Free ≠ Fair, Redux

My favorite librarian sent me a link from the Brockton Enterprise web site that raises several geographic issues. The May 19 story is about Java Jive, a coffee shop in Missouri.

The first geographic question is why a local newspaper in Massachusetts is running a story about a local business in Missouri. The answer is that the conglomeration of local newspapers into national chains focused on cost reduction means that they sometimes run odd stories just to fill space cheaply . The very same story can be found in the May 18 online edition of the Neosho (Missouri)  Daily News. If the Enterprise had the kind of reporting staff it did a generation ago, it would not be scrounging stories from other papers in their network. That said, the selection of a coffee story reflects growing public interest in the subject.

The story describes Jive in Java, a small, independent coffee roaster that is moving from Neosho to a larger facility in Joplin. The story mentions several aspects of coffee care, gleaned from interviews with the company's owners. Several details about coffee seem to have been "lost in translation." One example is the roaster's apparent reference to the problem of "old" beans; another example is a common mistake that is of particular interest to me.

According to the article, Jive in Java's varieties include "free trade" coffee. As I wrote back in December, I encounter a lot of confusion between the terms free trade and fair trade. Anybody making an ethical claim about coffee intends to use "fair trade," as "free trade" refers to the status quo in an industry that is anything but fair to the vast majority of coffee farmers. Had the reporter had time and inclination for adequate research on this story, the nature of the business would be clear to the reader.

Reading between the lines of the story, it appears that this roaster travels to a larger coffee market in Kansas City, where he acquires a variety of beans, which he then roasts in various combinations and at various roast levels in order to achieve particular flavor profiles. Among these purchases from time to time may be some beans that are certified as fair trade. This may be a roaster for whom "fair trade is a flavor," rather than a commitment. Jive in Java does seem to be a company dedicated to the quality of its roasts, but the connection back to the land and farmers is not made clear in this article.

In fairness to the roaster, I tried to find more information. Java in Jive has a very weak web presence, including a non-functional web site and an outdated Myspace page. It is not listed among Missouri fair-trade roasters by TransFair, which is the certifying agency for the United States, though perhaps it is purchasing some portion of its beans from companies that are so certified.

In the end, this story reflects the current status of the coffee industry. In the context of a huge trade -- the biggest in the world after oil -- most of which is demonstrably unfair, we are looking for assurance that the coffee we buy is not part of the problem. That assurance can be in the form of certifications, other ethical models, or wishful thinking.

In the short term, I work on various fronts to promote fair trade, because I have seen the difference it can make in the lives of farmers and their children. For the longer term, however, this is not enough. We cannot certify our way out of the inequity of the current global trading system, as it applies to coffee, chocolate, bananas, or a host of other commodities and products.

Plato at the Center

CLICK MAP to ENLARGE

Many thanks to my geography student Amy for letting me know about the recent placement of a marker for the U.S. population centroid in Plato, Missouri. Plato is in Texas County, which I have just missed in previous travels in Missouri (my home state from 1977 to 1980).

Amy found the story on the educational web site of the National Ocean Service, part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which also includes such institutions as the National Weather Service. I highly recommend spending some time exploring the NOS pages, which I recently found when looking for educational materials for an article about tides.

The NOS article Do You Know Where Your Centroid Is? describes NOAA's recent involvement in calculating the new population centroid (based on the 2010 census) in the small town of Plato, and the placement of a marker there on May 9 of this year. As explained in the article (and its accompanying audio clip), NOAA's National Geodetic Survey has been responsible for placing such markers since 1960, though the population centroid has been calculated for every census since 1790!

As the map above suggests, western expansion has been a consistent part of the population geography throughout the entire history of the United States. Starting around 1930, however, that westward movement has been combined with a movement toward the south. The NOAA news service provides more details about the celebration in Plato and the demographic history.

The calculation of population centroids requires access to detailed information from the census, but in principle the process is relatively simple. In fact, a county planner and GIS coordinator from New Jersey was able to place the centroid in the right town based on publicly available information released by the census last December. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Alex Zakrewsky was able to estimate the centroid's location in about 10 minutes. After months of  crunching more detailed data, the Census Bureau and the NGS found that the center was just on the other side of the small town, 3.8 miles from the location Mr. Zakrewsky had identified.

