Flood Flash

HOW TO HELP -- Ellicott City Parternship

Ellicott City encompasses 30 square miles of the northeastern corner of Howard County, Maryland, but to people from the western suburbs of Baltimore, the name refers to the charming shops along a single street in a small granite ravine.


I enjoyed frequent visits to Ellicott City during my days as a student at UMBC, and once even walked the seven miles from my apartment just to enjoy a stroll along Main Street. The first breakfast of our honeymoon was enjoyed there, and we visit any time we find ourselves visiting family, including my in-laws who live in a modern condo perched high above College Avenue. I most recently blogged about Main Street in 2012, shortly after taking a haunted tour of  our old haunts.

We enjoyed shopping in Ellicott City just over a week ago, and were thus all the more shocked to learn of the devastation that took place there last night. Notice on the map above that several streams converge near the upper end of Main Street and then disappear into buried channels.

Last night SIX INCHES of rain fell in this area in just two hours.

Estimates from Doppler Radar show the greatest intensity of rainfall centered over this narrow valley, and local rain gauges indicated even greater intensity. The results were devastating -- a beautiful streetscape gutted in a very short period.

Photo: Scott Weaver on Just In Weather

Rushing waters quickly undermined buildings, some of which may not be salvageable. More than 100 people were rescued from automobiles and from the Phoenix Emporium at the bottom of the hill by heroic firefighters, police, and civilians.

From Baltimore Sun archives --
Photos from previous floods. 
Notice the 1868 marker ABOVE
the bridge.

During our most recent visit to Ellicott City, we noticed a great density of Pokemon hunters, which means that plenty of smartphones were on hand last night to document the damage as well as the rescues. For some of those images and videos, see Flood Destruction (Just In Weather) and State of Emergency (Howard County Patch). The arts community is vital in Ellicott City, and has already begun raising funds for recovery.

The fact that this flooding occurred where natural streams had been put into underground pipes reminds me of the successful daylighting project in  Yonkers that I described earlier this year.  Given the extreme intensity of last night's storm and the very narrow topography of the Main Street area, however, it is doubtful that a comparable project would have been enough to make a difference in last night's events.

Lagniappe

Dan Somers recorded two minutes of cars being swept down Main Street during the flood.

YouTube user fatosh69 filmed 5 minutes from the window of a second-story restaurant. Warning: this is the most unsettling video of these events in real time. One local friend -- who recently survived a tornado -- describes this as horror-movie footage.

David Franklin Perry recorded a 20-minute walk-through with police during the night. He begins in the middle of the affected area, moves uphill and then back down to the base of Main Street.

Muir to the Story

I like to think of myself as too bright and wise to engage in hero worship, but I must admit that certain people occupy high pedestals in my view. John Muir is one of them. I am not alone in this his name graces many schools, natural features, buildings, and even a minor planet, according to a recent article by Justin Nobel, The Miseducation of John Muir.

Muir is best known as the founder of the Sierra Club (of which I was an active member when we lived in Texas) and for his role in establishing the National Park Service. I learned of him in the first geography course I took as an undergraduate -- Conservation Thought -- in which his views were contrasted with those of Gifford Pinchot, the first director of the National Forest Service. In modern parlance, the two would be considered "frenemies" -- one dedicated to the preservation (non-use) and the other to conservation (sustainable use) of wild areas. Despite understanding the importance of balance between the two, I must admit always liking the purist Muir a bit better than the pragmatic Pinchot.

For those who admire Muir as I have -- or who love the National Parks that are his legacy -- I recommend Nobel's article, which exposes some "ugly truths" (Nobel's phrase) about Muir, along with some more benign but little-known aspects of his early biography.

First, the benign. I did not know that he had been  both a worker and a mid-level manager in the Industrial Revolution; the wilderness he loved was a strong contrast with the machinery that was equally dear to him. He also had walked the post-war American South long before he walked the Cascades of California, covering 1,000 miles on foot.

And now the ugly: His writings about that walk extol the natural beauty while describing the people -- especially indigenous people -- in very ugly terms. He did not recognize -- at least as a 29-year-old explorer -- that the views of nature he advocated were already held by people he viewed as primitive.

