President's Column

Climate Change and the 2024 Annual Meeting in Honolulu

September 11, 2023

NASA aerial of the Lahaina fire on Maui.

This summer has been suffused with visceral reminders of the consequences of climate change: intense and extended heat waves, poor air quality, high ocean temperatures, and the list goes on. As geographers, we knew climate change was already here, but even so the last few months have caused grief and shock.

The fires in West Maui continue to be particularly upsetting. As I write this column nearly a month after the fire, emergency organizations have confirmed the death of 115 people and have posted the names of another 385 who are believed to be missing. It is one of deadliest wildfires in U.S. history. And history clearly matters here. The Maui fires were enabled by economic and ecological imperialism, as Kanaka scholar Kamana Beamer explained in a recent piece in The Guardian.

Until the nineteenth century, a dense Hawaiian population thrived in an abundant Lahaina landscape that featured flowing streams, waterways that irrigated taro and other crops, and a fishpond. But this sustainable food system was appropriated, manipulated, and in some cases destroyed to enable extractive plantation monocropping that lasted over a century. When the former sugar plantation shuttered its business in 1999, increased diversion of surface waters and the absence of active agricultural cultivation resulted in overgrowth of invasive non-native grasses, shrubs and trees that fueled the fire. As geographers have been arguing for more than half a century, there is no such thing as natural disaster.

Local resident's tribute of tagging "Lahaina Strong" on a wall beside a road. Credit: State Farm Insurance — Local resident’s tribute, Lahaina Strong. Credit: State Farm Insurance

While there has been an outpouring of public support, other responses to the fires have been profoundly disheartening. Indigenous and environmental groups are contending with opportunists exploiting the tragedy to grab water and land rights. Residents of West Maui have instead advanced post-recovery visions for reducing inequality and increasing the strength and interconnection of human and non-human communities. That is a future worth fighting for (see the Maui United Way’s response to the fires; the Na’Aikane o Maui Cultural Center, a key player in the fight for Kanaka land rights; and ongoing efforts by the Hawai’i Alliance for Progressive Action).

All this means that climate change and AAG’s role in mitigating or exacerbating it are heavy on my mind.

AAG’s Work on Climate Thus Far

Thanks to the big-picture thinking of the Climate Action Task Force and the efforts of staff, AAG has made some important initial steps in mitigating its climate impacts. The entire AAG endowment has been de-carbonized, so that we no longer financially support the fossil-fuel industry. AAG has moved into a LEED Gold building, notably reducing its day-to-day emissions. The first cohort of the Elevate the Discipline program, intended to increase geography’s impact on public policy, is focused on climate change. Through these and other programs, Gary Langham and the AAG staff have made it clear that they are serious about climate change.

AAG’s remaining climate impacts come primarily from the annual meetings. That means that AAG as an organization and we as a discipline will need to make some hard choices if we are to have any hope of bringing our net emissions down to 0 by 2050 as spelled out in our climate action commitment.

Mitigating the Climate Impacts of Annual Meetings

There are multiple options that we could pursue to mitigate the impacts of our annual meetings.

While many other professional societies have backed away from hybrid conference models because they are expensive and logistically challenging, AAG is continuing to make it possible to attend the annual meeting virtually. Thus, one approach would be to eliminate or reduce travel emissions via virtual attendance and the node model pioneered this spring. Nodes would have the added benefit of allowing us to contract with smaller hotel chains and vendors with better approaches to mitigating their impacts.

Another option would be to change the pattern of our annual meetings more radically, holding large in-person conferences every other year. In the alternate years, AAG could organize a set of smaller “hubs” connected by video-conferencing, perhaps linked to the existing regional meetings; an entirely virtual meeting every other year would reduce emissions further. In either case, it would take creative thought to enable the intellectual community building that is such an important component of the annual meeting, but I believe it is doable.

A third option would be some sort of offset. As geographers and others environmental scientists have demonstrated repeatedly, offsets have a terrible track record. Leaders of the Energy and Environment Specialty Group recently suggested instead that AAG make a long-term investment in an alternative energy project that might actually offset some of our emissions, preferably one with a strong social justice component. If it were possible to find a legitimate project, this could be an important component of AAG’s climate mitigation strategy.

Over the long term, we need to pursue some combination of these more interventionist approaches (along with other creative ideas from the Climate Action Task Force and AAG members), if we are to have any hope of moving AAG to net zero. The bottom line here is that AAG is going to have to change, and to change radically. That means we as geographers will have to, too.

Immediate steps AAG members can take to mitigate the annual meeting’s climate impacts

There are things AAG members can do immediately to reduce the climate impact of the annual meeting: attend virtually and/or help to organize a node.

Attending virtually is one straightforward way to reduce emissions associated with the 2024 annual meeting. We need to work on making virtual attendance more engaging, though. AAG’s data shows that in the past few years, the average virtual participant attended fewer than two full sessions: their own and part of another. Thus, I would encourage anyone going the virtual route to think carefully about viable ways to increase their engagement with the annual meeting. I would also encourage specialty groups to develop at least one virtual networking event for their members.

Another thing members can do to reduce the carbon footprint of the 2024 annual meeting would be to help organize a node. This approach was pioneered last year with a mini-conference that brought together geographers in Montreal, and a watch party for students at Cal State Fullerton. Both were very successful, but organizing them took a substantial amount of work. If more people volunteered to help organize it would make a big difference. If you are interested in co-organizing a node, please contact Patricia Martin or Betsy Olson, the current co-chairs of the Climate Action Task Force.

Our work to reduce AAG 2024’s impact on carbon and climate change is intertwined with the important work so many are putting into centering Indigenous Hawaiian history, knowledge, struggles, and victories at the meeting in Honolulu. I hope, too, that all virtual attendees and nodes will prioritize attending the talks, panels, and featured sessions that focus on Kānaka Maoli. As geographers, we know that climate change is inextricably social and biophysical: prioritizing one at the cost of another cannot move us forwards.

I am very grateful for Neil Hannahs and Aurora Kagawa-Viviani’s review of and suggestions for this column.

