitimate theory, rather than an unfortunate urinary incident. Two generations later, the loose-leaf Tea Party mob has brought millions of working-class people into political alliances with the über-rich and against the poor at home and abroad.

Two very different items came my way today, reminding me of just how misplaced public outrage is these days. The first was an unusual sort of contest, asking people to choose the most evil among a list of eleven billionaires. (I am not anti-billionaire, by the way; see previous posts about good and bad members of this class.) Fortunately, nobody from the Walton family was on the ballot, making my choice among the remaining candidates a bit easier. All are strong defenders of the right to unfettered accumulation of unearned wealth, but war profiteer and instigator Stephen Bechtel, Jr. (shown above, not seeming to enjoy his money much) was a clear winner in my book.

As much as I enjoyed the rhetorical swings at these plutocrats -- who will never know I exist, much less that I blame them for trashing my country -- I found another story that is a bit more useful and positive. Writing about Indian labor organizer Ela Bhatt, Renée Loth makes a very strong case for the importance of the global underclass in supporting the lifestyles enjoyed by middle and upper classes. The informal sector in particular -- the refuge of casual labors who often have no work place, no documentation, no rights, and no employers -- provides a huge subsidy to the formal economy. Ela Bhatt is an attorney from Ahmedadad who established the Self Employed Women's Association in 1972 to advocate for Indian women in this sector.

Bhatt has succeeded in organizing 1.3 million women, bringing some level of empowerment to workers at the extreme margins of the world economy. Loth points out the sad irony that the rules of the capitalist game -- being written by those who have the most to gain -- have not afforded a million women at Walmart similar recognition in recent court battles.

A third item I noticed today is Barney Frank's explanation of how the political process continues to tilt in favor of the rich. Scapegoats abound -- immigrants, unions, the poor -- that divert attention from the real villains.

Gaga Traffic

2011-07-20T18:11:00.000-04:00

Photo: LA Times

Geographer Sarah Goggin's Carmageddon post on Wiley GeoDiscoveries (a blog to which I sometimes contribute) describes the geography behind the cataclysmic traffic jam that was expected from a 50-hour road closure in Los Angeles last weekend. The expected chaos illustrates several geography concepts, the most obvious of which is extreme automobile dependency in Western cities that have seen most of their growth after the 1950s. Read the article to see what it has to do with Lady Gaga!

Thankfully, the preparations worked better than expected, leading at least one writer to conclude that we usually overvalue cars, even in LA!

South Sudan

2011-07-11T14:05:00.000-04:00

See this map with timeline at Washington Post

I happened to be listening to the BBC (via WBUR) late Friday evening, when it was beginning to report on the festivities surrounding the emergence of the world's newest country: South Sudan. For now, much attention is rightly focused on the jubilation that follows the decades-long struggle for the self-determination of people whose promised role in the governance of Sudan was never forthcoming. The fact that 98.8 percent of its people voted for secession is an indication of how very overdue has been this transformation. It can only be hoped that unity and jubilation are enough to advance a country that will have been monitored from Day One by a United Nations peacekeeping mission (UNMISS, whose web site is not yet distinct from UNMIS).

In addition to the BBC, the geographers at About.com have been among the best sources I have found for news and background on the new country. Editor Matt Rosenberg has written a thorough guide to the transition, while contributing writer Amanda Briney has written a detailed overview of the geography of South Sudan.

The map above is part of extensive coverage by the Washington Post. Like any good map, it tells several important parts of the story, including the strong climatic divide between arid, semi-tropical Sudan and wet tropical South Sudan. Located between 4 and 9 degrees north, the new country is dominated by tropical rain forest. Its ten provinces, in fact, include three named for its equatorial location. Not indicated on the map -- but well explained by geographer Briney -- are the language divides that were imposed when Egypt and England imposed boundaries that were to remain in place from 1947 until this weekend. One welcome feature of the map is its blurry edges -- Sudan and South Sudan exist within a regional context that extends in all directions and that does not end abruptly with any river, coastline, or edge of empire.

Perhaps most important for the economic future of the country is the location of the oil fields, which most have by now heard are located in South Sudan. The implications of this loss for Sudan are difficult to fathom, but their location in the immediate border zone suggest that the struggle for these resources is far from over. In fact, the Abyei region is contested, even before the sun rose on the first day of independence. Moreover, the map makes clear that Africa's 15th landlocked country faces a number of unpleasant choices for the export of its main commodity. Existing pipelines run through Sudan, by far the most convenient route to world markets. All other options are through impossible terrain (such as the highlands of Ethiopia), vast distances through other landlocked countries (such as any possible route through the Central African Republic), or through areas experiencing even more strife than Sudan (such as the Congo).

