Monarch Glimmer

Naturalists in the Californias (Baja and the one north of the border) have some rare good news about an imperiled species: the glorious monarch butterfly.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images via WBUR

The Butterflies Are Back! is a recent report on NPR that describes a small rebound in the west-coast population of the migratory insect. The enthusiasm of those who monitor the annual migration reminds me of the thrill I had when observing the migration at my former home in Pharr, Texas. There we could observe the migration of the east-coast monarchs without even trying. At times they would simply waft past us in their thousands. 

The report concludes with an important word of caution: the modest rebound is a cause for optimism but not for complacency. We are in the midst of a century of human population growth that biologist E.O. Wilson describes as The Bottleneck, which I described in some detail in my 2016 post Good News from Gorongosa.

Tremé Hopes

I have been teaching an honors colloquium about New Orleans for the past several spring semesters. It has been a chance to learn from afar about a city I have known -- so far -- only through books, music, radio stories, and of course maps.

It was only recently, however, that we learned about the 2010-2013 dramatic series dramatic series Treme and the Tremé neighborhood in which it takes place. I learned 

The series is immersed in the political ecology of Katrina on the one hand and the cultural geography of the city's food and music on the other. In fact, many New Orleans musicians (and a few visitors) appear as themselves throughout the series. A professor played by John Goodman delivers a brilliant soliloquy that captures the paradox in just 92 seconds; HBO elaborates on Tremé as cause for celebration on the program's web site.

Our Tremé immersion has coincided with the ongoing saga of (pathetic) Congressional wrangling over infrastructure spending. For those reading this after 2021 -- or for those not following the (pathetic) saga, Congress has spent most of the calendar year debating two bills on infrastructure, and in November finally got the first "easy" one signed into law. 

We learned about a longstanding problem in the Tremé neighborhood because of hopes it would be addressed as part of the $1,700,000,000,000 of roads-and-bridges spending that had finally been approved. Hopes were raised, according to NY Times journalist Audra D.S. Burch, by $20,000,000,000 that had been included to address the racially imbalanced impact of the Eisenhower-era construction of interstate highways.

As the map of the neighborhood makes clear, Tremé suffered a common fate of African-American communities. Highway construction tended to connect prosperous places without disrupting them, and to do the opposite to less powerful people living in less expensive locations. Because of the legacy of redlining, highways divided neighborhoods that would have been left intact if the properties were more expensive or the residents better connected. In the case of Tremé, Interstate 10 rumbles through the 442-acre neighborhood, separating the legendary Congo Square -- the point of origin of African music in North America -- from its neighbors.

The details, sadly, are far less hopeful than the headline. Congress removed 95 percent of what the Biden administration had requested for such projects nationally, leaving just $1 billion to address a problem that cost $20 billion to address (through the notorious Big Dig) in the city of Boston alone.

Lagniappe 

At the top of this post, I mention having only recently learned of Treme the show and Tremé the neighborhood. I learned of them from journalist Melissa Harris Perry's recent interview with Wendell Pierce, a star of both The Wire and Treme who is a native of New Orleans as they discussed his response (in both thoughts and deeds) to Hurricane Ida, which had befallen his beloved city the week before. 

Wendell Pierce as Antoine Baptiste (Image: HBO)

And finally, when I do get to New Orleans, I will be visiting the Tremé Coffee House and lodging at La Belle Esplanade, both in the neighborhood. 

NOLA Woes & Glories

 As Professor Creighton Bernette, John Goodman reads the 1880 work of Lafcadio Hearn about the miseries and glories of New Orleans near the end of the first season of Treme. 

In this scene, Goodman's character references Lafcadio Hearn -- also known as Koizumi Yakumo -- was himself an enigma and a bit of a NOLA legend. I look forward to learning more about him.

Though it aired a decade ago, my favorite librarian only recently began watching Treme. The 2010-2013 series explores New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, the hurricane that had devastated the city in 2005. 

I learned of the series when journalist Melissa Harris-Perry interviewed actor Wendell Pierce on WNYC's The Takeaway in September. (Terry Gross also interviewed Pierce for Fresh Air back in 2010.)

These paradoxes make New Orleans an ideal topic for geographic exploration. In my one-credit colloquium New Orleans: Global City, I meet just one hour each week with students in BSU's Commonwealth Honors program, most of whom are not geography majors. We explore the rich human geography and precarious physical geography of the city as a group before each student delves into a particular facet for their own research.

Lagniappe 

See the Tremé Hopes post I wrote a couple weeks after this one, with much more on the geography of the neighborhood for which the series is named.

Delaying Justice

 

"Australians want action on climate change, and so do I. But ..." said Prime Minister Scott Morrison in Glasgow,  going on to say that Australians "will not be lectured."

There could not be a greater contrast between P.M. Morrison and his counterpart Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, who implored Glasgow COP26 recognize the trivial contribution of Bangladesh to global greenhouse emissions in the context of the huge costs it bears. The NPR program On Point chose Bangladesh as one focus of its in-depth discussion of climate reparations at the beginning of the second week of the conference. Journalist Riton Quiah explains how sea-level rise interacts with increased storm activity to compound the vulnerability of Bangladesh and similar places.

