IPM House

After a decade in our "new" house, we have been rethinking a bit of the land management. Our 0.31-acre property is certified wildlife habitat and does draw an impressive diversity of critters, especially dragonflies, pollinators, and birds. But invasives were really crowding out the beneficial flora to the point that we recently hired a goatscaping crew, who removed most of ten years of random growth in as many days.

A human landscaper with organic-farming expertise has been working with us as well, as we move toward slightly more active management along the lines of permaculture, which would make the land productive both in ecological and culinary terms.

With his help, we have also -- at long last -- installed a bat house. Since it is in close proximity to the university, we hope that it can be part of a broader effort to encourage IPM -- integrated pest management -- as an alternative to aerial spraying for insect pests.

Aerial spraying has growing support as mosquito-borne diseases become more common as a result of climate change. A large slice of public opinion simultaneously endorses this blunt-instrument reaction to climate change while denying that the climate is changing. We know the climate is changing, and would prefer not to poison our way out of the consequences.

So in addition to better management of standing water, bat houses (and purple martin houses, which we also have) can be part of a more nuanced approach that will not kill beneficial insects and worms along with the pests. Bats love mosquitos, leaving all the other insects for the birds!

Diversity Grant Guidelines

The document below is copied from guidelines for a diversity grant currently available at BSU. I am placing it here on my blog for the benefit of diverse stakeholders (alumni and community members) who might have ideas relevant to the grant, but who cannot access the guidelines. I apologize for the weird formatting.

ALL members of the campus community are encouraged to submit applications to fund their diversity-related projects.

Apply Now! Applications for Fall 2013 projects are due October 4, 2013

Awards recipients for fiscal year 2013 projects have been selected.

Deadlines for Fall 2013 and Spring 2014 projects
For projects occurring during Fall 2013:

• Deadline 1: April 19, 2013
• Deadline 2: October 4, 2013 (Maximum possible grant award is $10,000)

For projects occurring during Spring 2014:

• Deadline 1: November 1, 2013 (Maximum possible grant award is $5,000)
• Deadline 2: February 14, 2014 (Maximum possible grant award is $5,000)

About the Grant

The Promoting Diversity Grant is designed to promote, support, and encourage new and collaborative diversity and social justice efforts that directly benefit undergraduate students, including but not limited to programs, projects, workshops, series, events, and other creative initiatives.

• Grants of up to $5,000* are awarded four times during the fiscal year: twice during the Fall semester and twice during the Spring semester. There are two application periods during both the Fall and Spring semesters
• Grants are available to campus departments, offices, and officially recognized student organizations
• All grant recipients will be required to submit the results of their project's assessments to the grant committee to gauge the impact of their program/project
• Assessments are due 30 days from the date of the project's completion
• Applications are judged based upon a scoring rubric

* Applicants may potentially be awarded more than $5,000 during a given cycle.  Any remaining funds from one application and disbursement cycle are rolled into the next application and disbursement cycle but only if both cycles occur within the same fiscal year. Funds remaining after the fiscal year are NOT rolled over to the next fiscal year. 

Grant Requirements
Projects that receive grant funding must meet the following criteria:

• Relates to diversity or social justice
• Collaborative
• Fills a campus need or educational gap
• Specifies learning goals
• Conducts assessments to gauge effectiveness of program/project
• Directly benefits undergraduate students
• The submitted application contains all required materials and information

Preferred Criteria
Project developers are encouraged to create projects that have the following characteristics:

• Intersectionality
• Highly collaborative
• Innovative or pioneering
• Sustainable
• Interdisciplinary

Read how the committee understands "diversity," "social justice," "collaborative," and "intersectionaliry" on our "definitions" resource. 

