Podcasts about american geographers

Im Dezember 1968 und 1972 entstehen zwei Bilder der Erde aus dem All. Auf diesen ist der Blaue Planet in Farbe inmitten von einem schwarzen Nichts zu sehen. Diese Bilder ändern sehr viel, was das Bewusstsein der westlichen Welt über das Globale und das Planetare angeht. Was genau und wie, das besprechen wir in dieser Folge genauer. Außerdem ordnen wir dies in die Debatten der 1970er Jahre über Limits und Umweltschutz ein. Literatur & Quellen:Cosgrove, Denis: Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1994, 84:2, pp. 270–294.Daub, Adrian: Was das Valley denken nennt. Über die Ideologie der Techbranche. Suhrkamp.Hersch, Matthew: Inventing the American Astronaut, 2012.Kilian, Patrick: Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst. Geschichte der Gegenwart: https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/ich-sehe-was-was-du-nicht-siehst/Maier, Charles S. “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era.” The American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 807–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2651811 .Poole, Robert: Earthrise: How Man First Saw Earth, 2008.Stichweh, Rudolph: Weltgesellschaft. Soziologische Analysen. 2000.Turner, Fred: From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

Episode Notes Currently there are over 22 million Asians across the US representing a range of ethnic groups originating in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Yet, oftentimes, the ways we think of Asian American history is tethered to the East and West Coasts. But Asians in America have a long history in the Deep South, a history that has garnered growing attention. Documentaries like “Far East, Deep South” and “Blurring the Color Line: Chinese in the Segregated South” follow the filmmakers as they explore their personal family histories. How does knowing these histories help us have a fuller and richer understanding not only of Asian Americans but also the South? And how might these histories be shaping our shared present and future? Today I sit down with Dr. Shaolu Yu, whose work examines these questions and more.   Dr. Shaolu Yu is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and the Chair of Asian Studies at Rhodes College. Trained as an urban geographer in an interdisciplinary background and participating in projects in urban studies in China, the U.S., and Canada, she has developed a comparative and global perspective and a mixed method approach in her research on cities. Her papers have been published in the journals Annals of Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Urban Geography, Geographical Review, and The Journal of Transport Geography.

Episode Notes May is Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month, a nationally recognized heritage month established in 1992 to celebrate the histories, cultures, and contributions of Asians in America. Currently there are over 22 million Asians across the US representing a range of ethnic groups originating in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Yet, oftentimes, the ways we think of Asian American history is tethered to the East and West Coasts. But Asians in America have a long history in the Deep South, a history that has garnered growing attention. Documentaries like “Far East, Deep South” and “Blurring the Color Line: Chinese in the Segregated South” follow the filmmakers as they explore their personal family histories. How does knowing these histories help us have a fuller and richer understanding not only of Asian Americans but also the South? And how might these histories be shaping our shared present and future? Today I sit down with Dr. Shaolu Yu, whose work examines these questions and more.   Dr. Shaolu Yu is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and the Chair of Asian Studies at Rhodes College. Trained as an urban geographer in an interdisciplinary background and participating in projects in urban studies in China, the U.S., and Canada, she has developed a comparative and global perspective and a mixed method approach in her research on cities. Her papers have been published in the journals Annals of Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Urban Geography, Geographical Review, and The Journal of Transport Geography.

On today's show, Dr Arthur Viterito discusses the geothermal hypothesis for climate change. GUEST OVERVIEW: Dr Arthur Viterito received his PhD in geography from the University of Denver with specialties in climatology and physical geography. He has published research in radiational receipt, urban climatology and climate change and his work in urban climatology was cited in the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He's a member of the Association of American Geographers, the International Association for Urban Climate, and the Maryland State Geographic Information Committee.

In conversation with Chenjerai Kumanyika Ruth Wilson Gilmore is largely credited with creating carceral geography, the study of how the interplay between space, institutions, and political economies shape modern incarceration. The author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and several often-anthologized essays, she is the co-founder of several social justice organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project and Critical Resistance. She is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and American studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. Gilmore's many honors include the Angela Y. Davis Prize for Public Scholarship from the American Studies Association and the Association of American Geographers' Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research. A collection of Gilmore's work from the last three decades, Abolition Geography offers scholars, activists, and all interested people a new way of reacting to the incarceration crisis. (recorded 9/22/2022)

The talk draws on findings on the Correlation of Seismic Activity and Recent Global Warming, as well as we discuss the changes occurring on the Earth, which cannot be explained in terms of anthropogenic CO2 emissions theory as the main cause of climate change. The study of Prof. Arthur Viterito establishes the connection of increased geothermal flux with the warming of the global climate since 1979. Geodynamic changes occurring currently on the Earth are practically ignored by most climatologists. The talk will highlight the impact of CO2 and the inaccuracy of the most cited climate models to describe temperature in the past and in the present. Climate is a really complex system and Prof. Viterito uses the most comprehensive sets of data on geodynamic changes, currents, ocean circulations in order to understand climate change and the impact of the different factors. Arthur Viterito is a Professor of Geography at the College of Southern Maryland. He is also a policy advisor with The Heartland Institute. Prof. Viterito is a member of the Association of American Geographers, the International Association for Urban Climate. ⏯ International online conference "Global Crisis. Time for the Truth", interpreted into 100 languages of the world: https://youtu.be/NJQ0ntduJjE ⏯ "How does the CORE affect climate?" https://youtu.be/63-b2WYwL3M ⏯ "Scientists have discovered the real reason for the melting of glaciers" https://youtu.be/ptm3TutJBYc ⏯ "Scientists have Exposed the False Theory of Climate Change" https://youtu.be/WJGM2sT_PVE

