Atlas Obscura is always a trove of geographic insight; the geographically curious can spend hours perusing the online or print version.
A recent contribution by journalist Lauren Vespoli offers even more to the geographically curious (including hints as to how and why we should all be geographically curious). In How to Dig Into the History of Your City, Town, or Neighborhood, she describes how she has used newly-found down time to explore her own surround -- and to engage friends to do the same. This is very creative online bonding! As she makes clear throughout the piece, the history comes in many forms and so do the processes of discovery.
Geographic discovery involves inquiry about
the ordinary in our midst.
She describes several tools that are familiar to me as a professional geographer -- such as Sanborn maps -- and other fascinating tools I had never heard of. I am most excited about using the Archipedia, which has well over 100 listings in each of two cities I teach as honors colloquia -- New Orleans and Detroit. Sadly, none of the fascinating buildings of Brockton (about which I teach an honors seminar) are this database, but I have other resources for exploring that city formerly known as North Bridgewater.
Among the tools Vespoli introduces is another I learned about from a fellow geographer just recently. Mapping Inequality is an impressive online collection of the maps used by the Federal Home Owners' Loan Corporation to guide mortgage rate-setting. In the guise of managing institutional financial risk, these maps also imposed or reinforced geographic patterns of racial discrimination through the practice of redlining. For many communities across the United States, researchers can discover whether their own neighborhoods fell inside or outside of those red lines.
I will also use this in my course Environmental Regulations, because this kind of research -- while enjoyable in its own right -- is potentially quite useful in some of the detailed work necessary to protect us from environmental contamination. Because pollutants from the past can be just as dangerous as chemicals currently in use, searching for possible relict sources of pollution is an excellent application of geographic skills.
I did my entire master's thesis on dams, so I feel emboldened to make more than the usual number of dam-related puns whenever the topic of dams comes up. And for the same reasons, I make sure that the topic comes up more than it does around normal people. That said, the title of this post is slightly mismatched to the topic, because the people responsible for the recent dam failure in Edenville, Michigan and for the associated toxic-waste disaster downstream seem to have exactly zero shame.
Shortly before a catastrophic failure. Image: NPR.
I am including a few items that relate to different geographic lessons about this failure. First is from a rather nerdy geomorphology perspective, but it illustrates sometihng everyone should know about dams.
Every dam has a spillway at some level below the top of the dam -- usually at least a few feet lower. This spillway defines what should be the maximum level of water behind the dam. It must be designed with a capacity to allow for ANY possible flow of water around the dam. If water is allowed to flow over the wall of the dam ("topping" the dam) failure is quite likely. This is especially true of earthen dams, but is also a danger with concrete or stone dams. Dave Petley's American Geophysical Union blog post on which I found this video includes more technical details, including some that are in the form of questions, as this system is much more complicated than it appears to non-specialists.
The failure of this dam brings immediately to mind the 1889 Johnstown Flood. In both cases, innocent downstream communities were devastated by a failure of both engineering and conscience. Wealthy owners had been warned that their structures were unlikely to survive expected rain events, but chose to risk not only their investments but also the properties -- and the very lives -- of downstream neighbors. Lee Mueller, the owner of the Edenville Dam, is doubly culpable because he has actively ignored federal and state safety regulatorsand he must know the history of Johnstown. He is a perfect illustration of the need for environmental regulations, and the need to empower those agencies charged with enforcing them. Sadly, at least 2,500 dams in the United States are considered dangerous, meaning that they are both in a position to cause deaths if they fail and in a state of repair that makes such failures more likely than they ought to be.
When I commented about the good luck that nobody was killed by the Edenville collapse (though thousands were evacuated and millions of dollars of damage was done), a friend and former professor of mine quickly corrected me: nobody died as an immediate result of the collapse, but the flood damage included the inundation of an inadequately prepared chemical plant downstream.
As I explain in my 2016 Houston, Too Close to New Orleans post, tanks storing hazardous chemicals are required to be surrounded by secondary containment, meaning a wall or berm that will contain the chemical in the event of flooding or failure of the tank. I know this because I have done the calculations for such containment in Puerto Rico. The inside dimensions must be adequate to contain the entire contents of the dam, plus a small freeboard capacity. Similarly, the outside dimensions (height above ground) must be high enough to withstand a 100-year flood. Tanks on Dow properties downstream from Edenville were not adequately contained, so my friend is correct that increased casualties are likely. But they will be the result of long-term, low-dose chemical exposure that will be impossible to document on an individual basis.