Looking back, Native Americans today are critical not only of those ugly attitudes but also of the adulation Muir received for doing things -- like the long walk itself -- that were already part of their cultures. In this way, Muir is a focal point for the deeply problematic way in which even European-American approaches to land stewardship have usually marginalized those who were its stewards long before colonization.

Lagniappe

After reading Nobel's article, I checked this blog for references to Muir and was surprised to find that my 2009 Botanical Travels post had actually mentioned controversy related to indigenous people in Yosemite.

2025 Update 

Sometime after writing this post in 2016, I decided to devote some significant time to it. Muir and his view of wilderness, after all, comprise the underpinning of much of what I teach -- particularly in a course entitled Land Protection. The distinction between preservation and conservation is complicated enough -- all the more so if we acknowledge that most or all of the "wild" land had ben in use all along.

So I started to prepare for a sabbatical in which I would examine all of this in more depth. I even started a very rough bibliography for this work. Sabbaticals come far enough apart (every 8th year at my university) that my priorities eventually shifted and my next/final sabbatical will be in Cabo Verde doing essentially unrelated projects. 

This update relates to the fact that someone already did the research I in mind, and in fact did it quite a while ago and quite well. I am currently reading the audio version of ethnoecologist M. Kat Anderson's 2005 book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. As the long title with the requisite colon suggests, this book gives every indication of having originated as a doctoral dissertation. The author references ample field work and also provides numerous, very specific examples to bolter the claims she makes. 

As the first part of the title implies: places that Muir and other European Americans thought of as wild were actually part of very complex patterns of land use that had developed over a period of more than 100 centuries before Europeans arrived in what is now California.

Hashtags - Plural

When I was in graduate school, one of my fellow doctoral candidates wore his #12 jersey in solidarity on any day the Chicago Bulls were playing. That geographer -- Ralph -- did so because he was a Chicago native, a season-ticket holder, and a loyal fan of  the Bulls in general and Michael (as he called him) in particular.

Ralph comes to mind as I read the latest news from Michael Jordan because of the focus of his research -- community policing. Yes, that is a very appropriate topic for a dissertation in geography, and Ralph had studied policing from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles.

And Michael Jordan is one of the best-known geographers in the United States, though he is better known for pursuits not directly related to his undergraduate major.

The latest news, of course, is that Michael Jordan has decided to speak out against the violence that is gripping our country -- two aspects of that violence in particular. As NPR reports in Michael Jordan Speaks Up for Black Lives and Police Officers, the basketball star has donated $2,000,000 to two organizations that he hopes can help to heal communities -- one established by the NAACP and the other by the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Like most Americans, he knows, respects, and values both African American men and law-enforcement officers. Like most Americans, he probably knows people who qualify as both. I certainly do. Rather than pretend that neither category matters, however, he is not choosing hashtags. For Jordan, it is not #blacklivesmatter OR #dallas5. It is #blacklivesmatter AND #dallas5.

If you have taken the time to read this blog post, I hope you will read the NPR article and more importantly, Michael Jordan's own statement, I Can No Longer Remain Silent.

Skipjack Learning

"Thought into action," my old traveling buddy (and fellow geographer) Mike used to say, whenever we actually followed through on some talked-about adventure, whether it be spelunking in Virginia or our 8,500-mile jaunt to Ensenada in his old VW.

That phrase came to mind as I prepared for a small adventure on Great Shellfish Bay, better known as the Chesapeake. It was near the Chesapeake that I first became a geographer -- as a student at UMBC -- and it is also where I was fortunate to experience learning geography in the field for the first time. Dr. Parker's courses on the Amazon are what drew me into geography, but he was not able to take us there (I of course went later on my own a few times, taking a student with me once).

But his colleague Dr. Miller was able to take classes to one of his study areas -- the nearby Chesapeake Bay. I took a whole course on the bay, reading Beautiful Swimmers and hearing from local experts who came to our class. A real highlight was going out on the bay itself, on a research craft operating from another University of Maryland campus. Little did I realize back then how important experiential learning would become in my own work as a geography educator.

