Lalibela's Black Jerusalem

Image: CBS News

The scale of the carving in the image above is easier to grasp once one notices the humans walking around the edges of the pit in which it rests. It is, in fact, a church carved into this slab of basalt in Ethiopia more than 800 years ago. 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley explored this church and the ten others like it -- each carved as a unitary structure on a 62-acre site in Lalibela, on the northern basalt highlands of Ethiopia.

His reporting includes an introduction to the geology that makes these carvings possible and the connections between Jerusalem and this site, considered sacred to Orthodox Ethiopians. He speaks with clergy, pilgrims, and experts on the architecture and stonemasonry of the remarkable site -- while the camera reveals many of the remarkable details of carvings made flawlessly and largely in the dark.

Lagniappe: Coffee

As students of my coffee classes know, Coffea arabica is misnamed because it is native only to the highlands of Ethiopia. Oromia is an important growing area within coffee's native territory, and site of the essential coffee documentary Black Gold. I include it on the map below to signify that although the churches of Lalibela are rely on the same geologic underpinnings as coffee, they are separated by a rift valley and about a 1,000 kilometers of distance from the southern coffee regions.

CV Coffee Movies

At Casa Hayes-Boh, we watch a lot of movies. Any time coffee is mentioned, one of us is likely to exclaim "Coffee Movie!" even if it is actually only a minor part of the film. In reality, even small scenes remind us of some important (to us) coffee concept. My Coffee & Tea Flicks web page points to some of the more substantial examples of coffee in feature films and documentaries about coffee itself.

This entry is more specific in scope. Here I have collected a series of documentary videos of varying lengths about the coffee industry in Cape Verde, the Atlantic archipelago a few hundred miles west of Senegal. I led a travel course there in 2006 about sustainable development in general. I will be returning in 2021, mainly to the island of Fogo, for my first African offering of my Geography of Coffee course. The videos collected here are meant to prepare students in the course -- and me -- for the experience of a very different kind of coffee production.

Many thanks to my friend Mr. Angelo Barbosa of the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at BSU for providing most of these links.

Cultura de Café no Fogo - Há Mar Há Terra 21m

Papaia - Há Mar Há Terra 18m

Djar Fogo Coffee Spirit 54m

The website of the Câmara Municipal dos Mosteiros (Mosteiros City Hall) is a good source of further information about coffee in Fogo, one of only two islands in Cape Verde where coffee is produced (São Nicolau is the other).

Os Melhores

"The Best" -- pronounced "Oos Mel-YOR-ays"

I am not fond of college rankings -- the U.S. News lists keep university administrators running from pillar to post trying to game the numbers, and bragging about all the wrong things if the rankings tilt in their favor.

But a recent headline from Brazil caught my attention, and gives me an excuse to make the case -- again -- for public higher education in general. The statement, shared online by various Brazilian friends, reads Entre 20 melhores universidades do Brasil, 18 são públicas. I am not sure why this is major news in Brazil, because public universities already carry the most prestige; the statement reads. "Among the 20 best universities in Brazil, 18 are public."

Most of these universities are federally funded; a few are funded by city or state governments. As I rightly guessed from the headline, the only "private" universities on the list are at least nominally Catholic. Number 19, for example is Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, pronounced POO-kee HEE-oo.

To my knowledge, all university acronyms have a distinct pronunciation that is widely known. My friends at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul can pronounce UFRGS at UHR-geese without hesitation. Likewise, the main rivals -- and sometime partner -- of my friends at the University of the State of Santa Catarina (UDESC or oo-DESK-ee) are across town at UFSC (OOF-skee), the Federal University of Santa Catarina. At the top of the list is USP (OOS-pee), funded by the city of São Paulo and a leading winner of grants from many sources.

What the major universities have in common is relatively low faculty pay (some of my friends parlay the prestige of public-university sinecures into better-paying side gigs at private colleges) but even lower tuition. If fact, public universities charge ZERO tuition and no hidden fees. The only payment students make to the universities is the fee for the vestibular, the departmental entrance exams that serve as the vestibules to public higher education.

Here is the tricky part, though: Brazil is far ahead of the United States in honoring public higher education. The fetishes of Grover Norquist have been gradually reducing funding for our universities, with xenophobic migration policies reducing the pool of international applicants for our programs. But in Brazil, support for public universities is not simply about enlightenment: it is in fact the epitome of enlightened self-interest.

That is to say that the entrance exams do create a kind of meritocracy in which students of modest means can qualify for a free education (except room and board and the opportunity cost of not being fully employed while in school). On its surface, the vestibular system is objective. If 30 seats are available in a geography department, the students with the 30 top scores on the geography exam get admitted to that department. (Changing majors is not a thing in Brazil.)

