Confluência de Confluencias

I decided to write the title of this post in Portunhol because the confluence desribed below is of rivers that are shared by speakers of both Portuguese and Spanish. (Caution: very nerdy linguistic details ahead) I considered using CONFLENCIA instead, since typing in all capital letters is a way to avoid accent marks, and the spelling in the two languages differs by a single diactrical mark. This is why most shirts and bags I order from LL Bean are embroidered with GEOGRAFIA. In doing two minutes of research on the subject I found one article supporting the all-caps convention and another article condemning it.

Now back to the geography. A confluence is simply the place where two rivers meet. I have been writing about specific confluences for some while, and this new post will serve as a confluence of those confluence posts -- hence "Confluence of Confluences" in the title. I was brought to the subject by this image, from the Facebook group Fatos y coriosidades (Facts and curiosities). 

The caption translates to: 

There exists an extremely symbolic point in South America where three nations are found in just one place: Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. It is the famous Triple Frontier, marked by the confluence of the Iguaçu and Paraná Rivers. On one side is Iguaçu Falls (Brazil), on the other Port Iguazú (Argentina) and, to the west, City of the East (Paraguay). This place is impressive not only for its geography, but also for the intence cultural and commercial integration among the three countries.

And here is an intriguing curiosity: in each country there is an obelisk painted with the colors of the national flag, positioned in a way that each can be seen from the other two -- a true triangle of frontiers visible to the naked eye. 

Tríplice Fronteira - Foz do Iguaçu (Brasil), Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) e Ciudad del Este (Paraguai)

In addition to the curiosities mentioned in the original post, I noticed that the confluence at the Triple Frontier exhibits a characteristic that is fairly uncommon among the millions of riparian conflences in the world: the two rivers retain distinct coloration because of different sediment loads and relatively slow mixing currents.

The most significant example of a non-mixing confluence is known (sometimes) as the Wedding of the Waters, also in Brazil. In this case, the waters of several countries come together, but no national boundaries are to be found for hundreds of miles up any of the hundreds of streams represented by the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões at Manaus. For this geography nerd, the Amazon begins at this confluence, though an increasing number of maps apply the word "Amazon" to the lower portion as well as the entire length of the Solimões.

In this video posted in 2011, Florida Aquariam educator Allan Marshall goes all in with an explanation of what makes this confluence so special.

Prior to seeing this video, I had no idea that the river was so deep. I knew about the temperature difference between the two rivers, but I did not fully understand the reasons. The waters are flowing from regions with very different climates, so they begin with very different temperatures. It so happens that the waters that start of cooler also have the higher reflectivity, helping them to remain cooler all the way to the center of the Amazon Basin.

And Now for Those Confluences

As I suggest above, confluences have had my attention for some while. In order to finish this post in a relatively timely fashion, I will just point to some of the other material I have posted on the topic. Some of these posts include links to still other posts. So if you get lost on the morass, I apologize ...

Wedding of the Waters is a 2015 post I created for the blog that I was maintaining back then as part of our Project EarthView outreach program. It includes a link to the video above and a bit of context about the entire basin.

Confluences is a 2015 post on this blog (Environmental Geography) that I created after I was delighted to find an article about ten visually interesting confluences around the world. My post includes a link to that original article as well as my own contribution: a Google map showing all of those intersections in one view. I have now amended that map to include the Triple Frontier.

Down the Creek is a 2023 post about the Rio Madeira, the longest of the Amazon's 1,300+ tributaries. Madeira Playlists points readers to photos and videos from my 2023 voyage from Porto Velho to Manaus, ending with my own closeup views of the Wedding of the Waters.

And finally, my six-part course Amazônia: Fables to Forests includes a slide set entitled Tributaries and Confluences. These are the maps and illustrations I use for an entire lecture on the hydrography of the Amazon Basin itself. 

Lagniappe

This bonus bit is for students in my environmental classes who just happen to like the sound of a phrase, that is a speciality of both geology and geography and that was a big part of my master's thesis and that has kept me interested in the form and function of rivers for many years. This is for them, if they happen to be reading this:

FLUVIAL GEOMORPHOLOGY

Neither Geo nor Duck

 My daily routine includes several of the New York Times puzzles. This habit serves three purposes, as far as I can tell. It is perhaps keeping my aging brain a little sharper. It helps me to come slowly to consciousness each morning as I very slowly sip each day's first carefully crafted, free-range cup of coffee. And it allows me to procrastinate on any actual puzzles I might need to tackle. Bonus: I can procrastinate further by sharing results online -- it helps me to touch base with the nerdiest of my many nerdy friends. 

