Plantation Discourses

The story of Dutch podcast partners Peggy Bouva and Maartje Duin began with an awkward conversation about the connections between their families. Both live in Holland, but Duin -- a journalist -- discovered that they were connected by a plantation in the former Dutch colony of Suriname.

They discuss their podcast, their friendship, and their travels together in a recent appearance with Joanna Kakissis on NPR's Morning Edition. (Careful listeners will notice that "slaves" is used as a noun in the introduction to the conversation, though "enslaved persons" is used in the conversation itself. This reflects a growing recognition that it is dehumanizing to identify people solely by the bad circumstances or crimes that have affected them.)

Although the podcast itself appears to be available only in Dutch at the moment, Google Translate offers some sense of the summary of each episode of The Plantation of Our Ancestors in other languages, and includes links to other resources, some of which are available in English. These include Mapping Slavery NL, which portrays historical places relating to slavery on the map of the Dutch colonial empire.

The description of the mapping project highlights on advantage Dutch and some other European folks have over those of us in the United States: they know that their countries were part of the metropol, that is, at the centers of global empires. Denial of its imperial nature is a treasured myth in my country, even though no empire has ever been bigger.

As pro-slavery statues are toppled by vote, by edict, or by protestors, some decry the loss of history. In most cases, however, the history remains to be uncovered, whatever happens to icons of bronze men on bronze horses. As we finally grapple seriously with the ongoing implications of slavery, conversations such as those between these Bouva and Duin are essential. 

Lagniappe 

Even at my seemingly far remove, I have derived a benefit from the ill-gotten glories of Holland's trafficking in humans. Among the artists supported by that immense wealth are both Rembrandt and Vermeer. My answer to the Getty Art Challenge of 2020 was a recreation of Vermeer's The Geographer. 

My entry in the Getty Art Challenge, special edition for Pride Week.

Shifting Wheels

 

Biking in Chicago (a city I now visit regularly)
Image: David Schaper, NPR

As people start to move about a little more -- perhaps too much more -- many of us are doing so differently than we did before. Until a vaccine is found -- and taken widely -- transportation patterns are shifting. In a brief radio piece, Journalist David Schaper explores the shifting patterns that are already noticeable. He then discusses which of these patterns might become permanent, and the degree to which some of the changes fit with long-term goals of city planners.

I will be sharing this story with students in my urban geography and global thinking courses. Those who wish to explore the topic further might also enjoy the free CitiesX course I am taking online at Harvard.

COVID-19 Hope from Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall in the Gombe Reserve, 1965

I have given too much thought, perhaps, to the assertion by Henry Mitchell that "all anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one." This started because I must have heard the quote not long before the only time (so far) I was in a room with Jane Goodall.

My one chance at a photo -
dim but magical!

I was in my hometown (Washington, DC) in the historic Wardman Park Hotel, where my brother, father, and both grandfathers had worked in various capacities. We had brought our EarthView globe for the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers.

While we were there, we learned that she would be speaking as the first recipient of the Atlas Award,: a new prize that professional geographers in North America were to begin bestowing on people from outside the profession who had made a profound lifetime contribution to our discipline.

As hundreds of geographers sat in rapt attention as she spoke to us so eloquently about the planet we study, I realized that she was doing us a favor by coming to receive this award, not the other way around. As I look at her Wikipedia page a decade later, I see that the Atlas Award is not even included among her prizes (I'm trying to fix that). Unlike Mozart, her good work has been recognized with gratitude and admiration in her lifetime.

So it was once again with rapt attention that I listened to her March 20, 2020 message about the crisis currently gripping our planet. Her hope is not a glib or shallow one -- she does not hesitate to point out how dire the Coronavirus pandemic has become. But she is clear about what we must do now and highlights the lessons those who survive this must take forward.


Lagniappe

I was also fortunate to be in a room in New York City when Dr. Mary Robinson became the second recipient in 2012. In that case, the acceptance speech -- a video of which is still on my blog -- served not only as my introduction to the concept of climate justice, but as the essential outline of an honors course I was to offer several times in succeeding years. I have not been present for any of the subsequent ceremonies, though Noam Chomsky did speak at my church once. Inexplicably, the AAG web page lists at least some of these awards with the wrong dates.

April 26 update: some good news...

During the blessing of the animals service (online) at my church today, I learned that Jane Goodall's main web page is simply a channel for encouragement. Have a look at her Good for All News for a bit of hope every day.

Cabo = Cape Verde

Having read earlier today that Cabo Verde had not yet reported any Coronavirus cases, I was saddened and surprised to see it marked on the definitive Global Cases map from ESRI and Johns Hopkins, which as of this writing (10pm EDT) indicated 305,234 cases worldwide, up by five thousand from when I checked earlier today.

When I zoomed in, I noticed two dots where Cabo Verde should be. Clicking on each in turn, I noticed the problem:

and 

The country has 4 active cases, reported under the new and old names of the country. A former Portuguese colony that became independent in 1975, it has been called Cabo Verde for centuries, Cape Verde in English.