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at rlave [at] indiana [at] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Boundaries and Connection: Creating a Meaningful Meeting in Honolulu

August 4, 2023

Panorama of Menehune fishpond, aka Alekoko Fishpond, historic Hawaii, Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii, USA

The first of AAG’s webinars in preparation for the annual meeting in Honolulu took place on Tuesday, July 25. Webinar participants Aurora Kagawa-Viviani (University of Hawai‘i-Manoa), Mahina Paishon-Duarte (Wai Wai Collective CEO and co-founder) and Ulalia Woodside Lee (Executive Director, The Nature Conservancy of Hawai‘i) shared stories, images, and songs to introduce Hawaiian culture and the central role of reciprocity; critiques of the impacts of imperialism and interlinked economic, environmental, and cultural struggles; and tools to help us organize the annual meeting in a way that positively addresses both. More than 130 AAG members attended the webinar, Aloha Aku, Aloha Mai: Aloha Given, Aloha Received.

These webinars are an important piece of AAG’s commitment to centering Kānaka (Indigenous Hawaiian) history, struggles and triumphs (see my July column for details on the other parts of that commitment), and to building a new locally engaged, justice-focused model for our annual meetings in Honolulu and beyond. This new model is an obvious step forward: in retrospect, it seems absurd that Geographers, the academics most centrally focused on space and place, have engaged so little with the areas outside our conference hotels. With the notable exception of field trips, our annual meetings have mostly focused inwards.

Yet this new model raises big questions, which Aurora, Mahina, and Ulalia crystalized for me in their comments on the 25^th. It is relatively straightforward to engage intellectually with Kānaka scholars, and even some local thought leaders, via key notes at the annual meeting. Economically, AAG has committed to waiving fees for Kānaka vendors during the meeting and providing lists of Kānaka-owned businesses to visit. But even a quick look at the chat log from the webinar shows that attendees also wanted to build meaningful relations while they were in Honolulu. How do we enable annual meeting attendees to build genuine connections with local communities without placing burdensome demands on their time and resources? How do we enter communities in respectful ways? In Ulalia’s words, how can we “level up expectations for guests” in Hawai’i?

There are no simple answers to these questions. My hope is that we will develop a collective response via the webinar series, and discussions among Specialty and Affinity Groups, the local organizing committee, and Kānaka community engagement facilitator Neil Hannahs. A few initial options mentioned during the webinar were:

Embracing our kuleana as guests: carefully considering what skills and connections we can bring to the local community, and being intentional about ways we can be useful and reciprocal.
Land engagements: field trips that enable conference attendees to contribute labor and resources to existing workdays for Kānaka community groups (rather than asking for special events for us).
Events for school groups: offering workshops for local schools, perhaps at the schools or in the Convention Center.

I look forward to adding to and refining this list in conversation with you to develop new practices for our annual meetings.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0136

President's Column

The 2024 Annual Meeting in Honolulu

July 10, 2023

Green triangular sign saying "Aloha visitors, please check in at office"

Over the last year, I have heard from geographers on four continents, voicing concerns about the 2024 annual meeting in Hawaiʻi in relation to cost and accessibility, climate change and carbon emissions, and Indigenous self-determination and legacies of settler colonialism. These issues of economic, climate, and Indigenous justice are deeply important to me, and I love being part of a discipline that foregrounds them and their interconnections. Thus, I deeply appreciate the people who took the time to reach out, and I am dedicating my first column as AAG President to these concerns.

The decision to hold the 2024 annual meeting in Honolulu was made in 2016, long before the current Executive Director, Gary Langham, or any of the current Council members held positions of authority at AAG. That said, we take responsibility for deciding to move forward. Our decision wasn’t made lightly, and it took into account the real costs of cancelling, as well as the inherent responsibilities in proceeding, especially in terms of climate action and attention to the wishes and wellbeing of the Kānaka Maoli, the sovereign people of Hawaiʻi.

I’d like to address these considerations one by one, although they are of course interconnected.

Indigenous Sovereignty

The concern I heard most frequently was about Indigenous self-determination, often citing tweets from Deondre Smiles, former chair of the Indigenous People’s Specialty Group, stating that Indigenous Hawaiians (Kānaka Maoli) did not want visitors to come to Hawaiʻi, and contemplating a boycott of the annual meeting. I reached out to Deondre in response to his statements on Twitter, and we decided the best way forward was to convene a conversation between Indigenous Geographers and AAG. After much consultation about who should be part of that conversation, we met on March 10 with a group of Hawaiian geographers, most of whom were Kānaka. They made two points that changed my thinking about the annual meeting:

Kānaka Maoli are not a monolithic group, and they have a range of views about and relationships to tourism; and
AAG was welcome as long as we were good guests. This second point is guiding a range of actions I’ll describe below, but the key is this: Rather than viewing Hawaiʻi through kitschy-touristic lenses (Grass skirts! Drinks in pineapples! Sun-bathing between sessions!), we need to do the work of learning about and attending to Kānaka history, struggles, and successes.

The geographers in that meeting asked AAG to walk away from typical annual meeting practices which, other than field trips, are only lightly tailored to the place where the meeting takes place. Instead, they asked us to center Kānaka issues throughout the conference, from the vendors to the keynotes. Among the most important things that we have agreed to and begun to implement are:

Kānaka vendors will have free space in the Convention Center.
Kānaka-owned restaurants and other businesses will be prominently highlighted in our visitor information, so that meeting attendees can support them.
Kānaka geographers and local people with a range of knowledge will be engaged directly in developing themes for the annual meeting that center their issues and concerns, such as US militarism, food sovereignty, and colonial legacies.
Field trips and events will be paired with these themes to create meaningful experiences of the Island.
Kānaka Maoli and other Pacific Basin Indigenous groups can attend the meeting free of charge.
AAG will work with interested specialty groups to select Hawaiian keynote speakers and foreground Kānaka themes.
AAG will develop a series of webinars to help attendees learn more about these themes in the run up to the annual meeting.
The AAG Indigenous People’s Specialty Group will have free space to run its own programming during the annual meeting.

Our discussion also resulted, in this meeting, in AAG hiring a Kānaka event coordinator, Neil Hannahs, the founder of Hoʻokele Strategies LLC, to help with all of the above, to ground us in Indigenous Hawaiian values, and help attendees to be good guests.

Climate Impact

We are still thinking about how to address the climate impacts of holding the annual meeting in Hawaiʻi, but there are a few things we can say with certainty now.

