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. 

My Fogo Sabbatical

Talking Coffee with
Cabo Verdean President Neves

In these challenging times for education in general and public higher education in particular, I am especially grateful that my university continues to provide sabbaticals for its tenure-track faculty and librarians. Pending final approval, my next (and final) sabbatical will be in the country of Cape Verde, primarily on the island of Fogo. I had the good fortune to visit with a travel course in January 2024 and look forward to returning for the entire Spring 2027 semester. 

I look at this as an 80/20 project, with the majority of my effort to be devoted to projects related to coffee but with attention also paid to the heritage of whaling. Ultimately, we might have the opportunity to bring recreational whaleboat rowing and racing to a country that has been a key part of whaling history and geography. 

I provide this blogpost as a way to share my project with friends and colleagues who may be interested in involvement with one or both of these projects. For now (August 2025), I provide a link to my full sabbatical proposal, whose abstract I present below.

ABSTRACT:

Cape Verde is an archipelago with deep connections to southeastern Massachusetts in general and with Bridgewater State University in particular. This sabbatical proposal describes two projects that arise from my two decades of work with the country and drawing upon two of my areas of interest. The major project is to learn more about the important but little-documented coffee industry of Cape Verde, particularly on the island of Fogo. An extended stay during the harvest season will allow me to continue sharing a global perspective on coffee with the country’s growers, processors, and policymakers. It will also allow me to learn details of Cape Verde’s unique coffee industry and to bring that story and the actual coffee to the attention of industry leaders in the United States. A secondary project intends to use recreational whaleboat rowing and sailing as a way to promote learning about Cape Verde’s maritime heritage.  

Stopping the Ambler

The Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve is a complex of several land units in central Alaska that is larger than the state of Maryland and that is mostly designated wilderness. Even its National Park Service visitor centers are outside of the park itself, and visitors are advised to visit by plane or on foot. Even hikers are advised that there are no trails into the park. 

This wilderness is just part of what is at stake in an ongoing battle to prevent the building of the Ambler Road, a proposal whose quaint name belies the damage that it would cause if completed. It would, of course, also be very damaging to migratory wildlife and to the traditional practices of many indigenous communities. It would also provide some employment to some communities whose traditional livelihood has already been compromised by climate change.

Journalist Sarah Gilman tells the Ambler Road story in the. March 2025 issue of Sierra magazine. "Alaskan Tribes and Activists Are Ready to Resist Ambler Road, Again" is subtitled "The proposed route would slash through pristine Indigenous land." The keyword in all of this may be "again" because this is illustrative of many efforts to preserve wilderness in Alaska and elsewhere. Protection victories are always temporary; proposals to disrupt need only succeed once. 

When I read about this article in a review by one of my students, I was initially interested because my spouse and I are considering a visit to the Iñupiaq Heritage Center, part of an indigenous whaling community in Alaska. That center is several hundred miles to the north of the Ambler Road proposal, but Gilman does mention Iñupiaq among those who are contesting the project. In fact, she begins her telling of the tale from the point of view of Jazmyn Vent, a young woman who is both Koyukon Athabascan and Iñupiaq.

She quotes Vent as saying, “Once this road opens, there’s no going back.” This reminds me of a key lesson from a very different place that I have studied more extensively. The story of deforestation in Rondônia is largely that of a road-construction project that got out of hand. Planners who hoped to attract 10,000 settlers by paving the now-infamous BR-364 eventually saw 2 million people arrive.

Confluência de Confluencias

I decided to write the title of this post in Portunhol because the confluence desribed below is of rivers that are shared by speakers of both Portuguese and Spanish. (Caution: very nerdy linguistic details ahead) I considered using CONFLENCIA instead, since typing in all capital letters is a way to avoid accent marks, and the spelling in the two languages differs by a single diactrical mark. This is why most shirts and bags I order from LL Bean are embroidered with GEOGRAFIA. In doing two minutes of research on the subject I found one article supporting the all-caps convention and another article condemning it.

Now back to the geography. A confluence is simply the place where two rivers meet. I have been writing about specific confluences for some while, and this new post will serve as a confluence of those confluence posts -- hence "Confluence of Confluences" in the title. I was brought to the subject by this image, from the Facebook group Fatos y coriosidades (Facts and curiosities). 

The caption translates to: 

There exists an extremely symbolic point in South America where three nations are found in just one place: Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. It is the famous Triple Frontier, marked by the confluence of the Iguaçu and Paraná Rivers. On one side is Iguaçu Falls (Brazil), on the other Port Iguazú (Argentina) and, to the west, City of the East (Paraguay). This place is impressive not only for its geography, but also for the intence cultural and commercial integration among the three countries.

And here is an intriguing curiosity: in each country there is an obelisk painted with the colors of the national flag, positioned in a way that each can be seen from the other two -- a true triangle of frontiers visible to the naked eye. 

Tríplice Fronteira - Foz do Iguaçu (Brasil), Puerto Iguazú (Argentina) e Ciudad del Este (Paraguai)

In addition to the curiosities mentioned in the original post, I noticed that the confluence at the Triple Frontier exhibits a characteristic that is fairly uncommon among the millions of riparian conflences in the world: the two rivers retain distinct coloration because of different sediment loads and relatively slow mixing currents.

The most significant example of a non-mixing confluence is known (sometimes) as the Wedding of the Waters, also in Brazil. In this case, the waters of several countries come together, but no national boundaries are to be found for hundreds of miles up any of the hundreds of streams represented by the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões at Manaus. For this geography nerd, the Amazon begins at this confluence, though an increasing number of maps apply the word "Amazon" to the lower portion as well as the entire length of the Solimões.

In this video posted in 2011, Florida Aquariam educator Allan Marshall goes all in with an explanation of what makes this confluence so special.

Prior to seeing this video, I had no idea that the river was so deep. I knew about the temperature difference between the two rivers, but I did not fully understand the reasons. The waters are flowing from regions with very different climates, so they begin with very different temperatures. It so happens that the waters that start of cooler also have the higher reflectivity, helping them to remain cooler all the way to the center of the Amazon Basin.

And Now for Those Confluences

As I suggest above, confluences have had my attention for some while. In order to finish this post in a relatively timely fashion, I will just point to some of the other material I have posted on the topic. Some of these posts include links to still other posts. So if you get lost on the morass, I apologize ...

Wedding of the Waters is a 2015 post I created for the blog that I was maintaining back then as part of our Project EarthView outreach program. It includes a link to the video above and a bit of context about the entire basin.

Confluences is a 2015 post on this blog (Environmental Geography) that I created after I was delighted to find an article about ten visually interesting confluences around the world. My post includes a link to that original article as well as my own contribution: a Google map showing all of those intersections in one view. I have now amended that map to include the Triple Frontier.

Down the Creek is a 2023 post about the Rio Madeira, the longest of the Amazon's 1,300+ tributaries. Madeira Playlists points readers to photos and videos from my 2023 voyage from Porto Velho to Manaus, ending with my own closeup views of the Wedding of the Waters.

And finally, my six-part course Amazônia: Fables to Forests includes a slide set entitled Tributaries and Confluences. These are the maps and illustrations I use for an entire lecture on the hydrography of the Amazon Basin itself. 

Lagniappe

This bonus bit is for students in my environmental classes who just happen to like the sound of a phrase, that is a speciality of both geology and geography and that was a big part of my master's thesis and that has kept me interested in the form and function of rivers for many years. This is for them, if they happen to be reading this:

FLUVIAL GEOMORPHOLOGY