In the case of the Dow facility, it is not yet clear what the nature of the miscalculation was; it could very well be that the berms met legal requirements and failed anyway. This is because the regulations worst-case conditions on which regulations are based might assume only meteorological flooding, not that caused by independent failures upstream. Moreover, the 100-year flood level is no longer an adequate way to estimate flood risk. It describes a flood that would have a 1/100 probability of being exceeded in any given year in the past. As I explain in my 2018 post Not in the Cards, even in the hands of statisticians, hydrologists, and engineers who do understand precisely what the term does and does not mean (and these people are rare), existing records are not adequate to estimate flood probabilities, because climate change means that today's conditions are statistically not related to those of the past.
We are not fans of reality television -- even if it pertains to food -- but of course we watched this show with great attention (and through torrents of tears, to be honest). PLEASE watch it if you can, because ultimately it is a hopeful story. Because it is not a show about hydrology, though, it is understandable that a mistaken comment about the floods was included without correction. Someone in the program said that the town had been struck by two 1,000-year floods. They did not go on to say that the odds of this would be close to one in a million, but it is implied. The reality, unfortunately, is that the floods in Ellicott City were inevitable given. climate change and recklessly inadequate regulation of upstream land use. The three blog posts above describe the details.
Incidentally, Ellicott City is still vulnerable, but engineering remedies -- including those described in Ramsay's show -- have likely reduced the risk in general terms and have removed some of the most vulnerable victims completely.
Lagniappe
Strictly speaking, my master's thesis was not about dams: it was about soil erosion. But the unexpectedly rapid sedimentation of a reservoir behind a medium-scale dam was the motive for our study, and we examined several dozen small-scale reservoirs to study the problem. When we started the project, I could barely discern small reservoirs on aerial photos; after a full year of study, I felt as though I knew some of them personally.
I am not certain to what extent dam safety has been a factor in the decision, but I recently learned that a small dam about a mile from my house in Bridgewater is slated for removal. This will create some environmental benefits and some environmental hazards (principally from the draining of artificial wetlands and the possible liberation of long-dormant toxic sediments). I will be following that with nerdy interest!
The Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco has long been home for many transgender people. Even in the context of a city with a strong reputation as a safe haven for GLBTQ people, however, the neighborhood has not always met the needs of its transgender residents.
Community leaders worked with city officials to create Compton's Transgender Cultural District in 2017. It is named for the site of the Compton's Cafeteria Riots of 1966, a pivotal event in the community's history, similar to the better-known Stonewall uprising in New York City three years later.
In this brief 2019 story, journalist Chloe Veltman tells the story of the neighborhood's transformation with the help of resident Honey Mahogany and city planner Brian Cheu.
Today, the district provides affirmation, a sense of place, safety, and support for economic development. The cultural projects of the district include advocacy, celebration, and education both in real-life events and online projects. The personal stories collected on its YouTube channel are a good place to learn, for people inside and outside of the community. For example, Kelly Kelly explains specifically why having this geographic space is important to her.
Any success in improving a neighborhood leads almost inevitably to concerns about gentrification: the tendency of improvements to make a neighborhood unaffordable for its residents. This can happen in a variety of circumstances. The first neighborhood I remember living in was Seven Corners in Falls Church, Virginia. It was rather modest when we lived there in the 1960s. My great grandparents happened to move into the same area in the late 1970s, and had financial difficulty staying when improvements were made to many of the apartments there. Upgrades have continued, so that it is now difficult to find any house in the area for under $600,000.
In many cases where the arts have been part of a conscious project of community development, property values can rise much more dramatically, often to the detriment of many of the same people who made the renewal possible in the first place. I have addressed the gentrification question in three different posts on this blog. Gentrification Outcomes (2018) is the broadest of these, drawing on excellent journalism by Linda Wertheimer. My 2016 Gentrifeination post explores the very specific role of coffee in gentrification. Most recently, Somerville Success (2020) focuses on the role of zoning in promoting the development of a city near Boston, with a link to a talk about gentrification there.