It has also represented incorrectly on maps in many ways over the years. I completed my doctorate in geography without being quite sure where or what these islands were, because I saw so many contradictions on maps -- some of them suggesting they were still part of Portugal, others indicating that the name referred both to the islands and to a point of land (a cape) in Senegal.

In 2013, the United Nations ceased using the name "Cape Verde" at all, insisting that Cabo Verde should be used, even in an English context. In southeastern Massachusetts -- home of the biggest Cape Verdean / Cabo Verdean / Kabuverdianu community outside the country itself -- I often read and hear both of these versions of the name, and a couple more.

 Geographer Tanya Basu reported on the name change for National Geographic at the time, and explained the bit about Senegal in the process.

The Johns Hopkins map synthesized databases from at least six organizations: Esri, WHO, HERE, GARMIN, NOAA, and USGS (all of these employ geographers, by the way). It appears that at least one of these is using the old name. I will of course be contacting some of these agencies to report the error while the numbers are still small.

Lagniappe

For general information about the geography of Cabo Verde, see my 2018 Basics post. For the story of another mistake I noticed in an online map of the country, see my 2013 Google In, Google Out post.

For the story and photos of my 2006 travel course, see my Cabo Verde - Cape Verde
Geography of Sustainable Development - Geografia do desenvolimento sustenavel web page. Since then, I have had the opportunity to learn a lot more about the country, and to give a presentation at a Cabo Verde conference at my own university. I have also begun to study Kriolu (one of the two national languages, similar to but distinct from Portuguese) and to help develop a minor in Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University. I will eventually be offering a Fogo version of my Geography of Coffee travel course as my own contribution to that academic minor.

Update

About 15 hours after I contacted the Johns Hopkins team, the error was corrected. It appears the total incidence as of this writing is 3. I do not know if they are on more than one of the islands or all on the same island.

1:30 p.m. EDT, March 22, 2020

Oil: Costs and Prices

The price of the benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude oil has fallen by more than half since the beginning of the year. So many other things are out of kilter in the world that many folks have hardly noticed. To the question of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, the answer is: it depends.

Of course, that is always the answer when prices change, but it is a far more appropriate answer than usual in this case. At a minimum, the answer depends upon:

• what country is being considered
• what sector of the economy within that country
• what time frame is of interest
• whether economic or environmental factors are being considered
• whether the environmental factor is climate change or water quality
• whether one is considering solar or wind alternatives, or oil itself
• whether you believe in climate change

Just kidding about climate change: this has climate implications whether people believe it or not.

Credit for these factors goes to two excellent reports on the recent slide, which is generally attributed to a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. That is, between Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Vladimir Putin -- two people who have rather unusual relationships with the current U.S. president. If this is a price war, it is no ordinary one, as each of these actors sees benefits in the geopolitical and economic consequences that are unfolding in the short term.

Rather than elaborate some of the tradeoffs to which my small list alludes, I refer readers to those excellent reports, which I am assigning to students in my Advanced Global Thinking class because there are so many complex geographical questions raised here.

I would start with the March 9 New York Times article Saudi Oil Price Cut Is a Market Shock With Wide Tremors by Clifford Krauss and then listen -- at least twice -- to Cheap Oil and the Climate, a discussion between Steve Curwood of Living on Earth (LOE) and Lorne Stockman of Oil Change International.

The transcript of the LOE discussion includes this aerial photograph of Jonah Field in Wyoming. One can easily imagine the dozens of wells reaching into this deposit, like straws in a giant scorpion bowl. It is an excellent example of the relationships among price, scarcity, and technology in the extraction of any mineral. Whether this is an oil deposit is a question of how much oil is present but also of what the price of oil is. It appears and disappears with price fluctuations. 

Beyond Translation

My wife Pamela and I famously met in French class, and though her French is much better than mine (because she regularly went to that class and then several more), neither of us speak it well. We did manage to put together enough phrases to navigate a weekend in rural Quebec about a decade ago, and if the current COVID-19 crisis abates in time, we'll brave a couple of days in France while passing between places where we speak the local languages more effectively -- Great Britain (sort of), Spain, and Portugal. Fingers crossed for that.

Meanwhile, I'm intrigued by a nice little story about learning French in order better to enjoy the rich cultural tapestry of the United States itself. The more one knows French, the more they can enjoy the food, music, and people of New Orleans. I know Rosetta Stone as language-learning software, but it also sponsors travel courses and a blog about language learning.

Louisiana parishes
Credit: Ian Young, Rosetta Stone

 
One tag used on the blog is words beyond translation, which points to articles that deeply explore just a few examples of words like ojalá (Spanish) and retrouvailles (French) that are exactly that: words for which the dictionary will provide an English equivalent, but which it is. worth learning the language to understand more fully. The Portuguese word saudades would be another great entry in this series. It can be translated as "longing" or "missing" but means so much more. I explored the word in my newsletter Folha da Frontera during my first visit to Brazil in 1996.

