Anne Buttimer

Anne Buttimer, emeritus professor of geography at University College Dublin, died July 15, 2017.

Buttimer was Fellow of Royal Irish Academy, Royal Geographical Society (UK) and Academia Europaea. She served as Council Member of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) from 1974 to 1977; of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) from 1996 to 1999; and as President of the International Geographical Union (IGU) from 2000 to 2004, the first female and first Irish person to be elected to that role.

During her distinguished career, she held research and teaching positions in Belgium, Canada, France, Scotland, Sweden, and the USA. She was appointed Professor of Geography at University College Dublin (UCD) in 1991, where she remained until she retired in 2003. However, she continued to work relentlessly, attending overseas meetings, giving invited lectures and engaging in debates on the promotion of social science, European cooperation and the world of geographical knowledge production and its circulation.

She has received many awards and honours, including a post-doctoral fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation 1965 1966; Fulbright Hays Visiting Professor in Social Ecology to Sweden 1976; Association of American Geographers Honors Award 1986; Ellen Churchill Semple Award, University of Kentucky 1991; Royal Geographical Society (UK) Murchison Award 1997; Royal Scottish Geographical Society Millenium Award 2000; Member of the Jury for the Prix Vautrin-Lud 1998-2012; Appointed to Board of Science for the Austrian Academy of Sciences 2010; Doctor, honoris causa, University of Joensuu, 1999; Doctor honoris causa, Tartu University 2004; August Wahlberg Medal in Gold from King of Sweden 2009; appointed Chair of the Social Sciences Section of Academia Europaea 2010; elected as Vice-President of Academia Europaea 2012; Doctor honoris causa, University of Grenoble 2012.

Anne’s colleagues Alun Jones and Stephen Mennell write:

She was a powerful advocate of the discipline. She was truly international in her work, vision and activities; a gifted multilingual scholar with a sharp intellect. Her scholarship on place, space and the spirituality of everyday human existence was truly groundbreaking. One paper that had exceptional impact was “Grasping the dynamism of lifeworld”, which appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers in 1976, and has been cited well over 700 times. It drew upon the social phenomenology that was then widely influential in the other social sciences, and applied it to the culturally defined spatiotemporal setting or horizon of everyday life. In her work she promoted the emancipatory role of humanism, and championed calls for Western scholars to seek better communication with colleagues from other cultures to address global environmental challenges. Anne’s work received deservedly numerous international awards and honours. Most recently these included: the Wahlberg Medal of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography in 2009; the Lifetime Achievement honour from the Association of American Geographers, presented to her at the Annual Conference of the AAG in Tampa in 2014; and the Vautrin Lud prize (often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize’ in Geography) in 2014.

Buttimer conducted her undergraduate studies at University College Cork in geography, Latin, and mathematics. She earned a master’s degree in geography from the National University of Ireland. After earning her master’s degree in 1959, she became a Dominican nun in Seattle, serving in the order for 17 years. In 1965, she earned a doctorate from the University of Washington.

Anne was deeply committed to her family, friends, and colleagues and she will be greatly missed.

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Masatoshi Yoshino

Masatoshi Yoshino, a distinguished Japanese physical geographer who served the IGU as the founder and the Chair of the Commission on Climatology (1988-1992) and as a Vice President (1992-1996), died on July 4, 2017, at the age of 89.

He was a devoted scholar and kept writing and publishing quality articles till the very last moment of his life. Many people might remember him not only as a respectable scientist but also as an able and reliable organizer or leader, as can be seen in the success of the International Geographical Congress in Tokyo in 1980 which he conducted as the Secretary General.

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Marvin W. Mikesell

Marvin W. Mikesell, Professor of Geography in the Committee on Geographical Studies, died unexpectedly Wednesday morning, April 26, 2017, at the University of Chicago Hospital in Hyde Park, aged 88, in the midst of teaching his seminar on problems in the human geography of the Middle East this Spring Quarter.

Marvin Wray Mikesell was born on June 16, 1929, in Kansas City, Missouri, attended high school in Los Angeles and received his B.A. (1952) and M.A. (1953) from UCLA. He earned his doctorate at the University of California–Berkeley in 1959 under the tutelage of the celebrated cultural geographer Carl Sauer. He joined the Department of Geography at the University of Chicago in 1958 and spent his entire 59-year teaching career, from instructor to professor, at the University.

Mikesell’s interests in research and teaching ranged over the whole orbit of global cultural geography, while his special concerns included the ethnic and environmental diversity of North Africa and the Middle East, the bases of ethnic conflict and self-determination worldwide, and the ominous trends in regional environmental degradation. He placed great emphasis on fieldwork in research. His books include Northern Morocco: A Cultural Geography (1961); Geographers Abroad: Essays on the Problems and Prospects of Research in Foreign Areas (1973); Perspectives on Environment (1974), and, most notably, Readings in Cultural Geography (published by the University of Chicago Press, 1962). This last volume brought together classic articles written by authorities around the world, many translated from their original language; the book quickly became a standard work that shaped the international field of cultural geography for more than a generation.