I have long been fascinated by the Treaty of Tordesillas in my courses on Latin America, I mention the many levels of audacity it represents, starting with the vagueness of its definition with respect to the Cape Verde archipelago and ending with the fact that two guys in Europe decided that a meeting with a third guy was the way to settle their differences over how to divide up the right to subjugate much of the rest of the world. I've been so fascinated, in fact, that a visit to the site of that meeting is on my agenda for a (now postponed) family trip to Europe.
Every once in a while I am reminded that the line across the Atlantic had a counterpart on the other side of the globe, established by the Treaty of Saragossa. I found this map of both on the very informative Doctrine of Discovery page posted by Dr. Gayle Olson-Raymer, a professor of history retired from Humboldt State University. Those reminders usually relate to the tiny Lusophone countries of East Timor or Macau (Macao) -- that is, coffee or gambling.
And this morning it was the latter -- the UrbanX course I am taking online features a 2016 article by journalist Simon Lewis about plummeting casino revenues in Macau. I include it here because it describes several aspects of the economic and cultural geography of this tiny country while explaining the counterintuitive finding that falling revenues might be a positive trend for its citizenry. Gambling addiction is often seen as an individual problem, but the experience of Macau illustrates the damage that can result when governments or entire economies become dependent on it.
The article includes this video from the Macao Government Tourism Office, in which historian Julian Davison explores the city, making many connections between its unique local features and its global position along what he calls the maritime silk road. We also learn that its name derives from the Portuguese spelling of the name of a Chinese ocean goddess -- this naturally reminds me of Iemanja/Yemaya. This is broadly similar to that of nearby Hong Kong, but with Portuguese rather than British connections.
How small is Macau? Even smaller than I realized. At 45 square miles, it is only twice as large as the small town I live in. I used the magic of The True Size to bring its shape to my neighborhood in southeastern Massachusetts for comparison.
As part of the CitiesX course I am taking online, I very much enjoyed this 2018 with Joe Curtatone, the mayor of Somerville, Massachusetts.
I learned some interesting things about a city near Boston I have visited only a few times, and I recommend the discussion for anybody who is trying to imagine improving how their own communities work.
The mayor's approach to leadership is also refreshing -- it involves long-term, deep listening. His discussion with Professor Ed Glaeser is short on details, but he references another talk that provides some more specific examples of how Somerville has succeeded. That talk was easy to find -- city planner George Proakis addressing a TEDx Somerville event in 2014.
Proakis starts with a fascinating primer on the origins of urban zoning in the United States before turning to a discussion of the process Somerville pursued in changing its zoning code that year. Spoiler alert: both talks include a gem that should be obvious, but sadly is not: if we plan our cities for cars, we are going to get cars. We cannot plan for cars and hope for walkability!
Bonus: Proakis mentions Artisans Asylum as an example of an enterprise that would be difficult to categorize under traditional zoning rules. It is the first makerspace I heard of, and traditional zoning struggles with whether to call these education spaces or manufacturing spaces. I learned of Artisans Asylum when my son had an internship there -- in teaching the tenants how to use the equipment, he developed skills that have been very useful to him as an artist.
Lagniappe
One of the ways to tell that Somerville is succeeding is that it has an extraordinary array of coffee shops -- a friend who used to live there has introduced me to a couple of them. I look forward to visiting again after the plague, to see how coffee fits into the Assembly Square area in particular.
Below is the message I sent BBC. I hope to have a reply soon, and will update this post if I do.
-----------------------------------------------------------
I turned to this profile because I have come to distrust the CIA Factbook, as some sections -- especially in Latin America -- have been edited for political purposes over the years.
So I was shocked to see what BBC has for Nicaragua, two years after the events of April 2018. It is no longer at all accurate to consider Ortega "left wing" nor is it reasonable to end the country profile with the withdrawal of the social-security "reforms" that sparked the protests of that month. Hundreds were killed and thousands more arrested or disappeared.
Coverage of the crisis in the US and UK was late (NPR did not air anything about this until the day after I contacted them) and scant, but there have been stories on BBC itself that would help to update this page.
Thanks for all you do at BBC to provide reliable coverage throughout the world. I hope you can act quickly to amend this entry.