I am teaching honors colloquia about New Orleans this year, specifically because I find the city interesting but have never had a chance to go. Music has been a big part of the class and we have also discussed the importance of education in the French language there. Exploring the Big Easy from afar with my honors students, I am looking forward to our eventual visit. We will brush up on our French before we go, and we will stay at La Belle Esplanade, a tiny hotel whose main purpose is to immerse people in the culture of the "real" New Orleans.

COVID-19 Clears the Air (in one sense)

Nitrous oxide pollution in Wuhan, 2019 (top) and 2020 (bottom). Chinese New Year is responsible for the temporary decline shown on the top line. The quarantine associated with COVID-19 is responsible for the deeper and more persistent reduction this year. The coverage by the Independent correctly attributes the reduction of smog-forming NOx to the extensive quarantines in the region. It also mentions the concomitant reduction in greenhouse gases, but can leave readers with the incorrect impression that the maps depict the presence or absence of carbon dioxide.

The situation in China is reminiscent of the clearing of the air in Mexico City in 1985. At the time, 14 million people lived in the high-altitude (thin-air) bowl of the Valley of Mexico, kicking up fine-particle dust from the bed of Lake Tenochtitlan and more importantly contributing the exhaust of millions of tailpipes. Two successive earthquakes essentially stopped traffic and the air cleared. Many residents saw Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl for the first time in their lives. These icons of the city had not been visible from the city for decades -- nor have they been visible since. Despite many efforts to clear the air of Mexico City, an active population now numbering 22 million has not taken a long enough rest to do so as effectively as the enforced vacation of an earthquake or epidemic would do.



These phenomena are reminders that the air pollution we experience in and around many of the world's great cities is directly related to the choices we have made about work and transportation in those cities, and how we regulate emissions. Unfortunately, the clean air correlates not only with illness but also with economic dislocation, as illustrated by plummeting stock prices near the end of the same period (see below). That is to say, despite some successes at the margins, pollution remains tightly linked to economic progress.

Geographic Information Systems experts at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are providing constant updates to the distribution map. This is a graduated-circle map, in which a place is represented by a circle whose diameter is proportional to the square root of the phenomenon associated with that place. This is the March 1 map; click the link in the caption for updates.

As of 3/1/2020, 6:23:02 PM
Current map: JHU-CSSE

Vertical World

Click to enlarge
Image: Prior Probability
Date and real source: I would love to know!

All maps involve choices: no single map can be "the" correct map, but all maps reveal something of the priorities of the cartographers who make them and the publishers who disseminate them. One of the most important choices -- especially for maps of the entire world -- is that of projection.

In representing a nearly spherical earth on a flat surface, mathematical bending, stretching, cutting and the like are needed, and the final result is a trade-off among four kinds of distortion. Perhaps one of these can be preserved, but certainly not all of them: 

size

shape

direction

distance

Which of these are favored depends upon the purpose of the map. I am not quite certain which have been preserved on this world map from China -- direction is definitely not, nor is size. The map draws attention to one of the cartographer's other important choices: the orientation of the map (we almost always use landscape rather than portrait) and the choice of a center.

The choice to center the map on the Indian Ocean has a number of interesting implications here. Students in my Advanced Global Thinking course will be asked to write about what some of these are.

Crypto-Judaic Latin America

I remember the first hours of my first (and so far only) visit to Cuba in 2003 as being a bit rushed. We had experienced a bit of delay at the airport and hotel check-in late on a Friday afternoon, so there had been little time for our group leaders to explain what the first part of our anthropology travel course would be. We simply piled on to our big Mercedes bus for a short drive across Havana, and were deposited into the foyer of a fairly large, modern synagogue.

The rush made sense in retrospect: we were trying to get to the sabbath services, which would begin at sunset. As unprepared as I was for the experience, many of the students in our group were even less prepared, moving out of several layers of their comfort zone in short order: first time on a plane for some, first time in a Spanish-speaking country for most, first time in an authoritarian country as well, and now the first time in a synagogue. In fact, it was adjusting to this that was a more immediate concern than any of the other layers: many of the students had never been to an Orthodox service and did not understand the segregation by gender or the need for men to wear yarmulkes. We got all that sorted, enjoyed the service -- in Hebrew and Spanish -- and then went downstairs for an experience that felt very familiar to me. The potluck supper in the basement felt like hundreds of church suppers I had attended.

Since Pamela discovered a terrific recipe for latkes in 2012, having friends
over for latkes during Hanukkah has become a cherished part of
our late-December traditions. Rowing the rest of the year helps, as
I insist on processing everything by hand. Photo credit to our friend
Korin, who kept me company as I cooked round after round.

This experience was on my mind during first day of Hanukkah, as I prepared our annual latke dinner for friends and considered the story of Genie Milgrom, which I had heard as I made coffee that morning. (Listening to BBC and NPR is an important part of my daily coffee ritual.) In it, journalist Greg Allen tells the story of a Cuban-American in Miami who was raised Catholic but discovered her Sephardic heritage from family recipes.