At the University, Mikesell was chairman of the Department of Geography (1969–74, 1984–86), and Master of the Social Sciences Collegiate Division (1981–84), among many administrative responsibilities. Nationally he was a member of the U.S. National Commission for Unesco (1973–78), and an advisor to the National Science Foundation (1977–79). Marvin was a long-time AAG member, and served the Association in many capacities over the years, particularly as Assistant Editor of the Annals (1962), Editor of the AAG Monograph Series (1966–72), the Commission on College Geography (1970–73), National Councilor (1972–74, Vice President (1974–75) and President (1975–76).

Marvin is survived by his wife Reine M. Mikesell. A memorial service for Marvin Mikesell will be arranged for early this coming fall.

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John Davey

John Davey, a prodigious figure in academic, trade and reference publishing for almost 50 years, died at home with family at his side on April 21, 2017. He had just celebrated his 72 birthday days earlier.

After making his mark in publishing in the 1970s, John joined Blackwell as their first full-time academic editor. During the 1980s he took the company from obscurity to being a major force in the industry. He rapidly became an editorial director, appointed several specialist editors, initiated Blackwell’s reference publishing, acquired and started several new journals, and had responsibility for rights and contracts.

In 1989, John went to Blackwell in the USA where he ran the business for three years, expanded the editorial and production staff, and transformed several years of losses into a profit. His personal contribution to geography publishing was so distinguished that in 1992 he was awarded a certificate of special recognition by the Association of American Geographers and in 1997 the Gill Memorial from the Royal Geographical Society. The field of geography was being radically reconstructed during this time and John was the go-to publisher for a younger generation of scholars. He had a similar impact on urban studies, publishing key works such as David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City and Manuel Castells on The Urban Question. His endeavors in these fields were transformative and remain legendary to this day.

Derek Gregory wrote in his touching tribute to Davey, “[He] was one of those rare publishers who believed passionately that books created their audiences and that geography was so much more than a textbook machine. He didn’t spurn textbooks, but he had a non-mercenary and thoroughly ambitious sense of what they ought to strive for.”

A man of many talents, John was a keen fly-fisherman, gardener, cook and poker player. He is survived by his wife, four children from two marriages, and five grandchildren.

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Ray Henkel

Ray Henkel was born Jan. 28, 1931 on a farm along the Cimarron River about 30 miles west of Tulsa. He died March 11, 2017, at age 86. Ray attended a one-room elementary school, and in 1948 graduated from Kellyville H. S. in a class of 15, earning an A in every class. Ray had a photographic memory, so school work was always easy for him.

Immediately after H.S. graduation in 1948, Ray and his family moved to Arizona to pick cotton. For the next two years, his family followed other laborers, mostly Hispanics, into California and the Northwest to pick fruit, potatoes, vegetables and the like. It was at this time that Ray learned to speak Spanish. Since the family was driving old cars, it was also at this time that he became an excellent mechanic, and for the rest of his life he worked on cars, doing both small and major projects.

He was drafted into the Army in 1950. After basic training, he was sent to the Officer Training School for the Army Corps of Engineers at Ft. Belvoir, VA. There were 21 students in his class, and he was the only one without a college degree or any engineer training, but he graduated 2^nd in the class. Upon completion of the course he was commissioned an officer in the Corps of Engineers. He was assigned to Korea, and his unit, the 811^th Engineer Battalion, was attached to the 5^th Air Force, and he quickly became commander of “A” Company. Ray spent time in Korea and Thailand, mostly locating and building airfields and revetments, and building radar stations on islands off the coast of North Korea. As well, Ray was assigned as the Army Intelligence Officer for his battalion, and solved several major cases (only one remained unsolved). He left the military in 1952 with the rank of Captain.

Ray returned to Arizona to work on cotton farms. With his engineering and organizational skills, he quickly became manager of a large vegetable farm. He earned “very good money,” but eventually decided to attend Arizona State College, starting out part-time. He graduated in 1960 (by then it was ASU) as a geography major, with all “As” except for one “B” (in a class where no one received an “A”).

Ray went to the University of Wisconsin where he completed an M.A. and a Ph.D. Both degrees were in geography, but he had extensive work in agricultural economics, which greatly helped in his later work, and where most of his interests lay. His dissertation was done in Bolivia on the Amazon side of the Andes, at a time in the mid-1960s when coca production was just beginning. His work was funded by the National Science Foundation, and the title of this work was “The Chapare of Bolivia: A Study of Tropical Agriculture in Transition” (1971). This was the beginning of a lifetime of work on the subject of coca and cocaine, and the tropics in general. He often described many “close calls” with government troops and violent narcotics producers. It was dangerous work, but he developed contacts with the two sides, and luckily managed to survive. He had many stories and slides, and he used both with great effectiveness in classes.