A couple of years ago, I found out that only a few skipjacks -- which I had learned about in the course -- were still sailing, and that it was sometime possible to go aboard, in or out of oystering season. I have grown increasingly interested, as I continue to learn about the maritime history and coastal geography of my adoptive home from the seats of replica whaleboats. "Some day," I thought, "I'll do that." As I prepared for our latest visit to family in the area, I decided that this would be that "some day," and I put thought into action. As a bonus, I was able to bring my brother along, as we had the same day free.

We went to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael's, from which we departed on a two-hour cruise aboard the H.M. Krentz. (Museum admission is included with the price of a sailing tour, but not vice-versa, of course.) The H.M.Krentz is one of a very small number of craft that continues to harvest oysters under sail, and its captain is a font of knowledge about the maritime history, ecology, and economy of the Bay. This is a very nice way to support regional ecotourism, learn about local fisheries, and get a bit of fresh air at the same time.

The H.M. Krentz is berthed aside a classic Chesapeake Bay lighthouse, many of which once dotted the shallow waters of the Bay. They were specially designed to be stable in soft sediments. This was the last of a couple dozen photos I took on board, all of which are in my Skipjack 2016 folder on Flickr.

I can also recommend grabbing a coffee at the nearby Blue Crab Coffee Company on Fremont Street.

Yemen: First Coffee

Coffee was discovered in Ethiopia, by a goatherd named Kaldi, according to legend. But it was first cultivated across the Red Sea in Yemen. Because this all happened some time ago, we should add "what is now" to the place names. We should also note that we call the main species of coffee (comprising 70 percent of world production) Arabica because Yemen is on the Arabian Peninsula. About 30 percent is known as robusta because it comes from a heartier, heat-resistant plant that originated somewhere in West Africa.

I was thinking of this recently because a new friend told me of a fort he had visited in Yemen -- constructed by the Portuguese to protect exports of coffee to Brazil. Of course, Brazil itself eventually became the leading producer of coffee, currently growing about 1/3 of the world total of both major types.

This led me to revisit some of my earlier posts about Yemen. In Missing Coffee (2013), I point readers to a whimsical but informative essay by a professor of food science, who explains the importance of Moka. In Arabica and Arabians (2010), I point to a few items related to Arabian iconography in the coffee business.

Coffee grows on terraces at unusually high elevation in Yemen, where it is too hot and
dry for coffee to be grown in more typical circumstances.
Image: Al Mokha

In my coffee seminars, students work in small groups to do research about the coffees of specific countries. They make posters and brew coffee from each country, which we present and serve at a large tasting event. Only one group has undertaken to research Yemen. They had difficulty finding much information about the current status of the coffee industry there. They learned that production is small -- something like 1/10 of one percent of the world total -- and the only vendors they could find were selling by the container (37,000 pound minimum). This suggested that most Yemen coffee production is for commodity markets, but I did find a single-origin source in the strangest place: Amazon.com, which does coffee from Yemen by way of several roasters.

One of those roasters is among those I found in today's research -- a company that is based in my home town and that is deeply committed to the coffee farmers of Yemen. Even though Yemen is not a major producer, its coffee industry is thought to employ one million people, or about 4 percent of the world's population. Washington-based Al Mokha (The World's First Coffee^TM) is connecting customers directly to those workers through direct trade, development programs, and consumer education. I hope to visit with Al Mokha staff during my next trip to D.C.

It is from Al Mokha's blog that I learned about a 2004 report on Yemen's coffee from the U.S. Agency for International Development. A dozen years is a long time -- especially in coffee -- but the great detail of the report suggests that it would be valuable for understanding at least the background of the current coffee scene in Yemen. Yemen's Coffee Revival is a briefer but more recent (2014) report from the regional news magazine Al-Monitor.

Coffee Week

Yes, Coffee Week (Not Weak)!

Beneficio Hayes-Boh: Doing the
dry-mill process at home on a
very small scale.

Coffee Week (Not Weak) is a course that I am offering -- with the help of many coffee professionals -- during the second week in July. I arrived at that quirky title because two other good titles were already taken. Geography of Coffee is my annual study tour in Nicaragua (coming soon to Peru and Ethiopia) and the Secret Life of Coffee (cleverly named by my wife Pamela) is the speaking-intensive seminar I offer each spring.