Plato, Missouri basks in its 15 minutes of geographic fame!

The Ship that Changed the World

A few months ago, I wrote about plans to build the biggest ships ever; the Danish shipping giant Maersk has ordered ten ships, each of which will hold 18,000 containers of cargo. My article points to several others that explain the importance of such ships to the way the world space-economy is organized today. Simply put, globalization is a process that has been under way for centuries, but globalization as we have come to understand it would not have been possible without the development of standardized cargo containers.

As I explain in that post, I have been interested in the phenomenon ever since I studied the geography of transportation as an undergraduate. Only today did I realize, however, that one person is credited with this critical innovation: Malcom McLean. I have been enjoying Simon Winchester's Atlantic, and am currently reading a chapter on the environmental impacts of human transportation across the great ocean. It is from this chapter that I learned of McLean, a former truck driver who outfitted the Ideal-X to carry 58 standard containers from Newark to Houston in 1956.

That first shipment took place the same year that President Eisenhower initiated the Interstate Highway System, which had both military and commercial goals, and did much to facilitate the global transport system of which containerization was to become such an integral part. An article about the Ideal-X on Hofstra University's Geography of Transportation web site explains the cost differential that made the idea so attractive to McLean. Finding a way to reduce the cost of loading cargo by more than 90 percent contributed to a career that eventually made him one of the wealthiest individuals in the United States. The original ship was sold for scrap in 1991; his company eventually became part of Maersk.

Where We Were

Many thanks to the Karoline with a K, one of my fellow BSU Campus Bloggers, for posing a very good question this week. Reacting to the news of Osama bin Laden's death, she asked her readers to recall where we were when we heard about the September 11, 2001 attacks, and where we were when we heard this week's news about bin Laden. I started to answer on the blog's comment form, but soon realized that I had much more to say, though I did not quite know what at first. Here, then, is how I remember the earlier date and how I think about this week's stunning development.

Where Were You?
(Updated May 7, 2011)

Good question -- thanks for asking. On the two dates, nearly a decade apart, I was in two locations, about 600 feet from each other. On the morning of September 11, I taught two sections of the same class, in room 208 of the Science Building at BSU (then BSC). In between, I went to my office a few feet away, and a former student -- closer to my own age -- stepped in to tell me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought of the plane that crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. I tried to look it up when I went back in for my second class, and I mentioned it to my students. The internet did not work, but I did not think much of that, nor of the actual incident. Somehow near the end of that class we learned the real story and why the internet was not working. As most people in the Northeast remember, it was an incredibly clear and beautiful day, with birds singing and flowers blooming. The chaos going on a couple hundred miles from us was hard to reconcile with the tranquility around us.

I eventually learned that a student in the first section had lost an aunt -- part of a group of TJ Maxx managers who were on one of the flights. I never saw that student again, and the rest of that semester was very jumbled. I remember being glad to be done with a semester in which I thought I did not really get much teaching done.

Within a day or two, I remember attending a moving interfaith service here in Bridgewater. I also noticed that people held doors for each other and -- even in Massachusetts and Rhode Island -- people drove courteously for a couple of weeks. I also remember noticing all of the support that poured in from around the world, in part because this was not just an attack on the USA. Years later, I found murals commemorating the attack in Managua, Nicaragua of all places. The outpouring of grief was global, and it should be remembered that the majority of bin Laden's victims have been Muslim, from many countries around the world.

From my Remembrance Page

The story for May 1, 2011 is much shorter. I did not hear the news of Bin Laden's death until early Monday morning, just before 5 a.m., when I heard it from the BBC feed on WBUR. (I often know whether I've gotten up early or "slept in" by whether I'm hearing British or American accents reading the morning news.) I was relieved to hear the news, but not jubilant. I spent much of the day trying to sort out exactly why this was, aside from a general aversion to killing, because in this case I understood that this might be the best outcome, and certainly a long-awaited one.

