The Poor Make Us Rich

No illegal immigrant could
be as harmful!

Ronald Reagan had it wrong, of course. He defended his promotion of government on behalf of the wealthy by repeating the words "trickle down economics" until they seemed like a legitimate theory, rather than an unfortunate urinary incident. Two generations later, the loose-leaf Tea Party mob has brought millions of working-class people into political alliances with the über-rich and against the poor at home and abroad.

Two very different items came my way today, reminding me of just how misplaced public outrage is these days. The first was an unusual sort of contest, asking people to choose the most evil among a list of eleven billionaires. (I am not anti-billionaire, by the way; see previous posts about good and bad members of this class.) Fortunately, nobody from the Walton family was on the ballot, making my choice among the remaining candidates a bit easier. All are strong defenders of the right to unfettered accumulation of unearned wealth, but war profiteer and instigator Stephen Bechtel, Jr. (shown above, not seeming to enjoy his money much) was a clear winner in my book.

As much as I enjoyed the rhetorical swings at these plutocrats -- who will never know I exist, much less that I blame them for trashing my country -- I found another story that is a bit more useful and positive. Writing about Indian labor organizer Ela Bhatt, Renée Loth makes a very strong case for the importance of the global underclass in supporting the lifestyles enjoyed by middle and upper classes. The informal sector in particular -- the refuge of casual labors who often have no work place, no documentation, no rights, and no employers -- provides a huge subsidy to the formal economy. Ela Bhatt is an attorney from Ahmedadad who established the Self Employed Women's Association in 1972 to advocate for Indian women in this sector.

Bhatt has succeeded in organizing 1.3 million women, bringing some level of empowerment to workers at the extreme margins of the world economy. Loth points out the sad irony that the rules of the capitalist game -- being written by those who have the most to gain -- have not afforded a million women at Walmart similar recognition in recent court battles.

A third item I noticed today is Barney Frank's explanation of how the political process continues to tilt in favor  of the rich. Scapegoats abound -- immigrants, unions, the poor -- that divert attention from the real villains.

Gaga Traffic

Photo: LA Times

Geographer Sarah Goggin's Carmageddon post on Wiley GeoDiscoveries (a blog to which I sometimes contribute) describes the geography behind the cataclysmic traffic jam that was expected from a 50-hour road closure in Los Angeles last weekend. The expected chaos illustrates several geography concepts, the most obvious of which is extreme automobile dependency in Western cities that have seen most of their growth after the 1950s. Read the article to see what it has to do with Lady Gaga!

Thankfully, the preparations worked better than expected, leading at least one writer to conclude that we usually overvalue cars, even in LA!

South Sudan

See this map with timeline at Washington Post

I happened to be listening to the BBC (via WBUR) late Friday evening, when it was beginning to report on the festivities surrounding the emergence of the world's newest country: South Sudan. For now, much attention is rightly focused on the jubilation that follows the decades-long struggle for the self-determination of people whose promised role in the governance of Sudan was never forthcoming. The fact that 98.8 percent of its people voted for secession is an indication of how very overdue has been this transformation. It can only be hoped that unity and jubilation are enough to advance a country that will have been monitored from Day One by a United Nations peacekeeping mission (UNMISS, whose web site is not yet distinct from UNMIS).

In addition to the BBC, the geographers at About.com have been among the best sources I have found for news and background on the new country. Editor Matt Rosenberg has written a thorough guide to the transition, while contributing writer Amanda Briney has written a detailed overview of the geography of South Sudan.

The map above is part of extensive coverage by the Washington Post. Like any good map, it tells several important parts of the story, including the strong climatic divide between arid, semi-tropical Sudan and wet tropical South Sudan. Located between 4 and 9 degrees north, the new country is dominated by tropical rain forest. Its ten provinces, in fact, include three named for its equatorial location. Not indicated on the map -- but well explained by geographer Briney -- are the language divides that were imposed when Egypt and England imposed boundaries that were to remain in place from 1947 until this weekend. One welcome feature of the map is its blurry edges -- Sudan and South Sudan exist within a regional context that extends in all directions and that does not end abruptly with any river, coastline, or edge of empire.

