Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
With large-scale demand and a mission to protect public health, hospitals are emerging as the next frontier of the sustainable food movement. Health care institutions spend $12 billion in the food and beverage sector each year,1 and a single hospital can have an annual food budget of $1–7 million or more.2 Even small shifts in foodservice budgets can create new markets for alternative foods.
To date, the darlings of the food movement have been farmers’ markets, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, and urban farms that connect eaters directly with the source of their food. These models appear to have boosted the number of small farmers in the U.S. after decades of freefall,3 but research shows that we now have an increasingly bifurcated system that favors small-scale direct markets and large-scale commodity markets. What’s more, experts believe that direct market models are reaching a saturation point even though they’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of the agricultural status quo. Local food sales account for less than two percent of total farm gross, and the goods exchanging hands at some 7,800 farmers’ markets nationwide represent less than one percent of total U.S. agricultural production.4
Meanwhile, mid-sized family farmers are being squeezed out by the march of consolidation within the food system, as are independent middlemen that aggregate, process, and distribute food regionally.5 This agriculture of the middle, meaning mid-sized family farmers and mid-level food system intermediaries, represents the most threatened set of entities in the agricultural sector. Direct market models hold little sway in solving this problem, they are too small to support mid-sized farmers, and they purposefully cut out middlemen.
Leading-edge food system advocates are looking to institutional buyers like hospitals, schools, and universities to help rebuild this missing middle ground because they buy in large volumes and they rely on the wholesalers, processors, and distributors that make up the functional infrastructure of the U.S. food system. But the leap in scale from an individual buying three onions at a farmers’ market to a hospital buying three hundred cases is not simply one of numbers, it presents an entirely different set of challenges, opportunities, and relationships. When you’re making soup for six hundred, changing your grocery list quickly gets complicated.
A team of San Francisco Bay Area hospitals have been at the vanguard of this institutional food revolution since 2005. Leaders including Kaiser Permanente, University of California at San Francisco Medical Center, John Muir Health, and the San Francisco VA Medical Center, gathered at the FoodMed Conference in Oakland, California that year. A non-profit organization called Health Care Without Harm convened leaders from the sustainable agriculture, environmental health, public health, and health care sectors to discuss their overlapping concerns and goals. Together, they articulated a systemic environmental nutrition approach to healthy food, going beyond counting calories and balancing food groups to address the many ways the food system impacts public health.
Since then, over 550 hospitals nationwide, they have signed a Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge generated by the nonprofit coalition Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) which states that “for the consumers who eat it, the workers who produce it and the ecosystems that sustain us, healthy food must be defined not only by nutritional quality, but equally by a food system that is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and supportive of human dignity and justice.”
Hospitals are putting this vision into practice by serving local produce when it’s in season, switching to rBGH-free dairy products, and sourcing seafood from community-based fisheries. They are buying fair trade coffee, cage-free eggs, and organic salad greens. Some are reducing meat servings to lower their greenhouse gas footprint and are using the cost savings to buy grass-fed beef and free-range chicken raised without antibiotics or added hormones.
“Local, organic chicken was a real challenge” says one leading Bay Area Hospital Food and Nutrition Services Director. Under the current system, he can place an order on his food distributor’s website, and the next day hundreds of uniform 4-ounce chicken breasts show up on his loading dock, shrink-wrapped and stacked by the case. Procuring local, organic chicken first required weeks of working through bureaucratic purchasing and legal systems to set up a new vendor relationship. When the hospital finally received its first delivery, it was an ice-packed box of whole chickens with the heads and feet still on. “My cooks almost died,” he reports. Having to chop off chicken heads is a far cry from lining up a row of boneless, skinless meat parts in the griller. Most institutional kitchens no longer have the equipment or staff with the knowledge necessary to deal with whole foods.
The pallets of uniform poultry parts that come through national distributors like Sysco and US Foods also help hospitals to meet strict federal dietary guidelines, as each cut arrives within a fraction of the weight ordered. In contrast, locally-sourced chicken breasts, even if they arrive pre-processed, might come in a four to eight ounce range, forcing staff to slice and individually weigh servings. With tight budgets, paying staff to mete out perfect portions may not be time that a hospital foodservice department can afford.
Efficiency has been a dirty word in some food movement circles, but a little efficiency goes a long way when you’re serving hundreds to thousands of meals every day. Equally blasphemous has been middlemen. But buying food at the institutional scale means relying on certain industrial-style standards and relationships. Hospitals are a microcosm of the challenges that face the alternative food movement as it seeks to scale up — they need to balance their sustainable food goals with their need for efficiency and affordability.