Her story is told in just five minutes, but it spans five centuries and three or four continents, so I have listened to it several times already, and look forward to listening with students in my course on the geography of Latin America.

This is because Milgrom's family story begins in her kitchen but passes backward through Cuba to Spain and Portugal, and then forward through generations of crypto-Jews throughout the Americas. These are people who lost their lives or their identities in the wake of the Inquisition. She now travels throughout Latin America, helping others to recover their stories. It is fitting that her story originates in Miami, which some consider the de facto capital of Latin America.

Her story reminds us that the Inquisition was not just the Spanish Inquistion, but that its abuses were found throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

A colleague with far greater expertise than I have confirms that this GIF is
a reasonable summary of shifting identities across Iberia, except
for the exclusion of Andorra. The Inquisition involved pushing both
Muslim and Jewish peoples out of the entire realm, or forcing their
religious conversion.

Inquisition door
Photo: Pamela Hayes-Bohanan

Olinda is a beautiful little corner of Recife, Pernambuco, and in 1535 it was one of the first Portuguese settlements in what was to become Brazil. Today it is known for its fine arts, and my family was indeed browsing a gallery there in the year 2000 when we noticed something unusual about the building we were in.

Although brightly painted and opened to admit the midday sun, we noticed narrow windows, heavy doors, and some walls nearly two feet thick. When we inquired about the architecture, the gallery staff informed us: this had been an Inquisition prison. It was in that moment that I realized the global scope of those atrocities. Genie Milgrom's story took me right back to that visit.





Lagniappe

Our own Hanukkah tradition continued, with our friend Scott lighting the Menorah for the first night. Between him and my son and daughter-in-law, photographer (and Scott's wife) Korin noticed an interesting figure looking down from the wall: Ché Guevara stares down from a plate I purchased during that 2003 Havana visit.

World of Facts

All the flags!  Getty image by way of Far & Wide

"Interesting if true" is a phrase that became common in our household as my co-favorite librarian and I would read the daily trivia column of the late L.M. Boyd. We found almost everything in his syndicated column to be interesting, even surprising. And most of it was true. We detected errors in one of two ways -- either a claim was so outlandish that we decided to look it up (most of the decades in which his column ran were pre-Google) or -- more likely -- the claim was in an area in which one or both of us had some expertise.

We were reminded of the phrase as I read -- and partly shared aloud Max DeNike's wide-ranging listicle on Far & Wide, entitled Fascinating Facts About Every Single Country on Earth. Each country 

The facts are indeed fascinating, and I have no reason to doubt most of them. In many cases, the facts chosen point to some broader truths about the country in question -- most notably the underwater cabinet meeting in the Maldives, a protest stunt that has become a well-known metaphor for the plight of low-lying islands worldwide.

Several positive characteristics distinguish DeNike's work from most listicles of its kind. First, it is just one long page, with no ads (pop-up or otherwise), no jumping from page to page, no silly teasers, and a clear organization scheme: one fact per country, in decreasing order of population, with "country" used as defined by the United Nations. Moreover, each entry includes the national flag, most have a high-quality photo that is related to the featured fact, and the current name (as of late 2019) is used. Each item also includes a link to a more detailed article for those interested in further research (as students in my Advanced Global Thinking course will be, even if they don't realize it yet!) It was from such a link that I learned the full story of Dylan's Mozambique. 

The Pyramids at Cholula are much taller than the Washington Monument,
starting at over 7,000 feet above sea level. Pam and I climbed these
almost every day during the summer 1989.
Getty Images by way of Far & Wide 

In some cases, the chosen fact is one that I find interesting and broadly relevant -- such as the discussion of Cholula for Mexico. I have been inside the pyramid he describes (which local people call "las piramides" because it is really seven pyramids, three superimposed on four smaller ones). I know that it was the most significant structure in the Americas when the Spanish landed, and the site of significant (if brutal) encounters between the Cortés and the Aztecs. I did not know -- or did not remember -- that it is the largest pyramid in the world. Again, interesting if true.

Other facts are interesting in their own right, but not broadly revealing about the country. I am not sure why I found it fascinating when I learned from Bohemian Rhapsody that Freddie Mercury was born in what is now part of Tanzania, but it tells us more about him than about the country itself. It is a reminder that no single story can represent an entire country. In this sense, I give DeNike credit for assiduously avoiding the temptation to pathologize places; in no instance does he focus on poverty or violence. Neither should be ignored, of course, but neither should be allowed to define a place or a people. We are, after all, more alike than different, a fact that is often obscured by a focus on the most negative stories. 

A couple more items merit specific comment. A fellow Latin Americanist geographer (yes, that is a thing, and there are a few of us) asked almost right away about the Brazil entry. Can there really be 100 uncontacted indigenous groups in the Amazon? We are both skeptical, and clicking through the links leads to a video claiming this number for the entire world; even that is doubtful in 2019, especially since a birds-eye photo purporting to represent such groups includes at least one person holding a machete.