Ray taught at ASU from 1966 to 1995. He took a leave to teach 2 years in the early 1970s at the U. of Zambia (to help establish their Geography Department), and one year at New Mexico State. Ray published on all aspects of coca and cocaine. However, all of these publications were in classified government documents without his name on them–as he once explained “I don’t want a bullseye on my back.” The only publication on cocaine with his name on it was with two co-authors on the use of climate for determining cocaine production (Nature Vol. 361, p. 25). For many years, during summer months, he worked for various agencies in Latin America on cocaine and varied problems in the tropics (for example, once on road building, where his engineering background came in handy). He traveled in both high society in cities, and among the poor in the jungles of the Amazon. He was considered the leading expert on all aspects of cocaine (the growing, processing, transport and distribution), and often was flown to Washington, D.C. for conferences, policy meetings, and for consultations. All of his work would be considered in the broad area of “applied geography.”

On first meeting him, many underestimated Ray. He was an “Oakie,” who spoke, dressed, and acted the part. But not only was he very intelligent, he was exceedingly observant, and quickly able to understand and make connections as to what he was seeing. He was also–academically and intellectually–a very organized person, and with this trait, he helped many graduate students organize and conceptualize theses and dissertations. He was a humble and quiet person, who never wanted to “stand out” in a crowd. He grew up in a very impoverished family, where everything was always shared, and that background influenced him the rest of his life.

Dr. Henkel contributed to geographic education at Arizona State University in many ways. He had a true commitment to students. He was a very compassionate person, who was willing to help any student who wandered into his office. Ray was always positive, never judgmental, and never had a bad word to say about anyone. He guided 26 MA theses during his career, but he helped many other students at all levels of academic work. He was also an excellent and very popular teacher. His classes were always educational and entertaining, and students flocked to them. He also taught many televised classes that were viewed by many in the community who were not even enrolled. Ray was involved with the geography honor society (GTU) from the time he returned to ASU to a year or two after he retired. He organized and led many field trips, held parties and gatherings, and organized an annual picnic that has since evolved into the unit’s annual banquet. He was liked and respected by all, and will be greatly missed.

Ray is survived by three brothers and numerous nieces and nephews.

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Robert E. Frenkel

Longtime Corvallis resident Robert “Bob” Frenkel, 89, died in Portland on Feb. 20, 2017.

Bob is survived by his wife, Elizabeth “Liz” (Mills) Frenkel; son Stephen Frenkel and wife Judy Walton; and daughter Ann Frenkel and husband Gwido Zlatkes.

He was preceded in death by his sister, Janice Pachner.

Bob was born in New York City in 1927 to Leo and Helen (Wolff) Frenkel. He discovered his lifelong love for the natural world in Central Park — his backyard. He attended Kenyon College in the late 1940s. At Kenyon he survived a jump from a burning dormitory but broke so many bones he was told he’d never walk again. Undaunted, Bob recovered within a year and graduated. He went on to obtain a master’s in metallurgy from UC Berkeley, where he hiked and climbed at every opportunity throughout the Sierras and Cascades.

After working as a metallurgist at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Bob returned to UC Berkeley in 1959 to follow a career path more closely aligned with his interest in the outdoors. He received a Ph.D. in geography, specializing in ruderal vegetation along California roadsides.

While at SRI Bob met and married Liz, who became a strong partner in his passions for mountains, hiking, environmental activism, international travel, good food and wine, music (particularly chamber music and the Oregon Bach Festival) and family.

Bob and Liz moved to Corvallis in 1965 where Bob joined the geography faculty at Oregon State. His specialty areas were biogeography and plant ecology, particularly in salt marshes. After retiring in the 1990s, he continued to conduct research as an emeritus professor.

Among Bob’s more notable achievements were his seminal work on salt marsh restoration at Oregon’s Cascade Head and his fight to protect the Jackson-Frazier Wetland north of Corvallis in Benton County. The county honored Bob by dedicating the wetland’s boardwalk — which Bob planned, raised money for and even helped build — as the “Bob Frenkel Boardwalk” in 2005.

Bob had a long history of environmental activism, particularly with the Sierra Club and The Nature Conservancy. His Sierra Club involvement began with the Mills Tower Conservation Committee, and included building and maintaining ski huts in the Sierra Nevada, becoming an active member of the Pacific Northwest Chapter, and serving as the first Chair of the Mary’s Peak Group and later as Oregon Chapter Chair.

In 1982 Bob received the Oak Leaf Award from The Nature Conservancy for his outstanding service for land conservation in Oregon, and in 1997 he received the George B. Fell Award for exceptional accomplishments from the Natural Areas Association.

Bob loved to share stories and slideshows of his adventures, from climbing Mt. Orizaba in Mexico, to a six-month bicycle trip through Europe in the early 1950s, to hikes, backpacks, ski tours, and international trips with his family. Though Bob’s memory was cruelly robbed by Alzheimer’s, these memories live on.

A memorial celebration in Corvallis is being planned for late spring.

Originally published in the Corvallis Gazette-Times

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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 friendsofjmm@gmail.com.

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 cmannozzi@aag.org 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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