First, given the excellent and damning work geographers have done about the ineffectiveness of carbon offsetting, we know that is not a realistic option.

Second, thanks to the vision and persistence of former AAG President Emily Yeh and the members of the Climate Action Task Force she convened, the willingness of AAG staff to think outside of conventional conference models, and the impressive efforts of geographers in Fullerton, CA and Montreal, we now know that nodes offer a viable alternative to attending the annual meeting in person.

In 2021, AAG released a report to aid in decision making for its meetings. Based on those projections, we know that AAG 2024 in Honolulu could have much higher emissions than typical meetings if no options are provided (35k vs. 16.5k tCO2). Adding additional hubs can reduce emissions impacts dramatically, however, which is why we are seeking to scale up nodes dramatically. The current plan is to have at least 10 nodes next year, offering much lower-carbon and lower-cost ways to view, and even participate in, the annual meeting.

Costs

AAG’s early response to concerns raised about the meeting was to look into the cost of cancelling. Doing so would have cost over $1 million, or about 1/6 of AAG’s annual operating budget. Particularly because AAG has spent millions of dollars over the last few years of virtual and hybrid meetings, there is no way to absorb that cost without laying off staff and cutting back on activities that support and promote geography and geographers. We have opted to instead invest resources—funds and people—in hosting the most robust, ethically responsive, and locally (and virtually) engaging 2024 meeting we can host. As with actions we have had to take over the past nearly four years, AAG’s stance is a thoughtfully risky one.

We know that traveling to any AAG meeting is costly, disproportionately so for our many members who do not have access to departmental or other funds to attend. That’s another reason it is so important to us to keep the virtual option in place, and to do what we can to secure competitively low hotel rates. While Honolulu is one of the most expensive places the annual meeting is held, it’s worth noting that travel costs vary markedly by geography; I heard from geographers from Aotearoa New Zealand who were delighted that they could actually afford to attend the annual meeting this year. For all AAG members, we provide a number of options that can defray travel and registration expenses including the Community College Travel Grants, AAG Student Travel Grants, and AAG-GTU Travel Grants.

Looking Forward

I have learned much by working through the concerns raised by our members, particularly in terms of Kānaka Maoli wishes and sovereignty. I have also been surprised and very pleased at AAG’s response to both criticism and constructive suggestions. Over the last few months, I have shifted from being worried and uncertain about the Hawaiʻi meeting, to actively looking forward to learning more about Kānaka history, struggles and victories. Land acknowledgments, where many organizations stop short, have been criticized (appropriately, in my view) for merely naming histories of dispossession and death; AAG’s planned approach in Hawaiʻi feels like the beginning of an answer to how disciplinary societies can do more.

I hope you will be part of the 2024 meeting, and I encourage you to be in touch with AAG concerning any questions. Email meeting@aag.org,.

* * * *

Join us in learning more. At the annual meeting in Honolulu the AAG will pilot a new approach that connects the conference more strongly to the place where it is held. To do that respectfully and well, we need to learn more about Hawaiʻi before we go. Between July and March, the AAG will be hosting a virtual learning series featuring Hawaiian speakers and perspectives on a broad range of environmental, political, and historical topics including Indigenous ecological knowledge and sovereignty. We are excited by these opportunities and invite you to join us. You can register for free for the first webinar in this series.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0132

President's Column

Welcoming a New President to AAG: Interview with Rebecca Lave

June 1, 2023

Credit: Conny Schneider, Unsplash

For the last President’s Column of her term, President Marilyn Raphael sat down to interview incoming President Rebecca Lave about her experiences within the discipline and her aspirations for her upcoming leadership at AAG. The following conversation offers insight into the new directions for the 2023-24 presidency.

MR: What brought you to geography, Rebecca?

RL: I came into geography from a rather naïve understanding that geography was the place that put physical science and social science together, and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to write and think about the political economy of stream restoration and how policy physically changes the landscape. I wanted a discipline where I could really understand and focus on the interaction of physical and social forces. It felt to me like geography was the obvious place to go for that. This was for my PhD; my earlier degrees were not in geography.

So I applied and I got in, and then I went to my first committee meeting, where they were quite shocked and not pleased that I wanted to do physical geography coursework. But because there were physical geographers in the department and I knew them, I could go to them and ask if I could take their classes, and they said yes. So it did end up working out, but there was an initial shock of discovering that the field of geography was actually more balkanized than I had understood from the outside.

I think that it’s very helpful that I was 30 when I started my PhD. I took time to do other things between high school and college, and college and my masters, and masters and my PhD. So it meant that when my initial committee said no, I thought, “Well, you’re not the boss of me. (Laughter from both) I’m here for my own intellectual path, and I’m going to figure out how to do what I want to do.” I don’t think I would have had the confidence to do that at age 21—speaking just about myself at 21.

MR: I had a similar experience from the opposite side when I took a political geography course in graduate school. The human geography professor was very welcoming, and it became one of my favorite classes. My physical geography professors wondered aloud — why was I doing this? I didn’t get the pushback that you did, Rebecca, because I didn’t ask permission, I just signed up. It’s so interesting to see the kneejerk responses from the two sides of the discipline.

MR: What would you tell students about what makes geography so relevant to the questions and issues of the day?

RL: The first thing I tell students is that geography is the field that has the most intellectual freedom of any part of the academy. To me the beautiful part about geography is that you have no excuse for ever being bored. Every week, when you go into colloquium, you’re hearing about something totally different and outside of the normal academic arena that you’re used to, and I love that about geography.

I can’t think of a really pressing issue in the world today that geographers don’t study.

In addition to the intellectual freedom, geographers are talking about everything from urban environmental justice to migration and immigration to natural hazards to causes of and responses to climate change. I can’t think of a really pressing issue in the world today that geographers don’t study. And that, to me, makes it an incredibly vital discipline.

MR: Yes, I have to agree with you. What prompted you to run for office in the AAG?

RL: It was not something I’d ever considered doing. I was quite surprised when I got the email from the nominating committee, asking me to talk to them about running for the presidency. I thought about it for a while and thought it was only worth doing if I had a serious intervention I wanted to make — and in fact, I have two — so on the basis of that, I decided to run. But it was quite unexpected for me.

MR: Do you want to say more about what those interventions were?

