MBTA Dark Territory

As a certain kind of geographer, I probably spend more time thinking about trains than actually riding them, though I am grateful every time I get a chance to do the latter (well, almost every time). I enjoy all three major scales (gages) -- local subways and trolleys, regional commuter rail, and national interstate rail. Of course, the national rail would be even better if I lived in some other nation, but Amtrak does its best, and despite terrible coffee and occasionally rude fellow passengers, I have enjoyed quite a few jaunts to NYC or DC, grateful to be following the general fall-line path of I-95 without being on it! 

In 2025, the New Bedford/Fall River extension finally opened. Long overdue for my friend and geography colleague who has been living in Fairhaven for most of his tenure at BSU, but just in time for me! We have had a weekend house in Fairhaven for about a decade, and recently made it our only home after an arduous year of renovations and property transactions. Just at the MBTA opened a train from Boston to Bridgewater soon after we moved to that town, it extended that line to the vicinity of our new home shortly after our full-time arrival on the South Coast.

A few geographic peculiarities accompany this development. First, the trains go to both Fall River and New Bedford -- there is a split between the two at East Taunton, with shuttles making up for the resulting infrequent direct service. The shuttles are trains, not busses, so this is a good solution, though it takes some getting used to and some very careful attention to announcements at that East Taunton platform.

Second is that a new station was built across the street from the Middleboro-Lakeville station. The old station is still operating, but ONLY -- as far as I can tell -- as part of the very infrequent service from Boston to Cape Cod.

The map below is about the third oddity, the one that inspired this post. When I drive from New Bedford to Bridgewater, I follow Route 18, a.k.a. Bedford Street, a.k.a. the old, very straight toll road to Boston (which gave rise to the tollhouse cookie, but that's another story). So in my mental map, the train ride would also be a straight line. On the real map and in real life, however, there is a zig and a zag, with the aforementioned Middleboro (Middleborough) station bing almost due east of the East Taunton station.

That eastward jog takes passengera across the northern edge of Massasoit State Park and -- it seems -- into a parallel universe of some kind, into which cellular networks do not reach. The main advantages of commuter rail are related to reduced emissions, vehicle wear-and-tear, and traffic stress. But the ability to work online while traveling is another benefit. Each MBTA train comes with a completely useless internet server, so I always connect my laptop to the interwebs through telephone hotspot.

The 5G network almost always fails between these stations, however, reminding me of two films: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory and The Bridgewater Triangle. I saw the former during my first visit to the Amazon, where the Portuguese dubbed version was helpful language practice. The plot revolves around and evil genius knowing that a train would be out of radio contact as it passed through a certain mountainous area. I saw the latter when it debuted in Dartmouth. It recounts the generally spooky folklore of our region -- the MBTA Dark Territory is right in the middle of the famous triangle.  

 

NESTVAL Nicaragua Follow-Up

Sustainable tourism was a central theme of the 103rd Annual Meeting of NESTVAL, hosted this weekend by the Department of Geography at Bridgewater State University. Among the highlights was a plenary session led by my good friend Nohelia Talavera, who traveled from Nicaragua to share her experience as a part of Matagalpa Tours, our partner on almost a dozen travel courses between 2006 and 2020. 

Nohelia and the Coffee Maven with
a photo from the Origen project.

As she explained -- and as my students and I know well -- Matagalpa Tours is far more than a tour operator. It is far more, even, than a tour operator with sustainability credentials. It is a vital member of the coffeeland communities of northern Nicaragua. They not only connect visitors to those who produce coffee; they also use their skills as guides and educators to improve those communities. 

Among the many connections Nohelia shared with the NESTVAL audience are the Origen photography project, the weaving cooperative of El Chile, and the environmental education project of Agualí. She also brought coffee, woven crafts, and photographic prints -- all of which are available for sale. All of the proceeds go directly to community-development projects in the coffeelands.

Origen photos and El Chile handcrafts. Many BSU students have 
learned about weaving first-hand from this women's cooperative.

And now to the purpose of this post: Nohelia still has some of each of these beautiful/delicious items for sale (cash/check/Venmo -- no cards). She will be offering them in the geography conference room (DMF 272) on Tuesday afternoon, October 14. You can buy coffee by the pound and I will also be serving (for free) coffee by the cup -- all from Nicaragua, of course! 

We will be in room 272 from 12:30 to 4:00 on Tuesday, October 14.

MUSICA

During the morning, Nohelia visited both sections of my Planet Sings class to share the music of Tierra Madre and Zircon Skyeband -- bands she has worked with in Nicaragua and Los Angeles, respectively. Both bands involve her friend and fellow Matagalpa Tours guide Hermes, who was kind enough to join us via video for conversation and to play a couple of tunes!