Initiatives like the Farm Fresh Healthcare Project offer insight into how leading hospitals are working with distributors to retrofit existing supply chains to become shorter, more flexible, and more transparent. Since 2011, a team of hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area have partnered with Health Care Without Harm and Community Alliance with Family Farmers to source more local and organic produce from family farmers.
Beyond purchasing power, hospitals can leverage another form of currency in support of organic agriculture – moral authority. Polls consistently show that health professionals rank as some of the most trusted experts in the United States. [1] They can “tell stories about great farmers,” as Luis Vargas, Procurement Manager for Nutrition and Food Services at University of San Francisco Medical Center says, “People look to us for this leadership, and we should be showing the way.” Like the first hospitals to ban smoking on their grounds, which led to greater public awareness and smoking restrictions in other locations,6 those that are leading the environmental nutrition movement are enacting changes that will have ripple effects throughout society.
David de Laubenfels, emeritus professor in the Department of Geography at Syracuse University, and a biogeographer who was an expert on tropical conifers, passed away on February 6, 2016, at the age of 90.
David John de Laubenfels was born in 1925 in Pasadena, California. His father, Max Walker de Laubenfels, was a noted marine biologist which perhaps influenced the development of David’s interests in the natural world.
After serving in the Quartermaster Corps of the United States Army during the Second World War, de Laubenfels attended Colgate University, NY. As part of his undergraduate studies, he completed “A Geographic Study in the Hamilton Area, New York.” Having graduated in 1949 he moved to the University of Illinois for postgraduate studies. His master’s degree, completed in 1950, included a thesis entitled “Marketing Geography of Open Display Cold Storage Equipment” while his doctorate dissertation, completed in 1953, was entitled “The Temuco Region, A Geographic Study in South Central Chile.” Despite the subject matter of these three studies, he was already gravitating towards physical geography and, more particularly, to biogeography.
His first professional appointment was at the University of Georgia, starting as Assistant Professor in 1953 and moving to Associate Professor in 1958. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Syracuse University where he remained for the rest of his career, attaining the rank of full Professor in 1971 and retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1993.
De Laubenfels studied the variation of vegetation from place to place. Among his many publications in biogeography are the books A Geography of Plants and Animals (1970) and Mapping the World’s Vegetation: Regionalization of Formations and Flora (1975).
He carried out various studies in the United States, publishing articles on the soil and vegetation of New York State, the characteristics of the Ozark Upland in the Midwest, the nature and boundaries of the Corn Belt, conifers of southeast, and the semi-tropical woodland of Georgia. He also did a comparative study of Australian forests with vegetation of similar climatic areas in the Americas.
However, it is for his work on the taxonomy of conifers, particularly tropical conifers, that de Laubenfels is known throughout the world. In carrying out his studies, he traveled whenever possible to the actual locations where the plants were established so that he could see them in their many natural growth forms. He had a particular interest in the south Pacific, carrying out field expeditions to locations including New Caledonia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Moluccas. New Caledonia was of particular interest due to the rare conifers there; on one of his expeditions he discovered a parasitic conifer and published his finds in Science (1959). He also studied conifers in Latin America including Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru and Uruguay.
His first major taxonomic revision in conifers was published in 1969: “A Revision of the Malesian and Pacific Rainforest Conifers, I Podocarpaceae.” In 1972, his chapter on “Gymnospermes” published in Flore de la Nouvelle-Caledonie et Dependances was a seminal piece of work because of the importance and uniqueness of this group of plants. Another major taxonomic publication, Coniferales, Flora Malesiana was published in 1988. Over the years, de Laubenfels identified over 100 new species in the tropics; in the photograph above he is examining Podocarpus beecherae, one of those he named. He also had one species named in his honor – Araucaria laubenfelsii, commonly known as the De Laubenfels’ araucaria – which is native to southern New Caledonia.
Outside of his taxonomic and plant geography work, de Laubenfels had a wide variety of interests on topics such as the geographic origins of human development and the origins of language. He also published a book on physics entitled It’s Hard to Believe in Infinity (1992). Meanwhile in another work, “Where Sherman Passed By” (1957), he highlighted General Sherman’s march through Georgia, walking the entire route using the maps of his great-grandfather, John (Rziha) Laube de Laubenfels, chief topographical engineer for one of Sherman’s columns.