RL: The first is that for the future of geography as an institution and intellectually, it’s important to have multiple strong bridges that connect human and physical geography. I think we already have one strong one in land change science, but until pretty recently, I would say that land change science hasn’t incorporated the more critical end of human geography. So one of my goals in running for AAG president was to promote more interdisciplinary bridges in geography.

The second intervention I want to make springs from having heard repeatedly from younger scholars and graduate students that they wanted to do community-engaged work but the penalties for doing so were so strong in terms of time to completion of dissertation, in terms of number of publications for tenure, all these things that stood in the way of doing community-engaged work.

One of my goals in running for AAG president was to promote more interdisciplinary bridges in geography.

Because those kinds of community-oriented, justice-based work are so important to me, I felt really saddened by that. So my second big initiative is to encourage AAG and anglophone geography more broadly to open up avenues to value and protect public and engaged scholarship.

MR: What would you say to a member considering volunteering?

RL: The first thing I would say is, even if you are coming from a department that hasn’t been involved before, the door is much more open than it looks from the outside. There are a number of avenues for getting involved, starting at the task force and committee level, then moving on to Council. I would really encourage it, because the organization is only as strong as the people it involves and the representation it achieves. I have now learned from being involved that it’s worth it, and really important to all of our futures in the field to support the organization that we belong to.

The second thing I would say is that it’s very interesting [to volunteer for AAG]. That’s another reason to do it! I have learned a whole lot about how AAG works. Also, the other councilors are coming from so many different institutions and regions, and I am learning so much about what geography looks like at other institutions inside and outside academia. That’s been really great.

MR: I really appreciate having been able to serve. I think, as you said, service to the organization is really important. It’s for us: the organization supports us, and we support it. It’s a reciprocal relationship. Now, my last question is what initiatives and projects you are most excited about right now?

RL: I’ll say four things.

First, I continue to be really excited about the work of the Climate Action Task Force. I’ve become a member of that task force and I will be working on ways to continue to make AAG less impactful on the climate.

Second, with the hiring of Risha Berry as the new Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at AAG, there will be a lot of exciting stuff happening around diversity and inclusion, and I am excited to keep pushing on that and helping support it.

Then, on things that I am taking more of a lead on, we started a Task Force on Public and Engaged Scholarship six months ago with the goal of doing several things:

Developing an AAG policy in support of public and engaged scholarship as a legitimate form of geography research.
Developing sample guidelines for tenure and promotion and for graduate theses and dissertations that departments could adopt or tailor to their own purposes, that value and protect public and engaged scholarship.
Creating similar documents for non-academic organizations such as research agencies or nonprofits that do that kind of work. How do we better support public and engaged scholarship in personnel reviews?
Reaching out to federal funding agencies who are increasingly encouraging researchers to include some element of public and engaged scholarship in their work but may not be as clear on what a good project looks like.

Finally, as part of being Vice President, I visited the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and graduate students there suggested having a day at AAG with a stream of events that is just for undergraduates and early graduate students to focus on things like professionalization and the many things you can do with a geography degree. This is a way both to support our students and to build ties across physical-human geography divides because everyone would be in the same workshops and getting to meet people from other campuses. This is a common sort of event at peer organizations, and it seems like something AAG could do.

MR: Thank you for sharing your vision with us, Rebecca. I know this is going to be a great year.

RL: Thank you!

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0131

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Connecting with Our Community to Bridge Divides and Raise Our Voices

May 2, 2023

Marilyn Raphael and her panelists Tianna Bruno, Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes and Kelly Kay posed for a photo after the 2023 AAG Presidential Plenary, Toward More Just Geographies. Credit: Becky Pendergast, AAG

It is now almost a month since our Annual Meeting in Denver concluded and I can still feel the glow. More than 6,000 AAG members converged on Denver ready to re-engage with their geography family. We were at first tentative about being with people in person, yet eager to restart the social-intellectual experiment that these meetings embody. I met many more members than I would normally — not simply old friends and colleagues, as delightful as that was, but also new members, in particular, early career geographers (students, postdocs). Everyone, from seasoned AAG members to brand-new ones to AAG staff, expressed to me how happy they were to be meeting and to be in conversation with each other.

I’ll mention three (of many) special moments:

There was one conversation that I overheard while having a quiet coffee, in which the members were saying how much they were enjoying the meeting, expressing the excitement of realizing that the author whose work you were citing in your presentation was actually sitting in the audience and that the meeting was totally worth the effort that it took to get there. I couldn’t help myself I had to go over and introduce myself as their President and confess that I had overheard them. They were delighted.

Another experience that I will cherish came at our opening reception on Thursday. I was greeted by a quartet of young African geographers who came together to meet me and be photographed with me. They were so excited that their president was a Black woman, they wanted it on record. Their excitement drove home to me how important diversity and inclusion are to inspiring and encouraging young people, not just in our discipline but in their decisions and ability to persist in their work and lives.

A third was attending [part of] the Bridging the Digital Divide networking session, which brought a number of students to the Denver meeting. I mention this because it is an initiative that AAG created in 2020 in “to quickly address the technology needs of geography students at minority-serving institutions, as COVID-19 disrupted their learning environments.” Actions like these move us towards a Just Geography, and the presence of these students at the meeting drove that point home.

The highlight of my meeting experience was the Presidential Plenary I led: Its theme, you will remember, was “Towards a Just Geography.” The plenary brought together ideas that AAG, and you as its members, have been working on for some time. The three panelists, geographers at different stages of their careers, suggested directions arising from their own study, experiences, and hopes. They reflected on the spatial and temporal dimensions of justice, the potential of critical physical geography, and the importance of mentoring our early-career geographers. These are only three facets of what is a multifaceted concept. However, the ideas passionately expressed by the panelists demonstrated a renewed understanding of how transformative the work of addressing justice must be, challenging our mindsets, frameworks, and assumptions.

This call for a renewed understanding stayed with me as I sat in on a number of themed sessions over the ensuing days. As I listened to the presentations, I was struck by the urgency of the voices of geographers as they discussed their work. I saw not only the value of their interdisciplinary and cross-cutting perspectives on the grand challenges of the world, but also the real need for the taking those perspectives into the public realm.