-----------------------------------------------------------
An April 2020 post on the blog A Mighty Girl highlights the contributions of 16 women to the protection of the planet. The list starts with Anna Botstoff Comstock and Kate Sessions, born before the U.S. Civil War to Greta Thunberg, born in this still-young century.
I know the work of several of these women, but others were introduced to me by this listicle, entitled Guardians of the Planet: 16 Women Environmentalists You Should Know. I am using the list in the online summer version of my introductory Environmental Geography course. I have taught the course in many formats, using a traditional textbook by my master's advisor for many years.
Almost a decade ago, I found a book that has worked better in many ways, The View from Lazy Point by MacArthur genius Carl Safina. I have already been supplementing the book in a few ways -- it was never intended to be used in this sort of class, after all -- and decided that I should create some supplemental activities using this list. Many of the most important environmental leaders on the planet are women -- including the original tree huggers -- and their words and works have been the basis of many of my other classes.
I am having each student read this article and do just a little research about one of the women on the list. Because enrollment in the class has recently surpassed the number of women described here, I have added a few more guardians of note. (Enrollment in the course is still open, so I might add a few more by next week). These links point to Wikipedia entries, a starting point comparable to what the listicle itself provides:
I have already given the students in this class plenty to grapple with in this five-week class, so I am grateful to my favorite librarian for helping me to craft a bibliographic assignment that requires the students to explore the contributions of these women without taking on too much additional work.
They will also be helping me to create a map that locates all of the guardians we are studying -- including Carl Safina.
Lagniappe
As I was getting ready to share this with students today (April 20, 2021), my favorite BBC program Witness History gave me a name to add. LaDonna Harris is a Comanche woman who was married to a U.S. Senator during the Nixon years (and later ran for U.S. Vice President in her own right). The story mentions that their marriage was illegal in Virginia at the time. She is credited with convincing Congress -- and ultimately President Nixon -- to return land to indigenous people -- not her own tribe, but the Taos Pueblo -- for the first time in U.S. history. This is just one chapter in a long and interesting life -- her Wikipedia entry has a few more good stories.
When I announced that I was teaching a new course -- Advanced Global Thinking -- many of my friends congratulated me on the title (I was really pretty proud of it) and said they wished they could take it. I offered it for the first time this spring with a great group of graduating geography majors. I very much enjoyed our conversations during the first half of the semester, which ended up including global thinking about a global pandemic -- something we were well prepared to discuss but could not have anticipated.
Near the end of the semester, I noticed an interesting post on a Brazilian science Facebook page, and realized instantly that I had material for our final exam. Before posting the exam, we had some online discussion of the 2009 ocean crossing by Katie Spotz, which our EarthView program had followed avidly. Coincidentally, Katie contacted me right after that discussion, to share her newest project - a walk across Maine. More on that later (though you can donate now).
My students enjoyed writing this exam and I very much enjoyed reading their answers, each of which emphasized very different geographic concepts. Some students even shared the challenge with their families, which inspires me to post it here publicly, so anybody with curiosity and a little time on their hands can have the same fun.
Herewith, the exam question:
Please see the link on Ciencianautas (Science Explorers or Sciencenauts -- an example of something that works better in its original language than in translation). See what you can discern from the post before looking at my translation below.
This map shows one of the longest uninterrupted walks that you can make on the Earth. A journey leaving Cape Town, South Africa, ending in Magadan, Russia. This represents a distance of 22,387 km. Google Maps estimates that it would take 4,492 hours to navigate, which means 187 days of walking uninterrupted. If you were to decide to walk 8 hours per day (much more reasonable), it would take 562 days to make the trip.
🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍🌎🌏
Now the assignment. Imagine that you were going to take this trip in 2018-2019, and write an essay of 5-7 pages describing how you would use human and physical geography in the planning process. [After some discussion, we decided to take Covid-19 considerations out of the exam. Those playing at home can choose a near-future time frame if they would like to focus on the geographic implications of the pandemic.]
PLEASE know that I realize you cannot write a comprehensive plan in the coming week. To do so in reality would require a year or more. But choose a few aspects of this journey and explain how you would apply your geographic expertise to plan those aspects. Choose a couple of things -- or maybe even just one thing -- that highlights your geographic skills.