In the same discussion, author David Wallace explains the temporal and spatial imbalances of climate change with great clarity. 

Representation for 51 and 52

This week I heard two stories that highlight the need for statehood to provide the full protections of federal representation for U.S. citizens in Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. I was born in the former and have visited the latter just once. Sometimes calls for D.C. statehood are dismissed with "What about Puerto Rico?" and vice-versa. Both are further dismissed as attempts to grab political power -- as if denying statehood were not itself a political hustle.

The first story I heard was about the plight of Robert Davis, whose release from parole in Washington, D.C. was badly mismanaged because local parole cases are managed by a federal commission with no local accountability. The second story was about the ongoing power outages in Puerto Rico, four years after Hurricane Maria.

In both cases, citizenship without representation is equivalent to no citizenship at all. 

Lagniappe

Legislation that would grant statehood to Washington would also change the meaning of "D.C." to Douglass Commonwealth, honoring a champion of freedom rather than an agent of conquest. 

The #legoparkranger version of Frederick Douglass
at his historic site in Washington.

São Tomé and Long Roads

 

L-R: Director Guenny Pires and BSU attendees Magaly Ponce,
  Angelo Barbosa, and James Hayes-Bohanan. 

One week ago today, I had the privilege of watching the 2010 film Contract Docudrama in the company of its director Guenny Pires and a room filled with scholars and students of Cabo Verde and and the places to which it is most closely connected.  The event was sponsored in part by the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at BSU, in conjunction with a similar center at UMass-Dartmouth, where the event was held. 

I look forward to bringing the film to BSU along with more recent work from this thoughtful director.  Meanwhile, the eight-minute trailer on IMDb is a thorough summary that includes spoilers. If you might have a chance to watch the film soon, you might prefer the three-minute trailer on YouTube, which does not include the spoilers. 

When studying kriolu  (Cape Verdean creole) last year, I learned something of the story behind the famous ballad Sodade, made famous by Cesaria Evora. I highly recommend listening to the song in the live Paris version, which has recently been made available with English/kriolu subtitles. In the live version, notice where the "Barefoot Diva" stands. Her contracts stipulated that she would stand on Cape Verdean soil, no matter where in the world she performed.

I thought of this song throughout the Contract film, and near the end I heard someone whisper, "now I understand that song" and i knew exactly what she meant. Stories of migration and loss run deep in Cabo Verde, and they run to many corners of the world.

Lagniappe 

In addition to São Tomé, many migrant stories also include Angola, which is why a popular Cape Verdean restaurant in Brockton, Massachusetts is called Luanda. The story of Angolan musician and sprinter (yes, he is both) Bonga Kueda is an engaging introduction to the contemporary realities of Angola.

#RangerBetty100

December 2025 update: Ranger Betty is one of those rare figures about whom we can say she was taken too soon, though she did live for 104 years and passed on the solstice after touching the lives of thousands. Her obituary on Berkleyside is one of many remembrances. From this one I learned that she was a musician, among her many other identities and achievements.

If you have only one hour to learn about the history of the United States, I recommend that you spend it with Betty Reid Soskin, National Park Service Ranger. (The NP Lego post below was in honor of her 100th birthday. As of this edit (July 2025), she is retired but still with us!)

I learned about Ranger Betty as many other people did, when the entire National Park Service celebrated her 100th birthday as part of the centennial celebration of the NPS itself. The occasion came to my attention in several different ways over a couple of days. The most fun, of course, was the item above from the impish creatives at NPS Lego Vignettes, from whom I literally learn something new every day.

She is a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in California. Her personal history is so deeply entwined in the mission and purposes of the park that they have created an entire web page for this particular ranger. The Betty Reid Soskin page included a schedule of the popular presentations she gave on site, a biography focused on her relationship to the park, and most importantly, that one-hour video I reference in the opening lines above. 

She is shown sitting as I've seen many rangers do in other parks, on a kitchen stool at the front of a small theater full of visitors. She introduces the park and the park's main documentary video. The hour spent with her includes about 20 minutes with that professionally produced film. It begins, however, with her presenting both a general introduction to the concept of urban national parks and her own connection to this one. After the film is when the real learning happens: in a series of firm but gentle steps, she guides listeners from a superficial understanding of what the home front was all about to a deeper understanding of how that reality was shaped by race and how that might be relevant today.

Spoiler alert: although she was born in Detroit, a key turning point in the life of Ranger Betty Soskin was the evacuation of her family from a flood that ravaged much of Louisiana. Most of us were not aware of it until after Katrina in 2005, though Randy Newman ... and later Aaron Neville ... told us all about it in Louisiana 1927, first released in 1974.