De Laubenfels joined the American Association of Geographers in 1949 and was involved in the Regional Division that included New York State, presenting papers at regional meetings including “Plant Geography Versus Vegetation Geography” (1962) and “The Variations of Vegetation from Place to Place” (1968).
He was also a member of the American Conifer Society and British Conifer Society. His love of nature was reflected locally too: he was a long-time member of the Onondaga chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club.
David de Laubenfels will be remembered for his major contributions to biogeography and his unparalleled expertise in tropic conifers. He had a remarkable career, with academic publications spanning from 1950 to 2015 when he was in his 90th year.
He is survived by his loving wife, Janet, three daughters, five step-children, several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, as well as three siblings. He was predeceased by his son, Eric.
Harold Rose, distinguished professor emeritus of geography and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and pioneer in research on race and segregation, passed away on February 2, 2016, at the age of 86.
Harold Milton Rose was born on January 8, 1930 in Nashville, Tennessee. He was raised by his grandparents, of whom his grandfather worked in a phosphate mine and his grandmother as a domestic.
Despite skipping several grades in school, he went to college at the age of 16 – somewhat by chance – having had heard that a friend had applied to Tennessee State, a historically black college, and been accepted. Rose paid his way through his four years of college by working in the cafeteria every day.
Having graduated with a degree in history and geography in 1950, Rose spent time in the Army then returned to Tennessee State to take some further geography courses. There he was encouraged by a professor to apply for a master’s program at Ohio State University.
He taught for a few years at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, also a historically black college, before returning to Ohio State University for a doctorate in geography. His thesis, completed in 1960, was entitled “An Analysis of Land Use in Central-North Florida: A Study in Conservation.”
In 1962, Rose received a joint appointment in the departments of geography and urban affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), one of the first tenured African American professors at the university. Although he was sought by other universities, Rose spent his entire career at UWM. This included serving as chair of the Department of Urban Affairs (1970-1973 and 1974-1977), Department of Afro-American Studies (1977-1978), and Department of Geography (1990-1994).
Although Rose began his academic career exploring issues of natural resource management, he shifted focus after arriving in Milwaukee in 1962. He had moved to a deeply segregated city during a time of heightened civil rights activism around housing and school segregation. He pioneered research on the conditions faced by African Americans and went on to build a national reputation in the field, specifically how racism and racial policy affected urbanization.
Rose’s foundational work on racial discrimination and segregation challenged urban geographers to consider the ghetto as produced through both spatial and social processes. His scholarship established that examining segregation was not just about mapping the distribution of racial groups across the urban landscape, but also about understanding the social processes and attitudes about race that produced those patterns.
He conducted community-engaged research field research on the quality of life in black communities, the black ghetto, black residential mobility and interregional migration, high rates of homicide in many black communities, and the experience of blacks and Cubans in Miami.
Among his many publications on race, segregation and violence were the books “The Black ghetto: a spatial behavioral perspective” (1971), “Black Suburbanization: Access to Improved Quality of Life or Maintenance of the Status Quo?” (1976), and “Race, Place and Risk: Black Homicide in Urban America” (1990, coauthored with Paula McClain).
His academic research was driven by his passion for social justice. Aside from his scholarship, he was extensively involved in community service, from his early work with the Milwaukee Urban League to his seat on the Board of Directors for the community-based North Milwaukee State Bank.
Rose retired from UWM in 1995 as distinguished professor emeritus, after thirty-one years of teaching, pioneering scholarship, and a remarkable career of mentoring and public scholarship. The university established the Harold M. Rose Lecture series focused on race and urban social justice in tribute to his legacy to the department, the university and the discipline of geography.
Rose joined the American Association of Geographers in 1955. In 1976 he was elected its President, the first – and to date only – African American to hold that position. He used his platform to challenge urban racial segregation and discrimination. His presidential address entitled “Geographies of Despair” (subsequently published in the Annalsof the AAG in 1978) voiced the need to expand research into the experiences of African Americans.
In 1996 Rose was awarded the AAG’s Lifetime Achievement Honor and in 2012 an award was created in his name – the Harold M. Rose Award for Anti-Racist and Practice in Geography – to honor geographers who have advanced the discipline through their research on racism, and who have also had on impact on anti-racist practice. To date the award has been given to Donald Deskins, Jr. (2013), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2014), and Bobby Wilson (2015).
