BSU EarthView is a blog I maintain as part of our Project EarthView outreach program, which mainly reaches middle-school students. Among other things, I use the blog to share resources I find appropriate to learning geography at K-12 levels, especially grades 4-8. Many of the things I post, however, are good for learners of all ages, such as the recent Vexillology Map post! It points to a ChartsBin map that includes a description of every national map in the world, as well as the maps of some territories.
Writing for Budget Travel magazine, Nicholas DeRenzo describes the geography of coffee in terms of consumption habits representing various countries. In his article A Coffee Addict's Guide to the World, he describes close to two dozen ways to serve and prepare coffee. Sadly, only one country is represented by a single corporation, the highest possible caloric impact, and a plastic serving container. Guess which one.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a long-standing educational project by which NASA provides examples of the benefits -- from the practical to the sublime -- of space exploration. I use a November 2000 image -- Earth at Night -- on my home page and in many of my classes, as the lights shown in this image mosaic are a reasonable but imperfect proxy for human population patterns.
Profligate users of electricity, for example, are over-represented while the rural poor are invisible -- as they too often are in real life. Still, it is clear from this image that the majority of people live in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, that more people live near water than in the interiors of continents, and that population densities are still low in places that are extremely cold, dry, wet, or high. (The "too wet" category surprises people, but the nutrients are often so thoroughly leached from tropical soils that although they are found under lush forests, they cannot support settled agriculture -- only low-density shifting cultivation.)
CLICK to ENLARGE
Better yet, visit original APOD post to really enlarge.
This image has a lot of detail that is not visible at even double this scale.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear APOD mentioned on the radio yesterday, as one WBUR broadcaster was exclaiming how cool the image was. The image, as it turns out, was actually a time-lapse series of images (that is, an accelerated video) from the International Space Station. Set to a lively musical score, Flying Over the Earth at Night fills the screen with imagery of lights that originate from human and natural sources. We are reminded of how common lightning is, for example. We see large areas of dense human settlement but even larger areas where humans are relatively few and generally far between.
Watch this sequence a few times, looking for patterns and familiar coastlines or other locations. You can share your reactions with the "comments" button below, or on the NASA site itself.
At first glance, today's APOD image seems similar to yesterday's sequence. It is mostly dark, with some scattered blues and oranges. But as the notes for Celestial Still Life make clear, these colored lights reflect (pun intended) patterns on a much vaster scale than anything on our planet could do.
Eric Weiner is a self-described grump who decided that happiness must have a geography. The Geography of Bliss describes his journey to figure out whether people in some places are happier than those in others and if so, why. Pam wrote about our reading of this book as part of her Year of Reading project.
I was thinking of all this when I found a piece of paper floating around in my murse and realized that I need to put its contents in a permanent -- which for me means electronic -- place before I can recycle the paper. The notes were scribbled at the end of a recent service at my church, when our minister suggested we write down a few steps to happiness. I wrote the following mini-couplets, one of which I added an hour or so later, while lunching at the Rockin' K Cafe with the recorder ensemble that had played that morning.
Gain learning & share it.
Honor work& do it.
Eat good food &prepare it.
Spend time in the outdoors& protect it.
Listen to music & make it.
I will leave it for readers to decide what to do with these suggestions, as they are intended to describe how I pursue happiness rather than to prescribe how others should do it. I will also leave to my readers the question of what if anything is geographic about them.
Living south of Boston with most of our family in Maryland, we drive through or around New York City much more often than we go to it. But I have found myself here in the City (yes, I am writing this from Midtown) twice in as many weeks. Last week, as mentioned on our department blog, I was one of more than 8,000 geographers attending our national meeting here. Today, I came -- again via Amtrak -- to give a talk on coffee at Yeshiva University. The train is the way to go: scenery, legroom, and wifi without any traffic or terrible drivers.
Because of shows like Friends, Seinfeld, Manhattan, and countless others, many Americans -- and fans of television and film throughout the world -- have at least some basic understanding of the geography of New York, particularly of the borough of Manhattan. The web site Time Formations is an interesting opportunity to explore Geographic Information Systems (GIS), building on the basics to explore an endless array of potential combinations of spatial variables.
