Passing of the First Argentine Pope

 

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

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

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

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

Nantucket Atheneum

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

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

The Coffee Maven prior to a 2007 Atheneum appearance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lagniappe

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

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

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

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

Citizen Science for the Birds

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

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

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

Photo: Shutterstock by way of Science Friday

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

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

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

Lagniappe

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

Dam Expertise

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

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

Map: Wikipedia

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