Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Modest Relief

NPR's coverage of the latest effort to reduce student-loan debt got some things right: Congress and the courts are making any such relief difficult and such relief programs benefit the entire economy. 

But then the discussion turned toward the "moral hazard" of such programs. Steve Inskeep is a good journalist, so I was surprised to hear him just nodding along with the secretary's nonsense talking points. 

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona

]I was not surprised to hear Sec. Cardona blame universities for the student-debt crisis, but I expected Steve Inskeep to point out the important role of state governments. Instead, he agreed with the Secretary's language of "moral hazard" as if universities just enjoy raising prices. 

Since the days of Reagan and Clinton, public-sector higher education has been under attack by both parties, shifting the 80/20 sharing of costs that people of my age enjoyed to the 20/80 (at best) sharing that exists today. Public universities are public in name only these days; we get a sliver of our budget from public funds, with students paying/borrowing most of what it takes to run a school.

This is why the anti-intellectual language of "ROI" has gained such traction, even among smart people like Mr. Inskeep.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Sir EGGOT

I remember where I was when I first saw this album. Even the name of the album seemed a bit transgressive to the sheltered kid I was at the time.

My father's youngest brother and sister were still teenagers when Elton John released Madman Across the Water. According to my fuzzy memories, my brother and I were in the back yard of our grandparents' home listening to a transistor radio when we learned about the album itself -- I don't remember knowing of any other rock albums before this.

So this morning I treated myself to this jazzy rendition that he had played for BBC television a week after it was released, and presumably a couple of months before I learned about it.

The occasion was Sir Elton's latest honor, this time at the instigation of my country's top librarians. Long after being knighted and shortly after becoming only the 19th person to achieve EGOT status (Emmy-Grammy-Oscar-Tony), the Librarians of Congress have granted Elton John and his writing partner Bernie Taupin its prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Named for George and Ira Gershwin, the first honoree was Stevie Wonder. Joni Mitchell was the most recent winner, and the tribute performance of Big Yellow Taxi was captivating.

As of this writing, even the Gershwin Prize page at LOC does not yet divulge the news, which I learned early this morning from NPR journalist Neda Ulaby. who clearly enjoyed telling the story and who gets credit for the EGGOT acronym.

Words & Music: Bernie & Elton
Photo: Loic Venance


Sunday, January 28, 2024

Cabo Verde Photos

This embedded slideshow is the best way I know to share all of the photos from my recent travel course in Cape Verde. This is captured from my Fogo 2024 album on Flickr, which is another way to view the same images and to capture them individually (with attribution, please). To view below, simply click < or > and click on the ... at the bottom to expand text. 

As those who know about my teaching are aware, I use coffee as a way to learn more about geography and geography as a way to learn about coffee. As I mentioned to a friend recently, coffee is the wedge -- we are always going to learn about a lot of things when we study it as geographers!

Fogo 2024

Background: In January 2024, I was delighted to travel to Cape Verde to co-lead my 16th international travel course and my first one since going to Costa Rica in January 2020 just before the world closed. I  always use the term "co-lead" even though I have been the academic instructor of record for all of these journeys. For most of my courses in Central America, I have relied on the expert guidance of Matagalpa Tours

For this visit to Cape Verde, I worked closely with experts on my own campus before, during, and after the travel -- just as I had done for the sustainability tour I led there in 2006. This time my colleagues at BSU's Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verean Studies developed this program with me over the past five years, introducing me to some of the people we were to meet on the journey.

For all of these classes, we have also relied heavily on our Office of Study Abroad to promote the courses, organize the travel, and provide assistance from home during travel. The success of these courses really do depend on many collaborators, especially those who welcome us to their home communities where group travel may not yet be commonplace. 

During the course, I gave public lectures about the geography of coffee to audiences that included our own BSU students, local high school students, local dignitaries, the general public, and some experts who are themselves involved in coffee or coffee research. The idea was to provide some. context for a global industry that many in the audience already understood from an intimate, local level. Slides from these presentations are provided on the Café no Fogo post on my Coffee Maven blog, along with materials presented by Carolyn King, a recent BSU graduate who has done remarkable work on connections between Cape Verde and Cape Cod.

This led to exactly the kinds of exchanges of insights that I was hoping to have, and prepares us for further collaboration in the future. The constraints of our academic calendar caused us to take this trip during a relatively quiet time of the year for local coffee activities; I look forward to returning when the harvest and processing are more active.

Lagniappe 

I have more to say about the background and significance of this journey in a draft article I have written for the Pedro Pires Institute newsletter.


Monday, January 15, 2024

Îles de France

50 Largest Islands of France
(Click to enlarge)



A fellow geographer recently shared this graphic representing the geography of French islands. As with any map, the cartographer has made some choices, in this case depicting shape and size correctly but ignoring distance and location. 