Some puzzles I do every day, and some I do never. My favorites are the inevitable Wordle and the obscure but lovable Strands.  This post is about yesterday's Connections. This is one that I try about half of the time, and that I solve about half of those times. And it is the best one for kvetching with friends online. Nobody who plays this game fails to complain about it sometimes. 

A brief explanation is in order for those who have managed not to get sucked into the Connections orbit. Each puzzle is an array of 16 words or short phrases. The player is to put them into four groups of four, each of which shows up as a colored square -- in the final results, correct groupings appear as color bars.

The purple bar is always the most difficult and garners the most discussion. The groupings tend not to be very obvious -- otherwise this would not be a possible. But the purple group is sometimes not obvious even after it has been chosen correctly by default. For example, they might belong together only if a common syllable were to be added or maybe even a rhyming word substituted.

I might grumble about that last, purple category. But if I fail at the puzzle, it is not because of that group, which comes together automatically if I have gotten the other four. So winning or losing is, for me, a measure of just how mentally sharp I am that day. I often "brag" about one-day streaks as a result.

Yesterday, the entire puzzle came to me quickly. Four solid bars means I had no missed guesses. I posted the "results" online in the usual way, which means that the achievement is shown but without the actual words.

Clearly a win, but with the most difficult group last, which is typical. And now for the real point of this rather rambling blog post: the actual results. It is safe to post this now because the original game has moved to the next round in all time zones.

Neither of the librarians in my house plays this puzzle -- even though it is all about categories -- but I shared the results with both of them. To my son, I had texted, "So geoduck is a thing, and it is not a duck at all." His response was priceless: "Yes, I am familiar with the geoduck. Why do you mention it? haha." He knows a lot about unusual foods and animals. 

I answered, "It was a puzzle answer and I assumed it was a duck, not a weird-ass clam." I had learned this, of course, from a google search. See whether you agree with my description.

Image: Oceana

Weird or not, they are apparently sought after, commanding prices as high as $150. The name derives neither from geography (my posting this nonsense on a geography blog) nor waterfowl. It comes from the clam's name in the Lushootseed language spoken in the Puget Sound area. The clam is found on the West Coast of North America from the Aleutians to Baja California.

And now for the other librarian response. Pamela noticed that not only are geoduck, seahorse, titmouse, and wombat animal names that end with other animal names, but that none of them are the same kind of animal as the second part of the name suggests. Sounding like kinds of a duck, horse, mouse, or bat, they are in fact a clam, a fish, a bird, and a marsupial. That is some professional-level librarian thinking!

Lagniappe: For the Nerds

In the course of looking for yesterday's puzzle outcome, I found my overall statistics for this game. According to the. NYT app, I've done a bit better at this than I thought. I have even gotten the purple category first 15 times. I think most of those were before I even realized it was always the most obscure category.

It could also be that like Reagan-era unemployment numbers, days that I open the puzzle and don't guess at all are viewed as "discouraged puzzler" days and are not counted. 

Johnstown Flood

Millionaires & Billionaires Who Did Not Give a Dam

I already knew something about the Johnstown Flood of 1889 because of my interest in floods and small reservoirs generally, and because of a long-ago NPR interview on the subject that is apparently no longer available. I learned so much more, however, from the recent Johnstown Flood episode on National Park After Dark. I highly recommend the NPAD version of this story to anybody who is interested in the intersection of environmental justice and hydrology.

Some related images are on the NPAD post on Facebook; the episode can be heard on Spotify as Episode 311 of the NPAD podcast. The flood became a subject for this blog because the event is commemorated at a National Park site. The Johnstown Flood National Memorial is located several miles to the east of the city.

The podcast episode includes a rich description of what was lost in the flood, how, and why. I did know that the neglect of the upstream reservoir's owner was responsible for the flood. I did not realize just how many warnings there had been, nor how the owners had modified the existing dam in a way that made it more suitable for their recreation preferences but also much less safe. I also did not realize that the flood waters entrained so much debris -- including an entire barbed-wire factory -- that it was more like a marauding monster than a wave of water by the time it reached downtown. And finally -- spoiler alert -- I did not realize the important role of Unitarian Clara Barton and the American Red Cross. 

