Geography Awareness

Many thanks to Jack Ohman, The Oregonian

It is fitting though sad that pizza magnate Herman Cain's presidential ambitions should be crashing on the shoals of his geographic ignorance during Geography Awareness Week. All that he could say for sure about Libya was that Obama's policy there was wrong, because he is Obama. The pause as he tried to remember anything -- anything at all -- about a country that has been in the news constantly for the past few months was excruciating. War is how Americans learn geography, if at all, but even war will not always do the trick, apparently.

Map of insurgent state in Libya as of February 2011,
  from the National Post in Canada. 

The lapse was embarrassing, even for the journalist asking the question, though it was a boon to comedian Jon Stewart. Political blogger Ana Marie Cox finds his demeanor about the incident even more troubling that the geographic ignorance itself.

For me, though, the greatest significance of the incident is that the ignorance we may mock in a politician is all too common in our own schools and workplaces. When I visit Nicaragua -- the second-poorest country in this hemisphere -- I notice that almost any kind of office or place of business has a couple of maps on the wall, as do most homes. In a contest over geographic knowledge, a high school graduate in almost any country of the world can run circles around most U.S. college graduates. Not just place-name geography, either, but where things are, why they are there, and how it matters. These things are much better taught in countries where progressive education did not mean getting rid of the geography teachers, as it has in too many parts of the United States.

In Massachusetts today, it is actually illegal to become a certified geography teacher at the secondary level. Fortunately, my colleagues and I have found allies in the State House who are interesting in changing this. If Senate Bill 182 -- which would simply restore geography to its previous position in the curriculum and teacher preparation -- becomes law, perhaps we could open a seventh-grade classroom for presidential hopefuls. Incidentally, the bill has both Democratic and Republican sponsorship; such a classroom would be open to candidates from any and all parties! 

Injustice Rising

Earlier this year, I posted two items about Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point, which may be the best environmental book since A Sand County Almanac, a good environmental book being one that celebrates and explains the world as it is and warns gently but deeply about the consequences of our disregard for it. The first post was simply to alert my readers to the book and Safina's beautiful writing; the second was to share Safina's cogent comparison between our exploitation of whales a century ago and our exploitation of oil today.

Pam and I finished reading the book last night, and it is full of post-it notes on passages that one or the other of us found particularly powerful. (See Pam's marvelous review on her "Library" Books blog.) As I hinted in my first post almost a year ago, this might be the new text in my "flagship" Environmental Geography course, though the text I have used for more than a decade was written by close friends and mentors. Lazy Point is just that good as an introduction to what is going on with planet Earth these days.

A recurring theme in the book is rising water, an inexorable process that we will see increasingly in the news, starting recently and for the rest of our lives. Even as I give a talk this evening about the drought gripping East Africa, the places that do not have too little water seem to have far too much.

As the UAE's Khaleej Times reported this week, Climate-vulnerable countries are meeting in Bangladesh out of a shared concern about rising sea level. Melting ice and thermal expansion are combining to put countries with low-lying topography at the front lines of climate change that is well underway. Even before such countries are thoroughly inundated, they are becoming increasingly vulnerable to occasional high water from storms, tsunamis, or even routine tidal fluctuations. Because those who have contributed the least to atmospheric carbon-loading are among those who are suffering the most, former UN Human Rights High Commissioner (and former Irish President) Mary Robinson has made Climate Justice the new focus of her work. She met leaders of vulnerable nations in February, also in Bangladesh.

The South Asian nation (formerly East Pakistan) is the largest critically vulnerable country, already losing thousands of people annually in floods that result from a combination of deforestation at a regional scale and climate change on a global scale.

Many of the other extremely vulnerable nations are small, low-lying islands, many of which are members of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), about which I wrote for Wiley GeoDiscoveries last winter. One such state is Maldives, whose cabinet famously held a meeting underwater in 2009 to draw global attention to its plight.

Because small islands are so much more visible on our giant EarthView globe than on most maps or globes, this middle-school outreach program has led me to take a much greater interest in the island nations of the world, and a number of my EarthView blog posts describe various aspects of their geography.