A nod toward location is made, however, by shading the islands according to the oceans. and seas in which they are found. Even though some of these islands are considered "Antarctic Lands," they are not in the Southern Ocean which begins about 10 degrees further south. 

The largest of these islands is a bit bigger than Connecticut; the smallest is about half the size of Manhattan. 

I appreciate this map, but followers of this blog will know that I cannot resist making a Google map whenever I see a spatial list of this kind. The combination of perspectives is, I think, instructive. 


Monday, December 18, 2023

So Goes the Colorado

 

Click to enlarge -- notice the tan hash-marked areas.


I follow the Facebook page Geomorphology Rules because it so often features maps like this one -- maps that tell a provocative story. I also follow it because my master's research was in fluvial geomorphology and I enjoy staying in contact (pun intended) with that quirky discipline that lies at the juncture of geography and geology. Plus which, geographer Kathleen Nicoll runs the site with equal measures of wit and wisdom.

The first thing I noticed about this map is that it identifies the Grand Canyon as a convenient divide between the upper and lower portions of the Colorado River drainage basin. I later noticed that this map (or perhaps it is a map excerpt) has no title or discernible producer.

But the most important thing about this map is that it explains why the Colorado River does not reach the sea most of the time. Most maps show it connecting to the Gulf of California, but in real life this is rare. Where Arizona, California, and Baja California meet, the river is scarcely 100 feet wide; immediately south of that it is not much wider than the small living room in which write this. 

And a few miles south of that, the bridge ("puente") that carries Mexico's Route 2 over the river is bridge over sand most of the time.
I have often explained this in terms of the unfair division of the river's water resources between the upstream and downstream neighbors. Octavio Paz famously lamented, "Alas, poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!" A century ago, the neighbors agreed to go "halfsies" on the basin's water, with each being allocated 7 million acre-feet of the total 14 million discharged annually. The agreement was made during an unusually wet period, but the U.S. always takes its half, since Mexico cannot come upstream to get it. Agribusiness and urban areas in the basin -- including the one I was living in when I learned all of this -- reduce the river to a trickle.

The maps makes clear, however, that this is not a full explanation of the problem. Rather, it is the interbasin transfers to the relatively small areas that essentially surround the basin. These are small regions to which water that would otherwise be making its way toward the aforementioned bridge is instead crossing the divide to supply cities, farms, or both in other basins.

The most notorious of these arrangements is the focus of the 1974 film Chinatown, but Los Angeles is far from the only culprit at this stage.


Sunday, October 29, 2023

Blue Zone Living

While driving home recently, I heard a sliver of delightful, bittersweet radio amidst the sad litany of suffering and violence that has dominated the news of late. I made a point of finding the story online when I got home so that I could share it with my family. I then found a print version because in this case, radio was not quite enough! 

It was the story of a Portuguese dog named Bobi -- not a famous dog of a fancy Portuguese breed, but a regular dog living in Portugal. Bobi lived, in fact, more years than any dog has ever been known to have lived -- and lived those years very well. He was an ordinary dog that was extraordinarily loved and cared for.  

Image: Guiness Book via BBC

His community was the key to Bobi's success, and the same is true for us humans. After hearing the story, we watched a limited series that had been on our list for a while. In four parts, Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones describes the ways in which several communities in vastly different parts of the world have come to include high proportions of people living very long lives. 

The show is a reminder to do more of some things we already know we should by way of diet, exercise, habits of mind, and relationships with our fellow humans. These are gentle reminders of how to lead a dog's life. A happy dog's, that is. 

Monday, October 02, 2023

Think Before You Redwood

This video addresses a landscaping trend of which I was unaware: the rampant planting of redwoods in places they are not meant to grow. Our hero Griff of Redwoods Rising cultivates redwoods for a living, but he warns against buying them for planting in the wrong places.  

@redwoodsrising plant the plants that are native to your area. don't plant redwood trees unless you have the area #redwood #gardening #landscaping #learnontiktok #naturevibes ♬ original sound - Redwoods Rising

Those wrong places, he argues, would be any places not highlighted on this map of western California ... and a few nearby spots in Oregon.

He teaches so many applied ecology lessons in four minutes that I do not need to add much to what he says, except to include a range map and links to the web sites he mentions.

Map: Save the Redwoods League

One thing I will add to his commentary is that when he refers to areas cleared by commercial logging operations, he hints at a bit of greenwashing engaged in by some in the industry. Forests are renewable, and all logging operationg replant the areas that they clear. The quality of that replanting can vary so much that his organization has to re-replant many clearings to maintain anything like a healthy forest.

As for the websites, his own Redwoods Rising project is now described on the Redwoods League page; the original URL he mentions is no longer operable.

Even in California, redwoods are not appropriate everywhere. He recommends calscape.org for information on more appropriate plantings in California. For the rest of the United States, he recommends Native Plant Finder, a beta site operated by National Wildlife Federation. The final site he mentions is Homegrown National Park.