As soon as I read the notice that our university was offering faculty a new format for courses -- allowing us to teach all day for five days (or in half-day segments for 10 days), the Coffee Week concept was born. To make it punnier, I wanted to call it Coffee Week -- Not Weak Coffee, but that would not fit in the scheduling software. Hence the cryptic, parenthetical subtitle.

The reason I was able to visualize the course so quickly is that our region is rich with coffee-related resources, including all kinds of excellent cafes and a handful of the world's most important roasters. The 8-hour class sessions give us a chance to visit quite a few of these, hearing directly from the people for whom coffee is a way of changing the world ... for the better.

Most of the places we will visit are independent cafes -- by their very nature, these are ideal places for discussion of any topic. The cafes will serve both as venues for conversation and topics of conversation. When millions of dollars are being spent on the marketing of commodity coffee in generic storefronts, what makes a local shop with limited resources survive and even thrive?

Our visits will also include a couple of those important roasters -- important because they focus on the fair treatment of the people who actually grow the coffee -- and some non-profit organizations with coffee connections.



Legend:
. - MONDAY - TUESDAY - WEDNESDAY - THURSDAY - FRIDAY - 

This map is not complete, by any means. I could easily fill a second week, including full days in Providence and Boston. I am willing to bet, though, that the six students taking this class will find their own way to more of our region's coffee treasures in the near future.

Find reviews of more than 100 independent cafes on my GeoCafes blog. This includes many student reviews and a few of my own, of cafes throughout New England and as far away as Shanghai. That blog has its own map, of course!

Read more about the original plans for Coffee Week (Not Weak) on my November 2015 Cafe Crawl for Credit post. Learn more about all of my endeavors -- coffee-related and otherwise -- through my new portal at www.doctor.coffee.

Retiring Home

Photo: Lancaster Times

Garrison Keillor tried to retire a couple of times, but it seems this is the real thing, and it is fitting that he has ended A Prairie Home Companion 42 years after he started it. Not quite the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, but pretty close. I have not listened every week, but I have listened many weeks, and I remember hearing him for the first time early in the run. Pamela Hayes-Bohanan and I never saw the live show, but we did have the great privilege of seeing him as a solo act at our wonderful Zeiterion Theater in New Bedford -- a real treat of nothing but his story-telling.
Another public-radio great -- Scott Simon -- shared a moving tribute this morning, crediting Keillor with creating public radio as we know it.

We will miss him, but few deserve a retirement more than Keillor, and I suspect that he will continue to spin stories for years to come. And when he finally does set down his microphone for the last time, we have four decades of great works -- audio, print, and even a little bit of film -- to explore.

But what is so spatial about Keillor? In other words, why is his retirement acknowledged on a geography blog? The short answer is that just about everything that interests me can be seen as related to my way of thinking about geography. But in this case, I can offer a few specific connections.

First, Keillor told fictional stories about people we eventually came to feel we knew personally, and he put those characters in a place that he described with many details and with obvious affection. We could tell that it was similar to -- but distinct from -- the places he had grown up in. Almost like Tolkien, he created an entire imaginary world, but in this case it was a world quite small in scale and quite close to our own.

Second, he took the time to get to know the places where he found his audience. I spend a lot of time learning about New Bedford, but heard quite a few new things about it from his most recent monologue there. I was reminded of this when I listened to part of his penultimate PHC broadcast, from Tanglewood in the Berkshires. Not only was he sharing information about western Massachusetts with his audience, he was bragging about its many virtues, even though he does not live there. He simply loves places, and that makes him a geographer!

Third -- and this is a reach -- he named the most famous radio variety show of the past four decades for a biome. It does not get much more geographic than that!

Lagniappe
The New York Times also published a nice tribute, with a lot more detail about Keillor, including some early photos that are quite funny.

The Netherlands of America

This is what Norfolk, Virginia could be, according to recent reporting on PRI's The World.

We own a home 22 feet above sea-level, closer to the Atlantic than the end zones of a proverbial football field. I was listening to a story about preparing for climate change in coastal Virginia just as I drove past the structure that makes this possible -- a hurricane barrier built in 1966 to protect New Bedford and Fairhaven from hurricane storm surges. That wall is the world's largest such barrier, and could not be built today because of Nixon-era environmental regulations (see M.L. Baron's video and narrative for fascinating details). Without it, though, our bank would have required prohibitively expensive insurance or elaborate engineering before approving a mortgage so close to the steadily rising sea. (We have not delusions about that wall being a perfect defense, by the way. It was designed based on careful review of the previous 100 years of flood records.)