Hello Interactors,We’re learning every day just how embedded racism is in the workings of American polity. My recent posts have picked on the history and influence of America’s cadastral and topographic cartography. Today I weave together European scientific determinism, early ‘big data’ authoritarianism, and White supremist cartography.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…CARL IN ALBUS PHYSICUS (CARL THE WHITE SCIENTIST) Our world is filled with data. There’s so much data that we came up with huge word to describe it – Big. Ok, a three letter word that happens means a lot. ‘Big Data’ is a big deal these days. We can’t seem to ever get enough data. More data seems to be more better. Scientists have been collecting, categorizing, and classifying data for hundreds of years. It’s the basis of the scientific method and our appetite for more data doesn’t seem to be waning. One of the most influential scientists in the early days of systematic data collection and classification was the father of taxonomy, Carl von Linné. He wrote in Latin, so he liked to go by Carolus Linnaeus. The word taxonomy has Greek origins: taxis (arrange) nomia (method). The method of arranging. Not to be confused with taxidermy. That’s the arrangement of skin. Linneaus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, and taxonomist who wrote a very popular book called Systema Naturae. The first edition came out in 1735, but the one that really caught steam and spread around the world was the tenth edition in 1758. That was the one where he dedicated five of the over two thousand pages to the following taxonomy of homo sapiens:Homo americanusHomo europaeus Homo asiaticus Homo africanus As you can see, he assigned a geographic association to each name: America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. It was commonly believed by Christian scientists during these times that humans were shaped by God to fit in their environment; including the shape of their bodies, color of their skin, behavior, and how they governed themselves. As Linneaus often said, "God created, Linnaeus organized." Brad observes that Carl also spoke in the third person. Here’s how he organized and described God’s homo sapiens indigenous to their land: “Americanus: Red, choleric and straight. Straight, black and thick hair; gaping nostrils; [freckled] face; beardless chin. Unyielding, cheerful, free. Paints himself in a maze of red lines. Governed by customary right.Europaeus: White, sanguine, muscular. Plenty of yellow hair; blue eyes. Light, wise, inventor. Protected by tight clothing. Governed by rites.Asiaticus: Sallow, melancholic, stiff. Blackish hair, dark eyes. Stern, haughty, greedy. Protected by loose garments. Governed by opinions.Africanus: Black, phlegmatic, lazy. Dark hair, with many twisting braids; silky skin; flat nose; swollen lips; Women [with] elongated labia; breasts lactating profusely. Sly, sluggish, neglectful. Anoints himself with fat. Governed by choice [caprice].”Linneaus ended up printing thirty editions of Systema Naturae all the way up to 1793. His geographically assigned taxonomy of humans became the defining standard of how the world came to categorize people. The word used to describe the taxonomy of the physical and behavioral characteristics Linneaus assigned to homo sapiens dates all the way back to the 1500s. That word is ‘race’.  BIG DATA, BIG COUNTRY, BIG MAPS, BIG PROBLEMGiven the geographic binding to race, it should come as no surprise that cartographers in Europe and America were quick to map these races. I spent the month of April talking about the history of America’s survey system and the gridding of the land for purposes of taxation and White colonial settlement. It started with Jefferson’s Land Ordinance act of 1785. But another American survey was started in 1790 that has also resulted in the creation of maps. It’s even written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the census survey. Just as America was the first to yank large scale cadastral mapping out of Roman times to build an empire, the U.S. was the first to utilize the census to reapportion government representation as the population grew. The U.S. House of Representatives grew steadily more or less in a straight line from the first census in 1790 to just before 1920. It’s been flat ever since. Despite the fact our population has more than tripled since then. I know big government is very popular these days, but clearly we’re not all duly represented in Washington D.C.Nineteen-twenty also marked the year the sagging line of rural dwellers crossed the climbing line of urban dwellers. Today over eighty percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas and that number is expected to grow exponentially. Another surge in U.S. population occurred in the mid 1800s as land across the country became increasingly easy to settle. As I mentioned in a previous post, a pioneering White settler could approximate a survey of 40 acres of land to call their own in under a day. But the influx of foreigners was troubling to many. The complexion of the country was changing rapidly. By the late 1800s, the census bureau was pressed to not just count but also classify, diagram, and map the myriad of ethnicities flooding the country from Europe and Asia. Many of whom were migrant laborers building the nation’s railroad. Government statisticians scrambled to find ways to accurately define and model the data. As cartography historian Jeremy Crampton notes,“The superintendent of the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Census, economist and statistician Francis Amasa Walker, explicitly remodeled its data collection to track what he saw as worrying immigration trends.” You could argue the 1890 census was the beginning of ‘big data’ in America. The eleventh census was the first to be tabulated with punch cards. A gentleman named Herman Hollerith invented the punched card tabulating machine in 1884. He went on to found a company called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Thirteen years later in 1924 it was renamed ‘International Business Machines’ or IBM. One of the many holes in those 1890 punch cards was for ‘race’. The census in America has had a long history of changing ethnic classifications every census or two. The first census in 1790 had three: ‘Free white females and males, other free persons, and slaves.’ In 1820 ‘free people of color’ was added.  Then, in 1850 back to three, but a different three: ‘Black, Mulatto, and White’. And then, in 1890 it was: ‘Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Black, Mulatto, Qaudroon, Octaroon, and White.’ Quadroon and Octaroon were considered one quarter or one eighth African and the rest European blood. All this data needed to be communicated efficiently. Not just to the government, but to teachers too. These census publications play a key role in teaching students across the land a particularly one-sided quantitative narrative of American history. To do so effectively, this big data needed much clarity, so they turned to the people best suited for the job; cartographers.  Not just any cartographer, but the father of American cartography, Henry Gannett. I introduced Gannett in last week’s post. He had pioneered the quadrant topographic survey system and then joined the census for the 1880 survey. He introduced a regional division scheme for the census that corresponded to the newly formed counties thus aligning census data to politics. The revised scheme looked to the past and to the future. It allowed for data to be compared to previous census collections and is still in use today. TAKING STOCK OF AMERICA’S STOCKThe 1890 census was the second survey to include maps and the first to be signed by Gannett. The Library of Congress has Gannett’s entire Statistical Atlas of the United States Based upon the Results of the Eleventh Census online. I highly encourage people to flip through the pages and zoom in on the illustrious maps, diagrams, and charts Gannett and his team prepared. The deep coloration of lithographic pigmentation that comprise the overlapped layering of isarithmic, choropleth, and dasymetric maps saturate the thirsty, bleached white paper making digital cartography look flat and lifeless.This census report is filled with statistical information and analysis. Part one covers gender, ethnicity, race, birth origins, parentage, schools, military, voting, marriage status, and family dwellings. Part two looks at age, school attendance, illiteracy, occupations, and citizenship. Piles of punch cards, mountains of data, and a looming worry that immigrant populations were about to tower over ‘White natives’. Gannett’s team devised a simple diagram to communicate the magnitude of the tower. They made an area chart showing ethnic and racial categories on the horizontal axis and time on the vertical. The category names chosen and listed along the bottom were: ‘Colored’, ‘Native stock’, ‘British’, ‘Irish’, ‘German’, ‘Scandinavian’, ‘Canadian’, ‘Poles’, ‘Hungarian’, ‘Italian’, and ‘Others’. Forming their own sort of taxonomy, they collapsed the European categories into a larger category called, ‘Foreign stock’. The resulting area chart then compares ‘Foreign stock’ (both newly immigrated and settled), ‘Native stock (these are descendants of original European colonial settlers – mostly British), and ‘Colored’. True Indigenous ‘Native stock’ of this land were not counted in the census until 1860, but only if they had ‘renounced tribal rules’.  The data runs from 1790 at the top (the nation’s first census) to 1890 at the bottom, the date of the eleventh census. The overall shape of the chart is what you’d expect. It’s narrow at the top and grows wider toward the bottom. It takes the shape of a tall, skinny mountain comprised of three distinct bell-bottomed vertical bands. The mountain top includes two of these bands, ‘Native stock’ and ‘Colored’ with ‘Native stock’ dominating. These are descendants of original White colonial settlers and their slaves. The British descendants of my long lost grandpa, Jonas Weed, would have checked the ‘Native stock’ box on their census survey.The ‘Foreign stock’ vertical band doesn’t show up on this mountain of census data until around 1835. My Scottish, Irish, and German descendants would have checked this box. The total number of ‘Foreign stock’ grew exponentially from 1835 to 1890 and this worried the dominant ‘Native stock’. This is why census statisticians modeled the data in a way that Gannett and his team could visualize it. They wanted to get a handle where these folks were settling and in what numbers. So Gannett made maps too.Some of the concern with immigrants wasn’t just their burgeoning population growth, it was the growing sentiment that they were not as “pure” as the White descendants of the original Anglo-Saxon colonizers. And the pairing of race to cartography and the mass distribution to schools nationwide helped spread this belief. Including the American Geographical Society who had been tasked since 1850 with expanding geographic knowledge across America. Again, Jeremy Crampton writes,“…the American Geographical Society (AGS) played a significant role in promoting racial and eugenicist views. These were often part of a narrative of the threat of immigration from populations considered unhealthy, degenerate, or otherwise undesirable.”The influence continued through to the twentieth century. The 1917 president of the Association of American Geographers was Harvard geographer and climatologist Robert DeCourcy Ward. He was also a eugenicist who cofounded the Immigration Restriction League in Boston in 1894. DeCourcy was a Mayflower descendant and he and his cofounders believed southern and eastern European immigrants were inferior to them and their fellow Anglo-Saxons. They believed the increasing presence of these immigrants was a threat to what they considered to be the ‘American way’. Eugenicists seek to rid populations of people they deem physically and mentally unfit, unhealthy, and degenerate so their blood won’t mix with the pure bred White Anglo-Saxons. This was about the time a certain twenty-eight year German soldier, Adolf Hitler, wrote in his diary while recovering from a British mustard gas attack, "When I was confined to bed, the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great. I knew immediately that it would be realized."WRAPPING A RACIAL TRAP INTO A MAP The liberation of racial editorializing of the U.S. census has also being realized. In reading Gannett’s 1890 census survey I am impressed with the objectivity he and his statistician colleagues presented. It’s an impressive undertaking. But I can’t help but notice tinges of racism creeping in – at least by today’s standards. It’s racism nonetheless. Consider the section entitled: Defective, dependent, and delinquent classes. Here’s a section of their analysis of the ‘insane’.