Grant Restrictions
Projects that include any of the below elements are not eligible for funding:

• Funds that go to individual students to address personal financial need, including student travel to conferences
• Projects that support a candidate for political office or ballot question
• Projects that charge admission to BSU undergraduate students
• Projects that include fundraising of any kind during the event
• Funds that pay honoraria to BSU faculty or staff
• Projects or programs that are off-campus
• The grant will fund projects that offer gifts or prizes to participants, but the monies from the grant may not go towards those expenses
• A project that has any expenses that violate federal, state, or local law, or BSU policies

Note: Grant recipients who fail to submit their project assessment results by the deadline are ineligible to receive funding from the Promoting Diversity Grant for one academic year.

The grant committee strongly encourages applicants to be familiar with the following:

1. The committee's working definitions of diversity and social justice, collaboration vs. cooperation, and intersectionality

2. Resources are available to help applicants write learning outcomes and assessments, potential assistance with writing outcomes and assessments from the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment is available to assist with developing learning outcomes and assessments

3. The committee's scoring rubric --the tool used to determine which projects will be grant funded

Assessment Guidelines
In a one page pdf document, summarize the results of your assessment. At minimum, include the following information based on your assessment data:

• Specify how your project did or did not achieve your learning outcomes
• Specify how your project did or did not benefit undergraduate students
• Indicate if or how your project should be modified in the future to improve its benefit to undergraduate students

Avast, Pull Together!

I am a big fan of fellow UU Robert Fulghum, and many years ago my favorite librarian and I enjoyed listening to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and other works as we spent many  hours on road trips in the Southwest. I was reminded of the title this morning, when I was telling a colleague about my new hobby of rowing. As he asked how I was doing, I almost responded with the "I'm busy" mantra of educators and other professionals, but I said, "keeping active" instead.

I actually meant it in the same way -- look at me and all I'm doing -- but as I said it, I realized that I really have been active for the past year in a way I was not previously. I told him that I had been rowing, and then I realized the beauty of a phrase I will be hearing later this evening: "Pull together!" It comes after we have all come to the harbor at the end of a work day, scrambling perhaps to get there in time, and then doing the complicated dance of getting ourselves into the boat and the oars out of the boat, and the whole setup into a safe place to begin rowing. The actual phrase is "... annnnnd: Pull together" as our boat steerer will lead up to the exact moment when everyone is perfectly ready, muscles taut and minds focused, so that we get the boat moving in a straight line.

This evening, that moment of pulling together will be our signal that it is time to do a bit of real work. Real work by the standards of a group of modern, middle-class professionals in need of a workout, that is: not real work compared to the rowers of the whaleship Essex, for example, or many others who toil daily in fields and factories the world over. It will be a bit more work than usual, only because of an upcoming regatta this weekend, for which we are doing some last-minute training.

And the reward for that work will be the other nautical word that I have come to appreciate: "Avast!" It means stop, which sometimes means there are more instructions coming. But it also means rest: take a moment to enjoy the privilege of being quiet on the water for just a few minutes. 

In my year of rowing, I have written several posts on this blog about the technical things I have learned. But these three words -- avast, pull together -- capture the true lessons.

And after we have enjoyed our moment of rest, it will once again be, "Pull together!"

Image: Whaling City Rowing

Fantasy League Rebound

$500,000,000,000

It is once again time to talk about our friend, the pink unicorn, the emblem of free markets. In August, I mentioned the fantastical creature in connection with Spirit Level, an analysis of the deleterious effects of income concentration. That the rich get richer is bad enough; that many of them believe they are winning a game that is not rigged is just annoying. That many of them do know that the game is rigged is just wrong.

A couple of days later, my Return of the Pink Unicorn post described a temporary drop in stock markets that occurred when minutes of a Federal Reserve meeting suggested that the game might not be rigged quite as much in favor of investors. The impression was quickly reversed, and so were falling stock prices.

Which brings us to this morning. The Federal Reserve actually did meet yesterday, and it decided to keep stimulating growth, sending stock markets around the world up by more than one percent. The number at the top of this post is a very conservative estimate of the capital gains made JUST TODAY on the basis of that one announcement. I base the estimate on a report on world market capitalization from the American Enterprise Institute. The first word of its tagline is "freedom," but it is not really serious about that.

