ABSTRACT: Geographers study the innovation and diffusion of ideas, policies, actions, and objects to understand processes of cultural evolution. These include the interaction of humans with ecological systems. Cultural hearths of major environmental policies are important and occasionally unsuspected. A case study of California's Channel Islands National Park, a small and lightly visited unit, demonstrated this reality in three ways: (1) the invention of a process of resource inventory and monitoring for preservation of ecological integrity; (2) research that led to the banning of DDT that had unexpectedly threatened endangered species; and (3) as a site of an oil spill that revolutionized protection of marine resources. All three led to decisions affecting parks and preserved areas throughout the United States and elsewhere.
ABSTRACT: This paper introduces the concept of "gastro poles" to explain how foodcentered development reshapes Buenos Aires' neighborhoods, offering an adaptation of growth pole theory to the micro-geographies of urban change. Building on the concepts of foodification and gastrodevelopment, I define gastro poles as neighborhood-scale clusters where restaurants, specialty shops, and culinary entrepreneurs act as catalysts for economic, cultural, and spatial transformation. Drawing on fieldwork in Buenos Aires, the article shows how gastro poles mobilize both material investments and symbolic resources, producing new geographies of authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and exclusion. Case studies of San Telmo's Avenida Caseros, Palermo Soho, and the emerging gastro poles of Villa Crespo and Chacarita illustrate the uneven ways in which food-led development is reshaping the city's neighborhoods and urban identity.
ABSTRACT: The rise of remote work compounded by the recent pandemic has given rise to an alteration of home, work, and social spaces. For the rapidly growing telework force, home and workspaces are conflated, while social spaces are invested with greater importance in sustaining links to the community. Not surprisingly, in our analysis we borrow heavily from sociologist Ray Oldenburg's concept of "third places." Third places provide the settings for informal social life that, Oldenburg argues, are vital to individual and community well-being. To explore this concept, we use Bend, Oregon, and more specifically the city's food truck pods, as case studies of social spaces for teleworkers. Each pod is comprised of a taphouse anchor and several food trucks framing or flanking a communal seating area, with most featuring fire pits and activities such as live music, trivia, and bingo. The pods are useful for this study given their popularity amongst the city's sizeable, if difficult-to-quantify, population of remote workers, digital nomads, and others working in nontraditional spaces. Our investigation finds that pods serve as integrative social hubs offering a sense of place and convivial interaction among telecommuters and locals alike. Pods are currently found in limited parts of the country but hold promise for other places of rapid growth and transformation.
ABSTRACT: One aim of historical geography is to understand and explain how specific cultural features emerged, diffused, evolved, and affected the landscapes and cultures into which they were incorporated. The focus of this paper is the summit-crossing ("watershed") transportation canal. Now recognized as the world's first summit transportation canal, China's Língqú 灵渠 Magic Transport Canal is 2,240 years old, dating from the year 214 BCE. "Re-discovered" for the Western world by Joseph Needham more than fifty years ago, its origin, context, design, and significance remain obscure. What innovations are embodied in the Língqú? How did its technology change landscapes, cultures, and the relationship of people with their environment? This paper brings together what is known of the canal, followed by a comprehensive summary of the Língqú's significance in the context of human history—the ingenious engineering of its invention, its role in the unification and creation of China, the diffusion of its concept to Europe where summit canals became critical enablers of the Industrial Revolution, and its contribution to the early development of today's worldwide transportation network.
ABSTRACT: Permitting energy development involves a complicated patchwork of federal, state, and local approvals. Often this pits local interests against federal considerations. This may take the form of "not in my backyard" or local groups wanting a project because of the associated economic benefits. In the United States, the friction between different governmental levels is partly by design as cooperative federalism shifts decision-making between these differing levels of government. The Millennium Coal Terminal was a massive coal-transfer facility proposed in Washington State that would have moved coal from railcars to barges along the Columbia River. The case study highlights the benefits and drawbacks of this multi-level government approval system. Using a combination of federal and state laws, this project was stopped by the State of Washington, which has aggressive decarbonization goals. We examine the legal and political dynamics of the case, and discuss the implications for future projects, including how the precedent could negatively impact the development of renewable power facilities.
