Afrika Mapping

The United Nations recently voted overwhelmingly -- over the predictably pathetic objection of the United States -- to endorse the wider use of equal-area maps for most purposes. This is a subject that was cogently addressed in a fictional (and better) West Wing back in November, 2000. 

Comparisons such as this one from The True Size help to illustrate the point that the UN was making: the 1569 Mercator projection was absolutely the correct choice for navigation but it is not good for representation. One could say that is was an essential tool of colonialism that has had the (mostly) unintended side effect of supporting post-colonial thinking. 

The disparity in the relative size of Argentina and Greenland is probably the example geographers cite the most. Until the obsession of the current president of the United States with the Danish colony, this has not been a very consequential example. More important and pervasive has been the tendency of the Mercator projection to minimize the size of Africa in the mental maps of many of us. 

I used the online tool The True Size to make the corrective example above, and I recommend the site to anybody seeking to compare the size of regions. I often use it when I want to help students (or myself) think about unfamiliar places in terms of more familiar places.

This is all by way of prelude to a number of maps of the African contient itself that I have found recently.. The map of national boundaries is both unfamiliar to many non-African viewers and also itself an inadequate representation of the continent. That is to say, the boundaries are merely a starting point, given that they obscure many important geographic patterns. In fact, many of the dire challenges facing the continent have to do with the imposition of these boundaries. 

Perhaps the best example of this is a map depicting 2010 (pre-South Sudan) boundaries superimposed on a map of language families. I discuss this -- and a North America comparison -- in my 2012 post Immigrants Should Learn the Language.

All of this is by way of prelude to sharing a few maps that have come across the (digital) transom in the past couple of weeks. Each of which is an opportunity to look at Africa in terms other than (or in addition to) the colonial.

The first is a more detailed approximation of the language geography hinted at above, in a map that identifies a few dozen languages in a half-dozen language families. No one map can capture all of the continent's linguistic diversity, but the Wikimedia Languages of Africa provides a bit more insight, as do the accompanying Wikipedia Languages of Africa article and its various citations. 

All maps are selective -- this one takes the unusual step of including a notation to that effect -- at least five times as many languages could be shown. The shortfall is much greater in some areas, particularly Nigeria with its 500 languages. I noticed one of the citations in this article with interest, but will spare readers a long journey down that particular rabbit hole and will just say that the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) is both a highly respected academic organization and a close partner of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. I have been to one of their jointly operated base camps in the Braziian Amazon; they share headquarters in Texas.

Whenever I think of the linguistic diversity of the continent, I am reminded of one of my favorite musicians: Angélique Kidjo of Benin (not far from Nigeria). She is fluent in two colonial languages and three regional languages: Fon, French, Yorùbá, Gen (Mina) and English. And in the one listed last in her biography, she is more fluent than most English speakers I have known. 

Another linguistic map that caught my attention recently describes the extent to which Amazigh languages are spoken across the nothern part of the continent, and the variety of languages in that family, which are perhaps better known as Berber languages.

Apologies: the only citation I have for this map is a
general reference to the Facebook page GeoPolice.

Another map that caught my attention is a bit of cartographic humor that shows just how arbitrary colonial land-taking could be. Nobody in these three countries wanted the absurd eastward extension of Namibia, but residents of all three countries must contend with it more than a century after the fact. The Geo All Day page includes a brief explanation of the 1890 Caprivi Strip.

The Fabric Map of Africa points to another important facet of cultural identity -- of which language, food, and religion are more commonly-noticed examples. It puts me in mind of impressive exhibits of art from the continent that I was lucky enough to see in Annapois and Baltimore in 2019. As with the lingusitc maps above, these fabrics represent much greater textile variety present in real life.

The other really cool map that came to my attention recently is about biogeography, though human movement seems also to be part of this story. 

The range of the super-cute African crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata) is quite unusually disjointed, comprising three or four isolated regions at great distances from each other. The distance is what suggests the involvement of human trade or migration in getting the critters so far apart. 