Reason Shrugged

This week NPR's Morning Edition is exploring some of the influential thinkers who have influenced the current generation of politicians. It is fitting that the discussion begins with Ayn Rand, whose Foundtainhead and Atlas Shrugged loom large in the formative thinking of the libertarian wing of the Republican party.

Andrea Seabrook begins her story on Ayn Rand with excerpts of an interview between Rand and Mike Wallace, in which her ideas are contrasted with the conservative thinking of the day. Rand advocates a politics far more conservative than Eisenhower, who was president at the time.

Having emerged from the Soviet Union in the early days of the Cold War, she equated any government role in the economy with the totalitarian approach taken by Stalin. She retained the Soviet aversion to religion, arguing for a reliance on pure reason, rather than faith or even altruism.

Replacing faith in God with faith in the "invisible hand" of markets, Rand argued that only entrepreneurs are productive, and that any level of taxation and regulation are inherently destructive, because they victimize those on whom the rest of society relies for economic growth.

As Seabrook explains, Rand was considered a fringe thinker for many years, but now such assertions are an article of faith. That's right: faith in the private sector has become a new fundamentalism. A million-dollar birthday party for an executive is a productive use of shareholder money, but a million-dollar library  is not a productive use of taxpayer money. Hedge-fund managers need protection from teachers and firefighters, the latter being parasites on the former. By definition, no parasitic worms inhabit Rand's private sector, and all public work is wasted effort.

Of course, even those who most adoringly quote Rand are selective in their application of her reason. Government spending in the military sector (especially for hardware, not so much for soldiers and veterans) is a glaring exception, as is government intervention in matters of sexuality, a contradiction to which Rand the atheist would surely object.

Incidentally, after posting this I remembered the last time I mentioned Ayn Rand on this blog was in the summer of 2010, when one of her devotees inadvertently revealed his dependence on government programs. See my "Libertarians in Space" post for an explanation of the many ways in which the libertarian message below was subsided by taxpayers.

Coffee Sense-ations

In a new Atlantic article Coming to Your Senses, Illy coffee expert Giorgio Milos explains the multiple sensations of coffee enjoyment. It can be a full-body experience befitting what is sometimes seen as a sensual beverage. For this reason, Milos is cited -- along with Sal at Lavazza -- at the top of my newly revised and expanded Coffee Romance page.

Romney School of Business

Today's installment of Tony Carillo's Bliss comic put me immediately in mind of presidential candidate Mitt Romney. People who have been paying close attention to the Occupy movement know that the creation of wealth and the creation of jobs are not the same thing. And when wealth is merely concentrated rather than created, the difference is even greater.

A common sleight of hand in politics, however, is to equate the two. Few politicians have done so as effectively in recent years as Mitt Romney, about whom I have written much on this blog in the past. Most rich people earn their money the old-fashioned way: they got poor people to earn it for them. Romney has taken this a step further. By mastering the liquidation of productive companies, he earns his money from the creation of poor people!

Farmers Markets: What's Cooking

I do a lot of writing and teaching about problems in the global food system. As recently as yesterday, I posted a link about the McRib sandwich, a near-perfect embodiment of the brutal efficiencies of a food system that disdains both its producers and its customers.

But later last night, I wrote about a growing movement to do things right. Farmers markets bring people together around fresh, local food. Supply chains are shortened, processing is minimized, and the environment benefits in any number of ways. The food actually looks, smells, feels, sounds, and tastes like food, so I posted my comments about the film To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Pig on my family's cooking blog: Una Nueva Receta Cada Semana.

Offal and Arbitrage

The sandwich in this box is not merely a sandwich. It does not merely represent the absurd and growing distance between farm and fork, or even the disdain of the food-industrial complex for its porcine and human participants.  No, this sandwich is much more: it is a hedge fund on a bun.

As Willy Staley writes in The Awl, the McRib is a very peculiar market manipulation, made possible only by the absurd scale of McDonald's, a corporation so big that its menu decisions -- something as simple as adding celery to a recipe -- "quickly become global agricultural concerns."


As nasty as the McRib may be, it has its fans, and they are frustrated by the shifting regional geography of its availability. By comparing the timing of McRib releases to fluctuations in pork commodity prices, Staley makes the case that McDonald's is able to use its mammoth purchasing power to shift a significant portion of the world supply from one market to another when the difference between the two is greatest.

