Awaken on Wake?

Morning Edition's  Travis Larchuk closes the year with a geographic puzzle that started with a Nantucket Nectars bottle cap. The trivium inside the cap indicated that Sconset Beach in Nantucket witnesses the first sunrise of each year in the United States, and Larchuk decided to investigate the validity of the claim.

He first turned to James Hilton of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which is the official time-keeping authority for the United States. Hilton said that it is a question that mixes "science with sociology," by which he means, of course, that it is a GEOGRAPHY question, though the word is never used in the report.

The answer involves physical geography questions related to elevation and atmospheric conditions as well as human geography questions related to the status of states, territories, and outposts.

States Wrap-up

Throughout 2010, followers of this blog will have noticed occasional links to Celebrating the States, a year-long blog project that was the brain-child of my favorite librarian, Pam Hayes-Bohanan.

I contributed to the celebration of each state, usually by sharing food and watching the movies. I also read (or had read to me) some of the 50-plus books Pam read as part of the project. Where I had something specific to contribute as a geographer, I did "guest blog" entries. We concluded the project yesterday, with the state that happens to come last in the year, our once-home state of Texas. Each of us wrote a lengthy entry, both with their share of geographic insights, and I recommend both of them to followers of this blog.

Visit the blog at least one more time after tomorrow, to see Pam's wrap-up reflections and to find a link to her next blog project!

Globalization of Mental Health

WBUR journalist Robin Young's recent conversation with fellow journalist Ethan Watters examines some subtle but important aspects of globalization. In his book Crazy Like Us, he describes a number of interesting and unexpected ways in which U.S.  mental-health frameworks interact with other ways of thinking about the mind.

Near the end of the interview, Watters says, "We should be sharing our notions of knowledge of the mind with the rest of the world, but we should be careful in doing that we do not trample local notions of the mind that may be helpful.... We cannot stop globalization; we cannot redraw those boundaries."

Like me, in other words, he does not aspire to put the genie of globalization back in the proverbial bottle. Rather, he is pursuing a nuanced understanding of some of its implications.

Percolator Anniversary

Yesterday was the 145th anniversary of the electric coffee percolator, making poorly-prepared coffee widely available. Percolator-fueled Coffee Hour being the closest thing we have to a sacrament in my religion, I posted a remembrance on my church blog.

For smaller crowds, I recommend a French press or a carefully-selected drip brewer, with preparation tips detailed on my Coffee Care page.

Flood Guide

In the cold of winter in 1919, the North End of Boston experienced a deadly flood of molasses. I first heard about it when we moved to the area a decade ago, and I thought it was some kind of joke, then at best an oddity. It was, in fact, a horrific event that had much in common with such disasters as the Bhopal gas leak and the Gulf of Mexico BP/Halliburton spill.

Historian Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide is a compelling account that includes several topics that are all-too relevant today, including reckless pursuit of corporate profits, government regulators who are too close to the industries they regulate, and cruel bias against immigrant workers.

Because the book is also instructive about many aspects of the urban geography of Boston, I am adopting it for my teacher-preparation course in the spring 2011 semester, as part of Bridgewater's One Book One Community program. To support community members, faculty, and students who are interested in learning more about the Molasses Flood and related topics, librarian Pamela Hayes-Bohanan has created the Great Molasses Flood Maxguide.

Article One: Enumeration

Last week was the 390th anniversary of the pilgrims arrival in Plymouth, Massachusetts. On the same day, a long-awaited announcement from Washington highlighted some interesting connections between the city of my birth and my adopted home state. The announcement from the Bureau of the Census is likely to keep political geographers -- and geographers in several other specialties -- busy for the coming year or two. The Bureau of the Census operates continuously, employing quite a few geographers in pursuit of its mission of serving "as the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy."


Its original purpose, however, is the one for which it is best known: Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution mandates that an enumeration be conducted within the first three years after the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and once per decade after that. The Constitution specifies the original apportionment as follows:


New Hampshire: three
Massachusetts: eight
Rhode Island and Providence Plantations: one
Connecticut: five
New York: six
New Jersey: four
Pennsylvania: eight
Delaware: one
Maryland: six
Virginia: ten
North Carolina: five
South Carolina: five
Georgia: three

The main purpose of the 1790 census was to reapportion these seats according to population, with each state to have at least one representative (in addition to its two senators), and no more than one representative per 30,000 residents. (The Constitution even stipulates how people were to be counted, with free or indentured citizens counting  as 1.0 each, Native Americans as 0.0 each, and slaves as 0.6 each.) If the 1:30,000 ratio were still in place, we would have ten thousand representatives in Congress, instead of 435.