“Of the native whites, 14 out of every 10,000 and 39 out of every 10,000 of the foreign born were insane. If these statistics are correct and complete, insanity is less prevalent among the colored and far more prevalent among the foreign born than among the native whites. Diagram 191 illustrates the tendency toward insanity among people of different nationalities. It represents the number of insane person in every 100,000 of those whose parents were born in certain foreign countries.The tendency toward insanity is greatest among the Irish, and next among the Hungarians. It is comparatively small among the Germans and British, and least of all among the Canadians.” O Canada, with glowing hearts we see thee rise. It’s true, I’ve never met more sane people than Canadians. Unlike the 1880 census, where physicians provided reports of the mentally ill, the 1890 did not. As a result the numbers are undercounted relative to 1880, but it begs the question; who supplied the data and how reliable was the source? And did they have a motive?Perhaps not. After all, in reporting on the ‘feeble-minded’ they state ‘Native whites’ are number one. “Of the native whites, the corresponding numbers were 17 (per 100,000), and of the foreign whites 10 (per 100,000), which shows, if the figures are to be trusted, that idiocy is more common among the native whites than among the colored or foreign whites, and least of all among the foreign whites.”A bold admission! But wait, there’s more.“The explanation of this is most probably to be found in the fact that idiocy was more fully reported by the native whites than by these other two classes.”This indeed may be true. Self reporting surveys are notorious error prone. But then that would render all of the census data suspect and not just those data that might make you look feeble minded.As summer approaches and echoes of George Floyd protests still echo across the nation, the section on mortality in the 1890 census reveals some curious facts regarding what were then called ‘negroes’.“[The death rate] of the negroes is the greatest of all. The rural death rate is but 15 (per 1,000), and is greatly exceeded by the urban death rate, which among the whites is 23 (per 1,000) and among the colored 34.5. Diagram 207 shows the death rate of the white and colored in certain southern cities where the negro population is large. From this it appears that while the death rate of the whites ranges from 18-25, that of the colored ranges from 30-42, being in each case nearly double that of the whites. It is probably, however, that this proportion between the two holds in the rural districts, which are better suited to the development of the negro than the environment of large cities.”In a refrain of Linneaus logic, it seems nineteenth century data scientists still believed race was a function of geography. Either it was inconceivable that Black Americans were victims of race violence at the hands of White supremacists who by 1890 would have been more than evident. The KKK emerged out of opposition to reconstruction. While they were suppressed legally by the federal government in the 1870s, these fearful eugenic fascists didn’t just disappear. It’s probable that many of them even found their way into southern urban police departments. There is no mention of lynching whatsoever in the mortality section. Lynching had been occurring since the end of the Civil War and was in full swing by the time the 1890 census would have been conducted. Racial terror is one of the many factors that led to droves of Black Americans migrating north. They were literally running for their lives. It’s easy to cherry-pick examples of racial and ethnic injustices from the annals of history. But it’s even easier to ignore it. Silence, after all, is a form of violence. It’s meaningful to me to know that the people behind those maps that were, and still are, coiled up in tensioned rolls above chalk boards and white boards that adorn our public schools were started by White supremacist eugenicists. And it wasn’t that long ago. My grandparents would have been teenagers when the American Geographical Society was shipping atlases to their one room schools in their freshly surveyed townships in Iowa.And Brad shouldn’t give Linneaus too much grief. His taxonomy invention made Charles Darwin’s life a lot easier. But he made little to no effort to even meet these Black, phlegmatic, lazy, Dark haired, Fat lipped homo sapiens. He never traveled south of the Netherlands and never left Sweden after age 42. He wasn’t a fan of scientists visiting other countries. This quote sums it up in a paradoxically named book Carolus Linnaeus: The Swedish Naturalist and Venerable Traveler. He admonished Swedish scientist who traveled outside of Sweden telling them “[not to] cross the stream for water, and waste... money endeavoring to learn in a foreign country what... might have [been] acquired at home.” Why risk actually observing and interacting with Indigenous Americans, Africans, or Asians? Probably because his tight protective clothing against his White, sanguine, muscular body would cause him to profusely sweat in hot and humid climates. Or perhaps his plentiful yellow hair and blue eyes would wither in the sun. He may have been a light and wise inventor, but curious and introspective he was not.As we continue to amass infinite amounts of data and rely on statistical methods to abstract, and reason away emergent patterns. Calculations so complex that no human can ever understand them. Let’s not loose sight of our humble interactions with people and place. Subscribe at interplace.io