The complex geography and fraught history suggest that the events of the past weekend are, indeed, just a beginning of what the world needs to learn about South Sudan. An excellent series of maps from BBC is a good starting point. I look forward to seeing an update on the CIA World Factbook, which currently acknowledges the need for a new listing, but lists only Sudan as of this writing.

Norwegian Baptist Prairie Coffee

2011-07-10T15:17:00.000-04:00

We do not like to admit that coffee has become an obsession in our family, but it is true that we seem to be especially prone to random coffee connections. For example, as we casually stopped by the used-book sale our church has each week at the local farmers' market, my favorite librarian noticed a book with coffee in the title. We could not really tell what it was about, but it was in our bag right away, and I finished the book later on the same day I bought it -- something I never manage to do!

The book is Margaret Jensen's First We Have Coffee. The paperback we picked up is a sixth printing of the (c) 1982 edition. Apparently later editions are still available, with at least two different subtitles. Our version has no subtitle, but the tagline "Treasure the romance, mystery, tragedy, comedy and faith in these true life stories of an immigrant family."

I am not so sure about the mystery in this tale, but the other elements are woven throughout this story of the author's family. From her mother's arrival from Norway as a teenager at the beginning of the twentieth century to the deaths of her parents in the 1970s, it is a family journey from small towns to prairie to big city and ultimately to the rural South. The "romance" is of a type that is subdued and deeply embedded in archaic gender roles. It is interesting that some online reviewers find this to be the most rewarding and inspiring part of the tale. Most of the tragedies are the kinds of losses and setbacks bound to occur over three-quarters of a century, though some might see the persistent privations as tragic.

The "immigrant family" theme is as much about the family's movements from town to country to city within North America as it is about the international migration. It is interesting to note, however, that the Norwegian communities in the book used their native language for decades after having learned English, especially as they came together for worship or life passages. This is a fine contradiction to the all-too common assumption that immigrants who speak another language do so only because they lack the ability to speak the language of their new home.

The "comedy" woven throughout the tale is of the gentle sort I would more likely call humor, in the tradition of Samuel Clemens or, more aptly, Garrison Keilor. Similarly, through the first 150 pages of the book, Jensen's nostalgia for the spare, spiritual, and musical days of her Norwegian Baptist upbringing brought out my own memories from my own childhood. Though separated by decades and many miles, we shared some experiences and even some favorite hymns, such as A Mighty Fortress and Blessed Be the Tie. (The last 40 pages of the book are about her experience of her parents as adults, and are burdened, in my view, by needlessly flowery prose, poor poetry, and self-conscious piety.)

The stories of her youth, however, are enjoyable and though coffee is almost never the focus, it is mentioned hundreds of times in many contexts. Coffee is for rising, in the morning, resting in the evening, and making a house a home. Most importantly, coffee is a catalyst for conversation. Almost any dialog in the book -- and certainly any important dialog -- is lubricated by coffee:

I chuckled to myself as I remembered a handsome minister from Norway, and his 'prayer meeting' with a farmer's daughter. I had inadvertently stumbled into the room in the middle of a not-so-holy kiss. One word to Mama sent an S.O.S. to Norway, and the secret code between wives resulted in action. Sooner than expected, the minister's adorable wife arrived on the scene. The curly-haired, saucy-eyed [saucer?] wife charmed her way into the hearts of everyone, especially Mama. The wife never made reference to the reason for the surprise visit, except to let the farmer's daughter know how much the wife had missed her charming husband. Chuckling over a cup of coffee, Mama and the wife agreed: 'You do your part, God will do the rest.' The subdued husband and his sparkling wife blended together lie coffee and cream. When Papa spoke highly of that devoted couple, Mama smiled over her coffee cup.

'There are some things you tell, and some things you don't tell,' Mama had said to me when I told her of my abrupt interruption of the hungry kiss. Her look told me that I had been entrusted with a secret -- that we were to keep this as our own.

In another case, it was a young wife whose eye was wandering, so "Mama took the wife aside. No one but those two knew what was shared over afternoon coffee. The wife returned her loyalty to her rightful lover, her husband." (The sensuality of coffee is, in this case, of only the most respectable variety!)