This news comes as Congress is debating whether to keep funding food subsidies for the poor, a program that has long had the support of conservative Senator Dole, who is aghast at his own party's selfishness these days. Cuts on the order of $4 billion per year are being contemplated by anti-tax fetishists in the House of Representatives who are both inhumane and bad at math. The result would be an unprovoked humanitarian injury that would also increase unemployment in the food sector and that would not balance the Federal budget.

Just as global capital "earned" more yesterday that Congress intends to save at the expense of poor people, middle-class families such as my own do also benefit. Those of use with typical retirement portfolios also "earned" as much yesterday as we can expect to spend in welfare-related taxes over the next several years. In this way, a game rigged for the top one percent earns the complicity of the next 10 percent or so.

Syria Q & A, Without the A

When in doubt, look at a map. If the situation in Syria were simple, it would have been resolved by now. Syria is a country drawn by arbitrary borders than enclose rival ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. The distribution of political power among these communities is often imbalanced. And Syria is in a neighborhood -- the Levant -- in which this sort of geographic complication is common, but nonetheless dangerous. Max Fisher describes the background and importance of this map in more detail in his Washington Post blog entry of August 27, The One Map that Shows Why Syria is So Complicated.

I found the map as a link in his more recent post of August 29. In 9 Questions About Syria You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask, he provides information that is more specific about the current question facing the United States of whether, why, and how to intervene in Syria's terrible civil war. Far from uplifting or encouraging, he does explain how this truly is a conundrum, with no easy answers. He cannot address every nuance in such short articles, but these are very good places to become better informed about Syria.

These articles prepare the reader for another thoughtful piece, written by Jim Walsh for WBUR. His title also acknowledges the complexity and the importance of deicsions being made in Washington, London, Paris, and Moscow at the moment: So Many Questions, So Few Clear Answers on Syria and Chemical Weapons.

Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway

Source: The Other 98%

This image is a reminder that wealth is no guarantee of wisdom, as our wealthiest society proves itself ever less aware of how children learn best. I found this online a few days after learning of the satirical homage to the popular (in the U.S.) Do They Know It's Christmas? -- Feed the World song that pulled at heartstrings but did not build understanding in either direction across the Atlantic. In fact, the popular song reads much like the travel writing that is parodied by Binyavanga Wainaina in a classic article from Granta, How to Write About Africa.

The satire Radi-Aid: Africa For Norway evokes many tropes of the well-meaning but poorly informed. The satire is not bitter, though: the site is actually hosted in Norway.



I do participate in development projects, as do many of my students and colleagues. But those succeed best that begin with listening, and with the realization that  People Are More Alike Than Different, the guiding principle of my friends at the Polus Center for Social and Economic Development. The video above serves as a worthwhile reminder of how even our best efforts will be seen if we fail to remember this.

While I was mulling this post and thinking about how best to present these parodies, I heard a remarkably appropriate story from South Africa, a country whose struggles with HIV have been monumental, and whose government once took an approach that was as absurd as it was lethal. In South Africa Finds Its Way, Jason Beaubien recounts South Africa's difficulties -- both past and present -- but then describes the successes that have arisen as the country finds its own ways of coping with the highest infection rates in the world. Transmission is still a huge problem, but treatment is in many ways far ahead of U.S. and European responses.

Background -- Why I Shared This
Since preparing for my first study tour to Cape Verde in 2006, I have given a lot of thought to what it means for someone in the United States to promote justice abroad, particularly through travel with students, particularly in Africa, and particularly if students from Africa are part of the journey. What the hell do I know, after all, that would be of any use?

As an economic and environmental geographer, I know that countries on the periphery of the world economy suffer disproportionately from environmental problems and generate much of the wealth that accumulates in the economic core, with few of the benefits. As a cultural geographer and traveler, however, I know that these imbalances, however important, do not define people or places. As a parent and citizen in a core country, I also know that the concentration of wealth has not eliminated all of our problems, and in fact has created some that are absent in developing countries, or found only among their economic elites. How do I address these very real imbalances while also honoring the richness of the human societies behind such abstractions?

