Farmer Gateway

Fortunately, this bit of satire relates to a very real and positive trend. I am very encouraged by the attention young people are paying to their food. The twentieth century saw a decrease of roughly 90 percent in the proportion of our population actively producing food. This has correlated with a rapid expansion in the proportion of people working in "food service," which often involves handing a bag of food-like substance to a customer through a car window.

The spoof is part of the quirky Face Your Farmer project, which aims to connect urban Canadians with their food sources, all while having a bit of fun. The Infinity and Beyond video is a perfect example, set to the tune of Green Acres -- a clever allusion that will actually be lost on some younger viewers. In case you missed this bit of 1960s television, here is the original theme song, featuring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor

Chichigalpa

View Larger Map

In my classes today, Jason Glaser of La Isla Foundation told the story of sugar-cane farmers in  Chichigalpa, just to the west of Leon. The story, sadly, is replicated throughout the Pacific coast of Central America, particularly in Nicaragua. Read about the foundation's research on BBC and PRI.

The family that owns the fields is the Pelas family. One of the family homes is on an island outside of Granada. The helipad is not visible in this photo taken on one of my Nicaragua study tours, but it is a pretty nice island.

A Long Way from Cochabamba

Cochabamba is a town in Bolivia that became known for its resistance to the privatization of water. Bolivia is a majority-indigenous country, but in a film depicting the 1999-2000 protests, I noticed a white, U.S.-educated vice president defending corporate ownership of water resources. Bechtel was forced to back down, even though at least one protester had been killed on behalf of the corporation. The water of Bolivia belonged to Bolivians.

As I mentioned on this blog on the occasion of his re-election, Evo Morales has represented a different path for Bolivia -- a country now being run of, by, and for its people. Writing for The Guardian, Luis Hernández Navarro now reports that by redefining "progress," Bolivia is making tremendous progress. After decades of laboring under the "Washington consensus" -- which was only ever agreed-upon between Washington and Chicago -- Bolivia has been transformed: the economy is growing while inequality is shrinking.

Bad Coffee House

Over the past decade, I have learned a lot about and have come to love coffee shops. They are places to gather, build community, share good food and of course drink coffee (or tea). They can even be the starting places for social movements, as they have most recently in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. At the local level, coffee shops can help to educate consumers about the people and places behind their favorite beverage -- as I have proposed for my own campus.

I recently learned, however, of a coffee shop in my own state that is actually promotes evil. Fortunately, the misdeeds associated with the misnamed Holy Ground Coffee House in Springfield have not gone uncontested. The shop is a facet of a nominally Christian ministry that has sponsored a movement to impose the death penalty on sexual minorities in Uganda.

As reported in the New York Times and MassLive, protests have been brought to the shop -- which mercifully is only open a few hours per month. Moreover, Sexual Minorities Uganda has partnered with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York to sue the "pastor" who both runs the coffee shop and promotes fatally anti-gay legislation abroad.

Fortunately, I have also found a church-sponsored coffee enterprise that is actually doing a lot of good in Uganda. As reported in Java for Jesus, the Pennsylvania-based Ugandan Gold sponsors clean-water projects in coffee-growing communities while paying the vast majority of the retail price of the coffee to the farmers.

Getting the Point

One way to create a new company name is blend two words together in a portmanteau that conveys their blended meaning. I have noticed, though, that many successful Internet launches in recent years have been named by joining two words that are related neither to each other nor to the business at hand.

I first made this observation with respect to the JetPunk quiz site, which is now a favorite that I share with students of all ages through my GeoGames page.

Geography is about a lot more than learning the names of capitals and longest rivers, of course. It is a dynamic discipline at the intersection of social and natural sciences, and it has a lot to teach us about climate, migration, land use, food, and even coffee.

Knowing basic place-name geography is, however, still valuable as a starting point for grasping the richer lessons of geography, and I find that quizzes can be very helpful, even for an experienced geographer. I also find it helpful to work with a variety of quiz formats, which is why I include so many options among the GeoGames.

I am particularly interested in the LizardPoint quiz known as The Caribbean Quiz because it focuses on the Lesser Antilles, a region I do not know well. As a Latin Americanist (and former coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program), I know something of this region at the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea -- but not as much as I should. With this quiz, I hope to master the locations not only of the sovereign states in this island arc, but also of the various dependencies. In the map excerpt below, the former are shown in ALL CAPS with a star indicating a national capital, while the latter are followed by parenthetical abbreviations of their empire centers (U.S., U.K., or France).

