Wisconsin Ecotones

I remain a teacher because it helps me to keep learning. Students -- current and former -- are a big part of that, and a long-ago geography student brought this latest geographic lesson my way. She has long been very knowledgeable about plants, and with her son now living in Wisconsin, she has been learning about the biogeography a thousand miles west of our local lands. She recently shared this image from Wisconsin Field Guide by way of the group Native Plants of Wisconsin. She rightly guessed that I would be interested -- I love this kind of geographic thinking and I love Wisconsin! 

The sources that recently posted this map on Facebook credit not only the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center for the image itself but also University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Curtis, who identified and named the Tension Zone in the 1950s.

He had identified a number of significant differences in biogeography and other landscape characteristics the areas north and south of this diagonal line. The Field Guide post describes a number of gradients in temperature, growing season, and soil that coincide along this zone, which comrpises the northernmost range of 180 plant species and the southernmost range of 120 others. 

The post goes on to describe many examples of changes that those driving might "feel" routinely without being conscious of it. My personal favorite is this one:

That is also roughly where people stop saying they are going to the cottage and start saying they are going up north.

I love this because it reminds me of something I hear a lot from our Wisconsin cousins -- summer vacations are not at a camp, cabin, or house They are at "the cottage" and everyone knows what this means. 

We visited those cousins this past summer and although we were to early for the cottage, we did enjoy our stay on the northeastern corner of the Tension Zone -- in Appleton, just west of the tippy-tip of Green Bay. We did enjoy a day-long side quest deep into the "South region" and more specifically the part known as the Driftless Area. Research on the soils and forests there was essential literature in my own studies just north of Cincinnati. 

This is where my own bit of geographic nerdiness comes into play. I went to graduate school in Ohio, another state whose landscape has been shaped by glaciation. I use the word "nerdiness" to reflect the fact that I kept a map of Ohio's glacial features handy the entire time, and was overjoyed to explore the geomorphology of the southernmost extent of Wisconsinian glaciation -- well to the south and east of Wisconsin itself. 

 The southernmost extent of some species coincides -- as Professor Curtis observed -- with the southernmost extent of Wisconsin glaciation. That term refers to the fourth and final (so far) advance of the continental ice sheets that advanced and retreated throughout the Pleistocene epoch -- that is, between 2,580,000 and 11.700 years ago. 

The Driftless Area is essentially a subset of the South Region identified by Curtis. This area was never covered by continental glaciers. Southeastern Wisconsin -- and areas to the south in several neighboring states -- were glaciated. But those were during earlier stages -- Nebraskan, Kansan, and/or Illinoian. That is do say, the Tension Zone itself varies a bit east-to-west. In the west, it defines a region that was never glaciated; in the east, a region that was not recently glaciated. Therefore the topographic differences are not as pronounced as the biological ones in the eastern part of the state. 

Fortunately, regional and Federal organizations have been working together to protect some of the fascinating remnants of Wisconsin's glacial past, most notably along the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. The development of that trail is a very complex and long-term project that is a case study in my Land Protection course.

All of this brings to mind another important line across North American landscapes: the 100th meridian. I would argue that this line is not only longer than the Wisconsin Tension Zone, but also that it defines even more fundamental transitions, while being just as obscure to most observers. 

Both of these lines exemplify some deeper and persistent discussions we have as geographers. To what extent do the patterns of physical geography influence or define human geography? In the early 20th century, geographers got rather carried away with patterns of influence, trying to show that human geography -- such as language patterns -- was determined by physical geography. Most of the field has shied away from what is called Environmental Determinism. But yet, cottages do seem to have something to do with glaciers!

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

More besides: 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.