Sharing the Hemisphere

When British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Washington last month, he was eagerly received, feted even, an encounter that was seen as giddy to the point of annoyance in some quarters. That recent experience was in sharp contrast to the merely cordial meeting between President Obama and President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil this past Monday.

Brazilians and astute observers in the United States were miffed at the relative attention paid to the leaders of the world's eighth- and sixth-largest economies, though one observer offered the charitable interpretation that perhaps this was a going-away party for the UK, before the partnership with Brazil begins in earnest.

Watch U.S., Brazil 'Disagree More Than They Agree,' Analyst Says on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

This PBS story on President Dilma Rousseff's visit provides a good overview of the issues that shape the bilateral relationship that is emerging as the United States comes -- very reluctantly, it seems -- to realize Brazil's growing importance in the world generally and in the Western Hemisphere particularly. One of the key goals of her visit has been to continue to press for an expanded role for Brazil on the United Nations security council.

(As with her predecessor -- Ignacio "Lula" da Silva --  President Rousseff is better known by her first name than her surname. The Rising Star interview with Lula is also very instructive regarding the emergence of Brazil.)

As the PBS segment suggests, the visit does highlight several areas of disagreement between the Brazil and U.S. administrations, including policy toward the embargo on Cuba, the coup in Honduras, and the realities of climate change.

For more than a century following the presidency of James Monroe, United States involvement in the hemisphere has been characterized by paternalism and intervention, leading the Mexican poet Octavio Paz to lament, "Alas, poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States!" As many dictatorships and civil wars came to an end in the 1970s and 1980s, U.S. attention shifted to other parts of the world, leading to a period described in this video as one of "benign neglect."


The video does play a bit with language, describing the region (at 5:00) as "absent of conflict" by defining away much of the violence related to the war on drugs and repression of labor organizers. At 6:00, President  Obama praises Brazil's progress on energy policy, but he could have gone further, by mentioning some aspects of Brazilian energy policy that  better protect the environment than do U.S. approaches.


Further reading:
Because my career as a geographer in many ways began in Brazil, and because I am fortunate enough to have many students and friends who are in, of, from, or about Brazil, I have written quite a lot about the country. My earliest and most comprehensive writing is about Rondônia, in the western Amazon Basin. Recent articles include Where's the Beef, in which I explain how changes in the beef industry provide additional justification for students in the United States to learn a foreign language -- especially Portuguese.

My Cliffwalk article explains lessons about the gap between the rich and the poor. Brazil still has a greater concentration of wealth than does the United States (or most countries), but Brazil is now leading the United States both in overall economic growth and in the equity of that growth.

Brazilian Embassy in Honduras describes an excellent example of the kind of kind of geopolitical leadership that Brazil is beginning to exert. More generally, readers can browse all of the articles that include "Brazil" on this blog and on the current and original EarthView blogs.

Where My Community Used to Be

YOUR Brockton Rox!

I knew I had arrived as a New England transplant when I started giving directions that included "turn where the ______ used to be." I will never be a real Bay Stater, by the way, because somewhere between going AWOL in 1734 and my arrival in 1997, ten generations of Bohanans lived in the Lower 49. We have a few generations of penance before some would really consider us locals, but nonetheless we take every opportunity to embrace our local community.

I was reminded of this because of the brilliant closing paragraph of the latest effort of the Brockton Enterprise editorial board to promote local-mindedness and the cultivation of a sense of place:

But if we want communities with character, if we want shops and restaurants that make the region unique, and if we want to show off when we have visitors rather than explain how things used to be, we’ve got to be active participants, not just passers-by. 

The editorial -- entitled -- South Shore Character is Worth Your Investment -- ran in the same issue in which a cover story describes the latest effort to salvage the Brockton Rox baseball team.

That article is focused on cost-saving and capital-raising details of the team's recent realignment with a strictly amateur league. The underlying story is one of fan apathy, parallel to the retail apathy lamented in the editorial. For each night paying a fortune to be part of an anonymous mob at Fenway, a Brockton-area family can enjoy ten nights of baseball with heart at Campanelli Stadium. It is a chance not only to see a game without binoculars, but also to see and get to know one's neighbors. Without it, we may soon directing people to turn at the giant hole in the ground on the city's west side. We will wonder, a la Chrissie Hynde, "Eh, oh, where'd you go?"

Tucson Stories

TELL ME

As readers of this blog may know, we lived in Tucson for during the first four years of my doctoral studies at the University of Arizona, from 1990 to 1994. Pam completed her library degree during the first two years we were there. Like many of our friends in graduate school, we both worked as substitute teachers. Because I was still in school, I took relatively few assignments, all of them at the Amphitheater School District. Pam did a lot more subbing, throughout the vast Tuscon Unified School District.