Perhaps most important for the economic future of the country is the location of the oil fields, which most have by now heard are located in South Sudan. The implications of this loss for Sudan are difficult to fathom, but their location in the immediate border zone suggest that the struggle for these resources is far from over. In fact, the Abyei region is contested, even before the sun rose on the first day of independence. Moreover, the map makes clear that Africa's 15th landlocked country faces a number of unpleasant choices for the export of its main commodity. Existing pipelines run through Sudan, by far the most convenient route to world markets. All other options are through impossible terrain (such as the highlands of Ethiopia), vast distances through other landlocked countries (such as any possible route through the Central African Republic), or through areas experiencing even more strife than Sudan (such as the Congo).

The complex geography and fraught history suggest that the events of the past weekend are, indeed, just a beginning of what the world needs to learn about South Sudan. An excellent series of maps from BBC is a good starting point. I look forward to seeing an update on the CIA World Factbook, which currently acknowledges the need for a new listing, but lists only Sudan as of this writing.

Norwegian Baptist Prairie Coffee

We do not like to admit that coffee has become an obsession in our family, but it is true that we seem to be especially prone to random coffee connections. For example, as we casually stopped by the used-book sale our church has each week at the local farmers' market, my favorite librarian noticed a book with coffee in the title. We could not really tell what it was about, but it was in our bag right away, and I finished the book later on the same day I bought it -- something I never manage to do!

The book is Margaret Jensen's First We Have Coffee. The paperback we picked up is a sixth printing of the (c) 1982 edition. Apparently later editions are still available, with at least two different subtitles. Our version has no subtitle, but the tagline "Treasure the romance, mystery, tragedy, comedy and faith in these true life stories of an immigrant family."

I am not so sure about the mystery in this tale, but the other elements are woven throughout this story of the author's family. From her mother's arrival from Norway as a teenager at the beginning of the twentieth century to the deaths of her parents in the 1970s, it is a family journey from small towns to prairie to big city and ultimately to the rural South. The "romance" is of a type that is subdued and deeply embedded in archaic gender roles. It is interesting that some online reviewers find this to be the most rewarding and inspiring part of the tale. Most of the tragedies are the kinds of losses and setbacks bound to occur over three-quarters of a century, though some might see the persistent privations as tragic.

The "immigrant family" theme is as much about the family's movements from town to country to city within North America as it is about the international migration. It is interesting to note, however, that the Norwegian communities in the book used their native language for decades after having learned English, especially as they came together for worship or life passages. This is a fine contradiction to the all-too common assumption that immigrants who speak another language do so only because they lack the ability to speak the language of their new home.

The "comedy" woven throughout the tale is of the gentle sort I would more likely call humor, in the tradition of Samuel Clemens or, more aptly, Garrison Keilor. Similarly, through the first 150 pages of the book, Jensen's nostalgia for the spare, spiritual, and musical days of her Norwegian Baptist upbringing brought out my own memories from my own childhood. Though separated by decades and many miles, we shared some experiences and even some favorite hymns, such as A Mighty Fortress and Blessed Be the Tie. (The last 40 pages of the book are about her experience of her parents as adults, and are burdened, in my view, by needlessly flowery prose, poor poetry, and self-conscious piety.)

The stories of her youth, however, are enjoyable and though coffee is almost never the focus, it is mentioned hundreds of times in many contexts. Coffee is for rising, in the morning, resting in the evening, and making a house a home. Most importantly, coffee is a catalyst for conversation. Almost any dialog in the book -- and certainly any important dialog -- is lubricated by coffee:

I chuckled to myself as I remembered a handsome minister from Norway, and his 'prayer meeting' with a farmer's daughter. I had inadvertently stumbled into the room in the middle of a not-so-holy kiss. One word to Mama sent an S.O.S. to Norway, and the secret code between wives resulted in action. Sooner than expected, the minister's adorable wife arrived on the scene. The curly-haired, saucy-eyed [saucer?] wife charmed her way into the hearts of everyone, especially Mama. The wife never made reference to the reason for the surprise visit, except to let the farmer's daughter know how much the wife had missed her charming husband. Chuckling over a cup of coffee, Mama and the wife agreed: 'You do your part, God will do the rest.' The subdued husband and his sparkling wife blended together lie coffee and cream. When Papa spoke highly of that devoted couple, Mama smiled over her coffee cup.