As I wrote in Climate Foxholes in late 2013, people with grown-up responsibilities such as running insurance companies are no longer able to avoid figuring climate change into their planning. Lately, the Scottish golf industry -- like the tea and coffee industries elsewhere -- is preparing for climate change, as described in some detail in journalist Robin Young's recent interview of turf agronomist Richard Windows. Even our own country's most audacious climate denier takes the risks seriously when it comes to his own golf courses.

Caption from original story: Hurricane Sandy sent 8-year-old Avery Solan out to play in the flooded streets of Norfolk, Virginia, in October 2012. The city is trying to prevent worse flooding as sea levels rise, and at the same time grow new industry in a region currently dependent on military jobs.  Credit: Rich-Joseph Facun/Reuters 

What intrigues me about the Norfolk example is that leaders there -- beginning, I think, with those who had to make long-term plans for the U.S. Navy's many facilities in the area -- were early adopters of a pragmatic, defensive approach to climate change; they now see themselves as being able to turn long-term peril into a growth industry.

Coastal Virginia is not the only place where planning for resilience to climate change is underway. Some of the greatest progress seems to be found in post-Sandy New York, including New York City and the neighboring Hudson Valley.

Lagniappe -- Why the focus on coastlines?

The effects of climate change are not limited to coastlines, as those who study agriculture, ecology, and a variety of other subjects well know. But the greater vulnerability of coastal areas to flooding does warrant significant attention. That vulnerability actually has several, interrelated causes:

• Melting ice. About 2 percent of ALL the water on the planet is currently in the form of ice caps and glaciers. In many cases, that melting is accelerating (increasing at an increasing rate), lowering albedo (reflectivity) at the surface and thereby causing even more warming. Most people who know that sea levels are rising seem to be aware of only this cause.
• Water already in the oceans is expanding as it warms, causing to to rise just as mercury rises in a thermometer. With average ocean depth at about 12,000 feet, we are very fortunate that the entire water column is not susceptible to thermal expansion.

Both of these factors raise Mean Sea Level, and it is easy to see why estimates vary as to exactly how much. Local sea level varies with topography and also, it turns out, with such local conditions as the amount of aquifer pumping that is taking place or sediment loads in nearby rivers.

Whatever the local sea level turns out to be, houses and business above that level can be at elevated risk for flooding. That is because winds, waves, and tidal surges from future storms (which may themselves be more frequently intense) will be occurring on top of higher local sea levels. So although our house at 22 feet would not ever become waterfront on a regular basis, it is potentially vulnerable to rising seas, making us quite grateful for the wall mentioned above.

Geo Veritas

Schadenfreude -- taking joy in the pain or failures of others -- is an unattractive emotion. But it is exactly what many geographers -- especially those who work in the shadows of a certain venerable institution on the Charles River -- feel when we view vignettes recorded on the edges of a Harvard commencement at the opening of the 1988 documentary A Private Universe from Annenberg Learner. 

Still from A Private Universe

The clip is from a longer piece about the shortcomings of private education in general, and the piece itself misses an essential point by mistakenly describing the topic of seasons as an astronomy question. If Harvard had a geography requirement -- or even a geography department -- the errors pronounced by these new graduates would be less common. It is geographic learning in particular that is missing in the background of these young scholars -- and future decision-makers. 

How many people with strong opinions on climate change would perform just as poorly? Far too many, it seems, and it is for this reason that any glee geographers take from this video is short-lived.

May 2020 update: courtesy of Harvard Crimson:

Our own BSU EarthView
as shown in the
 national standards for
geography education.
Photo: Ashley Costa (Harris)
National Geographic

We know that geographic illiteracy is a serious problem. We also know that decisions taken at Harvard almost 70 years ago are part of the cause. The short version is that homophobia was the cause, as shutting down the department was the only way to get rid of Derwent Whittlsey, the brilliant chair of the department when the attack on the department began in 1947. On the 40th anniversary of the events, Neil Smith wrote a detailed discussion of these and other factors in an analysis published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (now called the American Association of Geographers, of which I am a member.)