Following each census from 1790 to 1910, Congress not only reapportioned its seats, but also expanded the total number, so that by 1910 about 210,000 people populated an average district. Today that number is 710,000, though districts in smaller states may range from just over a half million to just under a million. Boston Globe commentator Jeff Jacoby has made an interesting argument in favor of expanding Congress, if not to the original ratio, then perhaps to the ratio that was in place in 1910. This is an unusual position for Jacoby to have taken, as he usually argues against any expansion of government, but his case does have some merit.

Incidentally, the secondary purpose of the censuses from the Founding until the passage of the 16th Amendment was to apportion the tax burden for the federal government. It was originally supposed to be levied on each state, in proportion to its population. This provision was removed when the individual income tax was adopted.

The big news last week was that the Bureau released not only the population count, but also its determination of what impact this would have on Congress. As the map below shows, several of the places I have lived are affected by yesterday's report: Massachusetts, Ohio, and Missouri will be losing representatives in Congress, while Texas and Arizona will be gaining. (My old homes in Maryland and Virginia will not be affected, and of course my birthplace of Washington, DC has taxation but no representation.)

Map: Washington Post

The map comes from an article about the count by Chris Cillizza on his Washington Post political blog known as The Fix, where he promises to follow this story over the coming months. The article leads with the observation that the shift of seats is, generally speaking, from so-called blue states to red states, meaning states that tend to vote for Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Cillizza goes on to explain that it is not quite so simple, mainly, he writes, because Republicans already have such large advantages in these states. In fact, those advantages are generally tactical, rather than demographic; the red state/blue state dichotomy is somewhat exaggerated, as Robert Vanderbei's Purple America maps illustrate.

Clearly, there are some regional differences, but most states are much closer to 50/50 than is generally realized. The redistricting process -- described in more detail below -- simply makes it possible to turn small demographic advantages into decisive political majorities.

Each state legislature sets the geographic boundaries of districts, and beginning in 1812, many legislators have attempted to draw them in ways that favor the leading party at the level of each state. The connection to my adopted state of Massachusetts is that this was first documented on February 11, 1812, when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced "Gary") protected his political allies by creating a district that was immediately lampooned for its salamander-like shape, thus coining "Gerrymander" as a synonym for politically-motivated mapping. The district's sinister appearance in political cartoons did not, however, shame the governor or the legislature into abandoning the transparent maneuver.

Elkana Tisdale's 1812 Gerry-Mander,
originally published in the Boston Centinel

The original amphibian that evoked such ridicule in 1812 would hardly be seen noticed two centuries later, as the process has become ever-more sophisticated. The U-shaped Chicago-area district below is featured in the 2010 documentary film Gerrymandering. I have not yet seen the film, but Witney Seibold's review is a nice description of the movie and of the threat the process still poses to our democracy. The two arms of the U shown below are joined by a tortuous, winding strip of vacant and near-vacant lands that could not in any meaningful way be considered a "district" or "neighborhood."

Although Texas -- a "red" state -- will gain four members of Congress and its majority-Republican legislature will do its best to capture all of them, it will probably not succeed in gaining all four. The Fix blog provides  a detailed update on the prospects for shifting seats in Texas, which has already undergone incredible efforts at political districting. In Decision Day for American Democracy, blogger Dave Pollard described what was at stake as litigation from the 2000 Texas redistricting made its way to the Supreme Court. The redistricting that took place between 2002 and 2004 illustrates the shamelessness with which legislators will isolate political and ethnic minorities. Precincts in the southern part of the Austin metropolitan area were joined with my former neighbors in west McAllen, 250 miles to the south, while the district in eastern Austin was extended about 100 miles toward Houston to offset the loss. The fact that such extreme measures have already been taken, however, makes it unlikely that even the most shameless and ambitious redistricting plan could gain much more for the Republicans.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Because politics is both a passion and a pastime in Massachusetts, the airwaves are currently full of reviews of this political year. The wrap-up discussion on Radio Boston concludes with an interesting suggestion. For more than a decade, Massachusetts has had two Democratic senators and ten Democratic representatives at the federal level (aided, no doubt, by supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature). With the election of Republican Scott Brown to fill Senator Kennedy's seat, "only" eleven of the state's twelve federal legislators are Democrats. The Bay State is losing one representative, creating the prospect of pitting two incumbent Democrats against each other. During the program, it was suggested that redistricting could be done in such a way that nine incumbents remain in place, with the tenth pursuing Sen. Brown's statewide seat, for which he needs to run again in 2012. Meanwhile, the Boston Globe ran an editorial last Thursday in which it calls for a clean redistricting process that would involve an independent commission. The editorial reminds readers not only of the original skullduggery of Elbridge Gerry, but also the more recent federal conviction of  Massachusetts Speaker Finneran, who lied about the process the last time districts were redrawn. Open discussion of how to protect incumbents suggests that the Globe's suggestion is not at all likely to carry the day.