My Tucson Teach-in post in February described the censorship activities of TUSD in the wake of changes to state law banning the teaching of Mexican-American Studies. At the time, I was critical of the district's willingness not only to comply with the state-mandated changes to its curriculum, but actually to embrace the limitations ... and of course to deny that it amounted to censorship.

I continue to follow developments, in part with the help of Cuéntame (Tell Me), from which I recently learned about Al Madrigal's report on the use hearsay evidence in the effort to eradicate the program. Because this appeared on The Daily Show, I was initially convinced that it was a spoof. Rather, it is mockery -- school-board officials mock reason and their responsibilities as educators, and the show's producers mock them simply by asking them to reflect on their choices.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The new documentary film Precious Knowledge tells the story in much more detail, and from the point of view of the students and teachers involved. It begins in the classrooms, showing what it really means to look at history and culture from a critical perspective. In times of increasing conformity to very narrow ideas of what education should be, it is actually radical to look at what really happens. It is also necessary.

SEE THE FILM

The reality-based teaching is what seems to bother the officials who went after these programs. They complain, for example, about lessons about Benjamin Franklin's racism, without disputing the racist writings of Franklin himself. What really bothers them, though, is that the teaching fosters a shift in thinking that could erode their power. Arizona officials are using the rhetoric of inclusivity, but its immigration and education laws increasingly resemble an attempt to create an American form of Apartheid.

The BSU screening of Precious Knowledge will be at 3:30 on Monday, April 9 in the Heritage Room at Maxwell Library.

Click to Expand
Cuéntame graphics are based on the traditional
Mexican Lotería game. 

Bridgetendo

Click map to enlarge

Thanks as always to geographer Matt Rosenberg for bringing yet another bit of geographic whimsy my way. Programmers at Google have -- for this week only -- created an April Fool's Day version of Google Maps that resembles the old-school, 8-bit graphics used in the 1985 Nintendo. (Yes, I had been using even more primitive TRS-80 computers, so I remember this being an advance!) As Matt explains, the temporary "Quest" link toggled on this low-resolution digital model. Since it was temporary, I captured my hometown above, and I provide this direct link.

Farmer Gateway

Fortunately, this bit of satire relates to a very real and positive trend. I am very encouraged by the attention young people are paying to their food. The twentieth century saw a decrease of roughly 90 percent in the proportion of our population actively producing food. This has correlated with a rapid expansion in the proportion of people working in "food service," which often involves handing a bag of food-like substance to a customer through a car window.

The spoof is part of the quirky Face Your Farmer project, which aims to connect urban Canadians with their food sources, all while having a bit of fun. The Infinity and Beyond video is a perfect example, set to the tune of Green Acres -- a clever allusion that will actually be lost on some younger viewers. In case you missed this bit of 1960s television, here is the original theme song, featuring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor

Chichigalpa

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In my classes today, Jason Glaser of La Isla Foundation told the story of sugar-cane farmers in  Chichigalpa, just to the west of Leon. The story, sadly, is replicated throughout the Pacific coast of Central America, particularly in Nicaragua. Read about the foundation's research on BBC and PRI.

The family that owns the fields is the Pelas family. One of the family homes is on an island outside of Granada. The helipad is not visible in this photo taken on one of my Nicaragua study tours, but it is a pretty nice island.

A Long Way from Cochabamba

Cochabamba is a town in Bolivia that became known for its resistance to the privatization of water. Bolivia is a majority-indigenous country, but in a film depicting the 1999-2000 protests, I noticed a white, U.S.-educated vice president defending corporate ownership of water resources. Bechtel was forced to back down, even though at least one protester had been killed on behalf of the corporation. The water of Bolivia belonged to Bolivians.

As I mentioned on this blog on the occasion of his re-election, Evo Morales has represented a different path for Bolivia -- a country now being run of, by, and for its people. Writing for The Guardian, Luis Hernández Navarro now reports that by redefining "progress," Bolivia is making tremendous progress. After decades of laboring under the "Washington consensus" -- which was only ever agreed-upon between Washington and Chicago -- Bolivia has been transformed: the economy is growing while inequality is shrinking.

Bad Coffee House

Over the past decade, I have learned a lot about and have come to love coffee shops. They are places to gather, build community, share good food and of course drink coffee (or tea). They can even be the starting places for social movements, as they have most recently in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. At the local level, coffee shops can help to educate consumers about the people and places behind their favorite beverage -- as I have proposed for my own campus.