'There are some things you tell, and some things you don't tell,' Mama had said to me when I told her of my abrupt interruption of the hungry kiss. Her look told me that I had been entrusted with a secret -- that we were to keep this as our own.

In another case, it was a young wife whose eye was wandering, so "Mama took the wife aside. No one but those two knew what was shared over afternoon coffee. The wife returned her loyalty to her rightful lover, her husband." (The sensuality of coffee is, in this case, of only the most respectable variety!)

Coffee was also part of moving beyond any unpleasantness; this passage -- following a death in the family -- is typical: "Mama washed her face, combed her hair, tied on a starched apron, and put on the coffee pot."

Garrison Keilor's tales of Norwegian Lutheran frugality on the prairie (and my own spare upbringing in Virginia) pale in comparison to Jensen's account of her arrival in Chicago as a teenager from the Canadian prairie:

The table was set for 'coffee' and three dishes, each containing a huge peach-half, were set before us. Taking charge of my siblings, as I'd been commanded, I promptly removed two of the dishes and proceeded to divide the one remaining peach-half in three parts. 'We always divide, I said, 'and then we can have peaches for two more days. We cut on orange in six pieces,' I added.

Although coffee is mentioned on nearly every page of this book, it is mostly in passing, so that it permeates the stories without being addressed directly. A few passages suggest that percolation (egad!) was the favored means of preparation, and once coffee with sugar lumps is mentioned as a Norwegian "national pastime." But in 185 pages and close to a thousand uses of the word, little else is revealed. This nonchalance is itself the main message about the geography of coffee in Jensen's immigrant experience.

Digging Back

Among the many jobs I had before becoming a geography professor was one I call "dry-cleaner inspector." My actual titles at that time were "Geographer" and "Assistant Regulatory Analyst" in the Cincinnati office of a global engineering firm that was then called Dames & Moore. I actually worked on a variety of projects, but the most common assignments were Phase I investigations for property transfer.

Simply put, when clients purchased commercial property, they would employ us to perform due diligence to determine whether the property could be expected to harbor environmental hazards, such as soil contaminated by an old spill or material leaking from a buried chemical or fuel storage tank. This kind of research is necessary because financial and legal liability for such contamination can extend to both prior and current owners of a property. (This may seem unfair, but it entirely necessary to eliminate the "shell game" approach that polluters have used to escape liability in the past.) Our Phase I investigations involved documentary research, interviews, and site visits. If any of these avenues suggested likely contamination sources, we would recommend a Phase II investigation that would include sampling in relevant media -- air, soil, water and/or building materials.

The properties I investigated included warehouses, garages, offices, and manufacturing plants, but at least 20 of the properties were dry cleaners, in about 10 different states. The common thread for these was a Cincinnati law firm that represented a British client that in turn was buying hundreds of dry cleaning operations throughout the United States. I cannot remember the name and you have never heard of it, because they always left the local name and managers in place.

When I was doing this work in 1989-1990 (and part-time in south-most Texas about four years later), all of the relevant documents existed on paper. Therefore when I first learned about a project, my first step was to make travel arrangements to visit both the store itself (usually there were two or three clustered in the same city) and to visit local and state offices that would have the records I needed. (This contributed nicely to my County Map Project, which was actually inspired by other workers in the same office.) My second step would be to make phone calls to order certain materials that I knew could be mailed to me. These included topographic maps from the U.S. Geological Survey and Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps. I would also order any aerial photography I could find, primarily through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These resources would give me some understanding of the literal "lay of the land" around a property and also some clues about current and past uses in and around the property that might pose environmental hazards. For example, the fire insurance maps might show PCB oil or asbestos as a good thing, because they were associated with fire safety, though we now think of them principally in terms of the serious health risks they pose.