Another problematic entry is for Costa Rica, which correctly points out that day length does not very much throughout the year there. This is hardly the most interesting thing about the country (which essentially invented ecotourism and is now a major center for agronomic research in coffee), nor is Costa Rica the best example. Day length varies even less in countries closer to the equator, notably Ecuador, which is actually named for the equator. More important, though, is the "explanation" having to do with distance from the sun. This is a common error among people who do not understand seasons or the basics of earth's orbit around the sun -- such as many graduates of Harvard.

Bottom line: this article provides plenty of exercise for a geographer's mind, and I look forward to using it to inspire further explorations with my students in the new year.

Lagniappe

At the bottom of the screen is another entry comparing cities that are famous globally with counterparts in the United States that share their names -- Memphis, Paris, and so on.  

The World Between Two Covers

I will be assigning this very geographic book in my spring 2020 class, Advanced Global Thinking.

The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe by Ann Morgan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As my favorite librarian Pamela says in her review (http://liberrybooks.blogspot.com/2019...), this is "not a beginner's 'year of' book." It is the first of the genre we've read that does not follow a calendar, for example, and some chapters will be a bit obscure for those with limited exposure to postmodern lit-crit.

But the work is full of wisdom about the value of reading in general and the importance of reading beyond one's usual bounds in particular. Her insights into the highly uneven geographies of publishing and translation are particularly valuable.

Her insights into the origins and current status of globalization are so keen -- and clearly articulated -- that I will be assigning an early chapter or two in my new Advanced Global Thinking class in 2020.

For another discussion of Morgan's project, read Winnie Khaw's review.

To see what Morgan chose to read, view the list on her blog.

View all my Goodreads reviews

Mexican Countries

By now, this screenshot will be familiar to many:

Fox News screenshot, as reported by Newsweek
and everybody else.

This filled my weekend newsfeed, an some have asked for my thoughts on it. Here is what I posted in response to a query from a BSU alumnus:

I have a few thoughts, in no particular order, other than the first:

• I am glad so many of my friends thought of my efforts in geographic education when they saw this.
• I am also reminded that our most prolific geographer -- the late, great Dr. Harm de Blij -- told us that he wrote 1,000 letters a year to public officials and the editors of various programs and publications about errors of this kind or erroneous maps. Some stand out more than others, but many are made. Dr. de Blij, incidentally, was the first person to put a map of Kuwait on television when Iraq invaded it; he knew instantly that it would be an example of Americans learning geography through war.

And some more thoughts:

• We wonder why Americans are so bad at geography, but we don't actually teach it much. The world is big and complicated; it needs more than a quick class in middle school. Massachusetts is about to increase it from a miniscule part of the curriculum to a tiny part. We need more, but someone in state government is working very hard against us.
• It remains illegal to become a certified high-school geography teacher in Massachusetts.
• Seeing this post did motivate me to get the publicity together for our next advocacy day (April 17, 2019) at the State House.

Photo by BSU Alumna Ashley (Costa) Harris
Massachusetts State House 2012
As published in National Geographic's
Geography for Life

And two more thoughts about the story:

• The xenophobia of the people involved is giving the quote more attention.
• The attention is a distraction from the important part of the story, which is the application of hamfisted negotiation tactics to a matter of extreme complexity in the international sphere.

Lagniappe

My doctoral minor in Latin American Area Studies can now be called Mexico & Stuff.

Antidote

The essential site Latino Rebels provides an antidote to the ignorance, in the form of a map (hurrah!) and a poem that is as instructive as it is tragic: Central American (In)Visibility.

Map: Latino Rebels

Geography, Race, and Colorism

The April 2018 issue of National Geographic focuses on race, and begins with a critical look at the magazine's own sordid history on the topic. As new Editor-in-Chief Sarah Goldberg writes in her introduction, "It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them."

From the NatGeo 2018 caption: Photographer Frank Schreider
 shows men from Timor island his camera in a 1962 issue.
The magazine often ran photos of “uncivilized” native people
seemingly fascinated by “civilized” Westerners’ technology.

Editor Goldberg was also part of a broader discussion about representations of the past in a March 2018 episode of On the Media.
On the same day I first read the National Geographic editorial (I got a bit behind on the magazine), I heard Shades of Privilege, an intriguing and important story about colorism as a particularly insidious form of racism in several national contexts.

Together, I believe these items are good starting points for deeper discussion about the depths of bias. The National Geographic article is particularly important for geographers who are trying to renew interest in geographic education. We already must overcome a stereotype of geographic education as boring; to the extent that the magazine spoke for the discipline, we must also overcome the notion that doing away with geography might have been a progressive choice until the very recent past.

Places are Real; Countries are Invented

In this short conversation with TED Radio Hour host Guy Raz, writer Taiye Selasi offers listeners a lot of wisdom on the meaning of place, and the relationships among place, power, and identity. Some of the things that concern her are familiar, but two decades of thinking about them have led her to some very useful ideas about how to have better conversations about the places that have shaped us.