I recently learned, however, of a coffee shop in my own state that is actually promotes evil. Fortunately, the misdeeds associated with the misnamed Holy Ground Coffee House in Springfield have not gone uncontested. The shop is a facet of a nominally Christian ministry that has sponsored a movement to impose the death penalty on sexual minorities in Uganda.

As reported in the New York Times and MassLive, protests have been brought to the shop -- which mercifully is only open a few hours per month. Moreover, Sexual Minorities Uganda has partnered with the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York to sue the "pastor" who both runs the coffee shop and promotes fatally anti-gay legislation abroad.

Fortunately, I have also found a church-sponsored coffee enterprise that is actually doing a lot of good in Uganda. As reported in Java for Jesus, the Pennsylvania-based Ugandan Gold sponsors clean-water projects in coffee-growing communities while paying the vast majority of the retail price of the coffee to the farmers.

Getting the Point

One way to create a new company name is blend two words together in a portmanteau that conveys their blended meaning. I have noticed, though, that many successful Internet launches in recent years have been named by joining two words that are related neither to each other nor to the business at hand.

I first made this observation with respect to the JetPunk quiz site, which is now a favorite that I share with students of all ages through my GeoGames page.

Geography is about a lot more than learning the names of capitals and longest rivers, of course. It is a dynamic discipline at the intersection of social and natural sciences, and it has a lot to teach us about climate, migration, land use, food, and even coffee.

Knowing basic place-name geography is, however, still valuable as a starting point for grasping the richer lessons of geography, and I find that quizzes can be very helpful, even for an experienced geographer. I also find it helpful to work with a variety of quiz formats, which is why I include so many options among the GeoGames.

I am particularly interested in the LizardPoint quiz known as The Caribbean Quiz because it focuses on the Lesser Antilles, a region I do not know well. As a Latin Americanist (and former coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies program), I know something of this region at the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea -- but not as much as I should. With this quiz, I hope to master the locations not only of the sovereign states in this island arc, but also of the various dependencies. In the map excerpt below, the former are shown in ALL CAPS with a star indicating a national capital, while the latter are followed by parenthetical abbreviations of their empire centers (U.S., U.K., or France).

See full Caribbean map from UT-Austin Library

Self-Limiting

Thanks (I think) to writer Daniel Ward for challenging the latest nonsense to be issued by Lawrence Summers, the economist and former Harvard president who recently argued, among other things, that it is no longer necessary to learn languages other than English. My only hesitation in thanking Ward is that prior to reading his article, I had been blissfully unaware of the mis-titled essay What You (Really) Need to Know. Summers is actually correct in some of his assertions about what modern higher education should include; as several online comments indicate, however, he seems remarkably unaware of the extent to which professors are already doing some of the things he calls for.

Summers drew the most ire -- and rightly so -- for his assertion that English dominance means that U.S. students can skip learning other languages. Without irony, he makes this claim as part of his item #5, which calls for an education that "breeds cosmopolitanism." He argues that the willingness of many Asians to learn English makes is "less essential" for North Americans to learn other languages. To some extent, it is true that it is easier to be monolingual in English than in many other languages, but there are costs, both economic and intangible. As my colleague Dr. Michael Kryzanek recently wrote in Going from Punchline to Global Citizens, some English speakers abroad are starting to push back a bit against monolingual arrogance.

Back to Daniel Ward -- From his article The Word is Your Oyster, I learned that the majority of people in the world speak at least two languages, a fact I was able to confirm in Richard Tucker's survey on bilingualism in education. Ward argues that monolingualism is "the acceptance of limitations," wryly noting that it should not be part of any child's vocabulary.

See my Small World page for more on the debate over language learning in higher education. Incidentally, the quiz site JetPunk has a number of quizzes related to the geography of languages. The English-Speaking Countries quiz, for example, lists all 16 countries in which at least 50 percent of the population speaks English as a first language, while the Spanish-Speaking Countries quiz identifies 19 countries where the same is true for Spanish. The English-Speaking Cities quiz identifies 21 cities of more than 2 million population, in which English is the dominant language -- at least some of the results are surprising. The Cities by Language quiz lists the largest city in which each of twenty languages is dominant. Countries and Languages identifies the countries containing the greatest number of speakers of each of thirty languages, with some countries being listed for more than one language! Finally, the Top World Languages quiz simply lists fifty languages, each of which has at least 20 million native speakers. If you are like me, you might not have heard of some of these!