ABSTRACT: When the Salt River started flowing across a topographic low of the Mazatzal Mountains of Arizona prior to 3.2 million years ago, it lowered the base level in its tributary drainages. The basic characteristics of these watersheds suggest that they may have been close to a general state of dynamic geomorphic equilibrium. However, this inferred dynamic equilibrium does not include the topography of the Salt River canyon within about 150 m of the river that displays dramatic relief linked to differential erodibility of rock types. We interpret this non-equilibrium state to be a response to formation of a major downstream river terrace about 330 thousand years ago that then produced a wave of knickzone recession and Salt River downcutting upstream. Thus, the present-day topography of the Mazatzal Mountains draining to the Salt River consists of an out-of-equilibrium chaotic inner canyon topography below smooth landscapes in a dynamic equilibrium.
ABSTRACT: This essay is adapted from the APCG Presidential address delivered at the eighty-fifth annual APCG conference in Ventura, California. The address summarized the ebb and flow of the sociopolitical responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. While initially the world engaged in a collective effort to mitigate this new disease, over time a more individualistic approach developed. This left vulnerable populations to bear the sociopolitical brunt of a severe disease continuing to infect, hospitalize, disable, and kill at rates higher than pre-pandemic rates. This essay frames this transition within a Malthusian approach to disease, where a eugenicist approach became dominant over a more traditional public health or collective community approach.
ABSTRACT: I graduated as a geography major from the University of California, Berkeley (1951–1953). After two years in the Navy, I came back as a graduate student, did not do well, and spent the next year traveling in South America and Nicaragua. Returning, I wrote my master's thesis on the pine forests in highland Nicaragua. After a year working in Washington, D.C., I returned to Berkeley in 1959. I did research in Bolivian Amazonia for my PhD, completed in 1963. Carl Sauer was my inspiration, but Jim Parsons was my mentor. I was hired by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I remained for thirty years. I was in and out of Berkeley Geography from 1951 until 1963, dropping out several times and then reentering. I became a geographer at Berkeley over seventy years ago, and I have continued relationships with Berkeley Geography since then.
ABSTRACT: The city of Trieste is located in Italy at the northeastern corner of the Adriatic Sea. It has been my good fortune to visit twice this fascinating place, whose history dates from the ancient Romans through the Habsburg dynasty, and two World Wars, and into present times. Studies of European history, German language, and English literature, together with many years of teaching various kinds of geography, brought deeper meaning to places and experiences in and around Trieste. The city is known also for the literary figures who have lived and worked there. This is a brief account of several discoveries and experiences that further expanded and enriched my geographical knowledge.
ABSTRACT: In recent years, many of Bucharest's residential properties registered as historic landmarks were vacated, which in some instances led to the eviction of families informally occupying these properties. Reasons provided by the municipality included projects to consolidate against seismic risk, rehabilitate for historic preservation, and address concerns about public health. The analysis presented here explores the municipality's official public policy discourse around the practice of squatting historic monuments and the squatters themselves. The dominant discourse homogenizes squatters as criminals and vandals of cultural heritage. Excerpts from field interviews with informal occupants are presented in order to identify discrepancies between lived realities and representations of squatting. Findings from this study provide an alternative interpretation to the dominant discourse around this housing practice, a version that highlights the multidimensional insecurity and social inequalities experienced by squatters.
ABSTRACT: This essay, adapted from the APCG Presidential address delivered at the eighty-fourth annual APCG conference in Bellingham, Washington, explores the substantial legacy of Larry Ford as an author and photographer. Ford's extensive research publications profoundly influenced the thinking, and indeed the career trajectory, of numerous geographers, including the author. Ford's corpus of landscape geography photography is perhaps the equal of his text-based works and is the most important photographic collection housed in the Geography Department at California State University, Northridge. To demonstrate the value of the collection, several sample images from the Ford photography collection are considered from a landscape geography perspective.
ABSTRACT: This paper aims to tell episodes of the geographical trajectory of radical geographer Clark Akatiff based on his own reflections and statements by people who know him as friend, colleague, or teacher. The authors make a plea to pay more attention to "small stories" and "minor geographies" in studies on the history of geography and to employ unconventional narratives that provide insights into how geographers engage with the world, express their political and philosophical standpoints, inspire others, and lead an essentially geographical life. Personal accounts like Akatiff's do not oppose the dominant discourse of key thinkers in the discipline as it is told in textbooks, but enrich geography's history by revealing grassroots stories that are frequently overlooked in academia and downplayed as ephemeral, in this case the origins of radical geography in the United States and the legacy of geographer William Bunge. The authors argue that research must follow a more inclusive, multivocal approach that consists of listening to stories and recording narratives.