But that is only on the surface, of course. The reality is that the children of those with higher income and more education are likely to score better on the vestibular than are their less-connected peers. In fact, it is common for the wealthy to invest in tuition for private primary and secondary schools, with the expectation that this will allow them to have their offspring educated at public expense at the university level. In effect, public higher education represents a net transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Brazil's former president Lula -- himself with only a fifth-grade education -- spent considerable political capital in trying to reduce this tendency, but setting quotas for low-income or minority appliands. This is -- to say the least -- highly incongruent with Brazil's recent embrace of more conservative (nay, authoritarian) politics. It will be interesting to see how public higher education fares in the days of Bolsonaro.

Heat Down Under

Source: Courier Mail

When reading the Courier Mail story about expected record heat in Australia, it is useful for non-scientist readers in the United States remember that 1°C = 1.8°F, so the differences cited are almost double what they would seem on quick reading.

... and that 40°C = 104°F, while 50°C = 122°F

Official temperature readings are taken 1.5 meters (5 feet) above the surface. From my experience in Tucson (and from the literature), I know that in dry, still air this means that the surface temperature can be MUCH hotter.

It is also useful when reading the story, of course, to remember that Australia is about to pass from late spring into summer. Records being broken now are very likely to be exceeded in January or February. As has been widely reported, smoke and fire are already serious problems.

Grasslands and Climate

I thought I had learned a lot about grass from my work in landscape maintenance with which I funded the last couple years of my undergraduate studies. In graduate school, I learned quite a bit more from a couple of the professors in my graduate program.

Dr. Hilary Lambert had written her dissertation on the cultural geography of monocrop lawns: specifically, she had connected the obsession with uniform green lawns in the U.S. suburbs to social constructs of the British manor house. And this was decades ahead of Downton Abbey.

Dr. John Klink was my mentor through four semesters of teaching lab sections of physical geography and taught my graduate course on soils. I took several courses that involved soil -- including an independent study -- but soil was the entire focus of a course I took with him. Since he earned his degrees in Minnesota (home of a certain prairie-themed radio program) and I was studying in a place where an entire economy of corn, soybeans and pigs was supported by the soils created by relict prairies, this biome loomed large in his lessons.

The biodiversity of prairie grass is an adaptation to the high variability of available moisture in the regions where it is found. The above-ground expression of particular grasses and other herbaceous plants fluctuates according to the conditions of a given season in terms of precipitation, temperature, fire, and mold, but a great deal more diversity is stored primarily in the roots. The roots are constantly exchanging carbon compounds with the surrounding soil.

Prairie grasses both create and rely on rich soil, with a relatively high percentage of organic matter and often exhibiting very deep upper horizons. It can be argued, in fact, that the United States enjoys a favorable balance of trade only to the extent that we are able to grow crops on the soils that were bequeathed us by the largely abandoned prairies of the Midwest and Great Plains.

So it was with more than the usual interest that I recently read Grasslands among the best landscapes to curb climate change, Bekah McBride's overview of recent research at the University of -- wait for it -- Wisconsin. I found her article a bit too late in the latest semester of teaching my Land Protection course, in which we discussed the ecology and climate-change relevance of both temperate and tropical forests in great detail, with inadequate attention to prairies. I will be including this post for use in our discussion of a land transaction that helped to create the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border, which I enjoyed briefly on a drive between the two states many years ago.

Lagniappe

A recent study in Germany found that fields of solar panels (PV or photovoltaic) are associated with relatively high biodiversity. The word "prairie" does not appear in the article, but this seems to be the vegetation type favored by managing lands for large PV installations. Mowing is very infrequent, but must take place just often enough to prevent succession to woodland. The result is a much more diverse grassland than typically found in populated areas.

Bogs and Biodiversity

From Estonia comes new research on the importance of biodiversity related to an ecosystem type that is found throughout southeastern Massachusetts -- the bog. As common as they are in the glacial outwash plains from Middleborough to Carver to Cape Cod, on a global scale these are quite rare.

Not only is the geomorphology needed to create them highly unusual, they must also have a hydrologic balance that allows organic soils to be maintained over millennia. Extended dry periods cause bog soils (highly organic types known as histosols) literally disappear.

As the article explains, adjoining fens (think Fenway) are even rarer and ecologically more important.

Landlocking Kenya

With its independence in 2011, South Sudan became the 14th landlocked country in Africa, one of 45 in the world. Being landlocked is not necessarily an severe barrier to economic development, as demonstrated by the case of Switzerland. But it can be quite an impediment for countries that are heavily dependent upon the export of primary goods, as most countries in Africa continue to be. 