See full Caribbean map from UT-Austin Library

Self-Limiting

Thanks (I think) to writer Daniel Ward for challenging the latest nonsense to be issued by Lawrence Summers, the economist and former Harvard president who recently argued, among other things, that it is no longer necessary to learn languages other than English. My only hesitation in thanking Ward is that prior to reading his article, I had been blissfully unaware of the mis-titled essay What You (Really) Need to Know. Summers is actually correct in some of his assertions about what modern higher education should include; as several online comments indicate, however, he seems remarkably unaware of the extent to which professors are already doing some of the things he calls for.

Summers drew the most ire -- and rightly so -- for his assertion that English dominance means that U.S. students can skip learning other languages. Without irony, he makes this claim as part of his item #5, which calls for an education that "breeds cosmopolitanism." He argues that the willingness of many Asians to learn English makes is "less essential" for North Americans to learn other languages. To some extent, it is true that it is easier to be monolingual in English than in many other languages, but there are costs, both economic and intangible. As my colleague Dr. Michael Kryzanek recently wrote in Going from Punchline to Global Citizens, some English speakers abroad are starting to push back a bit against monolingual arrogance.

Back to Daniel Ward -- From his article The Word is Your Oyster, I learned that the majority of people in the world speak at least two languages, a fact I was able to confirm in Richard Tucker's survey on bilingualism in education. Ward argues that monolingualism is "the acceptance of limitations," wryly noting that it should not be part of any child's vocabulary.

See my Small World page for more on the debate over language learning in higher education. Incidentally, the quiz site JetPunk has a number of quizzes related to the geography of languages. The English-Speaking Countries quiz, for example, lists all 16 countries in which at least 50 percent of the population speaks English as a first language, while the Spanish-Speaking Countries quiz identifies 19 countries where the same is true for Spanish. The English-Speaking Cities quiz identifies 21 cities of more than 2 million population, in which English is the dominant language -- at least some of the results are surprising. The Cities by Language quiz lists the largest city in which each of twenty languages is dominant. Countries and Languages identifies the countries containing the greatest number of speakers of each of thirty languages, with some countries being listed for more than one language! Finally, the Top World Languages quiz simply lists fifty languages, each of which has at least 20 million native speakers. If you are like me, you might not have heard of some of these!

Hemispheres of Influence

I spent my spring break on train and automobile travel, but a student who traveled by air found this treasure at 36,000 feet. Hemispheres magazine. The article is brief, and does not go as far as Black Gold in explaining the life-and-death stakes involved. But Rachel Slade does give United Airlines customers a glimpse into the human story that is behind each cup of coffee.

Coffee Concerned

When I visit coffee farmers in Nicaragua, they sometimes ask me, "What are you doing about climate change?" The do this because they know I am from the United States, which is both a democracy and a leading contributor to the problem of climate change. They also ask because they are already seeing the effects of climate change on their crops.

For two decades, the specialty-coffee movement has been helping farmers to improve the quality of their coffee, not only so consumers can enjoy a better cup, but also so that farmers could earn a better living. With climate change, all of that progress is severely threatened. Quality coffee is highly dependent on intricate combinations of factors coming together in particular places, generally at high elevations in the tropics.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is answering the question that my friends have been asking -- it is putting pressure on President Obama to enact new clean-air regulations that would reduce carbon emissions, thereby slowing the rate of climate change, perhaps saving coffee, among other things.



Watching this video with students today, we noticed three difficulties, two of which I have mentioned to the UCS through its web site. First, and most importantly: the red berries shown in the opening frames are not coffee. Second, the video indicates that "we" drink 2.25 billion cups of coffee per day. Because the video is focused on the U.S. president, viewers may infer that this refers to the United States, but this is in fact a worldwide total. Third, at 1:20 into the video, a sign asks for legislation to be passed, when in fact the campaign is intended to encourage the EPA to interpret existing legislation -- the Clean Air Act -- in a way that would require the regulation of carbon emissions.

Map of Flags

BSU EarthView is a blog I maintain as part of our Project EarthView outreach program, which mainly reaches middle-school students. Among other things, I use the blog to share resources I find appropriate to learning geography at K-12 levels, especially grades 4-8. Many of the things I post, however, are good for learners of all ages, such as the recent Vexillology Map post! It points to a ChartsBin map that includes a description of every national map in the world, as well as the maps of some territories.

Geography of Coffee Habits

Writing for Budget Travel magazine, Nicholas DeRenzo describes the geography of coffee in terms of  consumption habits representing various countries. In his article A Coffee Addict's Guide to the World, he describes close to two dozen ways to serve and prepare coffee. Sadly, only one country is represented by a single corporation, the highest possible caloric impact, and a plastic serving container. Guess which one.