Looking at other comments on Karoline's blog, I thought that the difference might be generational, that those of us who clearly remember the freedoms, bounty, and optimism we enjoyed up until September 10, 2001 would likely be more reflective and less ecstatic. I have no sense of bin Laden's death being some kind of "rewind" button for the last decade. Not only are all the dead still dead, and all the wounded still wounded, but our culture and our laws have changed in ways that will not be undone by this death. And even after the the last Al-Qaeda follower vanishes -- if such a thing could ever be verified -- I think those changes are still with us.

Then I started to read what some other people had to say. First, I noticed that a young friend had posted this quote:


‎"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
- Martin Luther King Jr.

We later learned that the attribution to MLK was erroneous, but what is very interesting to me about this quote is that it circulated rapidly in the day immediately following the death of bin Laden. This tells me that the initial glee -- however understandable -- may not be quite right. And people of all ages were soon uncomfortable with it. Writing in the Boston Globe, Kevin Cullen captures this perfectly, at least from my perspective. He acknowledges the grief, the relief, the sacrifice, and the other real and valid causes of the emotional reaction many have had. He then asks his readers to think very carefully about those reactions in the context of what we have seen on the "Arab street," particularly in light of the changes in Arab youth movements of the past three months. Cullen then suggests some very positive steps we can all consider, including an opportunity to show support for the troops on the May 22 Run to Home Base.

Just as Kevin Cullen captures what I see as my generation's ambivalence, Mary Brophy Marcus, in Turning Point for Millennials, explains why college-aged people may experience the demise of Bin Laden very differently.

Finally, I found it odd -- anachronistic, really -- that the Navy used the name "Geronimo" for the operation to find bin Laden. I was reminded of playing "cowboys and Indians" in my back yard four decades ago, before many of us knew any better. The blogger Seeing Things responds cogently in his article with a title that expresses his incredulity: Geronimo? Really? as in, "They could not come up with anything better than that?" He explains how similar terms were used routinely as late as the Vietnam War (when we were using them in my neighborhood -- hmmm). The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) then issued a very compelling statement in which its leaders -- including highly decorated veterans -- explain the many ways in which this selection of code words is offensive. The NCAI is careful to be proportionate in its criticism, but also calls on President Obama and the rest of us to consider the great sacrifices that Native American citizen-soldiers have made, particularly in the past decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Coffee Books without Tables

Holiday shopping idea for your
favorite coffee/library enthusiasts

As she often does, my favorite librarian recently introduced me to some literature on coffee. More precisely, she introduced me to literature on coffee that was in turn identified by a very interesting kind of librarian: a blogger who promotes the virtues of private libraries.

Some of the books -- and collectible cards -- in this article are already part of my private coffee library, but many are new to me, and I am downright covetous of a few, such as the expansive bibliography shown above.

National Security: From Containment to Sustainment

The United States is in a pivotal era, as we grapple with the close of a century in which our dominance of the planet -- whether seen as a good thing or not -- could be taken for granted. We continue to consume, pollute, and buy weapons out of all proportion to our population. Indications are mounting, though, that our position in the world is changing fundamentally. Somewhere between elation that undeserved dominance is ending and panic that this means the end of prosperity and security, a middle path must be found in which we adjust to some new realities.

In the tradition of George Kennan's "Mr. X" Long Telegram of 1964, two Pentagon officers have released a National Strategic Narrative under the name Mr. Y. I first learned of their report from Tom Ashbrook's On Point broadcast. Several cogent remarks from the report illustrate why I consider this a very important and timely document. Writing as private individuals but clearly with the support of senior Pentagon officials, the authors are telling simple truths that many in both parties have resisted.

A sampling illustrates:

Dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy. (p4)
Without our values, America has no credibility. (p6)
Perhaps the most important first step we can take, as part of a National Strategy, is to identify which of these resources are renewable and sustainable, and which are finite and diminishing.  (p7)
We can no longer expect the ingenuity and labor of past generations to sustain our growth as a nation for generations to come. (p7)

This last claim is rightly made, I believe, in the context of investing in the most valuable of our renewable resources: our youth. The authors go beyond the usual platitudes about the importance of education, to promote a new attitude toward it, and toward the value of work itself.