With the passing of Harold Rose, geography has lost an extraordinarily important figure. His research made significant contributions to geographic understandings of segregation and racism as a socio-spatial process. His work was courageous in challenging racism at a time when very few in geography even acknowledged racism and its consequences. He was also an exemplar of how scholars can go beyond theoretical understandings of social practices to engage actual communities and to make a difference in human life. Rose regretted that his life required him to be consumed with issues of race, but he knew that to be less involved was ‘simply not possible.’
Harold Rose was humble, kind and generous. He will be fondly remembered by many former colleagues and students at UWM and across the United States. He is survived by his lovingly wife of 60 years, Ann Louise, their son, Gregory, a granddaughter and three great-grandchildren.
AAG Archivist Geoffrey Martin Provides Rare Glimpses into the History of Geography
A near-capacity crowd gathered on January 21, 2016, in the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to hear a talk by the doyen of the history of geography, Dr. Geoffrey J. Martin, Professor Emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University and the official archivist of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) for more than 30 years.
Martin was invited to speak about his new book, American Geography and Geographers: Toward Geographical Science, which was published in 2015 by Oxford University Press. However, his talk was as much an account of his own career-long journey to collect material and write about the history of American geography as about the book itself.
As a young academic, Martin was drawn to three figures in American geography, who had shaped the discipline in the first half of the twentieth century: Mark Jefferson, Ellsworth Huntington and Isaiah Bowman. All studied at Harvard under William Morris Davis, the man who played a founding role in the establishment of the academic discipline in America. While Davis’s work focused on ‘physiograhy,’ his three disciples pursued new directions in geography which examined the physical earth as the home of man: Jefferson with anthropography; Huntington with physical climatology; and Bowman with the concept of region.
Over the years, Martin systematically collected archival information on the life and work of these three geographers which was published respectively as Mark Jefferson: Geographer (1968), Ellsworth Huntington: His life and thought (1973), and The life and thought of Isaiah Bowman (1980).
Following the publication of this trilogy, Martin then set out on a grander project: to tell the larger story of American geography and geographers. The recently published title covering the period from 1870 to 1970 took 17 years to research and write. It is a testament to Martin’s meticulous attention to detail — pursuing every lead, uncovering every possible manuscript, and tracking down every living person to interview.
Martin is an archivist extraordinaire. In the course of more than five decades of research, he visited 17 countries, consulted 300 archival holdings, accumulated 115,000 manuscripts, and personally corresponded with more than 100 people.
What came across during his presentation was Martin’s sense of sheer pleasure and privilege at being able to work with the living relatives of the key scholars in the book, including weekly lunches with Ellsworth Huntington’s wife and four successive summers spent in the basement of Isaiah Bowman’s son, Bob. He also told stories about some of the challenges and frustrations of working with archival material, from a will that prevented access for 50 years (which he negotiated with the family down to 25 years) to a son who ceremonially burned manuscripts from his father’s archive from time to time. During the Cold War, he also had to defend himself during the McCarthy investigations after a colleague turned him in for allegedly being a Communist sympathizer. The unjustified evidence was a small set of Russian books on chess strategies from when he was a world-class champion of the game.
Martin, now in his early 80s, is truly of the old school. He has not embraced modern technology, which makes one respect his research and writing even more — from his correspondence carried out by hand-written letter to his dedication in answering geography questions via telephone at any time of day or night.
Martin’s expansive and in-depth knowledge of the history of geography and geographers is unparalleled. Through his exposition of the main characters in American geography, one feels to have actually met them personally. The joy of listening to Geoffrey Martin is the combination of hearing an authoritative scholar, as well as an entertaining raconteur.
Sadly, these days the history of geography is not a particularly popular sub-discipline, but geographers of all ages and all nations ought to pay heed to Geoffrey Martin’s landmark text, American Geography and Geographers.
Ralph Ehrenberg, Chief of the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress, and Douglas Richardson, Executive Director of the AAG, took the opportunity to not only honor Martin at Thursday’s event, but also to introduce the recent agreement of the consolidation of the AAG’s century-plus old archives to the Library of Congress. Collections are currently being moved from several scattered locations to this central place, which will make many important and rare materials available to scholars and historians worldwide. In celebration of this, and to complement Martin’s talk, the Geography and Map Division displayed unique and rare historic maps, documents and other artifacts.