As with many podcasts, NPAD is recorded about a week before it is released. Because it often discusses traumatic events, this is not the first time that the producers have had to add a disclaimer when releasing the broadcast, because it touches on similar traumatic events that are very current. In this case, disclaimers were added at the beginning and end of the program. The first is because of the very deadly and highly politicized floods in Central Texas. The second is because the release date would coincide with the one- and two-year anniversaries of floods in Vermont, very neaer the home of one of the hosts. They could not have known that severe flooding has now taken place in Vermont on the same date THREE years in a row. 

As of this writing, the official web site of the Johnstown Flood National Memorial includes many details about the disaster, including a list of every member of the sporting club that was responsible. As with all U.S. government sites, it is now subject to revision and censorship. 

The web site also includes a land-protection story I did not expect: the effort to restore the bed of the South Fork Lake to its post-flood condition. Trees were removed by machinery and goats were employed to remove brush. I am reminded of a similar project at our own home in 2013, when we rented goats to remove brambles and poison ivy. 

Goat Junior Rangers. I believe the donkey is employed to protect them from hawks and coyotes.

Other Flooding-Related Posts on this Blog

Rio Doce 2015

Flood Flash 2016

Burying the Survivors 2018

Flooding: It's Not in the Cards 2018 -- in which I explain in detail why we should stop using terms like "100 year flood" already.

Dam Shame 2020

Bonus: Haunting My Old Haunts 2012 -- not about flooding, but about the place whose flooding I discuss in several of the later posts.

Cape Verde at the Whaling Museum

Southeastern Massachusetts and neighboring Rhode Island is the most Lusophone region in the United States. Our longstanding connections to Cape Verde, the Azores, and other Portuguese-speaking lands have their origins in whaling industry. For this reason, the New Bedford Whaling Museum (of which my family has been a supporting member for a number of years) has substantial permanent and temporary exhibits about these regions and strong connections to local Cape Verdean and Azorian communities.

Permanent exhibits about whaling in these two Atlantic archipelagos occupy more than half of the upper level of the Lagoda room -- whose main level features the world's largest model ship.

Cape Verde flag of 1975 - 1992
From my Morabeza exhibit album on Flickr

This post, however, is about two important temporary exhibits. As of this writing, I have spent some time with Morabeza: Cape Verdean Community in the South Coast (running May 24, 2025 through February 26, 2026). Some of my own impressions of this exhibit are in the captions of a few photos I have posted from my first visit. I will be returning to learn more, particularly about this local community's contributions to music at the national and global level. 

As of this writing, I am still looking forward to another exhibit, opening at the end of this week. Claridade: Cape Verdean Identity in Contemporary Art will run from the evening of May 13 through December 7, 2025. I will have much more to share about it after I attend the opening reception. 

Both of these exhibitions honor the 50th anniversary of Cape Verde's independence from Portugal.

Lagniappe

For much more on regional connections with Cape Verde, please visit the Cape Cod Cape Verdean Museum and Cultural Center in Falmouth. It includes a kiosk exhibit developed by one of my former students; her work is also available online as Tale of Two Capes. I learned very much from the minor role I played in that project -- particularly from CCCV founder Barbara Burgo.

Wherefore the Sirens?

Browsing Netflix offerings recently, we noticed a limited series called Sirens. The title alone lured us in (as it were), since I am an honorary member of a whaleboat rowing team called the Sirenes. Honorary member means that I often fill in as a substitute on this all-women's team so that they have a full boat. Sometimes I even get to race with them. 

In any case, the title and vaguely nautical vibes were enough to get us watching. It was a vague echo of the Nicole Kidman vehicle The Perfect Couple, a 2024 Netflix production that was set on Nantucket. Although we have not been there recently, this is a favorite haunt of ours, the only place in the United States that is an island, a county, and a town.

This show that clearly intended to depict Nantucket,  Characters came and went by ferry. One of them had a 17-hour trip from Buffalo. There were a lot of rich, white people and gray houses with white trim. A cute little downtown with big mansions a short drive away. Eventually, a neighborhood and a gulf course on Nantucket were named. But the writers and directors worked very hard not to mention it directly.

We were well into the series when Pam's keen eye caught a sign on the side of shop in said cute little town (creatively dubbed Harbor Town), and on the sign was carved its purported latitude and longitude. 

I took this photo of the screen -- both because the image was fleeting and the resolution low -- and went right to Google Maps. Incidentally, I was glad to see the degree-minutes-seconds format, which said Google Maps is making increasingly rare, and I note that even if correct, it is far more precise than accurate. By that I mean that four decimal places in the expression of a second of latitude or longitude equates to about 1/8 of an inch, which is smaller than the decimal point in use. 

Anyway, enough of the suspense. These coordinates are a bit out to sea, almost as far from Nantucket as the island is wide. But it is clearly the nearest landmass, so the carving was clearly intentional.

We are reminded of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which the latitude and longitude of Grover's Corners describes a point in the Atlantic close to New Hampshire but not in any real state.

As for the filming location of Sirens, IMDb indicates that it is North Fork, New York. That is, the North Fork of the eastern end of Long Island. It has a cultural geography and vernacular landscape similar to Nantucket. The physical landscape is also similar, given that both are terminal moraines formed by side by side at the end of the last ice age and later surrounded by rising ocean as the glaciers that formed them continued to melt. 

Africa Book Club

The World Book Club is one of my favorite BBC programs. Or should I write programmes?

Harriett Gilbert: A third-generation writer who does her research!

Its entire two decades of episodes are now available as a podcast, and I find myself listening frequently. Because I am prone to fumbling my podcast app, I often hear an episode several times, and I do not mind at all. I have read only a small fraction of the books under discussion, but I find that presenter Harriett Gilbert leads an entertaining and profoundly educational discussion with every participating author. I will enjoy an episode even if I have heard it recently.

The World Book Club is appropriately named. Each month a book is selected and announced so that readers have a chance to read the book and send in questions. The author then meets with the presenter and invited guests in person, usually at BBC's Bush House in London. The author is then introduced, always taking note of awards won and the number of languages into which their work has been translated. 

Gilbert and her team then curate questions from the live audience, from emailed questions, and from phone calls, along with her own questions that arise from her expert reading of the work. I use the term "curate" because the questions tend to follow a very helpful pattern, with general questions that might be asked of any writer near the beginning, followed by increasingly detailed and sophisticated questions that would arise only from a careful reading.

Gilbert graciously acknowledges each question, sometimes adding an expert edit as she repeats it, and always acknowledging mentioning where the caller or writer is from. And because she is a BBC journalist, she always pronounces names of both people and places correctly! In any given discussion,  it is likely that people from at least three continents will have participated. 

The list below is from all of the episodes for which I could readily connect the author to the African continent. Most of these are novels set somewhere in Africa and written by African authors. I have listed only one country as a kind of shorthand -- listen to the episodes to learn that many of these authors call several countries home and that many of the books are set in multiple places -- or in some cases fictional countries. Moreover, as is often the case, these episodes have a focus on one book, but with some authors a broader body of work enters th conversation.

Each entry below includes a link to a BBC page and/or a Spotify page as available. I also include dates of each author's life and each novel's publication.

February 2002 - Zimbabwe
Chenjerai Hove (1956 - 2015) Ancestors (1997)
(Spotify)
This is just the third episode of World Book Club -- the interest in Africa comes early in this series. It is just a conversation between the author and the host -- there were no questions from audience yet.

December 2002 - Nigeria

Ben Okri (1959 - ) The Famished Road (1991)

(Spotify)

July 2004 - South Africa

Gillian Slovo (1952 - ) Red Dust (2000)

(Spotify)

August 2005 - South Africa

Andre Brink (1935-2015) A Dry White Season (1979) 

(Spotify) Film adaptation in 1989: IMDb

This is an episode I will share in my Africa course -- it includes a bit of a meta converstation that connects to my own work as an educator and to my spouse's academic expertise as a librarian.

December 2006 - Ghana

William Boyd (1952 - ) Brazzaville Beach (1990)

(Spotify)

May 2007 - Nigeria 

Wole Soyinka (1934 - ) Ake: The Years of Childhood (1989)

Most books on this programme are novels, but this is the author's memoir. 

(Spotify) 

July 2008 - Nigeria

Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013) Things Fall Apart (1958)

(Spotify)

June 2009 - Nigeria

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977 - ) Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

(Spotify)

I have read two of Adichie's novels, and have sometimes assigned Half of a Yellow Sun in my Africa survey course. Her TED Talk is an important part of my teaching and has had over 14 million views on YouTube. I recommend her novel Americanah as well.