Hermes Montenegro

Album complementos
Video La chica de la rola
Pachamama

Zircon Skyeband
For what is worth
The poor side of town
Heroes 

La Gira Matagalpa 

Documentary Film: Twin Town Blues

Land Protection Books

The purpose of this post is to create a single connection to several books relevant to the protection of land -- especially in New England -- that have been part of my course GEOG 332: Land Protection. I have been teaching the course since 1998, when it still had its original title of Management and Protection of the Natural Environment. I have done my best to build on the legacy of Dr. Reed Stewart, who initially developed the course as a way to convey the lessons he had learned through years of involvement with land trusts and conservation commissions.

For each title mentioned here, I provide a link to the Goodreads entry for the book and to my own Goodreads review of the book -- these are not detailed reviews, but rather brief recommendations that explain the connection of the books to this course.

I could spend an entire year teaching this class, and if I did, I would assign all of these books and more. That being unrealistic, I have always assigned the first two (Foster and Gustanski) and occasionally one additional book at a time. With this post, I am encouraging GEOG 332 students to consider these books for their own reading. 

CURRENTLY REQUIRED

Thoreau's Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape. 1997. David R. Foster 
Goodreads entry -- My review

Protecting the Land: Conservation Easements Past, Present, and Future. 2000. Julie Ann Gustanski, Roderick H. Squires, and Jean Hocker (Foreword)
Goodreads entry -- My review

PREVIOUSLY REQUIRED OR STRONGLY CONSIDERED

Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England. 2002. Diana Muir
Goodreads entry

Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England. 1997. Tom Wessels, Brian D. Cohen, and Ann H. Zwinger
Goodreads entry -- My review 

The Journeys of Trees. 2020. Zach St. George
Goodreads entry -- NPR Story 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. 2013 Robin Wall Kimmerer
Goodreads entry -- My review 

Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. 2005. M. Kat Anderson
Goodreads entry -- My review

LAGNIAPPE: ORGANIZATIONS AND LOCATIONS

In addition to these books, two Massachusetts organizations have been essential to this class: the Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition and the Massachusetts Association of Conservation Commissioners. Both are excellent sources of continuing education for students who may have been introduced to these topics through this course.

Finally, the course has included field trips to two sites that former students tell me have been highlights of their education. Each has a claim to fame as being among the very earliest managed and studied forests in the United States. 

The most ambitious of these outings is Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park in Vermont. It makes for rather an arduous day trip, but the combination of science and art makes it very worthwhile. We have sometimes included a visit to Billings Farm, which is surrounded by the park and was once part of the property. It operates as an independent non-profit organization and shares some programming and resources with the national park. 

Because all federal web sites should be considered unreliable at this time (2025), I am including several extra links about the park: a description on the Billings Farm site, a Wikipedia article, and my own 2000 encyclopedia entry

The other major field trip in the course is a visit to Harvard Forest, of which author David Foster (see above) was the director for many years. I never met Foster, but his colleague John O'Keefe hosted many of my early visits with students before his retirement. I am able to lead reasonably effective visits there because of the combination of his teaching over many visits and the material he published for the Forest. 

In the 25+ years I have been visiting these sites, I have been able to see some ecological change in particular forest areas. More importantly, I have noticed that the organizations managing each of these properties have been building collaborations with researchers, neighbors, and indigenous communities. 

It's Complicated

Last Sunday, our minister recently read the Mary Oliver poem At the River Clarion by Mary Oliver, in preparation for a timely and insightful homily entitled Watershed.  

Although I do not know her work very well, I always enjoy poems by Mary Oliver. One line in particular stood out, leading me to find a nice photo of the poet on which to inscribe it digitally. 

Photo of Oliver and her dog by NYT photographer Angel Valentin,
as part of a story on Oliver's canine poetry by Dana Jennings.

I appreciate this line because it is a reminder of why education in general -- and geographic education in particular -- matters. We go to school only in part because it can help us to prepare for careers. We also study because the world is complicated, with complexities, connections, and paradox that defy easy explanation -- though charlatans are always ready to offer those.

Lagniappe 

As mentioned above, our minister's homily was entitled Watershed -- her thoughts in connection with the UU traditional in-gathering known as a Water Communion. Our congregations return from summer breaks to open the church year by bringing water from the places we have visited/lived/worked/played during the summer. 