John Norris wrote in his introduction of the Mr. Y piece for Foreign Policy (emphasis mine):

Yet, it is investments in America's long-term human resources that have come under the fiercest attack in the current budget environment. As the United States tries to compete with China, India, and the European Union, does it make sense to have almost doubled the Pentagon budget in the last decade while slashing education budgets across the country?

 Norris also highlights the report's finding that Americans have over-reacted to Islamist extremism. He and the authors are absolutely correct: the 9/11/01 terrorists knew exactly which buttons to push, and in many ways our country reacted exactly as they hoped. As the report authors write -- and remember, these are a Navy Captain and a Marine Colonel -- they have turned the United States into a paranoid country.

We have squandered the global sympathy that the 2001 attacks inspired (see my Managua memorial photos for an example), but there is time to re-enter the community of nations as a responsible participant. The authors continue:

We are, in the truest sense, part of an interdependent strategic ecosystem, and our interests converge with those of people in virtually every corner of the world.   We must remain cognizant of this, and reconcile our domestic and foreign policies as being complementary and largely congruent. (p9)

Where's the Beef?

I am in the unusual position of working at a university that promotes international education in many ways, but does not require its students to study a foreign language. Eventually we will change that policy, but meanwhile I am always looking for ways to encourage students to study languages.

Several reasons presented themselves recently, as evidence continues to mount of Brazil's growing economic importance. While the United States has been resting on its laurels, Brazil has been applying the lessons of hard work and education to grow its economy. OK, it is not all virtue: Brazilian capitalists occasionally apply some ruthlessness learned in the North as well. Whatever the reasons, as Brazil steadily moves up among the top-ten economies, specific examples of its importance to the United States are likely to become more common.

Almost three years ago, Brazilian Carlos Brito became CEO of a conglomerate that owns Anheuser-Busch. This Bud's for voce! As revealed in his Wall Street Journal interview, Brito is thrifty, hard-working, well-educated, and bilingual. It is interesting that in the "comments" page for the WSJ article, readers debate the relative merits of craft beer and mass-market beer, missing the MUCH LARGER lessons about education, work, and economic security.

More recently, NPR reported that a Brazilian company that started in the 1950s as a supplier of beef to workers building the new capital in Brasilia has now become the biggest meat producer in the United States. And the world. Again, as with any story of rapid corporate growth, many important concerns arise. A company that slaughters 90,000 head of cattle a day cannot be thought of as socially and environmentally responsible, for example.

An important lesson that can be gleaned from both stories, however, is that anybody in the United States who is in a position to learn Portuguese should do so. Fortunately, every student at my university (and throughout eastern Massachusetts) is in a position to do just that.

New Islands Discovered!

Gurupi Islands -- Google image from CoastalCare.org

The title above is attention-grabbing and a little inaccurate ... on purpose. A lot of information about the world gets presented to us in ways that are meant to grab attention, and it is good to develop the habit of comparing headlines and introductions to more detailed information, in order to determine what the real stories are.

In this case, the real story -- as reported on Live Science, Coastal Care, and many other sources -- is that a list of one type of island has been dramatically revised as a result of both improved technology and changes in outlook. Specifically, a list of the 1,492 barrier islands throughout the world was compiled in 2001, based on the satellite image data available at the time, and on what kinds of settings scientists believe it possible to find them. A more recent study used higher-resolution satellites, locally navigation and topographic maps, and a different way of thinking about the islands. The result: the list now has 2,149 islands, but the list and the thinking behind it are new ... not the islands themselves.

The finding is important because barrier islands are both very important and very vulnerable. Thousands of miles of islands protect coastlines throughout the world from storms, which are becoming a greater threat as sea levels rise. The islands, however, are dynamic systems that depend upon fresh inputs of sand that are easily disrupted by construction, land use, and -- ironically -- structures meant to protect coastal properties.

Most humans live near coastlines, and those who can afford to will often try to live as close as possible, making the real estate markets on barrier islands among the most competitive on the planet. The attraction is hard to resist: part of my honeymoon was spent on Ocean City, Maryland -- a mere sliver of sand protecting Maryland from Atlantic storms!

