Camino De Luz y Esperanza

As I discuss in more detail Tree Street Requiem, this week has included one of the rewards that come from teaching introductory environmental geography the way that I do: article recommendations from students. In this case, a student wrote about a profile of Adriana Gonzalez, a Sierra Club staff member from Puerto Rico. 

Illustration by Jon Stitch for Sierra

Based on an interview with Lindsey Botts, the profile is entitled "This Puerto Rican Organizer Sees a Path for Light and Hope." The story of following in the footsteps of her parents by continuing the advocacy that she began with them as a child is especially meaningful this week, as my spouse and I celebrate our own son's birthday and his completion of library school while working with geography education and specialty coffee. It is nice sometimes to see the proverbial apple land so close to the tree!

Her work includes efforts around climate resilience generally and renewable energy in particular. It complements the main text of my course, Bill McKibben's uncharacteristically optimistic Here Comes the Sun. 

I have not been able to find much about her very recent work, but I am pleased to see that the Puerto Rico Chapter of the Sierra Club remains active and that she has done a lot of writing about the ongoing aftermath of Hurricane Maria, about which I wrote extensively on this blog, particularly in Open-ended Crisis (2017). 

Tree Street Requiem

Drawing on the pedagogic wisdom of geographer D. Fink, I create final exams based on the goals I have for my students. In my introductory environmental geography course, one goal is that students will understand environmental stories differently because of the time they spent learning with me.

So each course ends with me either presenting them with such a story or -- better yet -- pointing them in the direction of such stories and waiting to see what they bring back. This gives students a chance to flex the intellectual muscles they have been developing and it puts me in touch with a wide variety of new ideas. 

And although I usually send them to a source I could read on my own -- the archives of Sierra magazine -- I never think to browse it on my own. So the articles they uncover are a real gift, and I'm regifting the latest one to readers of this blog!

This brilliant illustration by Ellen Weinstein
accompanies the article in Sierra

One of the essays that got my attention was about a 2025 article by Mike Tidwell, entitled "This Is How Climate Change Transformed a Maryland Neighborhood." I became even more interested when I noticed the subtitle of the article: Extreme conditions are impacting Takoma Park's trees. As Tidwell explains, Takoma Park was established as a trolley suburb of Washington, DC, one of many places that is now dependent on automobiles but that owed their origins to public trolley stops.

The author had moved the Willow Street in Takoma Park in 1991, shortly after I had moved away from Maryland. He describes the complicated series of climate-related events that removed all of its biggest and most important trees. 

The article mentions the increasing frequency of torrential rains, reminding me disastrous events in Ellicott City, another central Maryland community with which I am much more familiar, located about a 40-minute drive up US 29 from his home. Severe flooding there in 2016 and 2018 was the result of both incredibly irresponsible land-use changes and rainfall of unprecedented intensity. I have written about these events a lot on this blog, most comprehensively in Flood Flash (2016), Flooding: It's Not in the Cards (2018) and Burying the Survivors (2018). Some of these posts have subsequent additions related to other incidents of climate chaos. 

Tidwell goes far beyond the direct impact of extreme weather events, however, to explain how they can lead to pest infestations and ultimately the loss of trees. Replanting is admirable and necessary, of course, but ultimately insufficient, for a couple of reasons that Tidwell explains beautifully. First, a fully mature oak provides many ecosystem services that are only fully developed after more than a century of growth. Second, climate zones have shifted so dramatically that "the trees are foreigners now," so that restoration efforts should involve different species. He mentions cypress, for example -- a tree I heard a lot about on my recent swamp tour in Louisiana. 

The biggest surprise for me is Tidwell's discussion of the problem of disposing of felled trees. Mature tree giants are succumbing to storms and blights more rapidly than suburbia can repurpose them. There is not a sufficient market for the wood ships and salvage timber they provide, so that they take up valuable space and return greenhouse gases to the atmosphere once they been knocked or cut down. This article is the first mention I have seen of burying trees as a possibly meaningful contribution to carbon offsets. 

The Penguin Lessons

 Looking for films to watch recently, the algorithms rightly guessed that we would enjoy The Penguin Lessons a 2024 film starring Steve Coogan and based on the 2015 memoir by Tom Michell. 

And enjoy it we did. One one level, it calls to mind all of those films about teachers who are out of their depth with a challenging class but somehow win over their reluctant learners; think Dead Poets Society or Goodbye Mr. Chips. The protagonist's reluctant adoption of a penguin and his bumbling attempts at romance add levity to the story. 

The historical context, however, gradually introduces sobering elements to the story. The teacher in question arrives at a British school in Argentina just as it the country entered a period of brutal dictatorship. I had read quite a lot about this and other authoritarian regimes quite a lot in graduate school, when I completed a doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies. 

My mind has been very much on those studies over the past two years, as my own country experiences many of the practices and optics of the "Banana Republic" regimes we had been studying. Then, as now, I could not understand how governments could attack their own populations and still maintain enough pupular support to remain in power.

I still do not understand fully, of course, but I do notice that denial is an important means by which individuals cope with autocracy and an important element on which the autocrats rely.

This is eventually countered, of course, by the willingness of citizens to confront the regimes, often at great personal risk. In 1977 Argentina (and in Argentina to this day), that resistance was led by Madres de Plaza de Mayo. These were mainly middle-aged and older women whose adult children had been kidnapped by the regime, and who eventually helped to bring about the end of the dictatorship. 

I do not think that the makers of this film could have anticipated that by including those protests from half a century ago, they would be bringing to mind today's protests in the United States. The 2025 and 2026 #NoKings rallies are broader demographically, but are often dismissed by regime supporters as being too old to be taken seriously.

PRIDE in Our Beloved Community

Pride Sunday 2026 at First Parish, est. 1716

"Queer Resilience" was the title of our congregation's Pride Sunday service this morning, which our minister began with the poem A Protest and a Party by Rev. Hannah Roberts Villnave. It begins:

People sometimes ask:
Is Pride a protest
Or a party?

And the answer is
Of course
Yes.

I invite you to read the rest of A Protest and a Party on the UU World web site, where it was published last June, though it was first published about a decade ago. From the web page, I learned that the author is the minister of Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Appleton, Wisconsin -- where we will be visiting cousins in just a few days, as I write this. 

Our minister next read the picture book Stitch by Stitch. I include my entire brief review here because Goodreads links are sometimes glitchy. 

Stitch by Stitch: Cleve Jones and the AIDS Memorial Quilt by Rob Sanders

Before our minister read this book to our congregation as part of our Pride Sunday service, she said that it had moved her to tears while she was reading it in a public library earlier in the week. I should have gone to fetch a tissue when she said that, because my eyes are famously leaky, and indeed, this moved me in the same way.

I knew something of the story of the AIDS quilt, having seen a large part of it when it was traveling the country in sections. This small book catches the spirit of those tragic times and tells the very personal story of the man who initiated the quilt and those who helped him bring it to fruition.
View all my reviews

Our service was co-led by a young parishioner who shared their own story, both underscoring the importance of PRIDE and offering a poignant comparison between the AIDS crisis of the 1980s -- which they learned as history -- and the current crisis. Back then, they said, the government let the disease do the heavy lifting, while today it is attacking the queer community directly.

Lagniappe: Pride Sunday with the Poet 

As hinted above, we managed to have two Pride Sundays, a week and a thousand miles apart. As mentioned above, the author of "Queer Resilience" is a minister in our favorite Midwestern town, and was leading a Pride Sunday service there today (June 14, 2026). 

We did not hear the poem again, but greatly enjoyed the service, including her message and that of a parishioner as well as some deeply moving original music. 

Fox Valley UU Fellowship

How Many Gables? Seven.

 Note: this is simply my Goodreads review, but accessing such reviews through social media is no longer simple, so I'm reposting the review here. Also, I really like this related photo!

A famous house and several of its gables, framed in currants
From my Two Days in Salem folder on Flickr

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We started visiting Salem (north of Boston) pretty regularly when we moved to Bridgewater (south of Boston) in 1997. We drove or walked by the House of Seven Gables many times, always saying we should go there "some day" but not getting around to it until 2024, when we decided to spend part of our spring break in this fascinating city with important family ties (my wife being a direct descendent of Rebecca Nurse).

It was such a good house tour that I wanted to take the tour again immediately when we were finished -- so many twists and turns and more architectural and historic tidbits than I could keep in my brain from just one visit. And that was without having ever read the book.

We put the book on our list, and eventually it moved to the top. We thoroughly enjoyed the audio version -- laughing far more often than I expected to. It is a low-key gothic tale in which the horror is rather subtle and the humor quite clever. Having been in the house -- and knowing therefore what a "gable" actually is and how much the gables of the actual house have evolved led me to visualize the story more vividly than otherwise I could have.

One of our favorite photos of the house has it framed in currant bushes -- which were bearing fruit at the time of our visit. It was nice to hear them mentioned specifically almost any time the gardens are being described. Much is made throughout the book of a "cent shop" -- I am particularly interested in seeing if I am remembering that part of the tour correctly.

The book opens with a long discussion of sordid events said to have taken place on the property BEFORE the house was built -- a sordid tale of woe related to the aforementioned witch hysteria. When Hawthorne ends this back story by explaining that it sets the context for the real story of the house, we both exclaimed "opening snippet" because it reminded us of so many television shows in which a huge complicated story plays out before the opening credits.
I highly recommend both the book and the house tour. I'll be visiting again and rereading after such a visit!

Language note: the book includes many interesting turns of phrase. It also uses the word "epoch" more times that I would typically hear the word in a couple of years. In the audio book, it is pronounced the way I usually don't pronounce it.

View all my reviews I think you must login to Goodreads to see these, but it is not (for now, at least) a paywall. 

Here Comes the Sun

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Bill McKibben spoke about this book at the New Bedford Whaling Museum a couple months after it was published. I had been using another of his recent books (The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon) in my introductory environmental class. Just a few minutes into his discussion, I decided that this was likely a better choice, and reading the book confirmed it.

Although he admitted that he would need to "bum you guys out" early in his talk, this book is mainly positive. Climate change and the ridiculous politics surrounding it in the United States are still dire threats, as he concedes. But in this book, he demonstrates that just as petroleum almost inevitably replaced whale oil, wind and solar technologies are now replacing fossil fuels. He makes the case that this will continue, whatever happens at the political level.

Of course, this does not mean we should be complacent: quite the contrary. Even though positive transformations are under way, our attention is still required. The harm of climate change is already underway and will continue, making the embrace of already-available technologies worthwhile.

View all my reviews

NOTE: I have published this review to my blog using a little HTML tool in Goodreads. I am doing this mainly because I recently noticed what seems to be a change on the Goodreads site. I used to be able to share links to my many reviews that anybody could read. Not the site seems to require viewers to login to see those reviews. It is not exactly a paywall, since accounts are free, but it is a hurdle that I'm hoping the site operators remove soon. Meanwhile, some of my reviews will show up on this or other blogs.

NOLA IRL

Until very recently, New Orleans was the most important U.S. city that I had not visited, but I had been stalking it for years. A search of New Orleans on this blog yields many examples of my geographic musings about this fascinating city. I have read quite a few books about it, watched Tremé start-to-finish and even taught an Honors Colloquium on this most Latin American of North American cities. 

Café du Monde was, of course, among our first destinations.

But I had never made the time to go. The seeds of change came in the autumn of 2025, when our son traveled there with two close friends, one of whom had been there before, and both of whom have known me since they were little kids. The fact that I had never been, it turns out, was a frequent topic of conversation during their vacation. They brought back lovely gifts and what amounted to an admonishment to make the trip myself. 

My spouse quickly agreed. We had not had a proper vacation since Covid, our 2019 Malbeclipse journey to Chile and Argentina having been the last extended travel we had done without an academic or family objective. 

So it was decided: Spring Break 2026 would be an actual break. Off to the Crescent City we went. This was my first New Orleans visit and Pam's second. About a dozen years ago, she went to a conference there and did manage to do some sightseeing. In fact, her vampire tour was fodder for guest lectures in my aforementioned colloquium. But this was to be a first trip for both of us in many respects.

We stayed in a generic but quite comfortable hotel on the edge of the French Quarter, exploring what we could by foot in that area. In addition, we took a bus tour of the city, a ghost tour of French Quarter, a swamp tour just outside the city, and a food class and walking tour of the Tabasco facilities on Avery Island (this ended up being the only use of our rented car). We were also absolutely thrilled to learn that the New Orleans Book Festival was beginning during the final days of our stay, and that some dear friends from Massachusetts would be visiting friends of theirs in Bywater on our last night. In other words, we had a very full schedule -- almost like a study tour, but with no teaching responsibilities. 

I cannot help but teach about places, however, so this blog post is a pointer to a thoroughly annotated collection of the photos I took. That same kid who encouraged me to make this journey also makes fun of my continued use of the Flickr site, but I find it a handy way to gather and share remembrances, so please have a look, either by going to the NOLA 2026 folder on Flickr or by using its slideshow below. In both cases, annotations appear below each photo, albeit a bit awkwardly.

Some of these photos are included in an updated version of my slide set New Orleans: Latin American City, along with many other images and graphics about that way of thinking about the city.

Amazonia açu

The Amazon is where I became a geographer. More specifically, while I was an undergraduate student in linguistics, a friend recommended that I take a class with a professor who had done a lot of research among the Kayapo and caboclos of the eastern Amazon basin -- specifically in the Xingu sub-basin -- and I was hooked. I took five classes with that professor. Some of these had to do with other facets of environmental geography, but all were rooted in his experiences in Brazil.

It took me about a decade to get there myself, for dissertation research in Rondônia in 1996 and again with my family in 2000, a biology student in 2003, for a conference presentation in 2019, and for a very long boat ride in 2023. Followers of this blog will have found some of the lessons learned scattered throughout. Many are gathered in the materals for my Amazônia: Fables to Forest course.

So when the algorithms began to tell me about the Amazonia açu exhibit in New York City, I began to make plans to visit. I had missed some of the fanfare around its opening and the opportunity to visit during our winter break. To make a very long story short, I was grateful to be able to get to the exhibit on its penultimate day with my spouse -- who is both the daughter and mother of artists and was with me on my second Amazon adventure. We were both very grateful for the experience!

It is not possible -- and probably not appropriate -- to capture the entire exhibit in my own photos. But I could not resist taking a few, which I have posted in a Flickr album. Until I get a chance to annotate the photos, the photos I took of many of the caption cards can help to guide viewers. 

A Vaca tirando o serengueiro de casa
(The cow taking the rubber tapper out of his home)

This painting by Hélio Melo spoke most powerfully to me. He was born in Acre (pronounced AH-kree) in 1926 and lived as a rubber tapper (aviamento) for much of his live before becoming a painter. Many of his works are subtle commentaries about the lives of rubber tappers and their displacement by mining, cattle, and even sume rubber operations. 

Note: It is not quite the same as being there, but the exhibt catalog -- which the curators call a pocket book because it is quite compact -- is available through the eponymous online retailer for just $5. Related fun fact: although I bought this book in person, my very first purchase on Amazon.com was another book about the region that informed the final drafts of my dissertation.

From Coffee to Coffee House

  

I try to learn something new about coffee every day. My librarian spouse and I enjoy book talks. And our dog Crumpet loves story time. I snapped this photo in our reading room as we settled in for a virtual event that checked all of these boxes. Even better, the featured author is both an historian and a librarian! 

As you can see, we had a very content canine, and we were all happy to have learned of this particular author talk, and that we were able to fit it in just before I took off for a brief visit with our Maryland family. 

As always, it is through the kindness of friends and colleagues that I do manage to learn something small or large about coffee nearly every day. This day, it was large! A colleague in our English department let me know about a presentation by Michelle Craig McDonald at a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society. 

Bonus lesson: I had heard of AAS, but had no idea that it is based in Worcester, Massachusetts. I might have made that trip, but the timing was not good for that, so I'm grateful that her discussion of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States would be online -- Crumpet was glad as well. She's much happier to watch an author talk from Pam's recliner than to hear about it after we've left her alone. 