At the beginning, she mentioned that she was going to use a watershed analogy, even though she was not an expert. To my mild delight, she singled me out as someone she hoped would not be disappointed in her use of the concept. I was pleased that she recognized that this concept is very much in my realm of expertise, though she could not have known that even among geographers, my involvement with watersheds is kind of extreme. My master's thesis involved thousands of calculations in dozens of watersheds, I worked for several years with my university's watershed program for middle schools, and I teach some very arcane lessons about watershed geometry. 

With all of that said, I can report that our minister succeeded not only in describing what a watershed is, but also in connecting it to a very helpful message about approaching moments of change.

Birds Do It

 ... migrate, that is! 

According to the tracking site BirdCast, this past Tuesday evening saw record-breaking levels of bird migration across North America. 

The map brings two spatial observations to mind. The first is the importance of the 100th meridian (100ºW longitude) -- a line corresponding roughly to the 20-inch isohyet and evident on a surprising variety of North American maps. 

The second is the vivid reminder of the importance of the Rio Grande Valley to migratory birds. When we lived there from 1994 to 1997, we became aware that the greatest bird biodiversity in the country is observed in the handful of counties at the southmost tip of Texas. Several hundred species of birds (more than half of the U.S. total) have been observed in just two locations Aransas National Wildlife Refuge and Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge. 

This map is taken from my Texas County map page, in turn taken from 
my friend who created it for the regional Chamber of Commerce back in the day.

The latter was much closer to our home in Pharr, and we enjoyed a rich diversity of migratory birds there -- a single square mile that was occasional host to about 400 species of birds. Both sites are important because of the overland portion of the flyways converging -- with many birds essentially funneled between the Rocky Mountains and high plains to the west and open water to the east.  Birds following the eastermost flyways tend to do island-hopping as they skirt that side of the Gulf of Mexico.

I include a somewhat outdated map of the Lower Rio Grande Valley for several reasons, even though it does not show these refuges. Aransas NWR is a bit to the northeast -- just beyond the northern end of Padre Island, and Santa Ana is just to the south of Alamo (the town, not the San Antonio fort). What the map does show is that this is a largely urban corridor, with important highways and bridges in every direction -- a real challenge for preserving habitat, even for birds -- and even more importantly for large cats. Every acre of land matters, and I was involved with the Rio Grande Sierra Club in several efforts to preserve what remained. We were especially interested in maintaining corridors of connection between available patches of habitat -- this sometimes required rethinking the construction of bridges so that wildlife could transit under the roadway and along the floodplains. 

It is also worth noting -- for those not familiar with Texas geography -- that the Rio Grande Valley is not a valley at all. Rather, it is the very large, very flat delta of the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo. The lower 100 miles or so of this 1,896-mile river flows through a very large triangle of very flat land. 

Not Just Birds

The migration of birds made living in the Valley even more interesting than it otherwise was; I especially enjoyed certain evenings of my 108-mile commute to the town of Alice during seasons in which scissor-tailed flycatehers or red-tailed hawks would race my car in their hundreds. 

This is also an important corridor for monarch butterflies and was the first point of entry for Africanized "killer" bees, which we did observe at Santa Ana NWR. I knew what they were, because I had been mildly swarmed by during my first visit to the Amazon. This is a sound one does not forget!

Finally, of course, migration across this border by humans is immensely important and is lately the subject of much misinformation, abuse, and misguided wall-building. 

Lagniappe

I am reminded of what Nixon's (criminal) Attorney General John Mitchell had to say on the subject: 

"The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country."

We thought Nixon was the worst -- and at the time he was -- but even he ended up signing many landmark environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

Routes of Enslaved Peoples

 Congratulations to RISD Professor Spencer Evans for his installation at the harbor in Bristol, Rhode Island, entitled Our Ancestors Come with Us. This work was dedicated on August 24 and is the culmination of the Bristol Port Project Marker Project and is now part of Routes of Enslaved Peoples, a global UNESCO network of projects.

It is a good reminder for those of us who are proud of New England's role in the abolition of slavery that New England also played a key part in establishing the cruel institution on this continent.

There is surely more to notice, but what caught my attention was the fact
that each of the elders has a forward foot planted firmly on a stone, while
the youngster is pushing off from a similar stone, propelled to a wide-open future.
Their backs are to the sea as they all face inland.

I created the map below because of my Google Map habit, which leads me to create simple maps when I find articles or web sites that should have a map but do not. On this map, the sites identified as part of the project by UNESCO are shown with blue markers; the red markers are for similar sites not identified on the Routes of Enslaved Peoples web site.

The first of these non-listed sites is very close to my former home in Annapolis, Maryland. I was aware of the significance of the site, as someone who watched Roots when it was first televised, long before I realized I would be living near the landing point of Alex Haley's ancestor, Kunta Kinte. It is embarassing that I was not aware of the memorial there -- very close to where I once had a summer job. I will make a point of visiting next time I am in Maryland.