To meet that need, AAG has launched a major initiative, Elevate the Discipline, aimed at amplifying geographers’ voices with training and resources for media relations, public scholarship, and advocacy. In addition, AAG recently completed its Strategic Plan for 2023-2026, which features eight areas of innovation and effort. Woven directly into the new plan are the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion initiative goals, which will receive a significant infusion of members’ input and guidance this year with the launch of seven new working groups. I’d like to tell you more about these areas of AAG’s work and encourage you to get involved.

Apply: Elevate the Discipline program. May 5 is the last day to apply for AAG’s first-ever Elevate the Discipline training cohort. Elevate the Discipline is designed to provide training, learning resources, and a platform for geographers to be heard in the media, as voices for public policies, and in advocating for change.  In addition to the week-long training program this summer, AAG is developing webinars to be provided in 2024, and has curated a free suite of resources available year-round. This year’s theme for the week-long training is “Climate Change and Society,” which is particularly relevant to the focus on justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Join: Working Group for AAG’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) initiative. If you attended the Annual Meeting, you may already have had a chance to find out about the seven JEDI working groups that AAG is forming to enable members to advise and collaborate on the AAG JEDI plan. The groups will address governance, communications, focused listening, membership, reports, advocacy, and training. There are still spaces open on some of the committees, and you can use this link to apply.

In an article for ArcNews last year, I called for renewed efforts to suit our methodologies and research to the very real human needs and inequities that the climate crisis reveals: “There is so much more that physical and climate scientists, including geographers, need to learn about how we practice and use our science. We have made great strides in our understanding of the physical nature of climate and climate change. However, our understanding is limited by the fact that we do not incorporate the human element well enough.” Something similar can be said for our efforts to communicate what’s at stake: Do geographers have the tools they need to not only translate their research to public information, but also to connect the science with social impacts and possibilities? Both the JEDI working groups and Elevate the Discipline are powerful, member-driven opportunities to help AAG illuminate and amplify the social and physical dimensions of this current moment on our planet.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0130

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

In Denver and Beyond, Moving Toward More Just Geographies

March 10, 2023

Aerial view of downtown Denver with mountains in the background. Credit: CANUSA Touristik via denver.org

Our annual meeting is just around the corner, and I am excited. This is our first opportunity to meet in person since 2019, and AAG members are showing up! In March, more than four thousand geographers are going to descend on Denver, CO, the Mile High City, bringing with them the “spirit of Geography” More than fifteen hundred geographers will join remotely. Together, this means that well over 50% of our membership will be gathering to share research, ideas, and catch up, with one another for our largest gathering since 2020.

The theme of the meeting, Toward More Just Geographies, sprang from the ideas espoused in my nomination statement, back in 2020 when I talked about what we needed to do to create a stronger, more just AAG and discipline, and in the process, make Geography a force for positive social change. The heart of the theme is that the reality of a just geography is on the horizon, something that we must work towards, continually, but perhaps something that we never fully achieve. This is not setting us up for failure but a recognition that justice is not a finite, unchangeable thing, rather it is something that is constantly evolving towards an ideal. Hence, it’s towards a just geography. Member response to this theme has been heartwarmingly high — 471 of our 1,283 sessions are Just Geography themed.

Set against a backdrop of the numerous responses submitted to the appeal for member ideas on what a just geography means to them, the Presidential Plenary, scheduled for Friday, March 24 at 6:30 PM Mountain Time, is structured as a panel, featuring Tianna Bruno of UT-Austin, Guillermo Douglass-Jaimes of Pomona College, and Kelly Kay of UCLA. Our speakers will reflect on how we can approach a Just Geography in the tools that we use (GIS), in the framing of our research questions, and in our mentoring of students and early-career geographers. These reflections are not intended to represent the only ways in which we can approach a Just Geography, indeed, the member responses are rich with ideas on that subject.

Our intention is for these discussions to continue beyond the time allotted to the plenary and across all the days of the meeting. To facilitate this, AAG staff are creating at the meeting site, space where a curated set of the ideas discussed at the plenary as well as those contained within the member responses to the appeal are projected so that people could come in, sit or walk around and see the statements and spark conversations.

And there’s more! Beyond the immediate Presidential Plenary plans, in this meeting there are clear examples of the ways in which the AAG is moving towards a Just Geography. We are changing the way in which AAG’s conferences interact with the community, becoming less extractive while moving towards long- and short-term community engagement. This goes beyond the customary, popular offerings among our members to encourage mentoring, career development, and professional celebration and recognition. This year AAG also moves to connect with our host community, for example by once again offering a land acknowledgment on our website and during the meeting, and for the first time providing free registration to any member of the 48 tribes and nations with ancestral ties to the land defined by the state boundaries of Colorado. Several participants have taken up this offer. AAG works with and will make a monetary contribution to the work of the Denver Indian Family Resource Center (DIFRC), which works to protect the rights and serve the needs of Native American and Alaskan Native families in the Denver area. The DIFRC will also be on a panel of other Indigenous-led Denver advocacy groups on Friday, March 24 at 11:45 AM MT to discuss Denver as an Indigenous place. This session is co-sponsored by the Indigenous People’s Specialty Group.

The move towards justness is everywhere in AAG 2023’s programming. As noted above, one in three sessions is devoted to our theme of Toward a More Just Geography. A focus on just geographies is also a factor in our choice of honorees such as this year’s Honorary Geographer, Rebecca Solnit, who has worked conscientiously from an intersectional view of activism for climate action. AAG has given one of its highest recognitions to a person whose work arguably centers on justness. You can see Ms. Solnit alongside AAG members Farhana Sultana and Edward Carr on Saturday, March 25, at 10:20 AM MT, discussing the new book to which Sultana and Carr are contributors, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Narrative from Despair to Hope. Ms. Solnit will deliver the Honorary Geographer lecture on Sunday, March 26, at 11:45 AM MT. Local independent bookseller Boulder Book Store will sell copies of Ms. Solnit’s books onsite for signings.

Reducing our carbon footprint: Working with AAG’s Climate Action Task Force, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned to a less carbon-intensive meeting this year. The past three years have forced us to become more adept at organizing the virtual experience and now we are learning how to manage a more travel-intensive experience while continuing to reduce our carbon footprint. This is in line with a key commitment made by the AAG in 2020 to estimate and report the carbon footprint of the annual meetings, using the baselines that were established then. Our goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of our meeting by 45% by 2030, relative to 2010 values. Our meeting in Denver is likely to be on track for meeting that goal, something that unfortunately, is not as likely with our planned meeting in Honolulu. As laid out by AAG executive director Gary Langham recently, this is another aspect of the work we have been doing, which includes divesting from fossil fuels as well as making sustainable choices for our management and office space.