Hello Interactors,Today we’re branching into topography and the role western colonial expansion plays in the creation and articulation of our naturally occurring geography. Most of us are not very skilled at critiquing the role maps have played in shaping how we see the globe and the people on it. But I’m optimistic that when we do we can better confront the boundaries that maps have created between people and place.As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.Please leave your comments below or email me directly.Now let’s go…NAME THAT PLACEI spent last April talking about how the United States was surveyed and diced in little squares that are featured in our maps today. It was a technique ripped out of ancient Rome as a way to rationally quantify space across massive swaths of land. The United States perfected gridded cartesian cadastral cartography, but drawing little lines on paper as a means of assessing, assuming, and asserting control over land had been done for centuries by European colonial settlers around the world – beginning in the Renaissance. The Renaissance accelerated mapping. This was an era of discovering new knowledge, instrumentation, and the measuring and quantification of the natural world. Mercator’s projection stemmed from the invention of perspective; a word derived from the Latin word perspicere – “to see through.” European colonial maps were drawn mostly to navigate, control, and dominate land – and its human occupants. We have all been controlled by these maps in one way or other and we still are. Our knowledge of the world largely stems from the same perspective Mercator was offering up centuries ago. The entire world sees the world through the eyes of Western explorers, conquerors, and cartographers. That includes elements of maps as simple as place names. Take place names in Africa, as an example. The country occupied by France until 1960, Niger, comes from the Latin word for “shining black”. Its derogatory adaptation by the British added another ‘g’ making a word we now call the n-word. But niger was not the most popular Latin word used to describe people of Africa, it was an ancient Greek derivative; Aethiops – which means “burn face”. If you replace the ‘s’ at the end with the ‘a’ from the beginning, you see where the name Ethiopia comes from. Even the name of my home state of Iowa has dubious origins. Sure it’s named after the Indigenous tribe, the Iowa or Ioway, but the Iowa people did not call themselves that. They referred to themselves in their own language as the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je). They settled primarily in the eastern and south eastern part of the land we now call Iowa. Most of them were forced to relocate to reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma. It’s believed the name Iowa, came from a Sioux word – ayuhwa which means “sleepy ones.” It would be like the south winning the Civil War and then turning around and declaring the region to their north henceforth be referred to as: Yankees. Even the word Sioux is a French cheapening of a word from the Ojbiwe people– Nadouessioux (na·towe·ssiw). The Sioux were actually a nation combined of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota people. They referred to themselves as Oceti Sakowin (oh-CHEH-tee SHAW-kow-we) or “Seven Council Fires”. They covered the sweeping plains of most of what we now call Minnesota; which stems from the Dakota phrase Mni Sota Makoce – “where the waters reflect the sky”. They extended south to the northwest corner of so-called Iowa and east to the more aptly named state of South Dakota. These people were expelled from Minnesota after the Dakota War of 1862. They continue to suffer today the pains felt by America’s largest mass execution in history at the hands of none other than Abraham Lincoln. Just months after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln ordered 38 Dakota and Lakota men to be hung. Dissatisfied with the pace and politics of the makeshift trial of 303 Indigenous people, he decided on his own who should live and who should die. On April 23rd, 1863 the United States declared their treaties with the Lakota and Dakota null and void, closed their reservations, and marched them off their land. It took until this year, 2021, for the United States to give a southern sliver of land back to them. And in Northern Minnesota they’re still fighting to protect the water that reflects the sky.MAPS AND MATH FROM A MAN FROM BATH There’s another Westernized place name just west of where the Dakota and Lakota people thrived called Gannett Peak. It’s the tallest mountain in the state of Wyoming and is part of the Bridger-Teton range. I’m sure you’ve heard of the more popular neighboring range, the Grand Teton’s; another notable (and sexist) French place name which means – ‘Big Boobs’. Gannett Peak is named after Henry Gannett – the father of American mapmaking. Born in Bath, Maine in 1846 he went on to graduate from Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1869. After some time in the field documenting geology from the Great Lakes to the mines of Colorado he returned to Harvard for a degree in mining engineering. He spent a couple years working at the Harvard College Observatory making maps and calculating the building’s precise longitude. He then was hired as the chief astronomer-topographer-geographer by the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories in 1872. A mouthful. Perhaps daunted by such a long name for a department charged with precision and clarity of information, the USGGST was shortened to USGS in 1779 – the U.S. Geological Society. Some claim Gannett lobbied for USGGS in an attempt to maintain the word geographical and not just geological. If so, he was likely outvoted by his boss and prominent geologist, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden. His book, The Great West: its Attractions and Resources gives you a clue as to why geologists were maybe more revered than geographers in the late seventeen and eighteen hundreds. After all, there’s gold in them there hills.The study of naturally occurring geometric properties and their spatial relations over a continuous plane is the work of topology. Documenting and surveying those studies is the work of a topographer. And the artifact they generate is called a topographic map. The first large scale topographic mapping project was Cassini’s Geometric Map of France in 1792. Then, in 1802 the British followed with the highly precise topographic map of India. As I’ve noted in previous posts, the earliest surveying and mapping of the British colonies and the United States were funded and controlled by government backed private companies like the Hudson Bay Company in the 1600s and the Ohio Company of Associates in the 1700s. IT’S UP TO YOU TO QUESTION YOUR VIEWThe topographic map of India was also directed by a British colonizing super-spreader the East India Company. They, together with the British government, had been at it for 200 years already. But in the early 1800s they were seeking accuracy. They wanted far more precise control over the Indigenous land, resources, trade, and people. The people of India are second to Africa in genetic diversity and emerged via Africa through the Indus River valley; hence the name India. This massive southeast Asian continent was first named by the Spanish or Portuguese – India is Latin for “Region of the Indus River”. The map that the East India Company commissioned in 1802 is called the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Trigonometry had already been awhile. In 140BC its Greek inventor, Hipparchus, used it, as the British did, for spherical trigonometry – the relationship of spherical triangles that emerge when three circles wrapping around a sphere intersect to form a spherical triangle. It’s used to measure the spherical curvature of the earth and was employed with precision by the East India Company using instruments with cool names like theodolite and Zenith sector. What resulted was a map of India featuring a fine-grained triangulated lattice accurately depicting the designated borders of British claimed territories. It was also the first accurate height measurements of Mount Everest, K2, and Kanchenjunga. Those heights were surveyed by Indigenous Tibetan surveyors who were secretly hired and trained by the British. Europeans were not allowed into Tibet at the time, so the surveyors had to pretend they were just hiking. This trigonometrical triangulated technique was the first accurate measure of a section of the longitudinal arc. The same arced sections that defined the curved edges of Henry Gannett’s topographic quadrangle mapping system which he perfected seventy years later on the other side of the globe at an arc distance of roughly 8,448 miles or 13,595 kilometers.Gannett’s career arc makes it easy to see why he figures prominently in American geography. Following is just a sampling of his contributions.He was the first geographer assigned to the census for the country’s tenth census survey. Gannett was responsible for drawing the first census tracts and invented the enumeration of districts based on population and geography. He chaired the Board of Geographic Names and later wrote a book on the history of United States place names. You can read a digitized version online. It includes a surprisingly long list of place names across the country and their origins. He demarcated the first 110,000 miles of national forests and served as Teddy Roosevelt’s research program director for his National Conservation Commission which projected future natural resource use.He helped form the National Geographic Society, Association of American Geographers, and other astronomy and geology clubs.He published two hundred articles on human geography, cartography, and geomorphology all while editing a handful of journals and publishing textbooks.The topographical techniques and programs Gannett pioneered were used all the way to the 1980’s and 90’s as GPS and computers took over. As amazing as his work was, it was no match for satellite imagery, GPS, and computer imaging. The topography he painstakingly surveyed and mapped is now available to anyone with access to a computer and an internet connection.Gannett was one of many geographers throughout the history of western colonization. Sure he was more influential than most, but they were all tasked with the same thing. Whether it was triangulating British territories in India, finessing French regions in Africa, or delineating Dutch districts in Brazil they were all measuring, mapping, and manipulating how others should see the world. It’s the paradox of mapmaking. No matter your intent, whatever line you draw will reflect the bias you bring. Mercator was biased by perspective because that’s what the culture of his time led him to do. Gannett mapped natural occurring features of the land because the mapping of minerals and other natural resources was in high demand. Iowa was named Iowa because that’s what they knew. Even attempts to counter-map the dominance of cartesian colonial cartography can’t escape its own bias. Nobody can. But we live on a melting planet, so our days remain a few. If we’re going to survive this calamity, we must see that our thoughts are skewed. So the next you look at a map, consider its point of view. If we all do this together, we can invent a world anew. Sources: Henry Gannett Chapter. The History of Cartography, Volume 6: Cartography in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Mark Monmonier.Wikipedia. Subscribe at interplace.io

