Reflections of Richard Leakey

It seems that the past several weeks have featured more than the usual number of notable deaths, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, E.O. Wilson, and Betty White. Just after the passing of these nonagenarians came news of the death at age 77 of a slightly younger fellow whose work I knew less well.

Word Art from the Ngaren Museum 

My favorite librarian and I both recall hearing anthropologist Richard Leakey in a lecture hall when we were students, though we cannot recall for certain when or where this was. I remember only that he was part of a noted family of anthropologists and that he had rather a cantankerous personality. As with many notables, I seem to have learned more about him after his death than I did when he was alive.

Vivienne Nunis interviewed Leakey for the BBC program Business Daily, in the context of a career changer. In just 18 minutes, they discuss several very different phases of his professional life, which really began when he was a child tagging along on archeological digs with his parents, anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey. He lived his entire life in the English colonial territory that would become the country of Kenya.

In the first phase of his adult life, he reached into the distant past, literally uncovering the lives of humans who had lived in the Rift Valley 1.6 million years ago. He then became a noted conservationist whose audacious protests led to protection of elephants through restrictions on the trade in ivory (this benefited whales as well). His work as a conservationist was linked in complicated ways to his political life and other government service.

The most important part of the interview is the discussion of the work of what has turned out to be his sunset years. His understanding of humans across eons led him to fervent work on the problem of climate change. He sees the arc of human experience from deep prehistory to a precarious future from his lifetime in the Rift Valley, where we began and where our fate is clearly undecided. He and his colleagues have been working to capture that entire arc in the Ngaren Museum, where ground will be breaking soon on a project animated by this view of time.

Leakey was also profiled in a 2010 issue of Sierra, the magazine of the U.S.-based environmental organization. In Elephant Man, journalist Susan Zakin begins the story at the Peponi Hotel on the island of Lamu, where they were supposed to meet. His refusal to come ashore at the hotel becomes a metaphor for his uneasy status with fellow colonials. The profile she writes provides important details about the first two phases of the life Leakey discussed with Nunis last month, especially his work in environmental policy. 

Note: Their meeting took place at a time when many tourists were avoiding Kenya because of violence surrounding national elections. This coincided with my owned planned visit to the country. I had plane tickets and plans to meet a student and her family near Mount Kenya -- where both tea and coffee are produced. Just before the trip, she completely disappeared. I was never certain whether something had happened directly to her and her family or if she cut off contact to protect me.

Lagniappe 

Leakey's transition from renowned anthropologist to avid climate-change activist reminds me of a similar transition on the part of Jane Goodall, a protegée of Louis Leakey who thankfully is still with us. I point to some of her work in my 2020 post Jane Goodall: Climate, Community, Coffee. I have updated that post to include her January 2022 BBC interview, which pairs nicely with the Leakey interview above.

Crossing the Chaco

The Amazon rainforest is the largest ecosystem in South America; it is the one that drew me into the study of geography. I know quite a lot about it, though I still have plenty to learn. 

Three-banded armadillo is one of 150 mammal species
in the Gran Chaco. Image: WWF

I know very little, however, about the second-largest ecosystem of South America: the Gran Chaco of Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia. It is also second in biodiversity, with over 500 species of birds alone. 

Map: Wikipedia. Chaqu is a Quechua word meaning 
"hunting land" and hinting at the region's diverse fauna.

I have even more to learn about it, especially as both the land and the people of the Gran Chaco are threatened by rapid changes related to the opening of a bioceanic transportation corridor. The Amazon experience is, sadly, instructive -- rapid expansion of roads is bringing all manner of peril. In both cases, heretofore uncontacted civilizations are at greatest risk. 

Detail from an interactive map at Corredor Bioceanico, a website promoting the project.
The Gran Chaco is being traversed by road, rail, and river. 

 

Post-Post Soviet: 30 Years On

Thirty years ago this Christmas, AP journalists Alan Cooperman and Liu Heung Shing were hurriedly invited to a conference room below ground at the Kremlin for what turned out to be an extraordinary historical moment. 

In an interview exactly 30 years later, Cooperman describes the exact moment when the Soviet Union was disbanded. The interview begins with the drama of that evening and then explains how those events relate to the current crisis in Ukraine that has proven increasingly intractable for three U.S. presidents (so far).

Closing the books on the Soviet Union.
Forbidden image by Liu Heung Shing

I was fortunate enough to have been taking a course entitled Geography of the Soviet Union during the fall semester of 1991. I had been the student representative on the committee that hired a young economic geographer who was a leading expert on the region, so I decided to take her course as an elective. 