As she explains during the talk, Professor McDonald is a business historian who had noticed a gap in the coffee literature. Finding gaps is one way that scholars figure out what to study: read all you can in a particular field, and you will eventually figure out what has not been written. In this case, she found that a lot of work had been done on the spread of coffee cultivation and production and also a lot on the spread of coffee consumption. But the literature on growers largely assumes a market and the literature on markets largely assumes growers. The two bodies of literature were not talking to each other in her view, though I would argue that Mark Pendergrast's 1999 Uncommon Grounds does make a contribution in this area. Real coffee nerds will be able to discern that she read the second edition of his book. 

I was even more pleased to see that the talk was available immediately afterward, so I can share it with students in my Secret Life of Coffee seminar. I am particularly interested in them hearing her discussion of the rise of coffee houses and their once-important role in commerce. On the production side, her explanation of the rise and fall of coffee production in Haiti is particularly helpful. 

This book is, of course, going on my reading list! 

Happy Attainment Day, Dr. McPhee!

When I began this post last week, I had just learned that one of my favorite writers is about to turn 95. I learned this because I was answering a question in one of the many book groups I follow online, which was asking users to name a famous author -- living or dead -- we would like to meet. For National Authors Day last autumn, I wrote about some of the authors I had been fortunate enough to meet already, and for some reason John McPhee came to mind as one I would like to meet. And I don't think he would mind that this led me to check on the key question: living or dead. Not only is he very much alive: he is listed as a professor at Princeton. Not an emeritus professor, as i hope to become in 2028, but an actual professor -- though presumably with a light teaching load at this point. 

Since our family recognizes attainment days with as much enthusiasm as birthdays, I spent the week working toward posting this on the day before his birthday. John McPhee will know he is 95 on March 8, but we will know he has completed his 95th year on the day before: March 7. 

All of McPhee's more than thirty books were first serialized in The New Yorker. According to his Wikipedia biography, that relationship began the year before I was born -- a little sleuthing reveals that the article "Basketball and Beefeaters" was published two months before I was born. In it, he explains how he ended up playing basketball in England. 

He had first avoided it, thinking it not a very British game, but a lacrosse injury (inflicted by him, not on him) set him to what he ultimately decided was a suitable sport for "the world's foremost indoor nation. He goes on to describe the importance of place -- home-court advantage was never described with such careful attention. 

I have spent a lot of time in a wide range of school gyms, but never encountered oddities and absurdities as severe as the ones he describes. One of the oddest things he describes is a game that he personally instigated in a most unusual outdoor space.

He has been writing for that one periodical for my entire life. Just last year, he wrote about his first appearance in the magazine -- he was shown as the team mascot on the sidelines of a Princeton football game two years before my father was born. In other words, he has been at this for a long time. 

At my own university, I can think of two colleagues as permanent features -- people who came here as undergraduates, went away to grad school but briefly, and returned as educators for the rest of their careers -- about a half century each. The attachment of John McPhee to Princeton is even deeper -- closing in on an entire century. He was born there because his father worked there and although he is well traveled, he lived elsewhere for school only during brief educational forays at two prestigious schools. His older brother Henry McPhee, Jr. had been born in Iowa -- apparently before their father became the athletic department physician at Princeton -- and went on to a legal career that included service with President Eisenhower.

Goodreads Links

To see all of his books, go to the John McPhee author page on Goodreads. I have not delved deeply enough to understand the discrepancy between the 31 books mentioned on his own site and the 121 distinct works mentioned here. In any case, there is PLENTY from which to choose! 

Below are all of his books that I have read, in the order of their publication. I have posted reviews of about half of the ones I have read. Each of these "reviews" is fairly brief, just giving some idea of my interest in the work. 

Oranges (1967) my review

The Pine Barrens (1967)

Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) my review

The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975) my review

Coming Into the Country (1977) my review

Basin and Range (1981)

Rising from the Plains (1986)

The Control of Nature (1989) my review -- probably my favorite McPhee book

Looking for a Ship (1991)

McPhee is not, of course, the only author I enjoy. Readers are invited to look at all of my Goodreads reviews and all of the books I have read and thought to add to my profile. 

Lagniappe 

Even if you have not read anything by McPhee, you are very likely to have read something written or edited by one of his students or one of his daughters. The John McPhee Wikipedia entry provides links to some of those he has influenced.