As I struggled with these questions about six months before my first Cape Verde study tour, an African-American environmental activist shifted my thinking with one simple statement: "You are a bridge," she said. "You do not need to have the answers. You just help people make the connections." Working at Bridgewater State University, I have found that metaphor most helpful in my studies abroad and in my classroom and online teaching.

Lagniappe 

The controversy surrounding the original Feed the World did not stop there from being an eventual sequel that was even worse, but it did lead to Lionel Ritchie and others creating We Are the World -- composed and led by African Americans. The story of that song is told in the Netflix documentary Greatest Night in Pop. 

Natural Gas: Plank to the Future

I usually try to find a source for images I use on my blog, but I keep finding images similar to this on web sites about online piracy -- without attribution! I would love at least to know the name of the artist.

On my way to "whaling" on Sunday morning, I heard two important stories about climate change, the second with direct relevance to my new hobby.

BRIDGE TO NOWHERE

The phrase "Bridge to Nowhere" refers to the proposed Gravina Island Bridge in Alaska that would replace ferry service to the airport currently serving Ketchikan, Alaska. Even as it remains unbuilt, it estimated cost has continued to grow, reaching about $40,000 for each and every resident of the city. That would buy a lot of ferry rides, and the foolishness of the proposal has embarrassed even members of Congress in the proponents' own party. (See an overview and commentary to learn more about the most famous non-bridge in history.)

Politicians of both major parties -- and even some environmentalists -- regularly promote an even more costly boondoggle when they characterize natural gas as a bridge energy source. President Obama's "all of the above energy policy" is simply a refusal to acknowledge that natural gas is a fossil fuel. It burns more cleanly than coal or oil, but its recovery does more climate disruption than either of these. I have written extensively in this space about the pernicious nature of fracking as a recovery method. As civil engineer Tony Ingraffea explains in Climate Risks from Leaky Natural Gas Wells, however, even conventional wells are a huge source of climate disruption, long after the gas has driven our bus or heated our soup.

On a recent drive through Pennsylvania, we did not see these wells, but we saw a few of the thousand of trucks needed to carry water and equipment to them. We also saw plenty of evidence of the giddy economic bubble surrounding thi rush to extraction, from young guys in $50,000 pickups to real estate billboards and strip clubs.

Back to the metaphor that the industry and politicians and even some environmentalists like to use: natural gas is not a bridge. If it were, it would be connecting us in a reasonable amount of time to some other energy future. As currently operating, though, it simply serves as another way of ensuring that virtually all of the carbon stored several hundred million years before the arrival of human is put into the atmosphere in the blink of a geologist's eye. It is not a "bridge" in any meaningful sense, and actually generates profits while delaying real changes in the use of energy.

WHALES & OTTERS

Otter warrior
 Inbar TrueFlight

After hearing this very discouraging story, I continued my drive to the historic whaling center of New Bedford Harbor, where I was to meet my crew for an hour or so of rowing our replica whaleboat around the harbor, where we would indulge in a close-up view of the historic whaleship Ernestina before heading very briefly out to sea. (2022 correction: the Ernestina was never a whaleship; it was built for fishing cod before becoming a legendary ship of exploration and transportation).

So it was fitting that I heard a somewhat more encouraging story with a whaling connection. In Otters as Climate Defenders, environmental studies professor Chris Willmer explains a complicated sequence of event by which whaling in the Pacific a century ago contributes to climate change today, by limiting the ocean's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Enter the otter, whose restoration in the northern Pacific could be funded by the many millions of dollars of carbon credits that could be offset.

MORE TO LEARN

For introductory resources on climate change, please see my Inconvenient Geography page and be sure to click on the link back to this blog. For ongoing information about climate activism worldwide, join Bill McKibben's 350.org. To find out how the vulnerability and responsibility vary at a global scale, please see the Mary Robinson Foundation; for a focus on variable impacts in the United States, please see the NAACP Climate Justice Initiative page.