Support for gender equality has increased across the world, especially in cities. Why is this? And what does it tell us about the drivers of social change? World Bank talk, followed by insightful audience questions. Sharing in case it's of wider interest. My research in Zambia & Cambodia suggests that cities: (i) raise the opportunity costs of the male breadwinner model, (ii) increase exposure to women in socially valued roles, and (iii) enable diverse associations, so people can collectively contest established practices. Interests, exposure, and association then reinforce a snowballing process of social change. This work has been published in Gender & Society, and the Annals of the Association of American Geographers. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327035036_HOW_CITIES_ERODE_GENDER_INEQUALITY_A_NEW_THEORY_AND_EVIDENCE_FROM_CAMBODIA https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320921459_Cities_as_Catalysts_of_Gendered_Social_Change_Reflections_from_Zambia

Unsolved mysteries have a way of captivating us, leaving us searching for answers long after the people involved have passed on. This is most definitely the case for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Theories and ideas about what happened to this colony have abounded, but a solid answer has never been decided upon. Today, we will present you with the facts, and you can decide what you think happened for yourself! http://www.americaslibrary.gov/es/nc/es_nc_roanoke_1.html https://www.britannica.com/story/the-lost-colony-of-roanoke Dolan, Robert; Bosserman, Kenton (September 1972). "Shoreline Erosion and the Lost Colony". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 62 (3): 424–426 Kupperman, John (1988). Captain John Smith, A selection of his writings. Wilmington VA: Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press. p. 94 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