NWF, by the way, is the reason that WWE has its current name -- the wrestling people lost a trademark battle with the wildlife people. It is also the organization that certified the habitat restoration efforts on my family's 0.31 acre of land in Bridgewater

Thanks to our son Harvey -- artist, foodie, and budding naturalist -- for finding this video!

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Pueblos Oaxaqueños

While scrolling social media (as I too often do) earlier today, I was struck by this marvelous map, courtesy of the site Estado de Oaxaca. It is entitled Peoples and Nations of Oaxaca. 


I was immediately taken back to the summer of 1989, the only time (so far) that I have visited the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. My favorite librarian and I were spending the whole summer in the central Mexican state of Puebla as part of a study-abroad program. From our base in Cholula, we had the opportunity to travel to several other places, including both Oaxaca to our south and Mexico City to our northwest.

Two highlights of that summer were dance variety performances to which troupes had traveled considerable distances to participate. In Mexico City, dancers took to the main stage of the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Palace of Fine Arts) from many of the country's 32 states. It was a fabulous experience, made all the more remarkable by the stage curtain itself.

Image: Circulating on Facebook 2023

We had the privilege of attending a similarly organized performance when we visited the capital of Oaxaca at the time of its annual Guelaguetza. A similar event played out at a different spatial scale -- with music, dance, and clothing as varied at the level of the state as they had been at the national level. 

Coming from all over Oaxaca, many groups performed in an open hilltop stadium on two consecutive Mondays (Los Lunes del Cerro). Unlike the indoor performance, each of these groups ended its performance by tossing gifts into the stands. Most impressive were the clay pots and the pineapples!

I had thought that the timing of the dances -- literally two extended sets of dances a week apart -- a bit odd. It was not until our son visited Oaxaca years later that I realized the reason for the timing is that these public performances were part of a cultural gathering that was extending over the entire week. We were privileged just to have a glimpse as outsiders. 

Fun language fact: This city of Oaxaca is one of my favorite place names. With the abbreviation of the state name, it is written Oaxaca, Oax and pronounced something like Whuh-HAK-ka-Wok.

Monday, September 11, 2023

Big Yellow Taxi

I was already teaching environmental geography when I gradually realized the relevance of Big Yellow Taxi to my chosen field. It is a 1970 song by the incomparable Joni Mitchell, a Canadian singer-songwriter-genius who is a contemporary of my father. 

I start most of my university courses with music, and lately I have decided that this song is essential for the first day in both my survey course and my course focused on land protection. (For the latter, I play The Trees even before Taxi.)

I have been using two versions of Big Yellow Taxi:

A 2023 tribute recording on the occasion of her winning the Library of Congress Gershwin Award. Joni Mitchell listens as Angelique Kidjo, Cyndi Lauper, Annie Lennox, Brandi Carlile, Lidisi, and Lucius perform the song with great energy. I get particularly emotional at this rendition, both because of Joni's reaction throughout and because I have been lucky enough to see two of these performers (Kidjo and Lauper) in person. 

and  Joni Mitchell in Concert 1970, a perfect version despite the fuzziness of the video.

This simple song -- written, indeed, in the form of a children's lullaby -- has been covered more than almost any other -- over 400 and counting. In just a few minutes, she outlines much of what was wrong on our planet a half century ago -- and much of what continues to ail us. 

Writing for the Financial Times in 2019, journalist Charles Morris explains that part of the appeal of this song is Mitchell's ability to connect the political and the personal in just a few, simply worded lines -- without hubris. His article explains the history of the song -- both origin and aftermath -- with deftly embedded audio clips.

Lagniappe 

Before really listening to Big Yellow Taxi, I had been most familiar with Mitchell's 1994 Turbulent Indigo, which I had heard while staying with an American-Brazilian friend for a few days in the Amazon in 1996. The CD became a staple in our household for years, and is a rich, lyrical tapestry. 

It includes Magdalene Laundry, an ode to the victims of a brutal institution to which Sinead O'Connor's bravely brought global attention with her 1992 protest on Saturday Night Live.

Friday, August 18, 2023

Madeira Voyage Photos

I finished editing all of the photos and videos from my recent visit to the Amazon, during which my friend Miguel and I traveled Down the Creek from Porto Velho to Manaus. 

The videos are interspersed here but might make more sense in the Madeira Playlists I created on YouTube. You can browse the photos in this slideshow or visit the Rios Madeira & Amazon album on Flickr.

Rios Madeira & Amazon 2023

It has been a great blessing this summer to spend time in the place where I became a geographer -- both literally visiting the Amazon for the fifth time and devoting much of my summer to reading and writing about it. I am currently working on several related teaching and writing projects, which will linked to the Down the Creek post mentioned above.

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