The economy of Kenya is heavily dependent upon tea (mostly lower-grade, destined for Lipton). As with its neighbors to the north, west, and south, it also relies significantly on the export of coffee. Fortunately, each country of East Africa has both commodity and specialty coffee to offer, but most of it must pass through the port of Djibouti, Mombasa, or Dar es Salaam. 

Source: Kolumn and Al-Jazeera

Producers in Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia do of course succeed in getting their products to market, but the necessity of clearing customs BEFORE getting to a port certainly reduces their profit, and the limited number of options reduces their bargaining power. Farmers in Kenya have had the advantage of a deep-water port in Mombasa.

Kenya still has the coastline, and the port is still in place, but it may soon no longer belong to Kenya. As reported on Africa Stand, the port itself was mortgaged to secure US$5 billion from China to fund railroad improvements.  Since the debt crises of the 1980s, it has been common for national sovereignty (especially in the area of fiscal policy) to be eroded as a consequence of debt restructuring. 

The foreclosure on Mombasa, however, appears to be part of a growing trend of loans made by the government of China with unfavorable terms calculated to result in such forfeitures. In the case of Kenya, the result may be that a country with 300 miles of coastline will be as effectively landlocked as Rwanda or Burundi.

Source: Africa Stand

Detroit Arts City

It is time to propose one-credit honors colloquia for next fall, and I was beginning to think that my next topic should be Detroit, with a focus on the role of the arts in the social and economic development of the city. My kid -- an accomplished artist and honorary geographer -- had introduced me to the importance of this question a few years ago, with a brilliant paper in response to the proposed liquidation of some of the city's great museum collections.

The decision was made for me just now, by an instructive review of Detroit's proto-punk scene on PRI's Studio 360. As part of its American Icon series, journalist Pedro Rafael Rosado makes a convincing case for the pivotal importance of the 1962 one-hit wonder 96 Tears by Question Mark and the Mysterians.

Visual arts will figure just as prominently in our colloquium,
including Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry Murals,
completed thirty years prior to the music featured above.

Why Invest in Disemployment?

These machines are loud and unreliable, and provide evidence in support of my contention that all work involves skill and should be valued. Humans who oversee little clusters of these develop even higher-level skills, but I doubt they are compensated accordingly. I would not last an hour trying to help customers use these things.

Additionally, they rely too much on plastic bags, just as we are making some progress in getting rid of them.

Climate Change is Personal

I am spending this week in Porto Velho, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rondônia, where I did research for my dissertation in 1996. At that time, and during subsequent research visits in 2000 and 2003, the problem of deforestation was framed primarily in terms of land-use change. As I return, the same problem is -- rightly -- viewed through the lens of climate change.

Even when traveling, I often listen to WBUR in Boston, and this afternoon it brought me this excellent reporting on a story I have been following very closely since the summer of 2016. Journalist Rebecca Hersher examines the costs of two catastrophic floods in Ellicott City -- July 30, 2016 and May 27, 2018 -- in terms of personal relationships within a close-knit community that has great personal significance for me.


As the reporting indicates, even though they may disagree on the most appropriate ways to respond to the flooding, town residents acknowledge that climate change makes further severe flooding inevitable. The story briefly and obliquely alludes to land-use change as an additional factor; I discussed this in some detail in some of my previous posts about these floods.

Flood Flash -- July 31, 2016 -- my initial post about the first of the two floods mentioned in today's reporting. We had enjoyed a visit to Ellicott City just a week before this flood. This post explains why it was unprecedented, even for a town with a history of memorable floods.

Flood Peak -- August 5, 2016 -- following up a week after the first of the severe floods. Of course, at that time we thought of it as the only one.
--------------------
Flooding: It's Not in the Cards -- June 4, 2018 -- a detailed explanation of the multiple reasons that expressions like "100-year flood" are no longer useful, if ever they were.

Houston, Too Close to New Orleans -- August 7, 2018 -- compares flood disasters in three great American cities, two big and one small.

Burying the Survivors -- September 1, 2018 -- in which I indicate which remedy I oppose.

Lagniappe

Two posts from well before these floods, merely reveling in the charm that is Ellicott City:

Haunting My Old Haunts -- July 12, 2012 -- is just what it sounds like. This is a great place for ghost stories.

Great Divide Beer -- June 11, 2009 -- a geographic tidbit at one of our favorite E.C. boates.

Photo by Geoffrey Scott Baker conveys the hold this town has on people.