On the fifth episode of the Circular Metabolism Podcast, we had the opportunity to chat with Matthew Gandy, one of the pioneers of urban political ecology.Matthew is Professor of Geography, and Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge. He was Founder and Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and also has been a visiting scholar amongst others at Columbia University, the University of California, and the Humboldt University in Berlin.Matthew’s research topics range from environmental history, urban political ecology, urban water infrastructure, epidemiology, as well as rethinking existing understandings of urban nature. He is indeed an eclectic researcher led by curiosity, attentive observation and sometimes by serendipity. His research is sometimes inspired through art exhibitions asking unusual or unpredictable questions which social sciences tend to overlook or not address.His publications include Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City (The MIT Press, 2002), The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (The MIT Press, 2014), and Moth (Reaktion, 2016), along with articles in New Left Review, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Society and Space and many other journals. He is currently researching the interface between cultural and scientific aspects to urban bio-diversity. His article “Rethinking Urban Metabolism: water, space and the modern city” and his book “Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City” really helped me broaden my urban metabolism horizons by adding social, geographical, historical and political layers.In this episode, we discuss how our choice of words and metaphors is extremely important to describe complex social and environmental challenges. For instance, Matthew used the urban metabolism metaphor to describe for the double circulation in water infrastructure, meaning the circulation of water and capital as well as the interlinks between the material and immaterial flows. However, the use of this metaphor has been highly controversial and almost divisive over the years between critical geographers and industrial ecologists.Matthew also mentions how he actively changes the focus of urban political ecology by bringing different actors and protagonists at the forefront of the research such as flies and overmature trees to question our current discourses on biodiversity in the urban context. He argues that one of the weaknesses of urban political ecology is the lack of direct engagement with ecological science.In the future, a more radical interdisciplinarity is necessary to tackle complex urban problems. He believes that grounded theory and the use of a practical case could enable us to explore the combination between social, historical and ecological sciences.Enjoy this episode and don’t forget to visit our website www.circularmetabolism.com to find all of our activities and productions. Also, make sure subscribe to your favourite app including Youtube, iTunes, Spotify and Stitcher to avoid missing any new episode. Finally, leave us a comment or a review to help us improve our podcast.Link to the ERC project Rethinking Urban Nature ; https://www.naturaurbana.org/Link to selected publications“Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city”“Concrete and Clay, Reworking Nature in New York City”Gandy, M. 2016 ‘Unintentional landscapes,’ Journal of Landscape Research 41 (4) pp. 433–440.Gandy, M. 2017 ‘Negative luminescence,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 107 (5) pp. 1090–1107.Gandy, M. 2017 ‘Urban atmospheres,’ Cultural Geographies 24 (3) pp. 353–374.Gandy, M. 2019 ‘The fly that tried to save the world: saproxylic geographies and other-than-human ecologies,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Link to Matthew’s presentation at the Brussels Ecosystem conferenceLink to Matthew Gandy’s website, blog