Knowing something of the geography of the continent's climates and biomes makes the adaptability of this plucky mammal even more remarkable. It is found in areas suitable for grapes and olives in the north, lowland rain forests in the west, and coffee-growing cloud forests in the east. 

Lagniappe: A Speech

A very timely surprise came as I spent a few days writing this post. Cabo Verde Prime Minister Francisco Carvalho's turn to speak at the UN General Assembly came on Saturday morning, September 26. He took the opportunity to speak in Kriolu (Cape Verdean Creole) -- and the UN video player allows viewers to choose "original" as one of its eight audio tracks. This came a few weeks after the International Day of the Mother Tongue, and was apparently the first time that a Cape Verdean leader used the Cape Verdean language rather than Portuguese in this setting. Side note: the first two heads of state to speak were the president of Brazil and the president of the United States, which is the usual order. This is because at the first UN General Assembly, nobody wanted to go first, and the then-president of Brazil finally offered to do so. Brazil has been first ever since, followed by the United States as host. I have no idea how the rest of the order is set.

The content of PM Carvalho's address is, of course, as important as the language he used. He joined many (maybe all?) African leaders in using this opportunity to call for passage of a resolution that would give the continent -- and its 1.6 billion people -- a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The fifteen seats on the Council rotate in such a way that Africa is always represented. But importantly, it is only the five "permanent" members who have veto authority,  That short list is decades overdue for a reshuffle.

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). 

From Coffee to Coffee House

  

I try to learn something new about coffee every day. My librarian spouse and I enjoy book talks. And our dog Crumpet loves story time. I snapped this photo in our reading room as we settled in for a virtual event that checked all of these boxes. Even better, the featured author is both an historian and a librarian! 

As you can see, we had a very content canine, and we were all happy to have learned of this particular author talk, and that we were able to fit it in just before I took off for a brief visit with our Maryland family. 

As always, it is through the kindness of friends and colleagues that I do manage to learn something small or large about coffee nearly every day. This day, it was large! A colleague in our English department let me know about a presentation by Michelle Craig McDonald at a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society. 

Bonus lesson: I had heard of AAS, but had no idea that it is based in Worcester, Massachusetts. I might have made that trip, but the timing was not good for that, so I'm grateful that her discussion of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States would be online -- Crumpet was glad as well. She's much happier to watch an author talk from Pam's recliner than to hear about it after we've left her alone. 

As she explains during the talk, Professor McDonald is a business historian who had noticed a gap in the coffee literature. Finding gaps is one way that scholars figure out what to study: read all you can in a particular field, and you will eventually figure out what has not been written. In this case, she found that a lot of work had been done on the spread of coffee cultivation and production and also a lot on the spread of coffee consumption. But the literature on growers largely assumes a market and the literature on markets largely assumes growers. The two bodies of literature were not talking to each other in her view, though I would argue that Mark Pendergrast's 1999 Uncommon Grounds does make a contribution in this area. Real coffee nerds will be able to discern that she read the second edition of his book. 

I was even more pleased to see that the talk was available immediately afterward, so I can share it with students in my Secret Life of Coffee seminar. I am particularly interested in them hearing her discussion of the rise of coffee houses and their once-important role in commerce. On the production side, her explanation of the rise and fall of coffee production in Haiti is particularly helpful. 

This book is, of course, going on my reading list! 

#NationalAuthorsDay

(Thanks to my CyberNavigator son Harvey for helping me to fix the colors on this post.)

Not only is it El Día de los Muertos, but it is also National Author's Day. Followers of this space will know that I have great respect not only for those who write books but also for the librarians who care for books in particular and the written word in general. This is an important moment to recognize the importance of all writers, and especially those whose work is seen as too dangerous by some politicians. 

NOTE: This blog post is taking some while! I have listed authors in alphabetical order and have written something about the work for which they are best known and/or the ways I have met them. I am posting it in incomplete form so that friends can read some of what I have to say. There will be updates over this November 1-2 weekend. 

It was in 2017 that I decided to post online a list of authors I had met over the years. In some cases, I was fortunate simply to be seated in an audience for a talk. In other cases, however, I had occasion to speak directly with the writer, perhaps at a book-signing table. This happened so many times with David Sedaris that he began to recognize us. 