This year, AAG is investing significant resources in making the Denver meeting hybrid, increasing accessibility to members. At a time that many other organizations are pivoting back to in-person-only meetings, AAG has made a commitment to continue to offer virtual and hybrid experiences so that presenters and participants could take part without traveling to Denver, thereby increasing accessibility to the meeting. AAG has worked with other institutions to test “nodes,” the most active of which will be at Montreal, but there are others forming in other locations, such as UC-Fullerton in California. The organizers of these nodes are trailblazing for future meetings; as technology improves and costs drop over the years, we can look forward to these approaches becoming the norm for AAG meetings. Find out more about this year’s nodes.

Personal choices also matter. AAG is encouraging our meeting participants to make low-carbon travel choices to attend the meeting, and low-carbon transportation choices on the ground. We encourage you to signal us about your travel decisions using the #AAG4Earth hashtag, or to reach out to us at helloworld@aag.org.

All of these steps towards making a meaningful and memorable meeting, while small individually, move us along the path towards a Just Geography.

Visit the AAG 2023 website to learn more, register, or plan your participation.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0127

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Reflections on the State of Geography

February 1, 2023

Photo of a female graduate wearing cap and gown holding out a rolled up diploma

Credit: Felipe Gregate for Unsplash

Over the last few weeks I have been reading the AAG’s recently released report on the State of Geography. The report observes trends in post-secondary geography education in the United States over the period 1986-2021. These include trends across degree categories, and growth trends among students from populations historically excluded from the discipline. By historically excluded populations, I mean people who have been racialized/minoritized and excluded due to systems of white supremacy. The report confirms some of the concerns about our field’s lack of diversity, offers signs of change, and leaves us with important questions about the nature and constraints of the data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Here I highlight what I think are some of the important takeaways from this report.

What it reveals

A quick overview of the trends shows that the number of geography degrees grew quickly from the 1990s through 2012, but since then, that number has steadily decreased due largely to a decline in bachelor’s degrees. By comparison, masters’ and doctorate degrees have continued to grow. This negative trend in undergraduate geography degree conferral since 2012 reflects a broader downward trend across social sciences, unlike in physical sciences where fields like atmospheric science and conservation are both growing strongly. This is noteworthy because these fields are often found within or combined with geography departments.

Comparative bar chart showing the growth in women graduates across physical sciences, relative to geography; from the AAG State of Geography report, 2022 — Growth in women graduates across physical sciences, relative to geography

While the number of degrees conferred has fluctuated over the years, the field itself remains predominantly male and white, although women are making inroads at the graduate level. The strength of this finding is undermined by the binary representation of gender in NCES’s and other scientific institutions’ data collection. When I use the term “women” on its own here, I’m referring to a data category and not to individual or collective gender identities that the data do not reflect. With that said, the data show that people reported as women remain underrepresented in geography studies. They do have higher representation in graduate studies (particularly PhDs) than in bachelor’s programs, and a higher rate of growth in PhDs than in master’s or bachelor’s degrees. They also show more consistent positive growth in degree conferral than people identified as men. Overall, besides anthropology and sociology, geography is similar to other social sciences in gender makeup, remaining mostly identified as male.

It is encouraging to see that students in historically excluded populations appear to count for most of the new growth in the discipline, especially at the graduate level. Since 1994, growth in the number of geography degree conferrals has more than doubled among this population, and people identifying as Hispanic or Latinx make up the most rapidly growing proportion at the bachelor’s degree level. Geography degrees are not conferred equitably at any level of the discipline. However, this population’s numbers have grown relative to the total number of combined geography degrees conferred. In fact, it appears that people from historically excluded populations are contributing to any growth that geography is experiencing. Despite this trend, representation in geography PhD degrees is similar to that of other higher education fields, lagging in bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Growth overall has not increased among African American, Native American, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander students in recent years.

What it does not reveal

The report gives a picture of the state of geography in the US but also raises questions about the data. The way in which the data were collected/organized limits what can be known. For example, the way the data are organized tends to sidestep intersectional understanding of the discipline and students’ paths through it. Separating out race and ethnicity from gender is a superficial exercise that does not reflect lived reality.

Interpretation of the data should consider that the emphasis on STEM education in the United States has coincided with a decline in social science and humanities majors. Did this affect students’ choice of a geography degree? Perhaps. Geography is not consistently considered a STEM field in US degree-giving institutions. Thus, the emphasis on STEM may mean that students seeking a science career might not major in geography at institutions where it is not considered STEM. Nonetheless, overall trends for master’s and PhD programs show us that geographers seem to be finding their way to the discipline after they earn other bachelor’s degrees.

We also know that the NCES data categories themselves have limitations, especially as geography is such an interdisciplinary field and so rapidly advancing in GIS and other technologies. Many geography programs, in fact, need to or decide to apply non-geography categories to courses and degree paths. In particular, it’s possible that many geography-related programs, (social sciences, environmental sciences, etc.) are reporting GIS degrees or those with heavy loads of GIS coursework under the Computer Science and IT code. The large number of GIS-centric programs in the new AAG Guide database, paired with relatively low numbers of cartography and GIScience degrees conferred, could be evidence of this.

Where to go from here

Studying degree conferrals alone gives us statistical insights that can create the foundation for understanding the discipline’s trends, but it also inspires more qualitative questions about how a geography program’s design, curriculum, approach to recruitment, and faculty/student support can contribute to attracting and retaining a wider variety of students. The AAG is aware of the need for data that have more comprehensive categories and go beyond the quantitative into factors that are more holistic. For example, the AAG is interested in pursuing data that will provide a more detailed picture of gender identities, racialized and ethnic identities, and the disciplinary experiences and conditions that students are encountering. Later this year we will be asking for the geography community’s input into these data. Please respond when you see the call.

I encourage you to read the Report.