An artistic commemoration of the horrendous Middle Passage in a very different form was Madonna's 2019 Batuka music video -- a collaboration with the women of Cidade Velha on the island of Santiago, Cabo Verde. This is one of the sites from which Portuguese colonizers transported people in bondage to Brazil. I have had the privilege of visiting during my 2006 and 2024 travel courses to the country. We will always be sure to include this sacred ground in any program in which we bring students to Cape Verde. As of this writing, Cidade Velha is not part of the Routes of Enslaved Peoples project, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Museum Map Detail

 My recent Museum Map post included a snapshot of the map that represents my life list of museums I have visited (to the best of my recollection).  When I wrote it, I mentioned my next intended visit, and I return to the scene of the blogging for just a bit about that.

When zooming in on the museum and national park map to add my visit to Mystic Seaport Museum (courtesy of our CAMM affiliation through the New Bedford Whaling Museum), I noticed that I had omitted another museum in the same general vicinity. It was just over a year ago that we visited a friend and former student who managed the golf course on Fishers Island. As exclusive and private as the island is, it does have host the Henry L. Ferguson Museum, where we were fortunate to have a private tour.

I am including one image from each museum below. For more, see my Flickr folders for Mystic Seaport and Fishers Island.

This mural Or, The Whale by Jos Sances is a highlight of Mystic's temporary exhibit MONSTROUS: Whaling and Its Colossal Impact. It is both massive and intricate -- and worth a visit to the museum just to see it. 

I love finding site-specific maps in museums. This one is an excellent visualization of a lecture I often give about the New England moraines that comprise the Cape and islands -- from Nantucket to Long Island. It shows that Fisher Island and all the others were about 50 miles inland from the Atlantic coast at the time they were built by retreating glaciers.

Wherever you live or travel -- especially in the United States right now -- please support museums. The better the museum, the more likely it is under attack these days. And be sure to visit often -- most museums host both permanent and temporary exhibits. 

Museum Map

I look forward to adding one marker to my museum life-list map today! When knowledge is under attack (see below), learning is productive resistance. 

My visit will be to the Mystic Seaport Museum in coastal Connecticut. Admission is covered by my family's membership in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which we visit frequently.

I have actually been on the property before, when the museum hosted a whaleboat race in 2017. My team did not win, but we did place ahead of the museum's house team! I look forward to the museum's latest special exhibit on the monstrous impact of whaling.

The museums I have visited so far (and can remember). This is the red layer
from my National Parks and Museums Life List map.
Other layers are purple for national parks (also under attack) 
and yellow for my most important park and museum aspirations.

As of this writing in August of 2025, the felonious president of the United States has decided to direct his incoherent fury at museums in general and our best museums (the Smithsonian) in particular. Of course, he is not curious or literate enough to have any direct experience with the museums he is attacking, but Stephen Miller has apparently decided that now is the time to go after the places he hates most.

My family is grateful for museums and we will continue to support them!

Growing Old Growth

My introductory environmental geography course concludes with an assignment that sends students to the archives of Sierra, the little-known magazine published by the better-known club. The magazine began as a monthly bulletin in 1893, just a year after John Muir started the organization; it was published as a glossy bimonthly magazine when I was most active in the Club back in the 1990s and continues as a quarterly magazine today -- online and in print. 

Amazingly, the archives are now available back to the January 1950 issue (much earlier than was the case even a few years ago). It serves as a rich trove of environmental journalism on all manner of topics related to the protection of land, air, and water.  

I learn a lot any time I browse those archives and I tell myself I should try to keep up with the current editions. I rarely find time to do either, however, so I an glad for the reports from my students, who invariably find articles I really need to read! 

The latest example is "The Future Is Old Growth" by Krista Langlois. 

Photo: Mitch Epstein via Sierra

I decided I needed to read the article when the student who reviewed it mentioned a quote from David Foster, who is the author of Thoreau's Country, one of the books I use in an upper-level course. Small world of environmental geography! Foster's book was published in 1999, just as I was beginning to teach a course I would later rename Land Protection. At the time, he was the director of Harvard Forest, which my students and I were fortunate enough to visit several times with John O'Keefe, a forest ecologist who continued to host our visits for a number of years after his retirement. The combination of Foster's book and O'Keefe's many walks in the woods -- combined with a few sessions with more recent staff -- have allowed me to lead many student visits there in recent years. 

As I read the article, I saw quite a few references to Harvard Forest before seeing the mention of David Foster, who is not mentioned as the director, but rather by his affiliation with an initiative known as Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands, and Communities (again: very geographic!).