In still other cases -- more often than I really deserve -- I actually spent time with these great thinkers outside of the formal lecture. Most often, this was by association: my spouse the librarian was involved in organizing author talks (and dinners) at part of Bridgewater's One Book One Community program, and I was able to crash a dinner before the talk. This is an important way in which I have been far luckier in life than I deserve to be!

Herewith, all of the authors I can think of at the moment. In most cases, I have posted a link from the author's name to their GoodReads profile. In some cases, I have added a link to my own brief comments about one or more of their works.)

Julia Alvarez -- I created an earlier version of this list as a sort of online studnt, in which I listed authors I had met, plus one I had not. Julia Alvarez was the missing author on that list, because she was one of the authors I would most WANT to meet. I still have not met her in person exactly, but I have attended a virtual author talk she gave as a webinar. She is a professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont, so I thought our paths might cross some day as fellow Latin Americanists in New England. She is probably best known for How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, but two of her other works have been important to me A Cafecito Story: El Cuento del Cafecito is a love story that is inspired by the author's own coffee farm in the Dominican Republic. Her barely fictionalized novel In the Time of the Butterflies, however, is far more important even than the coffee book. This recounts the unbelievable but completely true story of the martyrdom of the Maribel sisters, also in the Dominican Republic. It remains one of the most important works on the notorious Trujillo dictatorship and the resistance that eventually brought down his reign of terror. This is a case in which the film adaptation-- with Edward James Olmos as the bad guy-- is nearly as good the book.  

Maya Angelou --

Michael Blanding -- We traveled to the State Library of Massachusetts to hear Blanding speak. That beautiful library is in the State House on Beacon Hill and is a must-visit for any Bay Stater. If you do go up there, please be sure to look for the giant ruler in a hallway nearby. I cannot remember whether it is 50 feet or 100 feet long, but it was installed to ensure consistent measurements of distance and area in the Commonwealth. We were there for Blanding's discussion of The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps. We agree that it is a gripping story. The audacity of the crime spree he describes was astounding to librarian and geographer alike!

Noam Chomsky

Dean Cycon -- Plot twist! The first time I met Dean in person was at a talk about his book Javatrekke, which sadly is out of print now. His memoir of life as a coffee importer. is the definiitive work on the need for genuine fair trade in coffee. I have assigned the bookto hundreds of students and have given away dozens of copy. The plot twist is that I was the one who gave that author talk. His local library had asked him to give two talks -- one at each of its branches -- and he agreed to do one and asked me to do the other. After it was settled, he decided to show up for the beginning of it and to bring coffee. It was a bit nervous-making to give a talk about a book with the author present, but he was gracious and I did bring a useful geographic perspective

Harm de Blij -- The family of Harm de Blij (du-BLAY) left the Netherlands on the eve of World War II, finding refuge in South Africa. He eventually came to the United States and became this country's most prolific academic geographer. He was a professor at several universities at the same time and published more than a dozen editions each of several of the most widely-used texts in our field. He also published at least a hundred academic papers and served as an on-air geographer for Good Morning America. In his spare time, he wrote 1,000 letters to editors each year to point out geographic errors in their publications. All of this was done with a blend of kindness, curiosity, confidence, and clarity that we are unlikely ever to see again. We are very fortunate that he was a great friend of our geography department and visited us twice. His work continues as those earlier textbooks continue to be revised by other scholars. Among his work for general audiences, I particularly recommend The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape.

Dr. Harm de Blij during his 2009 visit to Bridgewater State College. 
This photo is from a 2014 obituary post on our department blog.

Junot Díaz -- he was as gracious in his individual comments with my students as he was profane in his general remarks. We were fortunate that my librarian spouse was able to arrange his campus visit just before he started winning MAJOR awards, and that he was kind enough to honor that agreement and its relatively modest fee. My comments on The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao are brief, but the book had a big impact.