Among other things, the course was designed to show us the complexity and inherent inefficiency of Soviet governance. As the semester progressed, she would often start class with a map or article and say, "this is how it was in September" when the course began. And then she would explain what was already changing as Gorbachev implemented various reforms.

Although I never studied the region in depth after that semester, the in-depth survey helped me to understand much of what I have read and heard in the ensuing three decades. Most notably, it is clear that no U.S. president can take much credit for the collapse, even though excessive military spending in the U.S. did probably bring it about just a bit more quickly by justifying the same errant behavior in the USSR.

That professor, by the way, was soon named editor of a journal called Soviet Geography, which soon changed its name to Post-Soviet Geography. I recently learned that even that name became passé, and the journal is now called Eurasian Geography and Economy. 

Map: Britannica article detailing the Soviet collapse 

Ozone Interactions

The ozone layer has no ozone anymore
and you're gonna leave me for the guy next door
I'm Sick of You
~~ Lou Reed

I use the song "Sick of You" from the 1989 New York album to introduce the concept of ozone depletion in my environmental geography classes. The song is a quick catalog of the absurd environmental and political debacles of the Reagan years, but includes the charming couplet and refrain cited above. 

My point? Geography is the study of the real world.  

It was during the 1980s that climate change was just beginning to gain some attention as a problem for the far-off future and that the depletion of stratospheric ozone -- globally but especially around Antarctica -- was emerging as a more urgent concern. The science was debated and for some time actively denied -- as inconvenient science sometimes is. But as people realized that the problem could be addressed without serious inconvenience to them personally, the denial melted away and in 1987 the Montreal Protocol was signed.

For some time in the 90s and aughts, both global warming and ozone depletion were being discussed and debated. Since geography education is rare in the United States, much of that discussion took place in the absence of a basic understanding of the structure of the atmosphere, the reasons for geographic variations in climate, or indeed the basic relationships between the earth and the sun. 

Folks who do not know what the tropopause is nonetheless had strong opinions about problems taking place above and below it. Well-meaning people who want to protect the planet often have no better understanding of climate change, ozone depletion, or the difference between the two than do those who actively deny the science.

Enter this environmental geographer, seeking to clarify things for students who have heard about both problems -- but only vaguely. 

In order to focus on climate change, I begin many of my courses with an exercise that is focused on drawing a distinguishing it from ozone depletion. I start with a simple pre-test that asks students to identify distinctions, and a post-test that highlights those distinctions in some detail. I then spend one session on the details of ozone depletion, not returning to it much for the rest of the course. 

All of this is prelude to some emerging science that is cause both for concern and for confusion. All I have said about distinctions between tropospheric and stratospheric processes remains true, but there is now a serious caveat. 

I learned of the problem from the EuroNews Green newsletter, in a September 2021 article by journalist Rafael Cereceda with the earnest title "The Antarctic ozone hole is among the largest on record, how does it affect me?" The opening line of the article reflects what has been the broad consensus I have been teaching: "What happens in the stratosphere stays in the stratosphere?" The question mark, of course, suggests that the rest of the article is likely to disrupt that consensus. 

(Note: as of this writing, the article includes one grammatical (it's for its) and one arithmetic (square meters for square kilometers) error; I have contacted the publisher about both. The author uses Hadley Cell and other complicated concepts correctly, though, so I consider the errors isolated.)

The article does cite some fairly long-standing work that has been an exception to the general consensus: since the 1990s there ha been some inconclusive work on possible connections between ozone depletion and circulation changes in the mid-southern latitudes.

The article was. published at the time of year we expect news about ozone depletion. During the southern winter, it gets very cold in Antarctica. VERY cold. So cold that the normal rules about atmospheric heating and cooling do not apply, and the lower stratosphere experiences cooling that in turn creates clouds (in the dark) at altitudes they usually cannot be formed. When the first light of spring -- which coincides with Northern Hemisphere autumn -- reactions take place in those clouds that catalyze ozone depletion. 

This September, the news was that the size of the "hole" created by this process had been larger than normal. The article explains the significance in some detail: the 2019 ozone hole had been the smallest on record (because measurements were not made until the problem had been growing for a couple of decades). This had led to an unwarranted level of optimism among many analysts. 

Ozone "hole" upside down and backwards.
Image: Yan Xia

The article is also an occasion to share even more unusual news: in March 2020 a significant ozone "hole" was observed over the Arctic Ocean. The timing is consistent with previous observations: March is the north-pole vernal equinox, just as September is the vernal equinox at the south pole. What makes this story unique is that the north pole does not get nearly as cold as the south pole -- especially in recent years. Cereceda provides a link to a press release that summarizes an article explaining the dynamics of the 2020 northern ozone hole, in terms of a modified polar vortex.