I apply this experience to a student exercise in my introductory environmental geography course and in more detail in an upper-level course on environmental regulations. For better or worse, many parts of a Phase I investigation can now be done online. I think "better" because of the convenience, efficiency, and completeness of record searches that previously required a lot of time and expense and a little bit of luck in finding the right office. I think "worse," though, because the availability of online tools has pushed the price of Phase I work so low that many such investigations are done by people who never visit the facilities they are investigating ... and the only serious problem I ever found in a Phase I was something I discovered during my site visit that was not in any of the paper records.

For teaching purposes, though, the online materials are terrific, and have become much more convenient even in the past few years. The US Environmental Protection Agency continues to improve online access, bringing a lot of databases together in the Envirofacts portal. Many of these were previously linked from the Surf Your Watershed portal, which remains an excellent source for information about regional water quality and cooperating organizations.

Sanborn Maps were originally designed to guide the pricing of property insurance. They are very detailed and frequently updated, being most actively used during a period (late-19th through mid-20th centuries) of tremendous growth of industries that operated without meaningful controls on pollution. The maps can often be found in local libraries -- I actually required students in my Geography of Brockton course to study them. They are also available online, though at considerable expense. (At Dames & Moore I routinely paid $45 per sheet for photocopies, and online subscriptions today are quite expensive.) Users of the BSU Maxwell Library have access to the entire set of Massachusetts Sanborn maps; a link is provided on the Geography MaxGuide.

The textbook I use for the upper-level course (Ortolano's Environmental Regulation) is over a decade old but remains the most comprehensive explanation of the regulatory programs that are still in place to address environmental hazards in the United States.

Coffee Comics

Regular readers of this blog will know that I consider coffee an essential element of environmental geography. Google the phrase "geography of coffee" to see just how serious I can be about this beverage. I have created pages on coffee shops, coffee roasters, coffee films, coffee photos -- even coffee romance.

What I really wish I had, though, would be a nice collection coffee comics. The creators of newspaper comics (we called them "the funnies" when I was a kid) apparently include quite a few coffee enthusiasts. Most consistent are Brian Basset and Robert Harrell, whose Adam@Home strip is a virtual coffee festival. (See their Father's Day coffee special, for example!)

Today, however, it is Bliss by Harry Bliss that really resonates:

I am fussy about coffee. I am about quality way over quantity. I probably could not even drink the dregs that are likely to be stuck to the bottom of the coffee pot shown in this strip. Still, I am reminded of a class session about two years ago. 

I was deeply engaged in a conversation about some readings (readings about coffee, that is), when a student raised her hand and with a serious tone said, "I have a question." 

"Sure," I said, "what is it?"

"Just how much coffee do you drink?"

I remember holding my hand out to show her -- and the rest of the class -- that I could still hold it steady.

"See. Not too much."

Goode and Evil Maps

Thanks once again to geographer Matt Rosenberg for a great geography story. This time, Matt describes the background of an atlas that many geographers know and love. Goode's World Atlas, now in its 22 edition, began as an antidote to the all-too-common Mercator projection.

I have always taken the projection for granted in these atlases, being more impressed by the overall quality of the content, the careful selection of map scale, and the variety of thematic maps. I did not know that, in a 1908 speech, Professor Goode told the AAG that the Mercator projection is evil!

See Matt's article for the whole story and see the commentary on projections that I created for our K-12 EarthView blog.

One Cup -- Timor Coffee

One Cup is a 30-minute documentary about the coffee industry in Timor-Leste (East Timor). It describes the role of fair trade in the recovery of a once-vibrant coffee industry ravaged by war. It is among the best coffee videos I have seen, comparable to Black Gold but shorter and not as graphic. (Yes, the plight of coffee farmers is often dire enough to make for unpleasant viewing.)

I first saw the film when BSU's Social Justice League showed it a number of years ago, and fortunately I have a copy on my computer. It had disappeared from the usual sites, but thanks to the non-profit Internet Archive, it is now available for download or streaming in a number of formats.

That's How!

This afternoon I heard Terry Gross -- one of my favorite radio interviewers -- talking with illustrator and children's book author Christoph Niemann about his work and his unusual insights into everything from mental maps and parenting to the nature of sleeping and waking.