I’d like to thank the AAG staff members who prepared the State of Geography report, notably Mikelle Benfield and Mark Revell, for their data analysis, visualizations, and insights.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0125

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Toward More Just Geographies

December 14, 2022

Photo of large old tree with many healthy roots by Brandon Green for Unsplash

Credit: Brandon Green for Unsplash

The end of the calendar year can be a time to take stock, to renew one’s vision for the future and to make plans. For me, making plans implies hope, hope for a better, happier year. My plan for this year revolves around Just Geographies.

In the coming new year, I look forward to welcoming our members to our hybrid meeting in Denver this March, the first AAG event in three years to have a strong in-person component. Already, nearly 5,000 participants have registered: more than 1,000 sessions with about 4,500 presentations in all.

So far, at least half of all sessions at AAG 2023 will address the meeting theme, “Toward More Just Geographies.” My presidential plenary will kick off the discussion early in the meeting, and I am working with AAG to create a participatory approach to exploring what it can mean to create a “Just Geography.”

In preparing for the Plenary, I talked about this with some AAG members. We realized that a Just Geography is not simply a condition or place, but rather a goal towards which we should work. It is also not spatially or temporally fixed, nor is it something that we can achieve and then move on. Rather, a Just Geography sits on the near horizon, something we envision and can work to get close to, together.

Because each of us has different ideas about what justness means to us, a Just Geography cannot have a single definition. We need to put our ideas together to arrive at a more meaningful description of what is necessary to achieve justness.

I invite you to send to the AAG your thoughts about how to define and attain a Just Geography.

To this end, I invite you to send to the AAG your thoughts about how to define and attain a Just Geography. This could take many forms, from a couple of sentences, to a meaningful quote and citation, to a short poem, or a short paragraph. Since we have talented mappers and visualizers among us, we invite visualizations of all kinds. We would like your permission to project these different meanings of a Just Geography in the room where the Presidential Plenary is held in Denver, and to share virtually to meeting participants who join us online. We are also looking into setting up a conversation space for sharing these throughout the meeting, a place that also invites people to stay and talk with one another.

Through this work, we seek to share the many different and changing perspectives that each of you can bring to the question of a Just Geography. We would like to encourage the most diverse and meaningful dialogue around this question and its possibilities that we can.

Over the next few months, please send your thoughts on what a Just Geography means to you to helloworld@aag.org, or share on social media using the hashtag #JustGeographies.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0124

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Geography and Geographers in a Changing World

November 9, 2022

Photo of wind turbines on a farm by Karsten Wurth for Unsplash

Credit: Karsten Wurth for Unsplash

October and November are AAG Regional Meetings months, and I was preparing to go to my first as AAG President. As is customary, I asked what members would like to hear about, and was offered a number of different but related topics including “anything related to the future of geography and the role of the AAG.” The latter was especially important because a large proportion of the members attending the regional meetings are students — graduate and undergraduate. Instead of choosing a single topic, I integrated the two, and before I knew it, I had committed myself to speaking on Geography and Geographers in a Changing World.

Now, anyone looking at that title would instantly realize that this is not a 40-minute oral presentation; rather, it is the topic of a multi-authored manuscript (for example, this one) suitable for publication in a medium much like the Annals, or an edited book suitable for use in a “History of Modern Geography” class. In fact, a day or so after the presentation I casually googled the topic and found several related titles, including Gilbert White’s Geographers in a Perilously Changing World.

Graduate and undergraduate students in our discipline are trying to put their geographical education and their hopes for jobs into context as they prepare to leave university. They are entering a world that is more interconnected than ever — the speed with which information and misinformation are spread via social media is one example of that connectedness. Another is the reliance on mapping technologies for nearly everything, from finding the fastest route home through traffic to understanding public health trends. Our students face a world in which the economy is unstable, the global political state is tenuous, the climate is changing, and environmental degradation is a perennial problem. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, we have just experienced three years of a pandemic that has fundamentally changed the way we live and work.

Our students are so concerned about these issues that they are wondering how their geographic education is going to help them find jobs as well as answers to these pressing problems. Indeed, they are demanding a truly synthetic geography education that gives them a broad toolkit to tackle the world into which they will graduate. To meet their questions, it is worth reminding ourselves of who we are as geographers, from where we’ve come and to think about where we might be going. And how we fit into today’s world. It helps to take stock of what has happened in context, as we move to the next phase.

Changes in Geography and the AAG

“Change is a constant” is an overused phrase, but it is good to be reminded. Geography has been changing along with the world, very recently as well as over the last few decades. The discipline was once the static study of place concerned with how things are arranged on earth’s surface, with the map being the geographer’s tool. Geography’s quantitative revolution and the technological development of computers in the mid-20th century facilitated the development of geographic information systems (GIS), initially the tool of geographers but now used almost universally where spatial data analysis is needed. GIS, as well as new ways of thinking about things geographical, for example critical (human) geography and critical physical geography, means that geographers can ask different, arguably better, questions, potentially increasing the richness of their answers.

There has also been significant change in the leadership of the AAG, from one where men were far overrepresented, to one where women are more visible and active as leaders. The Association was founded in 1904. Seventeen years later, it elected its first female President. It took another 63 years before the second female president was elected (1984). Now, in the 21st century, a female president has become commonplace, so much so that I am the third female president in the last three years and next year there will be a fourth.

Other evidence of change within the AAG is apparent in the 2023 Annual Meeting theme: Toward More Just Geographies. This theme was chosen “in recognition of the urgency, centrality, and interdependence of equity, inclusion, diversity, and justice within our discipline and in the world” and reflects a core shift within the institution, matching changes that are occurring worldwide. This is not a singular action, but part of a fundamental change in the ways in which we operate. The AAG is now implementing a Council-approved 3-Year JEDI (justice, equity, inclusion and diversity) strategic framework.

The Outlook for Geography (as the Landscape Changes)

The point that I am making is that even with all of the changes that are occurring around us and within our organization, the core geographic ideas will not change. Geography, as in what we do, will change. A perfect example is how GIS has allowed us to ask new questions and to frame pre-existing questions differently, while still focusing on the richness of space moving from the static study of places on maps to the more revealing and arguably more interesting concepts such as the processes underlying the formation and interconnectedness of these places. A present-day working definition of geography is now closer to something like this: Geography examines human (e.g., social, cultural, economic, political) and physical (eg climatological, geomorphological, biogeographical) phenomena within the context of space, that is to say, how their location and their connections to others over space contribute to their characteristics and impacts and to the definition of the others.