People are more alike than different, but focusing on national identities needlessly accentuates difference. The Places We Call Home page includes links to  her biography and the full TED talk upon which this conversation was based. It also includes a link to another TED talk about which I have written recently, The Danger of a Single Story.

A Decreasing Increase

This graph shows the rate of human population year-by-year since 1951.  Notice that it has been in decline throughout most of that time.  How is it, then, that the human population has grown by billions during my lifetime and  we expect to gain about  2 billion more people by the middle of the century.

Graph source: worldometers
Note: a 2-percent growth rate results in doubling every 35 years
A 1.2-percent growth rate, every 58 year
During this period, world population nearly tripled, from 2.7 to 7.3 billion

A Dark and Stormy Night

To understand how this is possible I need to start with the story about the misconceptions* surrounding population change. This story goes way back, decades ago, to an evening in Cambridge Massachusetts. It was a dark and stormy night on the campus of Harvard University. A young divinity student who would eventually become a professor of mine decided to go to a lecture over at the Harvard business school. The speaker was a famous businessperson, perhaps one of the most famous in the world, though few know his name today.

Because it was a dark and stormy night very few people were in attendance, so Young Tom the divinity student** had the opportunity to venture a question after the lecture. His question was this:  “Mr. Kroc, Why are there no salad at McDonald’s?” As I mentioned, this young man was to become an old professor of this old professor, so this was many years ago, before the days of salads at McDonald’s. And the speaker was Ray Kroc, the chief executive of McDonald’s.

“Because it’s a hamburger place!” was his first answer, but Tom  pressed him about the the importance of having other other options.

“Well,” Mr. Kroc continued, “we have done extensive studies of Seventh-Day Adventists and we have learned that there are not enough of them to sustain a salad menu at McDonald’s.” It was from the story that I learned – and I think even young Tom the divinity student had learned – that about half of Seventh-day Adventists in the United States are vegetarian.

“That is not the only reason to be a vegetarian,” Tom replied, now entering a bit of a debate with one of the wealthiest people on the planet.  “What other possible reason could they have?” Mr. Kroc stammered,  for it was truly beyond his comprehension that someone would avoid meat unless they thought God was telling them to.

“Well,” Tom replied,  some people are concerned for animal welfare -- Mr. Kroc grunted but Tom continued -- “and people are trying to eat lower on the food chain because of their concern for starvation around the world.”

“Starvation? There’s no such thing as starvation,” he groused. “Don’t you watch the news?” asked Tom, straining in disbelief. “What about this Sahel? What about the Biafra children?”

“Well,  if they are starving ... it’s their own fault.”  Blaming the poor for their misery has long been a habit of the wealthy.  And then the punchline: “They’re breeding like rabbits."

Breeding like rabbits.

These three words stopped Tom in his tracks, and caused him to repeat the story countless times, as I have done in the years since I took his class. The rich give birth; the poor breed. And if population growth is making food scarce -- as it was at the time -- it must be because of more breeding.

Demographic Transition Model (DTM)

Demographers and geographers know that this is a misconception, commonly held though it is. Birth rates do fluctuate, but populations grow only modestly when birth rates increase. They grow dramatically when death rates decrease, and during the middle of the twentieth century, they were doing exactly that. Because of improvements in the availability of medicine -- particularly vaccines -- and high-yield crops, death rates fells quickly in many parts of the world -- falling much more quickly than birth rates tend to rise. 

Following World War II, for the first time in human history, death rates decreased in places that were not undergoing enough economic growth to sustain significantly more people. Population growth was therefore both unprecedented and problematic. The 1968 publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was the first widely-known description of the growth itself and of its potential to outstrip resources on a global scale. 

Ehrlich was scorned by some for his pessimism -- even though his most dire predictions did actually come to pass -- as many believed that the planet was simply too vast to be impacted seriously by humans. We are indeed on a giant sphere, 8,000 miles in diameter. But all of our resource comes from very near the surface of that sphere, and all of our pollution remains in that same thin layer of the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. 

Geographers also know that not all parts of the sphere are created equal. Seven tenths of the surface is covered by deep salt water, most of which sustains only a minimal amount of biological activity. The vast majority of food from the oceans is found on continental-shelf areas that comprise just 2 percent of the total. Similarly, most land areas are too cold, too high, too wet, or too dry to sustain settled agriculture without significant artificial inputs. Just 13 percent of the land surface is considered arable (farmable), and ALL of the good farmland is already in use either for farming or for more remunerative urban uses. Humans already use all of the good land and a good bit of the marginal land.