The article begins with someone who currently works at Harvard Forest. Erik Danielson is a self-taught dendrochronologist whose hobby is finding really big, really old trees. In the process, he has found patches of old-growth forest that have completely escaped the notice of other forestry experts. The article suggests, in fact, that Harvard Forest has purchased such a patch, about 30 miles north of its main properties. 

The article is a nice introduction to a central theme of my course and Foster's writing, which is that the reforesting of North America in general and New England in particular has continued since Thoreau's time but obscures the fact that almost all of the forests we see today are on land that was cleared for agriculture. Langlois goes a bit further, mentioning that much of what we see has been cleared again after its second growth. And maybe even again after that! 

She then reports on some of the scholarship around those old-growth patches that do remain, and some disagreements over exactly how they should be managed -- or perhaps benignly neglected. A familiar concept that she mentions is the effort to develop corridors of protected forests to maximize the resilience benefits of the genetic diversity contained in these relict patches. 

She also mentions -- though not by name -- the importance of buffer zones around the old-growth areas. I have thought -- and taught -- about buffers as a way to protect the integrity of key habitats. This is what the Massachusetts Biomap program calls Critical Natural Landscape. This article suggests a subtly different use of buffer zones. Second- and third-growth forests that surround old-growth forests can not only protect those rare patches: they can also provide a matrix into which they can expand. This cannot be true in a literal sense -- we cannot have new growth of old trees. But some ecologists are arguing that if left alone and surrounded by protected land, an expanded area could exhibit the essential characteristics of old-growth. 

Please read the entire article -- especially if you are in my Land Protection course -- for more insights about the spatial dimensions of forest ecology and forest protection.

Lagniappe: Coffee Connection

I plan to follow up with some of the Harvard Forest experts Langlois mentions, because there may be a benefit for coffee growers. My next sabbatical will be devoted to coffee on the island of Fogo in Cabo Verde. During my preliminary visit in 2024, I learned that a large proportion of the islands small coffee crop is harvested from trees that are over 100 years old. It is, of course, impossible to plant new 100-year old trees. But perhaps some lesson from Harvard Forest will provide benefits from those who work with those century trees. 

My Fogo Sabbatical

Talking Coffee with
Cabo Verdean President Neves

In these challenging times for education in general and public higher education in particular, I am especially grateful that my university continues to provide sabbaticals for its tenure-track faculty and librarians. Pending final approval, my next (and final) sabbatical will be in the country of Cape Verde, primarily on the island of Fogo. I had the good fortune to visit with a travel course in January 2024 and look forward to returning for the entire Spring 2027 semester. 

I look at this as an 80/20 project, with the majority of my effort to be devoted to projects related to coffee but with attention also paid to the heritage of whaling. Ultimately, we might have the opportunity to bring recreational whaleboat rowing and racing to a country that has been a key part of whaling history and geography. 

I provide this blogpost as a way to share my project with friends and colleagues who may be interested in involvement with one or both of these projects. For now (August 2025), I provide a link to my full sabbatical proposal, whose abstract I present below. 

ABSTRACT

Cape Verde is an archipelago with deep connections to southeastern Massachusetts in general and with Bridgewater State University in particular. This sabbatical proposal describes two projects that arise from my two decades of work with the country and drawing upon two of my areas of interest. The major project is to learn more about the important but little-documented coffee industry of Cape Verde, particularly on the island of Fogo. An extended stay during the harvest season will allow me to continue sharing a global perspective on coffee with the country’s growers, processors, and policymakers. It will also allow me to learn details of Cape Verde’s unique coffee industry and to bring that story and the actual coffee to the attention of industry leaders in the United States. A secondary project intends to use recreational whaleboat rowing and sailing as a way to promote learning about Cape Verde’s maritime heritage.  

LAGNIAPPE 

This sabbatical is planned for the middle of the three-year period comprising the last three years of my tenure as a BSU faculty member and with the first three years of being a full-time resident of the New Bedford area (living across the harbor in Fairhaven). 

I am fortunate that there are several ways in which I can use this time to focus on connections between this region and Cape Verde and also the rest of Macaronesia. I am including some of those connections here, for the convenience of friends and colleagues who might be connecting in some way with my planned travel. 

Hotel Papel is a new organization that builds cultural connections through informal language programs and through the sponsorship of residencies for artists. 

Cape Verde is a nexus of many kinds of connection across the entire Atlantic world. I plan to devote a lot of my time to a singular place that is the most specific point of connection -- Cidade Velha. The very brief Grand Canyon video I recorded in 2024 is an attempt to convey the importance of this place.