Urban Perception

Rowing along the working waterfront with Captain Colleen. 
I am in the bow seat. Photo by Captain Dan.

When they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, they might have this long-winded geographer in mind. When I post photos like this online, I often write something like "in honor of the banker who told me New Bedford is not near the water." With this latest photo, I decided I should explain that bit of snarkiness. I am doing it here because there are -- I am convinced -- some important geographic lessons to be had from one offhand remark.

About a decade ago, we decided that we were interested in buying a weekend getaway. Literally -- we wanted to get away from our house in the middle of the college town where we were both working. NOT for the reasons some might expect -- unhinged weekend parties were an occasional problem, but of limited duration. What we needed to get away from was little-league football. Not the football itself, but the loudspeakers -- always set to 11 and running late into every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night because our town had bought bright lights and big speakers at the same time. Even some of the college students complained about the constant noise, but we were all castigated as anti-kid and (worse) anti-sports. 

So we started to explore options for weekends, especially in the autumn. A recent graduate from New Bedford pointed us to a sweet little house for sale in. the neighborhood where she grew up, and it seemed perfect. We would have considered a cottage in the mountains somewhere, but I had started this coastal rowing hobby and we were also interested in the various amenities that were becoming available in the city's renaissance.

So I went to the lender who had refinanced our Bridgewater home to ask how we could start applying for a loan. The answer surprised me. Before even looking at any numbers, the loan officer asked where this secound house was. "New Bedford," I replied. She immediately said that underwriters would not approve a loan for a second house within 25 miles of to the first house.

I said something between "What?" and "Huh?" She responded, "unless there was something special, like it is near the water or something."  I asked her to look up the house on Google Maps, where she could see that it was two blocks from THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. So she conceded that it might be possible and we did talk about some numbers and we did not have the kind of downpayment needed for any kind of second home. I was OK getting rejected on the merits, and we ended up renting a house on a very quiet island from a friend of a friend -- just for little-kid football season. 

Don't worry, Dear Reader. This is not the end of the story. I'm working my way toward a point! 

The following spring, I was rowing a whaleboat in the harbor (as one does) when the subject of a club house came up. A fellow rower mentioned that her family had a home in Fairhaven that they needed to sell. It was a cute little house much like the one we had been considering the year before, but on the opposite side of the water. Her grandfather had built it, and with the recent death of her grandmother, her mother and aunts were selling. 

At this point, our circumstances had changed because of an inheritance. So I went back to the same lender and inquired about a second home in Fairhaven. Without a nanosecond of hesitation -- and without any apparent recollection of our conversation the previous year -- she handed me a clipboard to start an application and we were off to the races. 

The Fairhaven house is one mile CLOSER to our principal residence than the New Bedford house had been. It is in a smaller, less diverse community and its crimes do not lead the nightly television news. My take on all of this is that the gateway cities that are the engines of our regional economy and culture are also the locus of many of our region's social pathologies and are disproportionately feared in our smaller suburban towns. But they are part of our region. -- not another planet.

One more picture, but not a thousand more words. I took this photo at Pope's Island Marina near dawn on the first day of summer in 2016. As I wrote when posting it online that day, "Nothing is nearer -- and dearer -- to the water than New Beige!"

I have not disclosed the identity of the banker in question for several reason, the main one being that although a single remark from her has stuck with me for years, it does not define her and I am willing to bet she does not remember it. 

Lagniappe:

We love living in Fairhaven, both because it is a lovely town in its own right -- with a 10-minute walk to the beach and lovely vernacular architecture. We also like that it has much in common with Cape Cod but without the traffic. Most of all, though, we love that from Fairhaven we can easily reach New Bedford for a rich variety of food, music, and events, We are active members of several organizations based in the City That Lit the World:

Whaling City Rowing
Azorean Maritime Heritage Society
New Bedford Whaling Museum
New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center
Cape Verdean Association in New Bedford 
The Zeiterion Theater

Coming soon: The connection between New Bedford and Yosemite.

Vermont Adventures

When describing my work as a geography educator, I sometimes say that I have taken students to Nicaragua, Brazil, Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, and even Vermont! I add that last one because field visits are equally important whether or not they require an airplane ticket, and although Vermont is not very far from where most of my students grew up, occasionally students thank me for the outing as soon as we cross the state line. New Hampshire is more commonly visited and in fact we usually pass through the Granite State on our way to the Green Mountain one, what with Pythagoras and his Theorem. 

Lake Champlain, Burlington
from Vermont Getaway 2026 on Flickr

All of which is to say that I very much enjoy being close enough to Vermont to visit it fairly often and I have very much appreciated the particular destination of those student outings. Around the time I started teaching a course we now call Land Protection, Lawrence Rockefeller completed the donation of his property in Woodstock to the National Park Service. I should say "one of his properties" because it is the pattern of the Rockefellers to retain some of their own revenue-generating properties near the lands they so generously donate to the American people. This is true in the US Virgin Islands and the Grand Tetons, for example, and it is true in the small town of Woodstock, where the Woodstock Inn is scarcely a stone's throw from the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. I have been to the park close to 20 times now, though I've not stayed at the inn (keep reading for an inn that is more my speed). 

But I digress -- occupational habit of being this geographer. This post is meant to point readers to a couple dozen photos I took while on a brief vacation with my spouse, to visit friends from Massachusetts who now live up north. One family moved more than a decade ago to turn the Golden Stage Inn into the best B&B we know. Seriously, if you are going to southern Vermont at any time of the year, this is where you need to stay. The other friends moved more recently to Burlington, where one of them continues to be a hero nurse and the other enjoys academic retirement. 

Hildene Cottage, Manchester
from Vermont Getaway 2026 on Flickr

The photos are not of these friends (except for one canine!), but rather of places we visited near each of their homes. There is a lot about art, history, and landscapes worth sharing, as I have done in the descriptions of each photo on Flickr. (Yes, I am the one dinosaur still keeping Flickr in business.) This post also serves to point to some online resources hinted at by those captions. 

Aside from those provided above, the relevant links include:

• Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home in Manchester
• Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester
• Vermont Country Store in Weston and Rockingham
• Vermont Land Trust is not mentioned directly, but where I write that the Orton family as been involved in land protection, much of that work has been through VLT. I mention it here partly because it is a large enough organization that it might some day be a place of employ for some of the students who take my course. 
• Deep City Brunch and Events in Burlington is one of those rare places that makes a nice breakfast AND excellent coffee. It was recommended to us by our friends -- who know what a coffee snob I am -- and they were correct. It is a bit hard to find, but conveniently nestled between the Church Street shopping area and the waterfront parks.
• Green Mountain Horse Association and its Bridge to the Future Campaign are the organization and land-protection efforts that our friends in Burlington support. This is an example of the complexity of integrating the sustainability of landscapes with that of organizations. 
• Three Tomatoes Trattoria in Lebanon, New Hampshire gets honorable mention. It is not in Vermont, but for Pythagorean reasons cited above, it is on the way for those coming from eastern Massachusetts. This place is a wonderful, full service restaurant near the center of town. Great food, service, and atmosphere, with a lot of attention to visual arts.  

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.