In an undated article on Education.About, Brian Baskerville briefly describes the factors that led to the closing of the department (though he erroneously uses "preference" to describe Whittlsey's sexual orientation). He goes on to assert that geography remains at Harvard, as each of Pattison's 1964 Four Traditions of Geography can be found in one form or another in various parts of the curriculum. This is a rather "thin gruel" as they say, and a far cry from the systematic study of geography that is required to develop a geographically informed person.

About a decade ago, Harvard tried -- in its own flawed way -- to make amends with geography. Or at least to reclaim the word, if not the discipline itself. The effort is described in an understandably self-serving article in Harvard Magazine, Geographers See Death, Birth and Job Prospects. The article acknowledges but dismisses the claims of homophobia as it tries to build the case that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is both the key to returning intellectual rigor to the field and a necessary part of mending the "hopeless divide" between human and physical geography.

This is all by way, of course, of promoting the GIS program at Harvard. Although it is good to see a significant aspect of our field embraced there, it sadly represents a real missed opportunity. The tools and technologies of geography are important, but they are not geography itself. A conversation I had at Harvard a few years ago with GIS pioneer Jack Dangermond was telling. He had given a presentation in which he offered example after example of geographic principles and patterns. After the lecture, I was hoping that he would lend support to our efforts to expand geography education in Massachusetts. He was shockingly dismissive of the idea. The founder of ESRI is so convinced of the value of his product that he thinks it makes geographic literacy irrelevant. It is as if Word and Excel would make writing and math obsolete (which I suppose they have for some people). He argued that gap in our knowledge of geography would be remedied simply by adding more data to our GIS databases and improving user interfaces.

Whatever really transpired in the 1940s, Harvard remains a drag on geographic literacy.

Veritas -- Truth

Lagniappe -- CitiesX

I wrote this addendum in October 2022 -- here I acknowledge learning some valuable geographic lessons at Harvard during the pandemic. In fact, the course I describe below helped me to realize that I am, in fact, something of an urban geographer. Even though the word "urbanization" is in the title of my doctoral dissertation, I never thought of myself in that way before.

We all had unexpected experiences as a result of the dramatic change in our living habits during the global coronavirus pandemic of 2019 to present. At some point during 2020, I responded to an ad for a MOOC -- a Mass Online Open Course -- hosted by Harvard. I had been among the first people at my own campus to teach an online course, and the first to win an award for online teaching. But I had neither taught nor taken a completely open course like this -- something that had been set up and then essentially left alone for students to complete at their own pace.

As I browsed the offerings, I noticed CitiesX: The Past, Present, and Future of Urban Life and decided that this was the most likely to sustain my interest -- despite two strikes against it. Not only is the course offered at Harvard, but it is also housed in economics -- a field that makes ample use of simplifying assumptions that separate it from reality. I had plenty of time on my hands, however, so I took the course, and found that Dr. Edward Glaeser provided a great many insights about the geographies of a great many cities -- I only screamed at the screen a few times over many dozens of lessons.

In fact, the CitiesX video library is a rich resource that I use for some of my own teaching. It includes all of the videos used in the course, organized by location and theme.

Their Poem

Eggs at Casa Hayes-Boh come from The Country Hen, as part of our regular milk delivery from Crescent Ridge Dairy. This week's delivery included the following colorful poem.

GREEN EGGS?
Eat them here or eat them there.
Enjoy the goodness anywhere.
Green eggs are not to cause alarm.
We're really talking 'bout the farm!
The eggs are brown as all have seen.
It is the farm that's much more green!

Solar has been nature's way
from the beginning of our days.
Fossil fuels lead men* [sic] astray.
Making skies an ugly gray.
Now solar is back in a big way!
And blue skies will be here to stay!

We've been good stewards of the land
farming with nature hand-in-hand.
The soil, the water and the air
always reward us for our care.
The sun will run all our machines
And keep the air so nice and clean.
Our organic eggs will be more green!

Country Hen eggs are also available in many of our area grocery stores.

*as we know, women have also been known to use fossil fuels.