ALSO: I understand that one risk of an online exam is that you can end up spending far more time on it than the two hours normally alloted. Please do not spend all of your waking hours on this. But please give it some thought and then write an essay you would enjoy reading. And of course, please read your essay for style and grammar before turning it in.
Make sure to give the essay a good title; you probably cannot do that until you are nearly done with the essay. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Lagniappe
Here are some related links, including recent post on this very blog and some pages my students recommended after doing this research:
Tom's World Walk -- a very modest and average guy on a very long walk. Bonus: his web page starts with a reference to a very geographic song I've blogged about.
The journey envisioned above is a long-distance walk, but if it uses a designated long-distance trail, such a use is coincidental. Many long walks are inspired by the very existence of such trails, the most famous in the United States being the Appalachian Trail. My recent Trail Protection post discusses some of the legal, management, and policy questions relating to such trails, including a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.
One of the stories I heard on PRI's The World yesterday afternoon caught my attention in several phases. The report by PRI journalist Halima Gikandi begins with a broad assessment of the likely impact of the Covid-19 virus on the continent as a whole. Almost every country has reported cases, but they have been relatively few so far. The pandemic is spreading slowly but is expected eventually to overwhelm health-care resources in many places.
The report then turned to the experience of one family in Nairobi. Like approximately 10 percent of Kenyans, this is a Muslim family, and like all Muslim families, Ramadan is a time for being together. I had been only vaguely aware of Ramadan this year, and certainly had not realized we were 3/4 of the way through the month. The reporting describes the difficulty of the neighborhood of Eastleigh, where part of this family lives.
Note that the place names are a remnant of Kenya's colonial past: they are almost equally divided between English and Swahili.
Eastleigh is a struggling neighborhood in the best of times, and its normally limited access to food has been reduced by public-health closures. The municipal government is struggling to assure residents that it is the high concentration of virus cases and not the religious identity of residents that is responsible. As with many places -- including the United States -- the pandemic is highlighting social issues that might be present but not be widely acknowledged in "normal" times.
The Geographer, Vermeer 1668-1669
Another Geographer, Pam Hayes-Bohanan 2020
People have found some very creative ways to make the best of the boredom that ensues when our civic duty requires us to #stayhome during the global Coronavirus pandemic. One I just learned about from a student is the Getty Museum Challenge, in which people recreate famous works of art by modeling with materials already in their own homes.
When I saw what my student had done -- and before I realized it had already become so widespread -- my mind went immediately to The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer. I have long thought that a younger version of me looked quite a lot like Vermeer's model; Pam soon started identifying props in our house. A scheme was hatched!
Before creating the scene, I had spent some (minimal) time learning more about the painting. From Dianne Durante's "A Moment of Insight" I learned that there is some dispute about whether the wall in the original is exactly the same color as the wall in our living room. We are going to say, "YES!" More importantly, I learned about the importance of each prop and some ways to think about the differences in the state of mind between The Geographer and The Astronomer, which Vermeer had painted just the year before.
Some notes on the props: As a geographer, I should -- and once did -- have the dividers (a.k.a. compass) for making measurements on the map. My father gave me his long ago, and it is probably in my office. The office is only 600 yards from our house, but I decided that this would be against the spirit both of the challenge and of the #stayhome orders. Moreover, I was not sure they would be found. Chopsticks to the rescue!
I do not have any 350-year-old maps, but I do have a 90-year-old atlas, so I opened it to a map of the Netherlands and set it upon our National Geographic pouffe. An old map tapestry that used to be in our house is no more, but I realized that the tones of one of my favorite summer shirts would be a reasonable stand-in, so I draped it over the pouffe.
The globe is one of those stone-inlay items that used to be super-expensive until they became mass-market. From a distance, its frame works well. For the books, I thought about some anonymous old leather-bound books we have, but I grabbed a handful of Tolkien instead. He was my first somewhat scholarly interest, and during her tenure at a bookstore while we were dating, Pam helped me to build a pretty complete collection of his work.
Pam recognized the importance of the scroll that the original Geographer was leaning on; not having a scroll handy, she found a serviceable shelf!
Finally, I trimmed my beard for the photo, but did not shave it. Having accidently left my razor at a friend's house in Vancouver, Washington in 1996 without turning back, I decided against giving up the beard for my art.
Geography asks three questions:
