#NationalAuthorsDay

(Thanks to my CyberNavigator son Harvey for helping me to fix the colors on this post.)

Not only is it El Día de los Muertos, but it is also National Author's Day. Followers of this space will know that I have great respect not only for those who write books but also for the librarians who care for books in particular and the written word in general. This is an important moment to recognize the importance of all writers, and especially those whose work is seen as too dangerous by some politicians. 

NOTE: This blog post is taking some while! I have listed authors in alphabetical order and have written something about the work for which they are best known and/or the ways I have met them. I am posting it in incomplete form so that friends can read some of what I have to say. There will be updates over this November 1-2 weekend. 

It was in 2017 that I decided to post online a list of authors I had met over the years. In some cases, I was fortunate simply to be seated in an audience for a talk. In other cases, however, I had occasion to speak directly with the writer, perhaps at a book-signing table. This happened so many times with David Sedaris that he began to recognize us. 

In still other cases -- more often than I really deserve -- I actually spent time with these great thinkers outside of the formal lecture. Most often, this was by association: my spouse the librarian was involved in organizing author talks (and dinners) at part of Bridgewater's One Book One Community program, and I was able to crash a dinner before the talk. This is an important way in which I have been far luckier in life than I deserve to be!

Herewith, all of the authors I can think of at the moment. In most cases, I have posted a link from the author's name to their GoodReads profile. In some cases, I have added a link to my own brief comments about one or more of their works.)

Julia Alvarez -- I created an earlier version of this list as a sort of online studnt, in which I listed authors I had met, plus one I had not. Julia Alvarez was the missing author on that list, because she was one of the authors I would most WANT to meet. I still have not met her in person exactly, but I have attended a virtual author talk she gave as a webinar. She is a professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, so I thought our paths might cross some day as fellow Latin Americanists in New England. She is probably best known for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, but two of her other works have been important to me A Cafecito Story: El Cuento del Cafecito is a love story that is inspired by the author's own coffee farm in the Dominican Republic. Her barely fictionalized novel In the Time of the Butterflies, however, is far more important even than the coffee book. This recounts the unbelievable but completely true story of the martyrdom of the Maribel sisters, also in the Dominican Republic. It remains one of the most important works on the notorious Trujillo dictatorship and the resistance that eventually brought down his reign of terror. This is a case in which the film adaptation-- with Edward James Olmos as the bad guy-- is nearly as good the book.  

Maya Angelou --

Michael Blanding -- We traveled to the State Library of Massachusetts to hear Blanding speak. That beautiful library is in the State House on Beacon Hill and is a must-visit for any Bay Stater. If you do go up there, please be sure to look for the giant ruler in a hallway nearby. I cannot remember whether it is 50 feet or 100 feet long, but it was installed to ensure consistent measurements of distance and area in the Commonwealth. We were there for Blanding's discussion of The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps. We agree that it is a gripping story. The audacity of the crime spree he describes was astounding to librarian and geographer alike!

Noam Chomsky

Dean Cycon -- Plot twist! The first time I met Dean in person was at a talk about his book Javatrekke, which sadly is out of print now. His memoir of life as a coffee importer. is the definiitive work on the need for genuine fair trade in coffee. I have assigned the bookto hundreds of students and have given away dozens of copy. The plot twist is that I was the one who gave that author talk. His local library had asked him to give two talks -- one at each of its branches -- and he agreed to do one and asked me to do the other. After it was settled, he decided to show up for the beginning of it and to bring coffee. It was a bit nervous-making to give a talk about a book with the author present, but he was gracious and I did bring a useful geographic perspective

Harm de Blij -- The family of Harm de Blij (du-BLAY) left the Netherlands on the eve of World War II, finding refuge in South Africa. He eventually came to the United States and became this country's most prolific academic geographer. He was a professor at several universities at the same time and published more than a dozen editions each of several of the most widely-used texts in our field. He also published at least a hundred academic papers and served as an on-air geographer for Good Morning America. In his spare time, he wrote 1,000 letters to editors each year to point out geographic errors in their publications. All of this was done with a blend of kindness, curiosity, confidence, and clarity that we are unlikely ever to see again. We are very fortunate that he was a great friend of our geography department and visited us twice. His work continues as those earlier textbooks continue to be revised by other scholars. Among his work for general audiences, I particularly recommend The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape.

Dr. Harm de Blij during his 2009 visit to Bridgewater State College. 
This photo is from a 2014 obituary post on our department blog.

Junot Díaz -- he was as gracious in his individual comments with my students as he was profane in his general remarks. We were fortunate that my librarian spouse was able to arrange his campus visit just before he started winning MAJOR awards, and that he was kind enough to honor that agreement and its relatively modest fee. My comments on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are brief, but the book had a big impact.