ABSTRACT: Based on Carl O. Sauer's taped reflections on his own academic life, this paper outlines and offers a personal appreciation of Sauer's intellectual history. I argue that Sauer's intellectual life can be conceptualized as three dialectical developmental stages: (1) the Warrenton-Calw stage , marked by general education in his hometown environment; (2) the Chicago-Ann Arbor stage , marked by steep intellectual growth and expansion of his knowledge in geography as an academic subject; and (3) the Berkeley Stage , characterized by his Mexican field work and establishment of his own form of historical-cultural geography. This paper argues that Sauer's own intellectual curiosity, rather than any external influences, was the primary factor behind his scholarly progression to successive stages. Driven by his own curiosity, Sauer covered a wide range of research themes covering physical geography, use of fire in the development of landscape, theoretical discussion of the landscape morphology, and prehistorical agricultural origins and dispersals. He was a remarkable scholar and teacher who made a significant impact on the course of geography.
ABSTRACT: The notion of late-Cenozoic uplift was implied in 1865 by Whitney, who assumed a buried bedrock canyon lay beneath the Table Mountain latite flow and above the modern Stanislaus River canyon, with the difference between the two longitudinal profiles suggesting post-latite uplift. However, only a series of buried bedrock ridges exists and no uplift is inferred. I briefly present thirty-three key sites of about three hundred remnants in the entire Sierra Nevada, from north of the Feather River south to the Kern River. These include Late Cretaceous strata, Eocene strata, Oligocene rhyolites, Mio-Pliocene andesites, and Quaternary basalts, some remnants on canyon floors but most on lower slopes, preserving topography at the time of deposition. I found no evidence of late-Cenozoic incision, which is required under the late-Cenozoic uplift paradigm. Instead, each site contains verifiable field evidence that challenges the uplift paradigm. Moreover, the results are consistent with the range having a common uplift history: the crest elevation, drainage topography, and relief developed in the Late Cretaceous, and only minor changes occurred in post-Eocene time. This supports uplift studies in the northern Sierra based on hydrogen and oxygen isotopes on auriferous deposits, and supports pediment ages of 40+ Ma in the southern Sierra. Uplift studies based on thermochronology and numerical modeling, on cave-sediment dating and its implied incision, and on significant denudation on benchlands cannot be reconciled with verifiable field evidence. Finally, migration of giant sequoias southwest into the Sierra Nevada was possible only from late in the Cretaceous, when the Nevadaplano came into existence and the range was high, negating any Sierran late-Cenozoic uplift paradigm.
ABSTRACT: This paper is a recollection of and reflection on student participation in an expedition to discover and record a vast but previously unrecognized collection of Indigenous cave art created by ancient peoples in an extremely remote location in North Queensland. Now known as Quinkan Country, it was inscribed into the Australian National Heritage List in November 2018.
ABSTRACT: The Sanborn Map Company, established in 1867, was famous for publishing highly detailed maps of the urban areas of the United States. These maps, using data collected by an army of fieldworkers and surveyors, were used by insurance underwriters to remotely assess the risk of potential clients and were bound into regularly updated volumes for each major city in the United States. However, by March 1972, Sanborn began to close shop, disposing of most of their internal archives apart from the most recently updated volumes. Recognizing the inherent value of the volumes to the field of geography, faculty from the Department of Geography at California State University, Northridge, undertook an expedition to Sanborn's San Francisco office to recover as many volumes as possible. Over the years, the recovered volumes have moved from room to room until finally finding a home in a climate-controlled office in Sierra Hall, on the CSUN campus. Our article highlights three very different endeavors using the Sanborn maps, in an effort to illustrate the value of the CSUN collection to scholarly and artistic projects: Dr. Ron Davidson's exploration of historical change in a small corner of downtown Los Angeles; Dr. Jim Craine's attempt to uncover the "real" 77 Sunset Strip, and Los Angeles-based artist Debra Scacco's Compass Rose Project , an ongoing installation using Sanborn pages as a metaphor for American history.