For the image above, I chose to click "on" every data layer available -- great fun and colorful, if not particularly useful for analysis. In reality, geographers can use tools like this to look systematically at relationships among many spatially-variable conditions. Prior to GIS, it was often difficult to compare variables that were mapped in different ways or at different scales. Analysis in such situations still requires some professional care, but GIS does facilitate many novel approaches to spatial research.
December 10, 2012 Update 1: Artist and cartographer Jenni Sparks has brought her skills to a different kind of map of the city -- a hand drawing of the iconic island at a delightfully detailed scale. Like a modern, urban Erwin Raisz, she brings the landscape to life and invites exploration. The relatively small-scale overview below is posted along with several larger-scale samples on her blog, which includes a link for purchasing the entire map. I join Sparks in being grateful that New York has survived (for the most part) Super Storm Sandy.
December 10, 2012 Update 2: In Mapping Sandy's Reach, I point to an interactive map that allows users to find out which of these familiar places were recently flooded. Some of them still struggle with recovery five weeks after the storm dissipated.
A few weeks ago, I noticed a little chart like the one to the left. A friend had posted it about her own profession, and I thought it was clever. Within a couple of days, I noticed quite a few more online, and another friend declared that this meme had gone from unheard-of to overdone in record time. I agreed, but a few days later felt compelled to jump on board.
I had to admit that I did not exactly know what a meme was -- I thought it referred to this particular style of graphic. As I started to investigate, I learned that a meme is similar to internet viral content, except that each user changes it as he or she copies it, adapting it to individual messages. A meme, then, is like a micro-genre or a heuristic devise that can convey a wide variety of ideas in broadly similar packaging.
I learned the distinction from the Know Your Meme web site, where I also found an interesting article about what this particular meme with a cumbersome name tells us about the way we view ourselves and the what we think about the way others view us.
I made my own version using simple cut-and-paste methods with my browser and PowerPoint (and shirking my usually scrupulous academic habits to get the photos quickly, losing the attributions in the process). A few days later I learned that this particular meme can now be spread using a simple utility at UthinkIdo.com, which now hosts my Teaching Geography graphic. (2023 UPDATE: That site is gone, but I captured the image and am reposting it now.)
This little fad has been particularly interesting for me as a geographer, because I teach two senior-level university courses -- one for geographers in general and another specifically for teachers -- in which I push students to examine what it means to be a geographer, and in particular a geography teacher. Some of the ideas in the graphic I eventually created arose from discussions with students in the teaching class (thanks!).
The meme phenomenon is certainly facilitated by internet technology, but memes circulated quickly and widely in an earlier generation via office photocopiers, as documented in When You're Up to Your Ass in Aligators(1987) by Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter. The term meme predates this work, having been introduced by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene.
I would quibble with only two items in this graphic. One is the suggestion that arabica and robusta are the only species of coffee (genus Cofea). In reality, robusta is the most common varietal of canephora. Two other species are grown commercially, though the amounts are tiny and some experts consider liberica and conillon further varietals of robusta. Most agree that these are terrible coffees! My friend Freddy in Nicaragua informs us that there are about two dozen species, most of which are not commercial, some of which are found wild in the Americas, indicating that the genus was present prior to the emergence of the Atlantic Ocean.
The other is the rather confused terminology used for civet or Kopi Luwak coffee. These are not varietals, but rather a very rare method of harvesting and processing coffee -- using the palm civet digestive tract. Almost all of the 500-600 pounds of coffee collected in this manner each year comes from Indonesia.
One of the privileges of working at Bridgewater State College (now University) has been learning about -- and participating in some small ways -- in the Pride movement. We have tried to create a campus on which students and employees of all genders, gender expression, and sexual orientations are free to work, study, and participate fully in campus life. We have, for example, provided scholarships for students whose families have cut them off financially because of sexual orientation or gender expression.
I know that this work has been worthwhile, because students and even visitors have told me so. I know that students have completed their education here who might not have been able to at other schools, and I am proud of that.