Coffee was also part of moving beyond any unpleasantness; this passage -- following a death in the family -- is typical: "Mama washed her face, combed her hair, tied on a starched apron, and put on the coffee pot."

Garrison Keilor's tales of Norwegian Lutheran frugality on the prairie (and my own spare upbringing in Virginia) pale in comparison to Jensen's account of her arrival in Chicago as a teenager from the Canadian prairie:

The table was set for 'coffee' and three dishes, each containing a huge peach-half, were set before us. Taking charge of my siblings, as I'd been commanded, I promptly removed two of the dishes and proceeded to divide the one remaining peach-half in three parts. 'We always divide, I said, 'and then we can have peaches for two more days. We cut on orange in six pieces,' I added.

Although coffee is mentioned on nearly every page of this book, it is mostly in passing, so that it permeates the stories without being addressed directly. A few passages suggest that percolation (egad!) was the favored means of preparation, and once coffee with sugar lumps is mentioned as a Norwegian "national pastime." But in 185 pages and close to a thousand uses of the word, little else is revealed. This nonchalance is itself the main message about the geography of coffee in Jensen's immigrant experience.

Digging Back

2011-06-26T14:12:00.000-04:00

Among the many jobs I had before becoming a geography professor was one I call "dry-cleaner inspector." My actual titles at that time were "Geographer" and "Assistant Regulatory Analyst" in the Cincinnati office of a global engineering firm that was then called Dames & Moore. I actually worked on a variety of projects, but the most common assignments were Phase I investigations for property transfer.

Simply put, when clients purchased commercial property, they would employ us to perform due diligence to determine whether the property could be expected to harbor environmental hazards, such as soil contaminated by an old spill or material leaking from a buried chemical or fuel storage tank. This kind of research is necessary because financial and legal liability for such contamination can extend to both prior and current owners of a property. (This may seem unfair, but it entirely necessary to eliminate the "shell game" approach that polluters have used to escape liability in the past.) Our Phase I investigations involved documentary research, interviews, and site visits. If any of these avenues suggested likely contamination sources, we would recommend a Phase II investigation that would include sampling in relevant media -- air, soil, water and/or building materials.

The properties I investigated included warehouses, garages, offices, and manufacturing plants, but at least 20 of the properties were dry cleaners, in about 10 different states. The common thread for these was a Cincinnati law firm that represented a British client that in turn was buying hundreds of dry cleaning operations throughout the United States. I cannot remember the name and you have never heard of it, because they always left the local name and managers in place.

When I was doing this work in 1989-1990 (and part-time in south-most Texas about four years later), all of the relevant documents existed on paper. Therefore when I first learned about a project, my first step was to make travel arrangements to visit both the store itself (usually there were two or three clustered in the same city) and to visit local and state offices that would have the records I needed. (This contributed nicely to my County Map Project, which was actually inspired by other workers in the same office.) My second step would be to make phone calls to order certain materials that I knew could be mailed to me. These included topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I would also order any aerial photography I could find, primarily through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These resources would give me some understanding of the literal "lay of the land" around a property and also some clues about current and past uses in and around the property that might pose environmental hazards. For example, the fire insurance maps might show PCB oil or asbestos as a good thing, because they were associated with fire safety, though we now think of them principally in terms of the serious health risks they pose.

I apply this experience to a student exercise in my introductory environmental geography course and in more detail in an upper-level course on environmental regulations. For better or worse, many parts of a Phase I investigation can now be done online. I think "better" because of the convenience, efficiency, and completeness of record searches that previously required a lot of time and expense and a little bit of luck in finding the right office. I think "worse," though, because the availability of online tools has pushed the price of Phase I work so low that many such investigations are done by people who never visit the facilities they are investigating ... and the only serious problem I ever found in a Phase I was something I discovered during my site visit that was not in any of the paper records.

For teaching purposes, though, the online materials are terrific, and have become much more convenient even in the past few years. The US Environmental Protection Agency continues to improve online access, bringing a lot of databases together in the Envirofacts portal. Many of these were previously linked from the Surf Your Watershed portal, which remains an excellent source for information about regional water quality and cooperating organizations.

Sanborn Maps were originally designed to guide the pricing of property insurance. They are very detailed and frequently updated, being most actively used during a period (late-19th through mid-20th centuries) of tremendous growth of industries that operated without meaningful controls on pollution. The maps can often be found in local libraries -- I actually required students in my Geography of Brockton course to study them. They are also available online, though at considerable expense. (At Dames & Moore I routinely paid $45 per sheet for photocopies, and online subscriptions today are quite expensive.) Users of the BSU Maxwell Library have access to the entire set of Massachusetts Sanborn maps; a link is provided on the Geography MaxGuide.