Barbara Ehrenreich -- I don't think I had heard of Barbara Ehrenreich before her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America came out and she visited our campus as a One Book One Community program. The book and the visit were memorable. We often say in our house that the one think rich people do not understand is that poor people don't have money. Her book was a bit of a stunt in which a relatively prosperous person tried to currect this ignroance for herself and for her readers. She essentially went underground as a working poor person -- cleaning houses and working retail while living in a rented trailer. Even though she admits that the parameters she set for the experiment -- especially the maintenance of her health insurance -- made the experience less risky, the insights were profound. And they are needed more now than ever. At the time of this writing, the U.S. president has tried to suspend SNAP (food stamps) for everyone, and millions of people are cheering him on, falsely assuming that only lazy people need such benefits.

Jack Gantos -- Because his daughter was a school chum of our son, we were lucky enough to meet the auther of Rotten Ralph shortly after he won the Newberry Medal and on the very same day that he had been featured on the NPR quiz show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me. I have rarely met a more genuinely gracious person. And rarely has Peter Sagal had so much fun with a guest -- this is 11 minutes of delightful radio listening.

Arthur Golden -- this was a unique author encounter. I did not meet him in person, nor did we talk at all about his book. We did, however, have a couple of long telephone conversations in which I advised him on coffee for his home use. His book Memoirs of a Geisha is still on my to-read list, but I did watch the film version.

Jane Goodall --Of all the writers listed here, Lady Jane left me most starstruck. I was among more than a thousand people in the room when she was kind enough to accept an award from our American Association of Geographers, so we did not speak to each other at all. But I did manage to snap this grainy, somewhat magical photo. I highly recommend her Famous Last Words interview and will be watching her funeral online on November 12.

A.J. Jacobs -- The author of Thanks a Thousand! was scheduled to visit our campus in 2021, when this delightful little book was both the One Book One Community read and an ancillary text in my coffee seminar. Covid-19 had other plans, so I ended up hosting him for a virtual visit. He uses coffee as the focus of his personal project exploring what he calls a gratitude chain.

James Howard Kunstler -- We brought Kunstler to campus because he understands -- and explains -- the interactions among transportation, energy, and land use in powerful ways. He is deeply cynical, but his frustration with bad policy is firmly rooted in the math and physics of sprawl and non-renewable energy. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century

Susan Letendre — We became friends of this author through her human-rights work in Latin America and were proud to be present for the launch of her children's book Bonita: La Conejita de Mi Patio.

Rich Little -- The author of Cold Case to Case Closed, Lizbeth Borden, My Story is a local author who offers a novel interpretation of one of our region's most notorious criminal cases. As I often did with community reads, I assigned this book to my class of future geography teachers -- they used it as the basis for lesson plans and we also enjoyed a field trip to the scene of the crime and to the grave of the accused.

Bill McKibben

Terry McMillan -- To be honest, I don't think I have read any of her works, but I remember enjoying McMilan's discussion and I did enjoy the film adaptation of How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

Tom Miller -- Our connections to this author go way back -- many years before he came to speak at BSU. I think our first awareness of him was through his marvelous little book On the Border. As my review mentions, this book inspired me to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at as many crossings as possible Hayes-Boh Border Life is an annotated map of those crossings. When he came to BSU, he spoke about Revenge of the Saguaro, which opens with a story of poetic justice that those of us who have spent a lot of time in the Sonoran Desert can really appreciate. His most important book (for us) was published in between these two. When we were living near him in Tucson, my librarian spouse Pamela did research and fact-checking for his Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba. This helped him to become one of the authors we knew best, and we are grateful that it also allowed Pam to travel to Cuba on a literary tour he arranged in 2013.

Diana Muir The great niece of John Muir (a California naturalist best known for founding the Sierra Club in 1892) lives in Newton, Massachusetts -- a former mill town in the western suburbs of Boston. She published Reflections in Bullough's Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England in 2000, shortly after I had begun teaching a course on land protection. I have more to say about how her work fit into my class in my recent Land Protection Books post. She was kind enough to give a public lecture at Bridgewater (a similarly situated former mill town in Boston's southern suburbs) in connection with that class.

Bill Nye -- this Science Guy was met with more enthusiasm from our students than any other author who has visited our campus -- which includes about half of the notables in this post.