Image: Geography Fieldwork

Just after Ehrlich's book -- and perhaps to some degree because of it -- the rate of population growth began gradually to decline, as indicated in the graph above. This was the result of many factors, some related to intentional policies and others relating to feedbacks in the system. Known as the demographic transition, the conditions that accelerate population growth often lead to reduced birth rates in subsequent generations, and these changes actually continue to this day. Without them, population would already have passed 10 billion. Have a good look at the worldometers population page for a second-by-second estimate of the population (nearing 7,500,000,000 at the moment) and a lot of other ways of visualizing and understanding of demographic change.

Among many other cool visuals, the worldometer population page includes a 2000-year graph of human population that allows users to zoom in specific time frames. I use it here to approximate period shown on the natural-increase graph at the top of this post.

My Good News from Gorongosa post discusses the ecological implications of the century of rapid population growth from 1950 to 2050, and points to the original article "The Bottleneck," E.O. Wilson's excellent description of how this has happened and what it means. We can be concerned about the inexorable momentum of population growth, while being somewhat relieved that there is an end in sight... at least for those young enough to live to the middle of this century. Natural resources, ecosystems, and species that survive until 2050 will still face challenges from human activity, but a growing human population will not be one of them.

Lagniappe: Salad

Careful readers will note that McDonald's does of course have salads now, and might be wondering whether our young seminarian and his bold questions played a role. Sadly, no. Salad at McDonald's was literally an "over my dead body" thing, not appearing until 1985, when Mr. Kroc (1902-1984) was safely in the ground and for sure not coming back. His wife Joan lived until 2003. I do not know whether she played a role, but I have noticed that she is a generous funder of public radio, a cause I do not imagine Ray would have supported.

May 2020 Kroc-family update: When I posted this in March 2017, I did not realize that my guesswork about Joan and Ray Kroc was a well-known story (to others). In 2016, it was the subject of a book by Lisa Napoli and a film starring Michael Keaton. Author Napoli discussed their fascinating marriage with one of my favorite journalists, Scott Simon:

And another lagniappe: Science

Humans are innovative of course, and we have placed a lot of faith in science and technology to avert disaster as a population grows rapidly on a finite earth. But we also live in an era -- in the United States, at least -- in which the denial of science is widespread, greatly limiting our ability to employ it for adaptation.

*misconception: no pun intended, but my favorite librarian noticed
** Young Tom went on to be Dr. Tom Benson, who taught philosophy and religion at UMBC and started the interdisciplinary studies program there. It was with his help that I ended up with 12 internship credits in religious studies from a job he helped me secure at a UU church. He also introduced me to John McPhee, one of my favorite writers. Tom went on to be the president of Green Mountain College in Vermont, known in some circles as the first environmentally focused college. This has been on my mind of late (winter 2026) because that college closed some time after Tom retired, and its current owner is seeking to give it away. I am tempted!

Geo Veritas

Schadenfreude -- taking joy in the pain or failures of others -- is an unattractive emotion. But it is exactly what many geographers -- especially those who work in the shadows of a certain venerable institution on the Charles River -- feel when we view vignettes recorded on the edges of a Harvard commencement at the opening of the 1988 documentary A Private Universe from Annenberg Learner. 

Still from A Private Universe

The clip is from a longer piece about the shortcomings of private education in general, and the piece itself misses an essential point by mistakenly describing the topic of seasons as an astronomy question. If Harvard had a geography requirement -- or even a geography department -- the errors pronounced by these new graduates would be less common. It is geographic learning in particular that is missing in the background of these young scholars -- and future decision-makers. 

How many people with strong opinions on climate change would perform just as poorly? Far too many, it seems, and it is for this reason that any glee geographers take from this video is short-lived.

May 2020 update: courtesy of Harvard Crimson:

Our own BSU EarthView
as shown in the
 national standards for
geography education.
Photo: Ashley Costa (Harris)
National Geographic

We know that geographic illiteracy is a serious problem. We also know that decisions taken at Harvard almost 70 years ago are part of the cause. The short version is that homophobia was the cause, as shutting down the department was the only way to get rid of Derwent Whittlsey, the brilliant chair of the department when the attack on the department began in 1947. On the 40th anniversary of the events, Neil Smith wrote a detailed discussion of these and other factors in an analysis published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (now called the American Association of Geographers, of which I am a member.)

In an undated article on Education.About, Brian Baskerville briefly describes the factors that led to the closing of the department (though he erroneously uses "preference" to describe Whittlsey's sexual orientation). He goes on to assert that geography remains at Harvard, as each of Pattison's 1964 Four Traditions of Geography can be found in one form or another in various parts of the curriculum. This is a rather "thin gruel" as they say, and a far cry from the systematic study of geography that is required to develop a geographically informed person.

About a decade ago, Harvard tried -- in its own flawed way -- to make amends with geography. Or at least to reclaim the word, if not the discipline itself. The effort is described in an understandably self-serving article in Harvard Magazine, Geographers See Death, Birth and Job Prospects. The article acknowledges but dismisses the claims of homophobia as it tries to build the case that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is both the key to returning intellectual rigor to the field and a necessary part of mending the "hopeless divide" between human and physical geography.