Last month, an out lesbian student was assaulted for having written an editorial against California's Proposition 8. The crime remains unsolved, so it has not yet been determined the extent to which this was a crime motivated by her words or by her identity, but in either case, it was a serious affront to a community that has prided itself as a safe and affirming campus. I was offended by that action, as it threatened to undermine what we have done so much to create. I was ultimately gratified to see the way in which student leaders were able to rally the campus and surrounding community.
Those who carried out the assault could have had no idea what their cowardice would unleash. Rather than creating an unsafe space in the center of our campus, as they had hoped, they motivated the rest of us to reaffirm the entire campus as a place of safety and even affirmation.
One of the great privileges of my life has been that for most of my life (so far), I have been surrounded by excellent and even extraordinary educators. One of the great frustrations of recent years -- the past 18-20, really -- has been the ascendancy of non-educators whose "reforms" make good teaching increasingly difficult. In two articles last year -- Accountability and Kids Rule -- I argued that nobody is really measuring the success of "reforms" that aim to measure teacher performance.
The reforms are arrows in the quiver of class warfare, as often punitive measures are advocated for public educators at all levels that would never be tolerated in private schools. Having brooded on these contradictions and hypocrisies for many years, I was glad that a friend shared Sir Ken Robinson's rather elegant explanation (in a form known as an animate) of the divergence between what we say we want out of education and what we put into it.
This is worth taking the time to watch carefully a time or two!
During dinner with Parris Glendening a few years ago, someone asked the former professor and former Maryland governor which title was appropriate. Feigning modesty (as I would probably have done), he replied that he had heard one should use the “higher” title, with the clear implication that “Governor” was therefore preferred to “Doctor” or professor.
I was reminded of this last evening as I sat in rapt attention during a ceremony in which former Irish President (and Dr.) Mary Robinson did my profession the favor of receiving geography’s highest honor, the Atlas Award. Despite the etiquette breach – and how deeply privileged I felt simply to be in the audience – I could not resist the pop-culture reference in the title of this blog post.
President Robinson was the first female president of Ireland and the first head of state to visit post-genocide Rwanda. She then served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. She is also a founding member of The Elders and recently received my country's greatest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was not lost on her that the twenty-first century has opened with geography recognizing the lifelong leadership of two women – her friend Dr. Jane Goodall received the inaugural award in 2010.
President Robinson now leads Mary Robinson Foundation -- Climate Justice, an organization whose very name captures in two simple words the profound message that she brought to the 8,000 geographers assembled in New York City for our annual meeting. (Only a few hundred were in the room, but her words were clear and we can consider ourselves advised of how she sees our role in the world at this critical juncture between humans and the earth we inhabit.) Climate Justice describes a critical intersection between science and ethics. While politicians and pundits in the United States fritter away their time in ever more vitriolic and delusional dismissals of the obvious, physical and human systems are colliding in ways that are both severe and profoundly unjust.
Robinson spoke of Climate Justice in terms of three geographies: the Geography of Vulnerability, the Geography of Responsibility, and the Geography of Politics and Power.
She mentioned, for example, already-growing gaps between those who are harmed by climate change and those who stand to benefit in certain ways. Growing seasons in tropical low latitudes -- where economically underdeveloped countries are concentrated -- are being shortened by drought, in contrast to longer growing seasons in upper-mid latitudes. As if to put a coda on her speech, I saw daffodils flourishing near the hotel the following morning, even though it is still February!
President Robinson argues that the juncture at which we find ourselves requires “in-depth evaluation of what we mean by equity in development.” She is encouraged that at the recent climate summit in Durban the European Union, the Least-Developed States, and the Small-Island States led the way toward a successor to Kyoto, in the form of a $100,000,000,000 annual Green Climate Fund. (See what The Economist, Nature, and my blog had to say at the time.)
Delivering on that commitment is even more important, in her view, than is reaching overall greenhouse gas commitments. That is to say, reaching a target such as 350 ppm carbon dioxide may be necessary, but not sufficient if equity is not forcefully addressed. even if we could reach Kyoto targets, it would be an insufficient response, because of the inequities in the geographies she describes.
At the end of her remarks, President-Doctor Robinson called geographers to account, admonishing us: “You understand how our planet works.”
You can now listen to President Robinson's address in its entirety.
Geography asks three questions:
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