Nathaniel Philbrick - we had dinner with Philbrick on the same day he had breakfast with Ron Howard to start work on the movie version of In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. This is his telling of the true whaling story that inspired Melville to write Moby Dick. The cliché really applies here: Philbrick's book is much better than Howard's film of the same name. Philbrick has so much respect for Melville's great work that he has published an entire book simply to promote it: Why Read Moby-Dick?

Michael Pollan -- he visited our campus to talk about his most influential book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. Over lunch, he told us that he had a terrible time finding a publisher for a book about agriculture. So he asked about a different kind of book -- one about food and where it comes from. And now he is a rock star among foodies. My only review is of his later audiobook Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. He also features in many important documentaries about food and where it comes from (wink, wink)

Stephen Puleo -- we met Puleo when he came to campus to speak about Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 and were fortunate to have him return to talk about a completely different work, Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America's First Humanitarian Mission. He is both an indefatigable researcher and a gifted storyteller on the page and in person. Each of these represents countless hours of research, enabling him to bring surprising elements to each story. Each of these books would be a lifetime achievement to be proud of -- I am astonished to know that he has written almost a dozen such works.

Carl Safina signing a book for us
on Nantucket in 2016.

Carl Safina

Arthur Schlesinger (see Cycles)

David Sedaris

Sandy Tolan

Edward Tufte -- When I met Edward Tufte, he had not come to us: I went to him. Specifically, I went to a daylong workshop that this emertius professor of statistics was offering in Boston. For several days, he filled a ballroom with those who wished to learn about the visual presentation of information. Each participan had a stack of all of the major books he had published at that time, and he spent hours walking around the room, guiding us through some of their key lessons. He had an assistant who walked around the room at certain point in the lesson to show us various historic doucments on which Tufte's own work was based -- original graphics by Sir Isaac Newton and th elike. During the Q&A, people kept asking him about powerPoint, which was relaatively new at the time. I could tell he was annoyed even to be asked about such a low-quality communication tool, and he had very little to say about it. A few years later, he published The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within. I have since assigned it to many students and have made it the basis of several workshops I've given for fellow prfessors.

John Waters -- Baltimore's "filth elder" is huge in our household. All of us have been to see him at least twice. In addition to his many movies, I recommend his book Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America. It is a clever combination of memoir and fiction.

Kerrin Willis -- local educator and author of the amazing historic novel Strange Arithmetic, which takes place in the context of the Taunton POW camp.

Read But Not Seen

Of course, I have not met most of the authors whose work I have read, nor have I read nearly all of the books I have wanted to read. My GoodReads account includes quite a few books that have mattered to me -- feel free to browse my entire list (including read, in progress, or hoping to read) and the shorter list of those I have reviewed. 

A couple of authors have been particularly important to me. J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, right around the time I first started hearing about him. I later read The Hobbit seven times and the Lord of the Rights three times. This led to a love of languages, some acquaintance with maps, and many hours hovering around D&D tables. My favorite librarian worked in a bookstore during our courtship and supplied me with all of the prequels, legends, and sequels. My familiarity with the text of the original work led me to choose O Hobbit for both relaxation and language practice during my first visit to the Amazon. I read this entire Portuguese version in my hammock.

Robert Pirsig has been a close second to Tolkien in terms of a writer's importance to me. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence: An Inquiry into Values is both a book about travel and a book about, well, quality. The opening chapters came easily to me, and the philosophical ruminations become much more complicated midway. So although I have read the first half seven times, I have only finished the book three times. Still, the book shaped my thinking -- particularly about writing -- profoundly. 

I have occasionally been in conversation in which neither his name nor the book was mentioned, but whose contents were only possible because both of us had read the book. More profoundly, I realized that my favorite English teacher had given us exercises taken directly from the book. Pirsig lived until 2017, but I never met him. I do have a postcard from him, though. I had written to ask when the sequel would be published and he answered that it was a receding goal. When it eventually did get published, I read Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, but I found it unrewarding. I think he was a writer with one perfect book in him. 