The textbook I use for the upper-level course (Ortolano's Environmental Regulation) is over a decade old but remains the most comprehensive explanation of the regulatory programs that are still in place to address environmental hazards in the United States.

Coffee Comics

2011-06-24T22:59:00.000-04:00

Regular readers of this blog will know that I consider coffee an essential element of environmental geography. Google the phrase "geography of coffee" to see just how serious I can be about this beverage. I have created pages on coffee shops, coffee roasters, coffee films, coffee photos -- even coffee romance.

What I really wish I had, though, would be a nice collection coffee comics. The creators of newspaper comics (we called them "the funnies" when I was a kid) apparently include quite a few coffee enthusiasts. Most consistent are Brian Basset and Robert Harrell, whose Adam@Home strip is a virtual coffee festival. (See their Father's Day coffee special, for example!)

Today, however, it is Bliss by Harry Bliss that really resonates:

I am fussy about coffee. I am about quality way over quantity. I probably could not even drink the dregs that are likely to be stuck to the bottom of the coffee pot shown in this strip. Still, I am reminded of a class session about two years ago.

I was deeply engaged in a conversation about some readings (readings about coffee, that is), when a student raised her hand and with a serious tone said, "I have a question."

"Sure," I said, "what is it?"

"Just how much coffee do you drink?"

I remember holding my hand out to show her -- and the rest of the class -- that I could still hold it steady.

"See. Not too much."

Goode and Evil Maps

2011-06-23T09:41:00.000-04:00

Thanks once again to geographer Matt Rosenberg for a great geography story. This time, Matt describes the background of an atlas that many geographers know and love. Goode's World Atlas, now in its 22 edition, began as an antidote to the all-too-common Mercator projection.

I have always taken the projection for granted in these atlases, being more impressed by the overall quality of the content, the careful selection of map scale, and the variety of thematic maps. I did not know that, in a 1908 speech, Professor Goode told the AAG that the Mercator projection is evil!

See Matt's article for the whole story and see the commentary on projections that I created for our K-12 EarthView blog.

One Cup -- Timor Coffee

2011-06-23T08:49:00.000-04:00

One Cup is a 30-minute documentary about the coffee industry in Timor-Leste (East Timor). It describes the role of fair trade in the recovery of a once-vibrant coffee industry ravaged by war. It is among the best coffee videos I have seen, comparable to Black Gold but shorter and not as graphic. (Yes, the plight of coffee farmers is often dire enough to make for unpleasant viewing.)

I first saw the film when BSU's Social Justice League showed it a number of years ago, and fortunately I have a copy on my computer. It had disappeared from the usual sites, but thanks to the non-profit Internet Archive, it is now available for download or streaming in a number of formats.

That's How!

2011-06-22T16:07:00.000-04:00

This afternoon I heard Terry Gross -- one of my favorite radio interviewers -- talking with illustrator and children's book author Christoph Niemann about his work and his unusual insights into everything from mental maps and parenting to the nature of sleeping and waking.

I highly recommend listening to the wide-ranging interview and viewing the remarkable slideshow that accompanies the summary. The tile work in his bathroom is a geographic wonder and the understanding his boys have of the New York subway system is a parenting triumph.

Countries and Anomalies

2011-06-22T15:58:00.000-04:00

Most readers know that I am part of a team in the BSU Geography Department that takes a giant globe known as EarthView to schools and public viewing events, with close to 30,000 people -- in small groups -- joining us inside the globe in the three years we have had it. EarthView is a hand-painted, physical globe, which means that the only national boundaries that are well-defined on the globe are those of island nations such as New Zealand and Madagascar. Even where boundaries are fairly easy to discern, countries are not labeled, so I have been endeavoring to learn the locations of all the world's countries. This is especially helpful since someone with a doctorate in geography really should know where all the countries are, just as I would expect a "real" doctor to know where all my bones are! And there are roughly the same number to keep track of.

In geography school, though, we do not just sit around memorizing maps, so I actually did not know more than 85 or 90 percent of the locations until recently. A handy tool for improving my performance has been the geography games at JetPunk (apparently the key to naming web sites is to join any two, unrelated nouns with a further unrelated graphic). I learned about JetPunk when I put together my Geography Games page a couple years ago, and recently I have found several of the puzzles quite useful. The first (shown below) gives a user 12 minutes to type the names of 195 countries. Fortunately, many common misspellings are allowed, so it is quite forgiving. As names are correctly entered, each country is shaded on a single map and the name appears alphabetically in one of about a half-dozen clusters. About 20 countries are too small to appear at the scale used, so the map and list work together.