November 2009 - Egypt

Alaa Al Aswany (1957 - ) The Yacoubian Building (2009)

(Spotify)

April 2010 - Western Sahara/Mauritius

J.M.G. Le Clezio (1957 - ) Desert (2012)

(Spotify)

December 2010 - South Africa

Damon Galgut (1963 - ) The Good Doctor (2003)

(Spotify)

September 2011 - Libya

Hisham Matar (1970 - ) In The Country Of Men (2006)

(Spotify)

December 2015 - Sudan

Leila Aboulela (1964 - ) Minaret (2005)

(Spotify)

April 2016 - Somalia

Nuruddin Farah (1945 - ) Maps (1986)

(Spotify)

March 2019 - Kenya

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938 - 2025) A Grain of Wheat (1967)

This episode was actually recorded in a Nairobi bookshop.

(Spotify)

UPDATE: The author died in May 2025. Please see the BBC obituary Giant of African literature to learn more about his contribution to post-colonial literature, the price he and his family paid for his writing, his connections to other writers mentioned on this post, and allegations about his own domestic behavior.

August 2019 - Nigeria

Chigozie Obioma (1986 - ) The Fishermen (2015)

(Spotify)

February 2020 - Zimbabwe

Petina Gappah (1971 - ) The Book of Memory (2015)

(Spotify)

December 2020 - Ghana

Yaa Gyasi (1989 - ) Homegoing (2016)

(Spotify)

March 2021 - Zimbabwe

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959 - ) Nervous Conditions (1988)

(Spotify)

October 2021 - Nigeria

Wole Soyinka (1934 - ) Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth (2021)

This interview celebrates the author's third novel -- written 50 years after his second.

(Spotify)

April 2022 - Zimbabwe

NoViolet Bulawayo (1981 - ) We Need New Names (2013)

(Spotify)

May 2025 - Tanzania

Abdulrazak Gurnah (1948 - ) Paradise (1994)

(Spotify)

This list includes an average of about one episode per year with an African author. I could not help but do a bit of geographic math. If the continents were represented according to population, there would be about two per year from Africa. Authors of Asia and Latin America appear with similar frequency. This being a British production in English, the United States and United Kingdom probably account for half of the episodes.

I am reminded of Ann Morgan's 2015 book The World Between Two Covers, which my librarian spouse and I read together in 2019. Morgan describes a year spent reading one book published in English in each of the world's countries. It was more complicated than she anticipated, and helps to explain why some countries are much better represented than others on the list above.

Passing of the First Argentine Pope

 

When speaking with my students about the legacy of the first Latin American pope -- who was born in Buenos Aires -- I will begin class with this example of music that he loved: the tango.

I thought to do this while listening to a remembrance of Pope Francis by NPR journalist Sylvia Poggioli. I am highlighting it Poggioli's reporting because she speaks specifically about the geographic context of his life story and papacy.

It is just one of several interesting stories about the pope's passing on the April 21 edition of the morning program.

I also recommend a couple of early items about the inevitable political connotations. With 1.4 billion adherents in every part of the earth and of all political persuasions, interactions between politicians and the head of the smallest state and the largest religion are notable. I noticed an interesting article -- with a bit of video -- about his awkwarrd visit with U.S. Vice President Vance, who turned out to be one of the last people to see him alive. The other is a NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly interviewing former House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi about her four visits with Pope Francis over the years.

Nantucket Atheneum

 "As I made many journeys there, I began to speak to the people of the town, and once I walked in merely to attend a lecture at the Atheneum. Nantucket Town was a pleasant plae, with many independent and intelligent women. When men were home from the sea, they were happy to socialize along with their wives. I much liked the gabbiness of the town, for the talk was not mere gossip but of ideas and politics, spiced with the customs and sights from all around the globe."

-- Ahab's Wife or, the Star-Gazer p. 337 (end of chapter 77)

The Coffee Maven prior to a 2007 Atheneum appearance

The passage above is near the middle of Sena Jeter Naslund's 1999 novel, which could be called Moby Dick fan fiction. As with the original novel, it has much to do with New Bedford and Nantucket but also oceans a world away. I am a slow reader and this is something of a slow book. I have enjoyed it as a mood piece over the past several years, during stays at our weekend place that we have dubbed Whaling House. 

I was away from the house and the book for nearly a year as the house was renovated as our full-time home. Now that the dust has literally settled, I have dipped back into this book, savoring a few pages at a time. This is just the kind of novel -- or film -- I enjoy most: rich in texture, characters, and atmosphere. 

I read this passage aloud to my librarian spouse and share it again here because it mentions something we have actually done together. In 2007, we delivered a lecture at the Atheneum. This was very early in my time as a public scholar of coffee, and it was a delight to be ferried over to the island to talk about our travels to the coffeelands of Nicaragua. What better place for a local talk on a global topic? 