Finally, the best possible introduction to the topic is Carl Safina's beautiful and terrifying The View from Lazy Point, which is now required reading for all of my introductory Environmental Geography students. I first heard about the book from Safina himself on the program that is the source of both stories above -- Living on Earth.

Return of the Pink Unicorn

What a free market looks like

As I mentioned in a recent post about the deleterious effects of income inequality, free markets are exceedingly rare. This is important because the illusion of free markets informs so much policy-making with regard to the economy. Actually, "informs" is not the right word, since this unchecked assumption is at the heart of so many damaging policies.

As recently reported on the BBC, stocks fell briefly this week when minutes of a U.S. Federal Reserve meeting were released. This body meets periodically to set interest rates and to schedule the sale of U.S. debt instruments. Economists and investors spend an extraordinary amount of their time leading up to each meeting trying to figure out not only what the Fed will do, but also how it will impact markets, and how impacted markets will impact other markets, and so on.

The price of "freely traded" stocks are therefore influenced by fiscal policy, which in turn is the outcome of a political process. The value of money itself is similarly subject to policy decisions -- even the value of money in countries that have no power to set the policies. Even hints about upcoming decisions in Washington sent stocks tumbling in emerging markets in Asia -- billions of dollars lost in a single day because of possible changes in the way markets were to be manipulated.

Essential assumptions may be introduced at the beginning of a course on microeconomics, and they might just apply somewhere -- as in the land of the pink unicorns -- but the limiting nature of the assumptions is rarely scrutinized in mainstream discussions of finance, economics, or trade. The degree to which trading conditions are manipulated on the real Planet Earth is made very clear in the final scenes of the extraordinary documentary Black Gold, which take place at a World Trade Organization meeting in Cancun. In this film about coffee, we see that trade negotiations held in heavily fortified conference centers are structured to continue favoring the rich, while the U.S. trade representative sneers at negotiators from the global periphery for attempting to take a stand on behalf of poor farmers. This disdainful attitude has been shared by trade officials of both major parties at least since the first Clinton administration, because liberals and conservatives alike know that "American prosperity" could not take place in a completely free market.

Whew! Just made it!
Image: PennLive

Former Texas Governor Anne Richards is widely credited with saying that George Bush the Elder was "born on third base and thought he hit a triple." She did not actually say this -- though fellow Texan Barry Switzer did, and many people think further fellow Texan Jim Hightower did -- but it would have been true of either of the Presidents Bush, as it was of candidate Romney: all were born into incredible privilege, created and maintained for them by others, and thought that they had done most of the achieving on their own.

But here is the rub: it is also true for most residents of wealthy countries. To believe otherwise is pure fantasy.

Maya: Forward through Time

Browsing the BBC web site (a great activity for geographers), I found a short photo essay about the Maya of Guatemala. The collection is erroneously entitled "Step back in time in Guatemala" and erroneously filed under "history."

In fact, it provides five snapshots that illustrate the historical roots of the contemporary geography of highland Guatemala. For a tourist, it may seem like a step back in time, but it is more appropriate to recognize the persistence of Mayan culture a half a millenium after Conquest.

Spirit Level

This cartoon is taken from the opening pages of Spirit Level, a 2011 book in which Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson describe the ways in which excessive inequality lowers the quality of life -- not only for the disadvantaged, but for those at the top of the economic pyramid.

As I have argued elsewhere, low taxes have become a political fetish -- a perversion damaging even those who think they are pleasuring themselves with the tax code and market interventions that concentrate wealth.

Wait ... why is there a pink unicorn in this post?

Image: Deposit Photos

Because a pink unicorn is just as common as a free market. Many occupy the top of an economic system that they think of as open and fair, but that actually include structures that benefit them in subtle ways. Others at the top of the economy know this very well, and manipulate the political process to enhance such structures.

As Pickett and Wilkinson show, however, those manipulations ultimately damage not only the poor and the middle class, but even the wealthy themselves.