I find several other quizzes on this site quite useful. Each of these is focused on a region -- I have used "Central America" (which includes the Greater and Lesser Antilles), Oceania, and Europe. In each case, I already knew where the larger countries are located, but the game has greatly improved my mental map of the smaller countries.

A comparison of these games with EarthView and other maps leads to some important geographic questions about exactly what constitutes a country. Last autumn, for example, I was very interested in an unusual story from Tokelau, which I thought was a small country in the Pacific Ocean. It turns out that Tokelau -- like many of the planet's small islands -- is actually under the sovereignty of another country, in this case New Zealand. The JetPunk games, incidentally, seem to use United Nations membership as a principle criterion, though membership currently stands at 192, and Switzerland was only added in 2002. A new book from Lonely Planet has a more expansive definition, providing travel and geographic information for 230 countries.

As it turns out, although many of the world's countries are recognized nation-states, in scores of cases the connection between a nation and a state are complex, compromised, and/or contested. Thanks to geographer Matt Rosenberg for drawing my attention to a very interesting world map that highlights some examples.

CLICK to ENLARGE

The Revised Map of Geopolitical Anomalies appears, with a key, on the GeoCurrents blog. The examples on this single sheet could keep a geographer busy for days with quibbles, further examples, clarifications, and disputations! Having other work to do, I will just mention a few items that jumped off the page for me.

First, the key mentions Taiwan as "the most unrecognized state," describing some of the convoluted ways to which other countries sometimes refer to the island nation. I am reminded of Macedonia, one of the countries that emerged from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Although widely recognized, objections to the name by Greece Macedonia have led it to be included in the United Nations in the "T" section of the alphabet, as in "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia."

The map and key refer to several exclaves, which are portions of national territory -- such as Alaska -- that are not adjacent to the "main" portion of their respective countries. France is cited as having the greatest number of exclaves -- accounting for many of those islands in the Pacific whose names and locations I have not yet learned and giving France economic control of many thousands of square miles of ocean. I was reminded, though, that I just learned that one of the newest and smallest countries in the world actually has an exclave.

Timor-Leste -- also known as East Timor -- has belonged to Portugal, the Netherlands, Japan, and Indonesia, finally being admitted to the United Nations as an independent nation in 2002, after the loss of many thousands of lives. I knew that Timor-Leste controlled the eastern half of the island of Timor, but I only recently learned that tiny as it is, this nation has an exclave on the northwest side of the island.

Incidentally, the name "East Timor" is redundant in the same way that "Sahara Desert" is. Just as sahara is an Arabic word that can mean desert, the word timor is Malay, meaning east. One of its previous names, in fact, was Timur Timor.

Public Risk for Private Gain

2011-06-21T10:51:00.000-04:00

Red Bull Stadium from NJ.com

How do the rich make their money? They get poor people to make it for them. Increasingly, they get the middle class not only to make their money for them, but to shoulder the riskiest parts of their speculative investments. The story of Harrison, New Jersey -- a less-affluent neighbor of Newark -- and the titan of Red Bull is a recent case in point.

In 2006, the town agreed to underwrite the purchase of land on which billionaire Deitrich Mateschitz would build a professional soccer stadium. The usual arguments were made in favor of exorbitant public investment in a private sports venture. George Zoffinger, then president of the New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority, was among those who criticized the deal, and he was widely criticized for his pessimism.

As the Boston Globe reported yesterday, the city invested so deeply that is now in financial ruin, with mounting debt, layoffs of public workers, and a credit rating in the lower reaches of junk-bond territory. Bloomberg News reports that city officials remain optimistic, even as they prepare to sell off other city assets in order to continue making payments on the land that continues to enrich Mr. Mateschitz.

This story makes me wish for the good old days, when the robber barons could measure their pay in multiples of hundreds in comparison to that of their workers. In the case of Harrison, the arrangement of a literal playing field is an apt metaphor. The CEO of Wal-Mart now takes home more each hour than most of his employees make in a year, and yet the judicial and legislative branches continue to tilt the (figurative) playing field in his favor. Professor (and former Labor Secretary) Robert Reich gives a two-minute overview of how this fits into much broader trends.