I think it was from this experience that I learned that Atheneum usually refers to a private library, but in this case, the Atheneum serves as the public library for Nantucket. (Geographic note: although the Atheneum is in the densely-settled area near the harbor that is considered Nantucket Town, it is the case that Nantucket is a town, a county, and an island -- all occupying the same exact space.)

Our dear friend Nancy had grown up near the Atheneum and was a clerk there for many years. She played a big role in organizing lectures and hosting the speakers at her family's guest house. She also arranged for us to give related presentations at nearby schools, which I describe on my old coffee outreach page. 

The excerpt above mentions a few other things of interest. One is that when it was the global center of the whaling industry, women ran their households and the town. It also was a tiny place with global connections, much as its successor New Bedford became. Travel broadens the mind and globally diverse communities like these are good for the mind.

Which leads to the last point -- conversation is more interesting when we have diverse experiences to share. And it was a casual conversation on a street corner a couple blocks from the Atheneum that made Moby Dick possible. 

Lagniappe

Happy National Library Week to those who celebrate -- which should be all of us. My slow reading of Ahab's Wife brought me to the Atheneum passage on the first day of the 2025 celebration.

I am immensely proud of both librarians in my house. My wife Pamela has worked in every kind of library -- academic, corporate, and public -- both as a professional and as a volunteer. 

Our son Harvey has worked in a few libraries and archives and is now an outstanding student of library science at the University of Rhode Island. He is keenly interested in seeing that everybody has access to libraries. 

Libraries are among the public institutions most directly under attack here in the United States. Our family stands firmly for the freedom to read.

Citizen Science for the Birds

I have been an NPR nerd long enough to have fond memories of listening to Talk of the Nation whenever I had free afternoons, and especially on my way to carpool duty. It was a five-day program similar to Fresh Air,  and probably adjacent on our local schedule. 

I was sad when TotN ended, but glad that it only ended by 80 percent. That is to say, it retained  one day a week of programming. Fridays had been dedicated to fun and informative conversations about science, and Ira Flatow has continued that part under the name Science Friday. A decade or so on, he continues to bring great energy and enthusiasm to conversations with scientists, science educators, and science journalists of many kinds, working at all scales from the subatomic to the galactic. 

I particularly enjoyed his recent conversation about citizen science with Dr. Brooke Bateman and Dr. Janet Ng, who have been involved in the longest-running such project: the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. I believe I first learned about the count around the time I moved to Massachusetts, when I noticed local results in a newspaper a couple of days after Christmas. 

Photo: Shutterstock by way of Science Friday

I knew that it was much bigger than that, but it was only from the recent 17-minute segment What Scientists Have Learned From 125 Years Of Bird Counts that I learned how much bigger. The Doctors Ng and Bateman discuss their very different roles in science and policy, along with their very similar roles as two of the 80,000 people who did the actual counting this year. 

They also share the charming story of how this all began and the culture of cooperation and mentoring that has grown with this tradition. Some people have just done this for the first time, while others have been leaders in their local communities for more than 50 years in a row. Everybody is welcome, including people with limited mobility and limited (even zero) expertise. 

I invite readers to listen to the entire discussion for some examples of just what is being gained from the gathering, mapping, and analysis of these avian observations. Some of it is worrisome and some of it encouraging; all of it is fascinating. I will be using it both in my Environmental Geography survey course and in my advanced Land Protection course. The former emphasizes global climate change and the latter local landscape change; each course could use this healthy dose of both. And I am pleased that my good friend Geography Jeff will be using it in his Environmental Planning course at another school.

Lagniappe

Fresh Air with Terry Gross & Tanya Moseley continues to thrive five days a week. I have been listening pretty regularly since before it moved up from WHYY to NPR, and
I am glad that Terry Gross has worked so hard to cultivate a co-host who is allowing her gradually to transition toward a well deserved but as-yet unannounced retirement. 

Dam Expertise

I have been enjoying the work of journalist Ayesha Rascoe since she became host of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and this morning she uttered a phrase that endeared her to me even further.

"Your expertise is in geography," she said in the middle of a conversation about a proposed hydroelectric project in China with professor Mark Giordano, of Georgetown Univerity's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Their brief conversation draws on geography to clarify many of the physic and human implications of China's proposal to build a hydroelectric dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo River.

Map: Wikipedia

One odd oversight is that they do not. name the river directly, though Professor Giordano does explain several things about its geography that make this project both desirable and problematic, particularly for India and Tibet. In addition to this NPR interview, I recommend a recent BBC report for further background.