I highly recommend listening to the wide-ranging interview and viewing the remarkable slideshow that accompanies the summary. The tile work in his bathroom is a geographic wonder and the understanding his boys have of the New York subway system is a parenting triumph.

Countries and Anomalies

Most readers know that I am part of a team in the BSU Geography Department that takes a giant globe known as EarthView to schools and public viewing events, with close to 30,000 people -- in small groups -- joining us inside the globe in the three years we have had it. EarthView is a hand-painted, physical globe, which means that the only national boundaries that are well-defined on the globe are those of island nations such as New Zealand and Madagascar. Even where boundaries are fairly easy to discern, countries are not labeled, so I have been endeavoring to learn the locations of all the world's countries. This is especially helpful since someone with a doctorate in geography really should know where all the countries are, just as I would expect a "real" doctor to know where all my bones are! And there are roughly the same number to keep track of.

In geography school, though, we do not just sit around memorizing maps, so I actually did not know more than 85 or 90 percent of the locations until recently. A handy tool for improving my performance has been the geography games at JetPunk (apparently the key to naming web sites is to join any two, unrelated nouns with a further unrelated graphic). I learned about JetPunk when I put together my Geography Games page a couple years ago, and recently I have found several of the puzzles quite useful. The first (shown below) gives a user 12 minutes to type the names of 195 countries. Fortunately, many common misspellings are allowed, so it is quite forgiving. As names are correctly entered, each country is shaded on a single map and the name appears alphabetically in one of about a half-dozen clusters. About 20 countries are too small to appear at the scale used, so the map and list work together.

I find several other quizzes on this site quite useful. Each of these is focused on a region -- I have used "Central America" (which includes the Greater and Lesser Antilles), Oceania, and Europe. In each case, I already knew where the larger countries are located, but the game has greatly improved my mental map of the smaller countries.

A comparison of these games with EarthView and other maps leads to some important geographic questions about exactly what constitutes a country. Last autumn, for example, I was very interested in an unusual story from Tokelau, which I thought was a small country in the Pacific Ocean. It turns out that Tokelau -- like many of the planet's small islands -- is actually under the sovereignty of another country, in this case New Zealand. The JetPunk games, incidentally, seem to use United Nations membership as a principle criterion, though membership currently stands at 192, and Switzerland was only added in 2002. A new book from Lonely Planet has a more expansive definition, providing travel and geographic information for 230 countries. 

As it turns out, although many of the world's countries are recognized nation-states, in scores of cases the connection between a nation and a state are complex, compromised, and/or contested. Thanks to geographer Matt Rosenberg for drawing my attention to a very interesting world map that highlights some examples. 

CLICK to ENLARGE

The Revised Map of Geopolitical Anomalies appears, with a key, on the GeoCurrents blog. The examples on this single sheet could keep a geographer busy for days with quibbles, further examples, clarifications, and disputations! Having other work to do, I will just mention a few items that jumped off the page for me. 

First, the key mentions Taiwan as "the most unrecognized state," describing some of the convoluted ways to which other countries sometimes refer to the island nation. I am reminded of Macedonia, one of the countries that emerged from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Although widely recognized, objections to the name by Greece Macedonia have led it to be included in the United Nations in the "T" section of the alphabet, as in "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia."

The map and key refer to several exclaves, which are portions of national territory -- such as Alaska -- that are not adjacent to the "main" portion of their respective countries. France is cited as having the greatest number of exclaves -- accounting for many of those islands in the Pacific whose names and locations I have not yet learned and giving France economic control of many thousands of square miles of ocean. I was reminded, though, that I just learned that one of the newest and smallest countries in the world actually has an exclave. 

Timor-Leste -- also known as East Timor -- has belonged to Portugal, the Netherlands, Japan, and Indonesia, finally being admitted to the United Nations as an independent nation in 2002, after the loss of many thousands of lives. I knew that Timor-Leste controlled the eastern half of the island of Timor, but I only recently learned that tiny as it is, this nation has an exclave on the northwest side of the island. 

Incidentally, the name "East Timor" is redundant in the same way that "Sahara Desert" is. Just as sahara is an Arabic word that can mean desert, the word timor is Malay, meaning east. One of its previous names, in fact, was Timur Timor.