A third writer who has been very important to me is actually still alive. John McPhee has been contributing to The New Yorker for as long as I've been walking and talking. He wrote Encounters with the Archdruid, which was assigned in both the first geography class and the first philosophy class I took. I never met him, but I did get to meet the protagonist of that book a couple of times. I have gone on to read nine of his 31 books and need to read more. Perhaps I will celebrate National Authors Day by writing him a letter. His Wikipedia entry describes not only a tremendous career as a writer, but an even more important career as a teacher of other writers. He is a national treasure!

And speaking of national treasures, I will end this rambling with a link to Just Read, which is my tribute to the legendary Rep. John Lewis. If you do nothing else to honor authors today, please visit that entry and watch his National Book Award acceptance speech. I have watched it at least 50 times. 

Lagniappe

Perhaps this looking back and making lists has something to do with age -- I have in recent years created maps solely for keeping track of life experiences. My favorite started as a map of national parks I have visited, but grew to be a life list both of national parks and of museums. As with this post, the map is probably not quite complete, probably of interest only to me, and a bit uneven in the level of detail.

MBTA Dark Territory

As a certain kind of geographer, I probably spend more time thinking about trains than actually riding them, though I am grateful every time I get a chance to do the latter (well, almost every time). I enjoy all three major scales (gages) -- local subways and trolleys, regional commuter rail, and national interstate rail. Of course, the national rail would be even better if I lived in some other nation, but Amtrak does its best, and despite terrible coffee and occasionally rude fellow passengers, I have enjoyed quite a few jaunts to NYC or DC, grateful to be following the general fall-line path of I-95 without being on it! 

In 2025, the New Bedford/Fall River extension finally opened. Long overdue for my friend and geography colleague who has been living in Fairhaven for most of his tenure at BSU, but just in time for me! We have had a weekend house in Fairhaven for about a decade, and recently made it our only home after an arduous year of renovations and property transactions. Just at the MBTA opened a train from Boston to Bridgewater soon after we moved to that town, it extended that line to the vicinity of our new home shortly after our full-time arrival on the South Coast.

A few geographic peculiarities accompany this development. First, the trains go to both Fall River and New Bedford -- there is a split between the two at East Taunton, with shuttles making up for the resulting infrequent direct service. The shuttles are trains, not busses, so this is a good solution, though it takes some getting used to and some very careful attention to announcements at that East Taunton platform.

Second is that a new station was built across the street from the Middleboro-Lakeville station. The old station is still operating, but ONLY -- as far as I can tell -- as part of the very infrequent service from Boston to Cape Cod.

The map below is about the third oddity, the one that inspired this post. When I drive from New Bedford to Bridgewater, I follow Route 18, a.k.a. Bedford Street, a.k.a. the old, very straight toll road to Boston (which gave rise to the tollhouse cookie, but that's another story). So in my mental map, the train ride would also be a straight line. On the real map and in real life, however, there is a zig and a zag, with the aforementioned Middleboro (Middleborough) station bing almost due east of the East Taunton station.

That eastward jog takes passengera across the northern edge of Massasoit State Park and -- it seems -- into a parallel universe of some kind, into which cellular networks do not reach. The main advantages of commuter rail are related to reduced emissions, vehicle wear-and-tear, and traffic stress. But the ability to work online while traveling is another benefit. Each MBTA train comes with a completely useless internet server, so I always connect my laptop to the interwebs through telephone hotspot.

The 5G network almost always fails between these stations, however, reminding me of two films: Under Siege 2: Dark Territory and The Bridgewater Triangle. I saw the former during my first visit to the Amazon, where the Portuguese dubbed version was helpful language practice. The plot revolves around and evil genius knowing that a train would be out of radio contact as it passed through a certain mountainous area. I saw the latter when it debuted in Dartmouth. It recounts the generally spooky folklore of our region -- the MBTA Dark Territory is right in the middle of the famous triangle.  