The tools of geography are being used by other disciplines, and not just GIS. What I mean is that the interdisciplinary approach to understanding is becoming (or has become) commonplace. The contemporary movement in the social sciences, where I note many geography departments are housed, is towards addressing questions of global interconnection; migration, urbanization; environmental sustainability; climate change and its impacts, among others. There is a movement toward the use of more synthetic approaches to answer these questions. The synthetic approach is embedded in geography as is evident in the working definition that I outlined above and practiced in approaches like critical physical geography (and including critical remote sensing, qualitative GIS).

Finally, the demographic makeup of geographers is changing (or becoming more evident)

I am especially delighted that we see more geographers, representing many more identities: cultural, gender, ability/disability, and ethnic identities bringing with them a greater diversity of experience and knowledge. This expanding diversity means that different points of view are being introduced and incorporated into the body of geography. This can only make for a healthier discipline. There has never been a better time to be a geographer.

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0119

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.

President's Column

Climate Justice Demands an Integrated Geography

October 3, 2022

Message painted on wall that says "asterisk" Leave no one behind; photo by Etienne Girardet for Unsplash

Image by Etienne Girardet for Unsplash

Some months ago, I was asked to speak about climate justice at a monthly seminar series. The invitation welcomed my “perspectives on the role of Earth Observations (EO) for climate justice, areas of momentum within the geography research community [as] well as areas where attention is needed.” I was immediately tempted to say “no” because I felt that there were people better able to address this topic at that level, but the invitation cast the request within the context of my roles as the president of American Association of Geographers and director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, two groups which should definitely have something to say about climate change and climate justice. So, I agreed, taking it as an opportunity to do a deeper dive into the issue of climate change and climate justice, from the perspective of a physical geographer. I learned a lot — here is some of what I learned.

Climate science and climate justice

Historically, climate scientists have treated the climate as if it were a phenomenon separate from ourselves. We saw it as a very complex phenomenon that functioned on its own, largely beyond our control, its variability something that we could measure objectively, describe, and analyze. The study of climate variables that affected human comfort and survival was prioritized and predictions of the same were used to prepare for drought, floods and the like.

Climate justice demands that climate scientists no longer ignore what is right in front of our eyes but recognize and redress the ways in which our practice of science contributes to this injustice.

Human-induced climate change has changed that perspective. Primarily we now see that our use of the planetary resources, particularly fossil fuels, is directly responsible for the changes in climate that we are experiencing. The largely negative impacts of climate change, are unequally distributed so that people who are already disadvantaged and least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that forced climate change, are the most vulnerable. Climate justice, which recognizes how these inequities are exacerbated by climate change, is a movement as well as a way of approaching the climate crisis. The climate justice movement highlights the connections between climate change and social injustice. Most importantly, climate justice demands that climate scientists no longer ignore what is right in front of our eyes but recognize and redress the ways in which our practice of science contributes to this injustice.

To understand the role of EO for climate justice requires talking to climate justice organizers and activists themselves, given that climate justice, like environmental justice, is a movement more than an area of academic application and research. Physical scientists need to know the needs of groups working to advance climate justice. We also need to know the uses — present and potential, by and for whom or what — of the kinds of knowledge tools (datasets, models) we are working to construct. Additionally, often the need is not for additional research but rather a redistribution of resources to tackle problems whose causes and consequences are already sufficiently clear — especially to those who are most affected by them. So, we have to think in terms of community data needs as well as the relationships between producers of scientific knowledge and affected communities.

More generally, physical scientists need to pay more attention to the role of scientific representations of climate change in obscuring climate injustice. This is an ongoing issue. Here is one example — attributing responsibility for climate change to a generalized “humanity” instead of to a specific set of powerful human institutions that have a long track record of harming, exploiting, and extracting wealth from colonized and marginalized people and places. In this context, “climate change” might be more productively addressed as a symptom rather than a cause. We, rightfully, talk about the disproportionate impacts of climate change on marginalized groups but this framing can elide the underlying processes producing both climate change and systemic marginalization — for instance, settler colonial control of land that facilitates fossil fuel extraction and industrial development while undermining the ability of Indigenous communities to adapt to climate change’s effects.

A geographical approach to linking climate science and climate justice

In geography, there is an is an emerging body of work called Critical Physical Geography, which may be used as a lens and guiding framework for bringing climate justice into climate science. Critical physical geography advocates paying more reflexive attention to how knowledge is produced — how we conceptualize our research and the methods that we use. It argues that social inequalities and power relations are implicitly woven through what we study and should not be ignored if a thorough understanding of our science is our goal.

A recent paper puts urban climatology at the center of this discussion. Arguably, the city is the place where human impact on the landscape and climate is concentrated and where measurable and perceived climate change was noted well before global climate change was widely confirmed. Even today, the temperature increase attributed to large cities (the Urban Heat Island) is larger than the global average temperature increase. And cities are major sites of greenhouse gas emissions. The city is also the place where much work on environmental justice is done because of the unequally distributed negative impacts of the increased temperatures and air pollution, among other things. critical urban climatology draws on the tenets of critical physical geography to argue that we need both urban climatology and environmental justice to fully understand urban climates because they are shaped both by legacies of colonialism, and race, gender, and class; and by the nature of the urban energy budgets, the variation in air quality, and the thermal and moisture characteristics that define them.

Going forward, what do we do?

In those brief preceding paragraphs, I have barely touched the surface. There is so much more to learn, to inform how we practice and use our science. Physical scientists (physical geographers) have made great strides to understand the physical nature of climate and climate change. However, our understanding of climate, climate change and its impacts is limited by the fact that we do not incorporate the human element. The divide between these perspectives is nothing new, as Mei-Po Kwan pointed out in 2008, but this has to change, because our environments are no longer only physical or only human. Was it ever so? Bridging the gap between physical and human geography practice will not only better address climate justice but will also improve our science.

Learn more about AAG’s work on climate action and justice

DOI: 10.14433/2017.0115

Please note: The ideas expressed in the AAG President’s column are not necessarily the views of the AAG as a whole. This column is traditionally a space in which the president may talk about their views or focus during their tenure as president of AAG, or spotlight their areas of professional work. Please feel free to email the president directly at raphael [at] geog [dot] ucla [dot] edu to enable a constructive discussion.