Barbara Ehrenreich -- I don't think I had heard of Barbara Ehrenreich before her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America came out and she visited our campus as a One Book One Community program. The book and the visit were memorable. We often say in our house that the one think rich people do not understand is that poor people don't have money. Her book was a bit of a stunt in which a relatively prosperous person tried to currect this ignroance for herself and for her readers. She essentially went underground as a working poor person -- cleaning houses and working retail while living in a rented trailer. Even though she admits that the parameters she set for the experiment -- especially the maintenance of her health insurance -- made the experience less risky, the insights were profound. And they are needed more now than ever. At the time of this writing, the U.S. president has tried to suspend SNAP (food stamps) for everyone, and millions of people are cheering him on, falsely assuming that only lazy people need such benefits.

Jack Gantos -- Because his daughter was a school chum of our son, we were lucky enough to meet the auther of Rotten Ralph shortly after he won the Newberry Medal and on the very same day that he had been featured on the NPR quiz show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me. I have rarely met a more genuinely gracious person. And rarely has Peter Sagal had so much fun with a guest -- this is 11 minutes of delightful radio listening.

Arthur Golden -- this was a unique author encounter. I did not meet him in person, nor did we talk at all about his book. We did, however, have a couple of long telephone conversations in which I advised him on coffee for his home use. His book Memoirs of a Geisha is still on my to-read list, but I did watch the film version.

Jane Goodall --Of all the writers listed here, Lady Jane left me most starstruck. I was among more than a thousand people in the room when she was kind enough to accept an award from our American Association of Geographers, so we did not speak to each other at all. But I did manage to snap this grainy, somewhat magical photo. I highly recommend her Famous Last Words interview and will be watching her funeral online on November 12.

A.J. Jacobs -- The author of Thanks a Thousand! was scheduled to visit our campus in 2021, when this delightful little book was both the One Book One Community read and an ancillary text in my coffee seminar. Covid-19 had other plans, so I ended up hosting him for a virtual visit. He uses coffee as the focus of his personal project exploring what he calls a gratitude chain.

James Howard Kunstler -- We brought Kunstler to campus because he understands -- and explains -- the interactions among transportation, energy, and land use in powerful ways. He is deeply cynical, but his frustration with bad policy is firmly rooted in the math and physics of sprawl and non-renewable energy. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Susan Letendre — We became friends of this author through her human-rights work in Latin America and were proud to be present for the launch of her children's book Bonita: La Conejita de Mi Patio.

Rich Little -- The author of Cold Case to Case Closed, Lizbeth Borden, My Story is a local author who offers a novel interpretation of one of our region's most notorious criminal cases. As I often did with community reads, I assigned this book to my class of future geography teachers -- they used it as the basis for lesson plans and we also enjoyed a field trip to the scene of the crime and to the grave of the accused.

Bill McKibben

Terry McMillan -- To be honest, I don't think I have read any of her works, but I remember enjoying McMilan's discussion and I did enjoy the film adaptation of How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

Tom Miller -- Our connections to this author go way back -- many years before he came to speak at BSU. I think our first awareness of him was through his marvelous little book On the Border. As my review mentions, this book inspired me to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at as many crossings as possible Hayes-Boh Border Life is an annotated map of those crossings. When he came to BSU, he spoke about Revenge of the Saguaro, which opens with a story of poetic justice that those of us who have spent a lot of time in the Sonoran Desert can really appreciate. His most important book (for us) was published in between these two. When we were living near him in Tucson, my librarian spouse Pamela did research and fact-checking for his Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. This helped him to become one of the authors we knew best, and we are grateful that it also allowed Pam to travel to Cuba on a literary tour he arranged in 2013.

Diana Muir The great niece of John Muir (a California naturalist best known for founding the Sierra Club in 1892) lives in Newton, Massachusetts -- a former mill town in the western suburbs of Boston. She published Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England in 2000, shortly after I had begun teaching a course on land protection. I have more to say about how her work fit into my class in my recent Land Protection Books post. She was kind enough to give a public lecture at Bridgewater (a similarly situated former mill town in Boston's southern suburbs) in connection with that class.

Bill Nye -- this Science Guy was met with more enthusiasm from our students than any other author who has visited our campus -- which includes about half of the notables in this post.

Nathaniel Philbrick - we had dinner with Philbrick on the same day he had breakfast with Ron Howard to start work on the movie version of In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. This is his telling of the true whaling story that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick. The cliché really applies here: Philbrick's book is much better than Howard's film of the same name. Philbrick has so much respect for Melville's great work that he has published an entire book simply to promote it: Why Read Moby-Dick?