 

NESTVAL Nicaragua Follow-Up

Sustainable tourism was a central theme of the 103rd Annual Meeting of NESTVAL, hosted this weekend by the Department of Geography at Bridgewater State University. Among the highlights was a plenary session led by my good friend Nohelia Talavera, who traveled from Nicaragua to share her experience as a part of Matagalpa Tours, our partner on almost a dozen travel courses between 2006 and 2020. 

Nohelia and the Coffee Maven with
a photo from the Origen project.

As she explained -- and as my students and I know well -- Matagalpa Tours is far more than a tour operator. It is far more, even, than a tour operator with sustainability credentials. It is a vital member of the coffeeland communities of northern Nicaragua. They not only connect visitors to those who produce coffee; they also use their skills as guides and educators to improve those communities. 

Among the many connections Nohelia shared with the NESTVAL audience are the Origen photography project, the weaving cooperative of El Chile, and the environmental education project of Agualí. She also brought coffee, woven crafts, and photographic prints -- all of which are available for sale. All of the proceeds go directly to community-development projects in the coffeelands.

Origen photos and El Chile handcrafts. Many BSU students have 
learned about weaving first-hand from this women's cooperative.

And now to the purpose of this post: Nohelia still has some of each of these beautiful/delicious items for sale (cash/check/Venmo -- no cards). She will be offering them in the geography conference room (DMF 272) on Tuesday afternoon, October 14. You can buy coffee by the pound and I will also be serving (for free) coffee by the cup -- all from Nicaragua, of course! 

We will be in room 272 from 12:30 to 4:00 on Tuesday, October 14.

MUSICA

During the morning, Nohelia visited both sections of my Planet Sings class to share the music of Tierra Madre and Zircon Skyeband -- bands she has worked with in Nicaragua and Los Angeles, respectively. Both bands involve her friend and fellow Matagalpa Tours guide Hermes, who was kind enough to join us via video for conversation and to play a couple of tunes!

Hermes Montenegro

Album complementos
Video La chica de la rola
Pachamama

Zircon Skyeband
For what is worth
The poor side of town
Heroes 

La Gira Matagalpa 

Documentary Film: Twin Town Blues

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

NEW: Detailed Schedule

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.

I had the good fortune to lead travel courses to Cape Verde in 2006 and 2024 (see below) and to work be involved in many collaborations with Cape Verdean scholars and other professionals over the past two decades. I very much look forward to returning for the entire Spring 2027 semester for projects primarily related to Fogo. 

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 on São Vicente. 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.  

Photo: posted to the Facebook group Españoles in Cabo Verde on April 7, 2026
During our 2024 travel course, our lodging at the lower left of this dramatic image.

LAGNIAPPE 

This sabbatical is planned for the middle of the three-year period comprising the last three years of my tenure as a BSU faculty member and with the first three years of being a full-time resident of the New Bedford area (living across the harbor in Fairhaven). 

I am also fortunate that my project coincides with a new collaboration between BSU and our partners in Cape Verde, particularly at the Mindelo campus of UNICV and Biosfera. I was not involved in developing this important marine-ecology research project and its related science outreach elements, but I am very pleased to be supporting the HERITOR Project in various ways and will be visiting the island of São Vicente in that capacity.

I am fortunate that there are several ways in which I can use this time to focus on connections between this region and Cape Verde and also the rest of Macaronesia. I am including some of those connections here, for the convenience of friends and colleagues who might be connecting in some way with my planned travel. 

Hotel Papel is a new organization that builds cultural connections through informal language programs and through the sponsorship of residencies for artists. 

Cape Verde is a nexus of many kinds of connection across the entire Atlantic world. I plan to devote a lot of my time to a singular place that is the most specific point of connection -- Cidade Velha. The very brief Grand Canyon video I recorded in 2024 is an attempt to convey the importance of this place. 

My Growing Old Growth post describes some relevant forestry. Coffee is, after all, a tree crop and the best coffee arises from good agroforestry practice. The prevalence of century-old trees in Cape Verde's coffee farms creates some interesting opportunities and conundrums.

Looking Back 

I am happy to share Flickr folders of photos from my two travel courses to Cape Verde: 2006 sustainable development and 2024 coffee and volcanoes. (My other 13 travel courses over the same period have been in Central America.)