Paul Smith photography

Understanding Race

The Museum of Science in Boston is a terrific place for learners of all ages -- and learning about many subjects. It truly is one of the great treasures of the region in which I live. Saturday I had the privilege of visiting a temporary installation that was timely for me in a number of ways. RACE: Are We So Different? is at the MOS only through May 15; I encourage all my local friends and students to see it if at all possible -- and to allow plenty of time for its engaging activities and exhibits.

The experience was timely for me in two ways. Over the past several months, my (mostly white, suburban) UU church in Bridgewater has been actively involved in a growing partnership with a (mostly black, urban) Baptist church in nearby Brockton. The two congregations are located only a few miles apart, and are enjoying the conscious exploration of what unites and divides the communities in which we reside. It was in this context that I immersed myself -- along with some university colleagues and students -- in the museum's application of anthropology, biology, geography, and medicine to the question of what exactly race is.

The exhibit was timely in a second, somewhat more prosaic way. In recent discussions of demography with second-year geography students, we turned our attention to the subject of race in the U.S. Census. I have posted a lot of articles about the Census during the current "season," including some about race. I was stumped by a very basic questions the students asked, though: Why does the Census include race at all? And the close corollary: Should it continue to do so?

I went to the exhibit, naively hoping to find an answer to one or both of these questions. In fact, I came away with more and deeper questions, but only very partial answers. Before I realized photographs were forbidden, I snapped the one above, of a bunch of people posing in t-shirts. My camera phone being what it is, the point of the shirts needs explaining: each person is wearing a shirt with three different "decade" dates over the past two centuries. Each date is followed by the description of race or ethnicity that person would have chosen on the census for that year. Every person has at least two -- and many three -- designations. The exhibit includes some interesting questions about what to do now, and the implications of continuing, modifying, or eliminating the questions.

The installation's online companion web site is extensive, and I look forward to exploring it more fully. It includes an interesting exercise related to the census discussion above. I was able to complete the race/ethnicity question for myself as if I were a resident of about ten different countries; I did not get the same answer each time!

Against the World

I created this montage shortly after my 2003 visit to Cuba, taking the photos from public sources and the ideas from a political cartoon I had seen at least a couple of administrations earlier. Yes, I have been to Cuba. As a resident of "the freest country on earth," this is one freedom I was very lucky to enjoy, thanks to a compromise that allows the freedom to a few, in exchange for keeping it off-limits to most. In 2004 -- desperate to widen the margin of the Florida "vote" -- George W. Bush took away most academic licenses, so even the sliver of freedom to travel has been reduced.

The anachronisms and paradoxes of U.S.-Cuba relations are manifest in a series of Cuba photographs collected for The Big Picture, the Boston Globe's new blog celebrating the vital work of photojournalists throughout the world. The 31 photographs -- most recent but some vintage -- tell a variety of stories, which is exactly the point. The high wall that successive U.S. administrations have erected between the people of the United States and Cuba mean that enormous potential for understanding is lost -- in both directions. The photo below, for example, shows a group of women gathered as dissidents within Cuba, while another introduces the viewer to dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez . It is difficult to imagine how isolating their country helps foster democratic movements of this kind.

A caption for another photo in the collection mentions that in October 2010, the United States joined Israel in opposing a United Nations resolution that called for the end of the embargo. As the Associated Press reported at the time (as distributed by the Christian Science Monitor),  a similar result had been reached 19 times in a row, with the U.S. convincing only its most dependent ally to vote with us and three additional allies (apparently also fairly dependent) to abstain from the vote. Aside from these five, all the other countries in the world -- 187 of them -- agreed on the resolution. This is not a resolution about the "goodness" or "badness" of one-party rule in Cuba. Such a question would spark much greater debate. Almost everybody in the world agrees, however, that the embargo does more harm than good.

Perhaps the case could have been made when Eisenhower or Kennedy was president, but President Obama has not offered an explanation of why Cuba should continue to be the only country in the world to which ordinary citizens of the United States (and some other nationals holding U.S. visas) do not have the freedom to travel.