Michael Pollan -- he visited our campus to talk about his most influential book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Over lunch, he told us that he had a terrible time finding a publisher for a book about agriculture. So he asked about a different kind of book -- one about food and where it comes from. And now he is a rock star among foodies. My only review is of his later audiobook Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. He also features in many important documentaries about food and where it comes from (wink, wink)

Stephen Puleo -- we met Puleo when he came to campus to speak about Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 and were fortunate to have him return to talk about a completely different work, Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission. He is both an indefatigable researcher and a gifted storyteller on the page and in person. Each of these represents countless hours of research, enabling him to bring surprising elements to each story. Each of these books would be a lifetime achievement to be proud of -- I am astonished to know that he has written almost a dozen such works.

Carl Safina signing a book for us
on Nantucket in 2016.

Carl Safina

Arthur Schlesinger (see Cycles)

David Sedaris

Sandy Tolan

Edward Tufte -- When I met Edward Tufte, he had not come to us: I went to him. Specifically, I went to a daylong workshop that this emertius professor of statistics was offering in Boston. For several days, he filled a ballroom with those who wished to learn about the visual presentation of information. Each participan had a stack of all of the major books he had published at that time, and he spent hours walking around the room, guiding us through some of their key lessons. He had an assistant who walked around the room at certain point in the lesson to show us various historic doucments on which Tufte's own work was based -- original graphics by Sir Isaac Newton and th elike. During the Q&A, people kept asking him about powerPoint, which was relaatively new at the time. I could tell he was annoyed even to be asked about such a low-quality communication tool, and he had very little to say about it. A few years later, he published The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. I have since assigned it to many students and have made it the basis of several workshops I've given for fellow prfessors.

John Waters -- Baltimore's "filth elder" is huge in our household. All of us have been to see him at least twice. In addition to his many movies, I recommend his book Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America. It is a clever combination of memoir and fiction.

Kerrin Willis -- local educator and author of the amazing historic novel Strange Arithmetic, which takes place in the context of the Taunton POW camp.

Read But Not Seen

Of course, I have not met most of the authors whose work I have read, nor have I read nearly all of the books I have wanted to read. My GoodReads account includes quite a few books that have mattered to me -- feel free to browse my entire list (including read, in progress, or hoping to read) and the shorter list of those I have reviewed. 

A couple of authors have been particularly important to me. J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, right around the time I first started hearing about him. I later read The Hobbit seven times and the Lord of the Rights three times. This led to a love of languages, some acquaintance with maps, and many hours hovering around D&D tables. My favorite librarian worked in a bookstore during our courtship and supplied me with all of the prequels, legends, and sequels. My familiarity with the text of the original work led me to choose O Hobbit for both relaxation and language practice during my first visit to the Amazon. I read this entire Portuguese version in my hammock.

Robert Pirsig has been a close second to Tolkien in terms of a writer's importance to me. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence: An Inquiry into Values is both a book about travel and a book about, well, quality. The opening chapters came easily to me, and the philosophical ruminations become much more complicated midway. So although I have read the first half seven times, I have only finished the book three times. Still, the book shaped my thinking -- particularly about writing -- profoundly. 

I have occasionally been in conversation in which neither his name nor the book was mentioned, but whose contents were only possible because both of us had read the book. More profoundly, I realized that my favorite English teacher had given us exercises taken directly from the book. Pirsig lived until 2017, but I never met him. I do have a postcard from him, though. I had written to ask when the sequel would be published and he answered that it was a receding goal. When it eventually did get published, I read Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, but I found it unrewarding. I think he was a writer with one perfect book in him. 

A third writer who has been very important to me is actually still alive. John McPhee has been contributing to The New Yorker for as long as I've been walking and talking. He wrote Encounters with the Archdruid, which was assigned in both the first geography class and the first philosophy class I took. I never met him, but I did get to meet the protagonist of that book a couple of times. I have gone on to read nine of his 31 books and need to read more. Perhaps I will celebrate National Authors Day by writing him a letter. His Wikipedia entry describes not only a tremendous career as a writer, but an even more important career as a teacher of other writers. He is a national treasure!

And speaking of national treasures, I will end this rambling with a link to Just Read, which is my tribute to the legendary Rep. John Lewis. If you do nothing else to honor authors today, please visit that entry and watch his National Book Award acceptance speech. I have watched it at least 50 times. 

Lagniappe

Perhaps this looking back and making lists has something to do with age -- I have in recent years created maps solely for keeping track of life experiences. My favorite started as a map of national parks I have visited, but grew to be a life list both of national parks and of museums. As with this post, the map is probably not quite complete, probably of interest only to me, and a bit uneven in the level of detail.

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.