SEXCoffee

What else is there to say? SEXCoffee is a Providence-based band that recorded a promotional video at Supreme Coffee & Donuts in Seekonk, MA. Oddly, the video has a low-volume Chuck Berry audio track, but the band itself seems to have an edgier sound.

Health Care Rationing

During the debate over health care -- in which corporations that benefit from the status quo dominated the debate -- scary scenarios of rationing and "death panels" were associated with any and all public-sector approaches. Reality has already overtaken those dystopic visions, but not in the way Fox News predicted.

Tom Ashbrook examines how rationing and death panels are already at work in small government Arizona.

Do Tell: From Sea to Shining Sea

Two of eight principled Republicans in the Senate

Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were among the eight Republican senators who voted on Saturday to repeal the failed, 17-year experiment with closeted military service, known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." The previous policy acknowledged that people could serve their country regardless of sexual orientation while condoning bias against those very same patriots. I have not yet seen the specific reasoning that led these senators to break with the majority of Republicans on this important vote, but for me it shows that they are actual conservatives, as opposed to the bigots and religious reactionaries who have captured much of the Grand Old Party. 

Brown and Murkowski were joined by Sens. Collins and Snow of Maine, Kirk of Illinois, Voinovich of Ohio, Ensign of Nevada, and Burr of North Carolina. Talk-radio pundits have written off Brown as a "captive" of Massachusetts, which they think is a liberal state (it really is not), but the rest of this list shows that civil rights is not just for coasts.

It is now time for another Republican Senator to apply the courage for which he is famous. I refer, of course, to Sen. John McCain, who fought bitterly in favor of continuing the failed DADT experiment. Fortunately, his wife Cindy is better informed and tried (unsuccessfully) to change his mind before the vote. Now it is my hope that she can help him understand that he still has a chance to be on the right side of history. Sen. McCain seems sincerely to have believed that uncloseting gay service members would lead to such conflict within units that it would literally cost lives. 

The senator's active duty was during a more homophobic period of our history, and this causes him to overestimate the danger posed by opening the closet. He is partly correct, however, in that significant bigotry remains, and some service members are likely to react badly as the closets open. The appropriate response, however, is not to wait until all bigotry has somehow evaporated. It is time to build on the progress that has been made so far, and for military and political leaders to exhibit the kind of leadership that was needed when President Truman integrated the military services with respect to race. If the Senator's assertion is at all correct, the McCains are in a position to enhance social justice and national security at the same time.

Putting the Economy Second

George Perkins Marsh was such an avid reader that he damaged his eyes at a young age, and for a time he was forbidden to read. With hundreds of acres of forest and fields surrounding his home, he learned to "read" nature instead, and went on to write the 1864 work Man and Nature; Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. He is credited with being the first modern geographer, and certainly the first environmental geographer. His Vermont home is a national park that I sometimes visit with students, and about which I have written a brief article.

I was reminded of all this by the opening of Steve Curwood's interview with David Suzuki, an environmentalist who was separated from Marsh by a century and most of a continent. For very different reasons, Suzuki was isolated from language and immersed in nature at a pivotal age, and his lessons in "reading" nature were the foundation for a lifetime of learning. In his case, he was exiled to the Canadian Rockies as part of the Japanese internment during World War II, but did not speak Japanese.

Some of the lessons that began in that period have emerged in Suzuki's new book, The Legacy: An Elder's Vision for Our Sustainable Future, which is the basis for his conversation with Curwood. Although I listen to Living on Earth as often as I can, I had missed this segment, and I'm grateful to my friend Marilee for pointing it out to me.

What most interested her is Suzuki's understanding that we suffer from a lack of integration in our approach to economic, environmental, and social problems. Certainly as a geographer I find this to be the case; as Sierra Club founder John Muir observed, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." I found Suzuki's analogy for the growth of human consumption to be quite compelling as well; even as the rate of growth of the human population slows a bit, the rate of growth in consumption is, if anything, increasing. His test-tube analogy does not offer a lot of hope, but it may very well define where we are headed at this stage in history. The "environment" will, as he points out, eventually recover from our abuse; the problem is that we very well may not.


My favorite part of the interview is his explanation of how, as he puts it, we came to "elevate economy above ecology and we think that everything's gotta be done to service the economy." He ties this faulty but all-too-common attitude to the post-War thinking of Victor Lebow. Economic growth has become the engine of prosperity, but it has been based on economic theory that assumes infinite resources. More integrated thinking would be grounded in the assertion of the late Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, who helped to establish Earth Day: "The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment."