John Miller Morris

John Miller Morris, Jr., 64, passed away on February 16, 2017, in a San Antonio hospital after surgery, attended by friends who traveled thousands of miles to come to his bedside. He is survived by a daughter Erin Claire Noakes of Washington D.C. He will be missed by his longtime companion, many friends, colleagues, and neighbors.

John grew up in Amarillo in the Texas Panhandle and his early experiences in the southwest shaped his work, home, and life. He was an Eagle Scout and high school underground newspaper editor demonstrating his civic priorities from an early age. He obtained a bachelor degree (Plan II Honors Program), two master’s degrees (Community & Regional Planning and Slavic Literature and Language), and a doctoral degree (Geography and Planning) from The University of Texas at Austin where he also competed in fencing. His love of the land and his personal heritage was demonstrated through his long involvement in the family’s business, the C.B. Morris Company, one of the first family farm corporations in Texas.

As a scholar, he authored and edited multiple books on his way to his full professorship at the University of Texas at San Antonio, including El Llano Estacado which remains the definitive work on the history, geography, culture and peoples of that region. He also received multiple awards including the UT Regents Outstanding Teaching Award and the Piper Professor Award for his “dedication to the teaching profession and for outstanding academic achievement.”

John was well-respected throughout the state and was a member of many professional organizations including the Texas Institute of Letters, the Texas State Historical Association, and the West Texas Historical Association (current president). He was also a charter member of the Sensitive Men, a monthly brunch/politics/Frisbee fellowship in Austin and a vital member of the Pros & Cons, a group of scholarly colleagues who met monthly for critical dialogue and conviviality.

John was also an integral force in keeping his Austin neighborhood and the surrounding area on RM 2222 beautiful, livable places. He worked tirelessly to improve and expand Long Canyon’s unique hiking trail system. He served on the homeowner’s association board for numerous terms. He worked with developers in the RM 2222 corridor to assure that developments would be tasteful, as unobtrusive as possible, minimize environmental impacts, and in character with the Hill Country.

He was brilliant, outgoing, inquisitive, energetic and unique. One of his many legacies is a 140-year-old Victorian house he rescued from demolition in the west campus area in 1978, moved twice, and lovingly restored in the woods and hills of west Austin. If you would like to share a memory of John or would like more information about memorials, please email [email protected].

Memorial contributions may be made on his behalf to the John Miller Morris UTSA scholarship here: https://giving.utsa.edu/Morris.

Published in Express-News on Mar. 5, 2017

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Thomas Wilbanks

Dr. Thomas J. Wilbanks, age 78, a groundbreaking scientist and a devoted family man, passed away Sunday, January 29, 2017. He will be greatly missed. Dr. Wilbanks was a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he had worked since 1977 and conducted research and published extensively on sustainable development, energy and environmental technology and policy, responses to global climate change, and the role of geographical scale. He was a president of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), one of only three nonacademics to serve as the president in its more than 100 years, and authored, co-authored, or co-edited 9 books and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. Dr. Wilbanks’ highest honor was to be formally recognized as a co-laureate for the 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace, in recognition of his work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He was also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was awarded numerous other honors in his field. He helped lead the first comprehensive US national energy plan and led more than 70 projects in 40 developing countries worldwide. Born in Texarkana AR, Dr. Wilbanks received his undergraduate degree from Trinity University, where he was named Distinguished Alumnus in 2013-14. He received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University. Dr. Wilbanks served his country in the U.S. Army, where he was an Airborne Ranger and a military intelligence officer. Before coming to Oak Ridge, he was a professor at Syracuse University and chaired the Geography Department at Oklahoma University.

He was predeceased by his parents, Thomas Winston Wilbanks and Elsie Thompson; and is survived by his wife of 57 years, Kathryn Jordan Wilbanks; brother, Dana Winston Wilbanks; sister, Beth Wilbanks Robb; children, Kathryn Lee Wilbanks, Lisa Wilbanks Rentenbach, and John Thompson Wilbanks; daughter-in-law, Carolina Almeida Antunes Rossini; and grandchildren, Augusta Belle Rentenbach, John Conoley Rentenbach, and Noah Rossini Wilbanks.

The Wilbanks family has created the AAG Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography to honor researchers who have made significant contributions to Geography and GIScience. The family asks that donations be made to the AAG Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography at this link or by contacting Candida Mannozzi at [email protected] or 202-234-1450.

Donate to the AAG Wilbanks Award for Transformational Research in Geography

Portions published in Knoxville News Sentinel on Feb. 5, 2017

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Susan Christopherson

Susan Christopherson, Professor and Department Chair of the City and Regional Planning at Cornell University, passed away on December 14, 2016.

Christopherson was a geographer committed to the integration of scholarly work and public engagement. She was awarded the 2016 AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors for her considerable and long standing contributions to economic geography research, public engagement, teaching, and service. Her work on media, optics, agriculture, renewable energy, and manufacturing included deep engagement with local economic development authorities to produce research that contributed to spatially and socially balanced economic growth.

Christopherson’s work on nontraditional energy sources continued this tradition, including her appointment to a National Research Council panel to consider the implications of shale gas and oil development for local communities and the dissemination of policy reports on the risks and impacts of crude oil rail transport.

As the first woman to be promoted to full professor within her department as well as the first female chair, she also broke ground in terms of increasing diversity within the field of economic geography, which she accomplished by mentoring and teaching. Christopherson received a Ph.D. from the University of California–Berkeley.

Please leave your own personal tribute or remembrance in the comments section below.

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David Slater

David Slater, Emeritus Professor of Political Geography at Loughborough University, UK, who was a leading critical development geographer and known for his work on Latin America, passed away on October 20, 2016.

Slater studied for a bachelor’s degree in geography at Durham University in the mid-1960s which was when he first became interested in geopolitics, seeking to understand international relations in a spatial context. He went on to the London School of Economics, where he completed a doctorate in geography in 1972.

His long career saw him teach at universities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, North American and Europe. He was based at CEDLA (the Interuniversity Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation) in The Netherlands for a number of years before moving to the Department of Geography at Loughborough University as Professor of Political Geography from 1994 to 2011. During that time he also served as the editor of Political Geography (1999-2004). In 2011 he became Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University and was also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.

During the 1970s Slater emerged as a distinctive voice in radical development geography, critiquing mainstream development concepts, models and theories. He used a Marxist framework to explain the spatial characteristics of development, specifically how underdevelopment in the ‘Third World’ was shaped and perpetuated by relationships with the West. His pair of papers published in Antipode on “Geography and Underdevelopment” (1973 and 1977) were particularly influential and remain widely cited to this day. He wrote them while working in Tanzania at the University of Dar Es Salaam, during which time he was inspired by scholars from Africa, Asia and Latin America who were explaining inequality and underdevelopment in terms of colonial exploitation, political domination and dependency.

During the 1980s, Slater focused much of his attention on Latin America. Among his significant publications during that period was the book Territory and State Power in Latin America: The Peruvian Case (Palgrave Macmillan 1989) which examined the central spatial tendencies of capitalist development and state-society relations in Peru between 1914 and 1984, but with wider applicability to other countries in the region. He also edited Social Movements and Political Change in Latin America (CEDLA 1985), a compilation of papers from a CEDLA workshop held in 1983 on the topic of new social movements and the state in Latin America.

It is difficult to select examples from someone who had such a prolific writing output and published consistently in leading journals of geography, development studies, and political science. Certainly worthy of mention and exemplifying one of the major themes in his work is the article “On the borders of social theory: learning from other regions” (Environment and Planning D 1992) which was a criticism of Western ethnocentrism. He argued that ‘First World’ geographers should examine the West’s relationship with the ‘Third World’ in order to appreciate their own societies. His argument about ‘learning from other regions’ was quite influential as human geography began to grapple with postcolonial thought and remains very relevant today.

A number of Slater’s publications examined US power. The American Century: Consensus and Coercion in the Projection of American Power (Wiley-Blackwell 1999), jointly edited with Loughborough University colleague Peter Taylor, brought together studies of Americanization and American imperialism to assess how far the twentieth century can be seen as the ‘American Century.’ Following this, his much lauded book, entitled Geopolitics and the Post-Colonial: Rethinking North-South Relations (Wiley-Blackwell 2004), focused onUS-Latin American encounters and theorized an alternative postcolonial perspective for understanding contemporary political and economic globalization.

Over many decades, Slater’s work consistently challenged Western hegemony. His critical analyses of North-South relations exposed long-standing, ongoing and acute asymmetries of power and geopolitical injustice. While he was a provocative voice, he was also very highly regarded as a scholar. His complex theoretical work was deftly written and grounded in real examples. He was an inspiration to many students who were drawn to his critical perspectives on development studies and political geography. He will be fondly remembered by many colleagues at Loughborough University and beyond.

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Lawrence S. Hamilton

Larry Hamilton, emeritus professor of natural resources at Cornell University, who played a leading role in the worldwide conservation of mountain areas, passed away on October 6, 2016, at the age of 91.

Lawrence Stanley Hamilton was born in Toronto in 1925. He couldn’t wait to get out of the city and started working in logging camps in the North Woods during the summers while he was still a teenager. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm as a pilot. Both his early connection to forests and his exposure to the horrors of war went on to shape the rest of his life.

After the war Hamilton enrolled at the University of Toronto to study forestry while also working as Zone Forester in Ontario. For postgraduate studies he moved to the College of Forestry at Syracuse University, completing his master’s degree in 1950 with a dissertation entitled “An economic analysis of the cutting of sugar maple (Acer saccharum Marsh.) in small woodlots in the vicinity of Syracuse.” This was followed by a doctorate in natural resource policy at the University of Michigan; his dissertation, completed in 1962, was entitled “An analysis of New York State’s Forest Practice Act.”

Hamilton joined the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University in 1951 and stayed there for 30 years before becoming professor emeritus. He was an exceptional educator, advisor, and pioneer of courses in forest ecology, watershed studies, interdisciplinary collaboration, and international resource issues. In the early 1970s, he produced one of the first documentations of tropical rainforest deforestation (Venezuela) and mangrove destruction (Trinidad).

In 1980 he moved to Hawaii and spent the next 13 years as a Senior Fellow in the Environment and Policy Institute at the East-West Center, an institution which aims to promote technological and cultural interchange between people in the United States, Asia and the Pacific region. He traveled all over the region including Thailand, Western Samoa, Nepal, Indonesia, and Australia doing pioneering education in forest hydrology and tropical forestry, convening workshops and authoring hundreds of applied conservation publications.

While in Asia Hamilton became interested in mountains, recognizing them as unique and very delicate ecosystems, and suggesting that conservation efforts that work in many other environments can be devastating for mountains.

Since the 1970s he had been a member of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Commission on National Parks and Protected Areas (subsequently known as the World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA)), but it was during the 1980s that he began to draw the Commission’s attention to mountains.

Hamilton and a small group of fellow scientists launched a concerted call for mountain conservation, publishing “The State of the World’s Mountains: A Global Report.” They took their message to a wider audience as “An Appeal for the Mountains,” which was presented to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Earth Summit) and became the basis for the mountain chapter in Agenda 21. This effort, and the ensuing awareness of mountain ecology, is the work of which Hamilton said he was most proud.

Over the next 25 years, under his leadership, the mountain theme became an important element of the WCPA’s work and he built a strong global network of mountain enthusiasts and experts. He brought them together in numerous WCPA mountain workshops including Hawaii (1991), Australia (1995), Canada (1996) and South Africa (2003).

On the ground he provided guidance and advice to mountain protected areas including parks and reserves in Australia, Bhutan, Canada, Ecuador, USA and Nepal. He championed tropical montane cloud forests, corridors of ecological connectivity, trans-border cooperation for conservation and peace, understanding of mountains as water towers, and the spiritual/cultural values of mountains.

His formidable paper legacy is to be found in almost 400 publications including: IUCN guidelines on Transboundary Protected Areas for Peace and Co-operation (2001) and Planning and Managing Mountain Protected Areas (2004); and Managing Mountain Protected Areas: Challenges and Responses for the 21st Century (2004). He made special mountain contributions to PARKS (1996), the IUCN Bulletin (2002), and a World Heritage publication (2002). From 1992 until 2015, he also edited 89 editions of the quarterly newsletter Mountain Protected Areas Update.

For his work Hamilton received the New York State Conservation Council’s Forest Conservationist of the Year award (1969); the Environmental Achiever Award from the UN Environment Program (1987); the IUCN/WCPA Packard International Parks Merit Award (2003); Hawai’i University’s Distinguished Scientist award for work on Cloud Forest Conservation (2004); the Gold Medal for Mountain Conservation Leadership from the King Albert I Memorial Foundation in Switzerland (2004); and Honorary IUCN Membership (2008).

In 1993 Hamilton and his wife moved to Vermont to be near family. They set up home in the small rural community of Charlotte where they loved the natural surroundings and the four seasons. They also liked the sense of neighborliness and civic participation, and Hamilton was proud to be a local tree warden. He also served for over two decades as a trustee of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) Vermont where he shared his expertise through many local conservation initiatives. Just two days before his death, he was delighted to learn that they named the trail in the local TNC forest preserve the “Hamilton Trail.”

As well as the local engagement, bigger conservation issues continued to concern him. For example, in 2011 he travelled to Washington, DC to protest at the White House against the Tar Sands Pipeline Initiative. Beyond his conservation activism, he was also a pacifist and was an active member of Veterans for Peace.

Lawrence Hamilton’s life was grounded in a love of nature. He said, “If I can be responsible for saving one little chunk, I will have had a successful life.” In reality, his life’s work ensured the protection of mountain areas passing through whole continents, and their preservation as biological and cultural treasures for our future generations. He will be remembered for his vision, commitment, enthusiasm and youthful energy. Although not a geographer per se, his academic work and practical action was an inspiration to many, including members of the AAG’s Mountain Geography Specialty Group.

Larry is survived by his wife of 36 years, Linda; children Bruce, Anne and Lynne; as well as seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Main sources:
New York Times obituary, October 2016
Obituary on IUCN website, October 2016
Blog by Gillian Randall, November 2011

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Ary J. Lamme III

Ary Lamme, a cultural and historical geographer and professor emeritus at the University of Florida, passed away in September 2016 at the age of 76.

Ary Johannes Lamme III was born in New York on June 30, 1940. His grandfather, Ary Johannes Lamme Sr. had emigrated from Holland in the late nineteenth century and settled in New York.

By the time he was a small boy, the family had moved to Westminster in western Maryland, although his father still worked in New York and commuted home at weekends. From there the family had regular outings to the battlefields at Gettysburg and Lamme remembered enjoying the countryside, the war stories, and having picnics together. This was perhaps the gestation of a lifelong interest in historic landscapes, and Gettysburg would be a central example in one of his major works later in his professional life.

At McDonogh School on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland, Lamme enjoyed mathematics and the social sciences. He then went on to Principia College, Illinois, for undergraduate studies, graduating in 1962. He later acknowledged the role of particular geography, history and English professors there who enabled him to develop and use important scholarly tools.

Next Lamme moved to the University of Illinois for a master’s degree in geography, graduating in 1965. Military service then intervened and he served as an instructor squadron commander in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam.

After an unexpected release from the military, one of his former professors from Illinois enabled him to enter Syracuse University for a doctorate. There he was particularly influenced by David Sopher and Donald Meinig and their work on historic and cultural landscapes. His dissertation, completed in 1968, was entitled “The Spatial and Ecological Characteristics of the Diffusion of Christian Science in the United States: 1875-1910.”

His first teaching position was at the State University of New York at Cortland before moving to the University of Florida at Gainesville in the early 1970s, where he stayed for over three decades.

Lamme was interested in different aspects of cultural and historical geography, as reflected in his publications which cover topics including the historical development and spatial distribution of religious groups, the cultural landscape of the Amish homelands, the sense of vernacular regional identity in Florida, and a comparison of the physical characteristics of spaces where people were enslaved and where they were freed.

One of his most noted publications was the book “America’s Historic Landscapes: Community Power and the Preservation of Four National Historic Sites” (1990) which explored historic landscapes and how they acquire meaning. He used four case studies – St Augustine in Florida, Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia, Sackets Harbor in New York, and Gettysburg in Pennsylvania – to explore the community power issues involved in landscape preservation.

Lamme was a long-time member of the American Association of Geographers and recognized for 50 years of continuous membership in 2014. He was also involved in the Southeast Division (SEDAAG) and had presented his work at the Race, Ethnicity and Place Conference.

Ary Lamme will be remembered fondly by many former colleagues. He leaves behind his wife, Sandra, and two adult children, Laurel and Ary Johannes IV.

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Sally E. Eden

Sally Eden, professor of Human Geography at the University of Hull, UK, whose research explored issues of environmental perception, sustainable food production and consumption, passed away peacefully in September 2016 after a period of illness.

Sally E. Eden was born in 1967. She studied for a bachelor’s degree at the University of Durham followed by a doctorate at the University of Leeds.

Her first academic posts were at the University of Bristol and Middlesex University where she taught geography and environmental studies before joining the Department of Geography at the University of Hull in 1998 where she served for the last 18 years.

Eden’s research explored how people relate to the environment through consumption, leisure, knowledge and policy.

One strand of work investigated how nongovernmental organizations use and communicate environmental information, and how environmental science is used to influence policy and consumption. For this she focused on water environments, researching how river restoration is designed and justified and how laypeople get involved with and make sense of river management in the UK.

Another area of research was how ideas of sustainable consumption, environmentally friendly products and green lifestyles are constructed, legitimated, sold, understood and put into practice (or not). She explored these issues through case studies such as the environmental certification of organic food, sustainably farmed fish and well managed forests.

From 2013-15 she was Co-Investigator on a major project funded jointly by the UK Research Councils called Digital Economy: Food Trust. The goal was to explore how digital tools can promote more sustainable production and consumption of food through connecting producers and consumers. It involved the creation of three prototype apps – ‘Food Cloud’, ‘FoodCrowd’ and ‘Shopstamp.’ One of these, for example, enabled shoppers to scan QR codes on food products to access information about the farm where the item was produced.

Eden’s work was widely published in leading journals of geography, environment and rural studies. Sadly she passed away before publication of her book, Environmental Publics (Routledge, December 2016). This volume explores how ordinary people think about the environment as they go about their daily lives; how they engage with environmental issues in different contexts of work, leisure and home; and whether thinking about the environment make them do things differently.

Eden was a member of the AAG and a regular attendee at the Annual Meetings. She was also one of the Section Editors for the AAG’s The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology (Wiley, 2017). She was responsible for the “Environmental Policy, Management, and Governance” section, and also wrote three entries for the encyclopedia: Environmental Science, Environmental Restoration, and Environmental Issues and Public Understanding (the latter with Hilary Geoghegan). The AAG team will remember her as an excellent editor as well as a lovely person with whom to work. Her colleagues at the University of Hull and beyond will miss her greatly.

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John A. Enman

John A. Enman, Ph.D., passed away on August 17, 2016, at the age of 94. He was born on September 11, 1921 in Newton,. Mass., the son of the late John A. and Grace (Johnston) Enman. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, New York City and went on to receive his B. A. degree in Geography and Geology from the University of Maine in 1943. Having previously enlisted in the Reserve Army Corps, he was called up for active duty in the Army Air Corps in 1943. As he had been a geography major in college, he was selected to become a cartographer, serving in that capacity in India until the end of World War II.

After returning from the war, John earned an M.A. degree in Geography from Harvard University and went on to teach at Washington and Jefferson University in Washington, Pa. He joined the faculty of what is now Bloomsburg University in 1959, where he was a professor of geography in the Geography and Earth Science Department.

Dr. Enman earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburg in 1962, having completed a study of the historical geography of Western Pennsylvania as the basis of his dissertation. Upon retirement in 1984, he continued his scholarly research. His book, ”Another Time, Another World: Pennsylvania Bituminous Coal, Coke and Communities” was published in 2010.

He was preceded in death by his wife, the former Betty (Betsy) Buckles, on September 18, 2005.

He is survived by a sister, Elaine Enman, York Beach, Maine, and a cousin, Martin Johnston, Harleysville, Pa., as well as numerous friends and university colleagues.

From the Dean W. Kriner Funeral Home

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Leland R. Pederson

Lee Pederson, Emeritus Professor of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, who was a Latin Americanist and a historian of geographic thought, died on July 27, 2016, at the age of 88.

Leland R. Pederson was born on January 2, 1928, in Bismarck, North Dakota. He earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from Valley State Teachers College, in Valley City, ND, and a master’s degree in history from Colorado State College of Education in Greeley. Drafted during the Korean War, Pederson was posted to Fort Ord, in Monterey, California, where he taught typing.

Upon his discharge from the Army, Pederson continued his academic studies in the geography doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley. There he met Lucy Valintino, a graduate student in Spanish. Lucy was taken with his mercurial personality, which, over six subsequent decades, would prove a worthy match for her own forceful character. The two wed and traveled to Chile; there they lived from 1959−1960, while he undertook fieldwork for his dissertation, carried out under the direction of Professor James J. Parsons.

Pederson’s development as a scholar was greatly influenced by the vigorous tutelage on writing provided by Professor Edward P. Leahy to the Berkeley graduate student group. He had a life-long love affair with the English language and would become a stickler for proper usage, grammar, and spelling.

Taking his first teaching position in the geography department at Northwestern in 1961, he would be remembered by a number of faculty colleagues and graduate students there, as well as later on at the University of Arizona, for his critiques and constructive criticisms of their papers at the pre- (and post-) publication stage. Pederson frequently consulted an unabridged American-English dictionary, which he kept for many years resting on a stand in the Arizona department’s conference room, immediately adjacent to his office.

Pederson’s Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The Mining Industry of Norte Chico, Chile” was accepted by the Berkeley geography department in 1965. He continued service on the faculty at Northwestern through the spring of 1968. That fall, he and Lucy moved to Tucson, where they each would teach for the better part of three decades. Pederson took up a faculty position in the Department of Geography and Area Development, then a unit of the College of Business and Public Administration, while his wife began many years instructing language courses in Spanish and Italian.

Throughout Pederson’s 27 years at Arizona he taught first-year Human Geography, regional courses on Middle America and South America—staple classes for the B.A. and M.A. degrees offered through university’s Latin American Studies program—and a graduate-level History of Geographic Thought. The History of Geographic Thought was a mainstay of the required curricula taken by generations of Arizona geography M.A. and Ph.D. students. Like his mentor Professor Leahy, Professor Pederson left his forceful impress on the writing skills (and psyches!) of numerous emerging scholars.

After only a single initial year of service on the Arizona faculty, Pederson was named Acting Head in the fall of 1969. Soon thereafter he was appointed to an official term as Head and would lead the department until January, 1975. During the Pederson years, the geography Ph.D. program was approved in October, 1972, with the first doctoral applicants admitted to begin studies in August, 1973. Also during his tenure as Head, the university’s Committee on Urban Planning was merged with the department of Geography and Area Development, and the name of the department changed to Geography and Regional Development.

A long-time member of the AAG, the Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers and the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Professor Pederson served as Program Chair for the April 1988 Annual Meetings of the AAG held in Phoenix, and twice as APCG Program Chair, arranging the agenda for two Annual Meetings held in Tucson: in June 1976 and September 1991. Graduate students whose theses and dissertations Pederson supervised were Wayne Sigleo (1971), Peter Hoffman (1974), David McGrath (1983), Steven Turiano (1984), Linda Lizarraga (1985), Eric Shapiro (1989), Susan Moore (1992), and James Keese (1996).

Until his retirement in 1995, Pederson actively participated in faculty oversight of the university’s libraries. He continued to exert a strong influence and an unstinting insistence on the maintenance of standards of excellence for geography at the University of Arizona. He watched, generally with approval, as geography on campus advanced far beyond its initial humble roots as a small undergraduate program in the business school to its current position as a top-tier, full-spectrum, doctoral-degree-granting School of Geography and Development, now home to 25 regular faculty and over 25 adjunct and affiliated faculty and offering four graduate degrees and four undergraduate majors. Read his (2002) Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona: A History.

Until ill health precluded it in his final year and a half, he continued to pay weekly visits to the School of Geography and Development and, in his geographic historian way, to follow and assess the activities of its faculty and graduate students.

Recently he was asked by a publisher to have an updated version of his dissertation translated and published in Spanish: This was a project he undertook with his characteristic zeal for all-things-editorial. The book is now in its second printing after the first sold out.

Lee Pederson is survived by his wife, Lucy, and daughter, Lisa. Contributions in Lee’s memory may be made, per his wishes, in support of the University of Arizona’s School of Geography and Development through the University of Arizona Foundation.

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Bradley T. Cullen

Brad Cullen, professor emeritus in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico, passed away unexpectedly on June 4, 2016 at the age of 65.

Bradley Thomas Cullen was born on February 8, 1951 and raised in Portola, northern California. He studied for his bachelor’s degree at Chico State University, California, then for his master’s degree at Miami University, Ohio.

Next he moved to Michigan State University for a PhD in geography. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 1980, was entitled “Wood products plants in northwestern California: changes in location and size” and examined the forestry industry.

Cullen moved to Albuquerque in 1979 to take up an assistant professor post in the Department of Geography at the University of New Mexico (UNM) where he was to stay until retirement in 2014. During his career at UNM, he served as department chair and was instrumental at one point in advocating for the department when its closure was under consideration. Without his major contributions, the important department of today would be significantly poorer and may not even exist.

Cullen’s work spanned social and economic geography, with his primary research interests being industrial geography and problems related to the environment and energy consumption.Among his many publications was a notable book Sustainable Development and Geographical Space: Issues of Population, Environment, Globalization and Education in Marginal Regions co-authored with Heikki Jussila and Roser Majoral (Ashgate 2002).

He became a member of the American Association of Geographers in 1979 and was actively involved in the Southwest Division, including serving as the Chair in 1992. In addition, he was a strong supporter of the Applied Geography Conferences, serving on the Board of Directors for many years and helping to organize numerous paper sessions. He was also involved in the International Geographical Union including serving on the Steering Committee of its Commission on Marginalization, Globalization and Regional and Local Response. Other service included being a member of the editorial board for the Scottish Geographical Journal.

Cullen had been teaching geography on a part-time basis at Sierra College, CA, since January this year. He had also recently gained certification to teach English as a second language, and had been preparing to serve with the Peace Corps in Mongolia until his health required a change in plans.

Away from his professional life, Cullen enjoyed performances of the New Mexico Philharmonic Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera. He was an excellent cook reputed for his desserts but also loved eating out locally in Albuquerque. In addition, he loved dogs and was always seen driving around town in his Mini Cooper.

Cullen will be remembered as a consistently supportive and friendly colleague. Thousands of students he taught over the years will also remember his dry and wonderful classroom humor. He is survived by his older brother John, and sister-in-law Lorraine, and his beloved nephews and their families.

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