UPDATE: I returned to this post in July 2025 because I happened to hear one of Ranger Betty's talks on The Moth. I recommend both of them! This also led me to read the rest of her story on the Betty Reid Soskin Wikipedia entry.

Lagniappe

If you have more time to devote to learning about the Great Migration that is a big part of Ranger Betty Soskin's story, I highly recommend Isabelle Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns. She focuses on the stories of three families in order to provide a few in-depth examples from among the myriad experiences of millions of Americans moving over a period of half a century. For a link to the book and my own thoughts on it, please see my Warmth of Other Suns review on Goodreads.

I found the Ranger Betty video while I was looking for material about this book; I found it a bit after the fact. Wilkerson was featured on the TED Radio Hour, which includes a conversation with her and a link to her TED Talk.

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP

Shortly after we arrived at BSU, a retirement gave me an opportunity to teach a course about Land Protection, while two outside events helped to shape the way I would teach it for the next two decades (and beyond). One was the publication of Thoreau's Country and the other was the establishment of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. 

The namesakes of the park, courtesy of 
NPS Lego Vignettes

Each of these has shaped what we do in class, but more importantly they have given us places to go for the exploration of the interactions among forest ecology, land protection, and conservation. These are the aforementioned National Park in Vermont and Harvard University's research forest in central Massachusetts.

In the early years of teaching the course, I was fortunate to have the direct involvement of a local expert at each site -- seasonal ranger Scott Davison at Marsh-Billings and assistant director John O'Keefe at Harvard Forest. Each provided my students and me with a rich discussion of the inside and outside features of the respective properties -- combining the history of the site and the insights of forest ecology.

I highly recommend the Fisher Museum in Petersham and the mansion in Woodstock, as well as the extensive walking trails in each place. Trails that were provided for the enjoyment of visitors or the working of farms and forests are now available for learning the forests themselves. 

Although their histories are quite different, the two sites have a few things in common. Like most of New England, they were indigenous lands used for hunting and gathering before they were colonized by Europeans and became agricultural lands, the sources of firewood and pastures for grazing or over-grazing. Again like most of New England, these lands have been reforested, but unlike most of the secondary forest in the region, these have been managed and monitored for a century or more. 

The Fisher Museum web page now provides high-resolution images of its famous dioramas and information about very recent exhibits that honor indigenous stewardship of the land.  The National Park Service provides virtual access to much of the collection at Marsh-Billings via virtual exhibits.

To learn more about the Marsh-Billings property from afar, I recommend the very cursory encyclopedia article I wrote in 2000 and copied onto my website, as well as A Place in the Land, which is a bit more interesting than its trailer suggests. It provides glimpses of some of the amazing artworks that were collected by the families who lived there and that are essential parts of the story of conservation in the United States.

Lagniappe -- September 2024

Here I include a couple of related links I will be sharing with my Land Protection students, following our most recent visit to Marsh-Billings. 

Marsh Billings Rockefeller: Conservation on a Grand Scale is a 17-minute episode of the America's National Parks podcast that puts the park in a broad context. This context is what makes it important in my course!

The one thing I regret about our 2024 visit is that we did not have a chance to go inside the mansion. Among the treasures on the first floor are important paintings of the Hudson River School. Some of them are included in the MABI Flickr account, starting with this Bierstadt painting. His works and others of the Hudson River School were presented in Re/Framing, a traveling exhibit that was at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in 2022.

On our way to Marsh-Billings, I asked students to share their favorite national parks -- either those visited or those they would like to visit. Not that they asked, but I have created a life-list of national parks and museums I have visited. I would like to visit all of the parks, of course, but I have included on the map just a couple of aspirations. 

I also mentioned the B.A.R.K. Ranger program, of which my crazy dog is a proud participant.

Podcasters Danielle and Cassie bring their love for the outdoors and their love for morbid stories together in a very engaging podcast that alternates between their own well-researched stories and outdoor experiences shared by their readers. 

Listen, learn, and watch your back!

Four Minutes on Fire

 By the title above, I mean both that this is literally a four-minute story about fire and figuratively that it is "on fire" in the sense that it conveys a lot of knowledge in a very short amount of time. Please give a listen:

Journalist Lauren Sommer and the experts she interviews convey not only the ecological importance of prescribed burns as part of long-term fire control but also the great variability in the legal and cultural context of these practices across the United States. 

Fortunately, land managers in dangerously fire-prone regions are starting to seek the expertise of those with long experience in controlled burns in other regions. Because the story also mentions the legal and financial considerations of burning on privately-held land, this is now required listening in my Land Protection class.

Controlled burn in Georgia. Photo: Morgan Varner

Tara-NOLA

Photo: David Grunfield for NOLA.com

A private home in New Orleans has an interesting geography and a problematic history, as it pays homage to a work that symbolizes the Lost Cause revisionist history of the U.S. Civil War.

As Mike Scott writes in The original Tara may be gone with the wind, but the look lives on in New Orleans on St. Charles Avenue, the house was built when Gone with the Wind was wildly popular despite its Lost Cause ideology.