This is all by way, of course, of promoting the GIS program at Harvard. Although it is good to see a significant aspect of our field embraced there, it sadly represents a real missed opportunity. The tools and technologies of geography are important, but they are not geography itself. A conversation I had at Harvard a few years ago with GIS pioneer Jack Dangermond was telling. He had given a presentation in which he offered example after example of geographic principles and patterns. After the lecture, I was hoping that he would lend support to our efforts to expand geography education in Massachusetts. He was shockingly dismissive of the idea. The founder of ESRI is so convinced of the value of his product that he thinks it makes geographic literacy irrelevant. It is as if Word and Excel would make writing and math obsolete (which I suppose they have for some people). He argued that gap in our knowledge of geography would be remedied simply by adding more data to our GIS databases and improving user interfaces.

Whatever really transpired in the 1940s, Harvard remains a drag on geographic literacy.

Veritas -- Truth

Lagniappe -- CitiesX

I wrote this addendum in October 2022 -- here I acknowledge learning some valuable geographic lessons at Harvard during the pandemic. In fact, the course I describe below helped me to realize that I am, in fact, something of an urban geographer. Even though the word "urbanization" is in the title of my doctoral dissertation, I never thought of myself in that way before.

We all had unexpected experiences as a result of the dramatic change in our living habits during the global coronavirus pandemic of 2019 to present. At some point during 2020, I responded to an ad for a MOOC -- a Mass Online Open Course -- hosted by Harvard. I had been among the first people at my own campus to teach an online course, and the first to win an award for online teaching. But I had neither taught nor taken a completely open course like this -- something that had been set up and then essentially left alone for students to complete at their own pace.

As I browsed the offerings, I noticed CitiesX: The Past, Present, and Future of Urban Life and decided that this was the most likely to sustain my interest -- despite two strikes against it. Not only is the course offered at Harvard, but it is also housed in economics -- a field that makes ample use of simplifying assumptions that separate it from reality. I had plenty of time on my hands, however, so I took the course, and found that Dr. Edward Glaeser provided a great many insights about the geographies of a great many cities -- I only screamed at the screen a few times over many dozens of lessons.

In fact, the CitiesX video library is a rich resource that I use for some of my own teaching. It includes all of the videos used in the course, organized by location and theme.

Immigrants Should Learn the Language

This a complaint I often hear from xenophobes who make a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions about those who have migrated to the United States. Just a week ago -- as we were getting ready to send our daughter to China -- I heard a father whining to his daughter in the waiting room of our physician's office. 

"We're in America, right? Just checking, because this is the only magazine in here in English." Setting a fine example for his daughter, he complained that the issue of Time he picked up was the only thing he could read on that particular table. He did not check the magazine rack, nor did he notice that all of the other magazines were the exact same issue of a new, Spanish-language publication, which had clearly been dumped in the office as a way to get quick attention. And of course he did not see the problem in terms of his own limitations, as in "I wish I had studied more languages."

"We're not in Spain," said he. "Or Mexico," she added. As our daughter approaches fluency in four languages, this young lady is learning to avoid knowing more than one.

I was reminded of this scene when I found the map below among the files in my "to-be-blogged" folder. It is essentially a 1491 linguistic map of North America. Some of these language groups persist at some level, but most of the linguistic diversity of the continent has been lost in the "long night of these 500 years," as Manu Chao and Bidji have called the colonial and post-colonial period.

Lost details of the credit for this map -- feel free to inform me!

Even thinking about the post-conquest period, the English-only crowd suffers from some problematic misconceptions. In South Texas I once heard a winter visitor from Nebraska complain that "these people move here without bothering to learn the language." Aside from the basic rudeness of the "these people" nomenclature, the comment ignored the fact that Texas was Spanish-speaking for the majority of the past 500 years, and that she and I were more recent migrants than many of "these people."

She also repeated a common error, which is that whenever people are speaking a language other than English, it is because they cannot speak English, or because they are somehow conspiring against any English speakers in the room. Sadly, many of my fellow citizens just have too little experience in multilingual environments to understand how rarely either of these conditions holds true.

When my own ancestors arrived on these shores -- in 1609 Virginia and 1620 Plymouth -- they did not learn Algonquin languages, preferring to bring English with them. By the time the first Bohanan landed in Boston in 1734, he presumably had to adjust from Gaelic to English, but he had surely picked up some of that already from his shipmates/captors.

While working on this post, I also had the pleasure of watching a movie that is already one of my favorites -- The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls. Among the many other virtues of these witty Kiwi entertainers is their embrace of the Maori language in their performances.

I close this post with a map that is a bit better known among geographers. It depicts political boundaries in continental Africa (prior to the formation of South Sudan) and the languages and language groups of the continent prior to European invasions. Since many boundaries were set by people who had not even visited the places they were ruling, cultural geography was rarely reflected in the lines that were drawn. I cannot help but notice that the dividing line for the current division in Mali is corresponds precisely with linguistic boundaries.

Compare this map to that of the division of lands among European colonizers that was established at the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.