Leo Zulu is an associate professor in the Michigan State University Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences. His research interests include political ecology; environment and development; community-based natural resources management in rural Africa; deforestation; food security; socio-spatial; temporal and biophysical processes of land use and land cover change in Africa and the techniques that permit their examination. Zulu is editor of the African Geographical Review – the official journal of the Africa Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. He earned his doctorate from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  

In EPISODE FORTY THREE we continue with our two-part Summer Reading Series and finish our review of  John Kirtland Wright’s  1946 Presidential Address Association of American Geographers.  In this canonical text, Wright outlines his ideas for  geosophy . How was this address received by his colleagues? What would the study of geosophy look like? Professor John L. Allen joins us to explore these questions- and others -It’s our first major exploration of this key text.

Yonette Thomas, PhD. is an entrepreneur who is moving from a lifetime as an academic research professor to a coach for academics. Her new venture, Strategic Transitions, helps academic professionals navigate the various transitions they’ll face during their career. She has an impressive background, just read this brief bio from the IAPHS website: Yonette Thomas, Ph.D., is science advisor for urban health to the New York Academy of Medicine, a member of the International Society for Urban Health Board, and a senior research advisor to the Association of American Geographers. She is a faculty affiliate of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland College Park and a voluntary associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine where she teaches social epidemiology. Yonette was formerly the associate vice president for research compliance at Howard University. Previously she served as the chief of the Epidemiology Research Branch and program director for the sociology epidemiology program at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health. She has held faculty appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the School of Pharmacy at Howard University. She is a member of the Consortium of Social Science Associations Advisory Committee and the Steering Committee of the National Hispanic Science Network. Her primary research and publications have focused on the social epidemiology of drug abuse and HIV/AIDS and the link with geography, including edited volumes: Geography and Drug Addiction, Crime, HIV, and Health: Intersections of Criminal Justice and Public Health Concerns. She has a Ph.D. in medical sociology and demography, with postgraduate training in epidemiology. Wow. A real slacker, huh? She and Mark met at Bo Eason’s’ Mastermind Group: The Best (based in Thousand Oaks). They’ve worked closely together to help her get her new business, Strategic Transitions off the ground. Our conversation was fascinating and included: • How people have always been attracted to her, especially around her personal story, and they ask her, “What do I do?” This constant questioning was what caused her to make the transition herself from academia into the world of consulting. • She loves guiding, coaching and mentoring • We talked about the Millennial Leadership Institute (MLI) • What she means when she talks about Finding Your Avatar • What it takes to become a professor, moving on to a tenured position, an endowed chair and how to access a professional network • What it means to be a thought-leader • Owning your achievement • “It’s lonely in the world of higher education.” • Why she loves the metaphor of gardening to describe what she does and how seasonality, planting, pruning, weeding, fertilizing and related tasks are deeply relevant to her new endeavor • What’s been the biggest surprise so far? How much you have to pay attention to the ‘business’ side of the firm. As an academic her entire career, this requires focus and attention. • Why you need a 20-year plan. She made a good case by studying the truly successful, who all had such a plan

Philip Steinberg (http://philsteinberg.wordpress.com) is Professor of Political Geography at Durham University and Associate Editor of Political Geography. At Durham, he is Director of IBRU: Durham University’s Centre for Borders Research and he also coordinates the ICE LAW Project (the Project on Indeterminate and Changing Environments: the Anthropocene, Law, and the World). Phil’s research focuses on the projection of social power onto spaces whose geophysical and geographic characteristics make them resistant to state territorialisation, spaces that include the world-ocean, the universe of electronic communication, and the Arctic. His publications include The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001), Managing the Infosphere: Governance, Technology, and Cultural Practice in Motion (Temple, 2008), What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina (Georgia, 2008), Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North (I.B. Tauris, 2015), as well as recent articles in journals including Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Society & Space, Ocean Development & International Law, Antipode, Polar Geography, and Atlantic Studies.

The Empire Club of Canada Presents: Dr. Meric Gertler, President of the University of Toronto With Foundations for Canada's Prosperity: Signposts and Directions Meric S. Gertler began his term as the 16th President of the University of Toronto on November 1, 2013. Prior to that, he served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, the largest faculty at the University, from 2008 to 2013, where he championed many important innovations in undergraduate teaching and learning. He is a Professor of Geography and Planning, and the Goldring Chair in Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is a Co-Founder of a large research program at UofT's Munk School of Global Affairs investigating the role of city regions as sites of innovation and creativity in the global economy. His work engages in comparative analysis of North American and European cities to understand how local social and cultural dynamics create the foundations for economic success and prosperity. He has served as an advisor to local, regional and national governments in Canada, the United States and Europe, as well as to international agencies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris, and the European Union. He has authored or edited seven books, including Manufacturing Culture: The Institutional Geography of Industrial Practice and The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, with Gordon Clark and Maryann Feldman. He has held visiting appointments at Oxford, University College London, UCLA, and the University of Oslo. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and received the 2007 Award for Scholarly Distinction in Geography from the Canadian Association of Geographers. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, UK. He holds a doctor of philosophy honoris causa from Lund University in Sweden. Most recently, Gertler received the 2014 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of California, Berkeley and the 2014 Distinguished Scholarship Honor from the Association of American Geographers, AAG. Speaker: Dr. Meric Gertler, President of the University of Toronto *The content presented is free of charge but please note that the Empire Club of Canada retains copyright. Neither the speeches themselves nor any part of their content may be used for any purpose other than personal interest or research without the explicit permission of the Empire Club of Canada.* *Views and Opinions Expressed Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the speakers or panelists are those of the speakers or panelists and do not necessarily reflect or represent the official views and opinions, policy or position held by The Empire Club of Canada.*

Frank Lafone discusses his poster and project at the 2011 Association of American Geographers conference in Seattle.

Frank Lafone discusses his poster and project at the 2011 Association of American Geographers conference in Seattle.

Sue and Jesse spoke with Matt Koeppe, GIScience Program Director of the Association of American Geographers about Geography and GIScience careers and the AAG's careers site.