Lagniappe 

The album includes one cetacean offering -- Last Great American Whale -- an allegory in which Professor Reed (as I often call him) disparages the state of environmental consciousness in his decade. For the past decade I have taken a great interest in whales and whaleboats. See my Rowing and Rocket Science;  Whaleboat History; and Finity posts for some of the better examples.

We Cannot Negotiate With Nature

The physics of climate change are not interested in the opinions of humans. 

This is what Danish Climate and Energy Minister Dan Jørgensen had in mind when he made the statement I use as a title above. In an interview with the BBC, he was explaining the very bold policies his country is employing in order to reduce its greenhouse emissions. Some of these approaches also have economic benefits, but he makes it clear that they will operate some utilities at a financial loss if necessary.

Image: Maersk

The interview included both the political leader of Denmark and the CEO of its largest company, the shipping giant Maersk, which moves one fifth of the world's trade. He described how the company is planning to make all of that transportation carbon-neutral by 2050, and how it has already begun to accelerate those plans. The first carbon-neutral cargo ship will be on the water in 2023, with eight already on order.

The finances are negotiable; the atmosphere is not.

Their sense of responsibility is in sharp contrast to that of investment bankster Roberto de Guardiola, whose $10,000,000 yacht Highlander was berthed for a couple of months recently near my club's much more modest vessels in New Bedford. 

I was reminded of this yacht -- called a super yacht because of its size and cost -- when listening to another person in the same BBC program -- Selina Leem of the Marshall Islands, which is the country where this yacht happens to be registered. 

The yacht called Highlander is registered in Bikini, M.I. Perhaps de Guardiola chose that port in part because he enjoys the excuse to have a name that sounds sexy painted in huge letters on the stern of an otherwise unadorned vessel. If he is aware of the calamities inflicted on the small archipelago by the United States, it does not stop him from claiming the name. Nuclear testing erased some islands and left others with a legacy of poison. None of this matters, of course, since the islands were chosen strictly for the "convenience" of lower fees and looser regulations that the super-rich often prefer. 

Selina Leem is an activist and one of just 60,000 residents of her country, which is found entirely on low-lying islands and atolls. I have written about the vulnerability of similar archipelagos in Climate Attack and other posts, but her first-person account of the multiple perils of rising seas is well worth hearing, as is her conversation with the program host about the reasons she would rather combat climate change than abandon her country. 

This conversation was just a sample of many events that were taking place in and around Glasgow in the days leading up to the most recent global climate negotiations. As I posted in Delaying Justice, the main negotiations offered some progress on some of the unmet goals (read: unkept promises) of the previous round of negotiations in Paris. It is of some use to have heads of state make commitments to future targets, but it is increasingly clear that Greta Thunberg and others are correct in insisting that we need much bolder action than COP26 could provide.

The participants in the BBC interview cited above (which I recommend taking the time to hear in its entirety) were in Glasgow at the invitation of TED as part of an ongoing effort called COUNTDOWN that is putting into action exactly the idea suggested above. Never has the adage of to think globally and act locally been more important. We can press our political leaders to do the right thing at a global scale, but we must also do the right things ourselves countless ways that will never be part of the COP proceedings.

Lagniappe

The world desired by the Guardiolas of the world and the politicians they rent:

Language Matters

Both education and training are important, but they are not the same thing. The distinction is rapidly being eroded by the managerial layers (of which there are many) in education who use the words "customer" and "workforce" in place of "student" and "thinker" when describing the people we serve. 

The result is a growing emphasis on teaching only that which can be clearly tied to a specific job, at the expense of teaching that which expands the capacity of the mind to understand nuance and to create new ideas.

Languages and mathematics and the arts are well worth learning, for example, even if none of these are strictly required for a particular job one might pursue. As jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes said, the "mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension."

Lera Boroditsky illustrates this in a popular TED Talk, whose main message is the importance of preserving linguistic diversity.

This talk is itself an illustration of what Holmes was claiming: I have studied languages and linguistics quite a bit, and yet will never think of them in quite the same way after hearing her examples.

An important implication of her work is that language learning is valuable exercise for the mind -- it has value in both training and education. 

Lagniappe 

I have been tilting at this particular windmill for a long time. My 2009 Small World page was part of a concerted -- and failed -- effort to keep languages as part of the core curriculum at my university.

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.