This just in: more geography of McDonald's. The Huffington Post reports that "artist and scientist" Stephen Von Worley has found the point in the contiguous United States that is most remote from any McDonalds, and in fact has mapped the entire country according to its distance from McDonald's. I put "artist and scientist" in quotes because for me this really captures what a geographer can be!

A Very Boss Cake

Buddy Valastro is known as television's Cake Boss for his elaborate cake designs and his ability to transport unusual cakes from his shop in Hoboken to wherever they might be wanted. 

Episode 15 of Season 4 is entitled Houses, Help and Hitting the Road. It is the story of Valastro's biggest challenge to date: feeding 4,000 guests at the 40th anniversary party of Century 21. Not only is the realty network focused on location, but its membership is truly global, inspiring Valastro to concoct a truly global creation reminiscent of our own EarthView. (Big as this Rice-Krispie-filled decoration is, its volume is only 1/500th that of our inflatable globe, though undoubtedly much tastier.)

Much of the episode is dedicated to the logistical challenges of making, transporting, and serving such a colossus. The geography of vernacular landscapes throughout the world is reflected in the parts of the cake that represent various kinds of houses.

For geographers, though, the most dramatic moments arise when Valastro realizes that a rather significant land mass is missing from the design. His indignation is endearing ("Where's Asia? You gotta fix Asia!"), as is the reference one of his staff members makes to Pangaea as they discuss remedies. In reality, none of the former continental configurations quite match the erroneous cake decoration, but the final result is magnificent.

View the episode in two parts on YouTube: Part 1 and Part 2.

Girls Grow

National Geographic Special Series: 7 billion

It seems only a few years ago that I was in a classroom, telling students that the world's population had just reached 6 billion. In fact, it was 1999, and that classroom is now gone. Still, the time between that milestone and last week's estimated arrival at 7 billion was short. With any luck will have been the shortest such interval, a quick decade of growth in what E.O. Wilson has called the Bottleneck century. Between 1950 and 2050, the world population will have roughly tripled, and though the earlier predictions of Paul Ehrlich and others were of a J-shaped curve that would rocket us toward oblivion, the sigmoidal (S-shaped) curve on which we are embarked is no global picnic. Somewhere, we need to find the resources to feed, clothe, and -- increasingly -- entertain three people for every one person who was on the planet at the end of the second Great War.

Given the attention generated by this milestone, it is timely that scholars at the University of Chicago released Girls Grow, a report on the importance of supporting women and girls in rural communities. Equity in the education, health, and nourishment of girls in underdeveloped rural areas worldwide is a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Cultural relativism goes too far when it allows generations of women to be marginalized, sometimes brutally. Not only are the results inhumane, but failing to invest in the human capital of girls contributes to the perpetuation of poverty. The importance of investing in the capacity of girls is captured in the subtitle of the report: A Vital Force in Rural Economies.

Some economists continue to suggest that population growth should not concern us at all, partly because of their propensity to assume resources not in evidence and the failure of many in that field to realize the fundamental difference between open-ended, linear processes that characterize many human endeavors and the closed-loop process that define the natural systems of which our economy is only a subsidiary part.

Another commonly-cited cause for optimism, however, is that greater numbers of people mean greater potential for innovators. It is true that Kenya environmentalist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai was born in a high-growth country. In creating future leaders, however, the care taken in the education and encouragement of girls is far more important than overall population numbers.

Nuclear Coffee

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I recently wrote about weapons-grade ratatouille on our recipe blog; my hero Adam @ Home has gone one better: Nuclear Coffee!

People often ask me, by the way, about what coffees are "stronger" and I rarely have a good answer. High-quality arabica coffees are actually lower in caffeine than the robusta coffee used in cheaper blends, such as Maxwell House. And the darker the coffee has been roasted, the lower the caffeine will be.

Of course, high "dosing" -- spoons per cup prior to brewing -- can make a difference, as can adding multiple shots of espresso in a single beverage. Each serving of espresso has less caffeine than a standard cup of coffee, but some coffee drinks might have four to six servings!

Read more in my June 24 Coffee Comics post.