I am writing this column on the first day of the new year. Effective January 1, 2016, the AAG will begin to operate under the name “American Association of Geographers,” rather than “Association of American Geographers.” The membership voted overwhelmingly in both 2014 and 2015 to make this change. The name “American Association of Geographers” is a registered “DBA” or “doing business as” name. Using a DBA name does not require the AAG to change the association’s prior name, and both names can legally be used by the association. The new name will be phased in over the next year.
I know some members are not happy about the change but it is, in fact, a recognition that our organization has changed. We have substantial membership from outside the United States. Our annual meeting is enlivened with participants from around the world. Our journals invite submissions from geographers everywhere and we publish the abstracts in multiple languages. We are an international organization that is located in the United States. The name reflects who we have become. Of course this means a new logo and some adjustments over time. And it means that at some point we may wish to re-think our systems of representation to acknowledge our growing internationalism. We have regional councillors, national councillors—do we need international councillors? That is an agenda item for another president, not me. Continue Reading.
Important Election Information: AAG Voting Now Open
The AAG online election is now open through Feb. 4, 2016. Each member may vote with the special email code you received Monday, Jan. 11, via your preferred email address. This code will allow you to sign in to our AAG SimplyVoting website and vote.
If you didn’t receive your electronic ballot for the 2016 AAG Election, please check your spam folder. To ensure you receive further election communications, please add aag [at] simplyvoting [dot] comto your address book, so we’ll be sure to land in your inbox.
C. Patrick Heidkamp, Southern Connecticut State U.
Jonathan Leib, Old Dominion U.
Laura Pulido, U. of Southern California
ANNUAL MEETING
Session Commemorating William Garrison To Follow Presentation of Garrison Award
The recipient of the William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography will present their paper at the AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco. A memorial session and reception to commemorate the life of Bill Garrison will follow. Learn more.
Garrison Award Session
Thursday, March 31, 2016 | 3:20 p.m.
San Francisco, CA (Room TBD)
Tributes in Memory of William L. Garrison
Thursday, March 31, 2016 | 5:20 p.m.
San Francisco, CA (Room TBD)
Rebecca Solnit: ‘Mapping the Infinite City’ – A talk on the ‘infinite trilogy’ of atlases
When the trilogy Rebecca Solnit and a host of collaborators launched in 2010 with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas concludes with the New York atlas co-directed by geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, the teams will have produced three books and 70 maps making postulates about both the nature of cities and the possibilities of contemporary cartography.
This talk will explore what maps can do, or at least what these particular maps do, the ways these projects are counters to the rise of digital navigation and celebrations of what maps did in other eras, and how cartography lets us grasp or at least gaze at the inexhaustibility of every city, the innumerable ways it can be mapped. Learn More.
Explore the Growing List of AAG 2016 Field Trips, Workshops and Excursions
Explore the rich physical and cultural geography of San Francisco, Calif., and the Bay Area through informative field trips led by geographers or other experts. Field trips and excursions are also an excellent way to meet and exchange ideas with colleagues and friends. Also, expand your knowledge base and sign up for a workshop within your area of expertise. Learn More.
FOCUS ON SAN FRANCISCO
Bay Area Open Space Is ‘Not’ Open Space
By Sheila Barry, Paul F. Starrs, and Lynn Huntsinger
The San Francisco Bay Area has more open space within its borders than any other metropolitan area in the United States, an intriguing state of affairs for a regional population approaching nine million people. While so much open space provides a scenic landscape and exceptional opportunities for outdoor recreation including hiking, biking, horseback riding, and hang gliding, it also supports the area’s most prevalent land use. From Santa Clara to Sonoma County — on private lands, regional parks, on habitat conservation and watershed lands — cattle ranching continues as the number-one land use in this famed tourist destination and hotbed of the knowledge economy and high tech industry. Whether the working ranches are on public or private land, many Bay Area ranchers represent a fourth, fifth, or sixth generation stewarding the land and their livestock, drawing on older traditions and practices of pastoralists and primary producers. Ranching or working rangelands describe the land use of over 1.7 million acres of the Bay Area’s 4.5 million acres of open space (PlanBayArea.org). Rangelands that produce both livestock products and ecosystem services are known as “working landscapes” in the Bay Area. Learn More.
[Focus on San Francisco is an on-going series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of San Francisco and the Bay Area]
ASSOCIATION NEWS
AAG AWARDS
2016 AAG Awards Announced
The AAG congratulates the following awardees on their accomplishments:
Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of the ‘Annals of the AAG’ on Social Justice and the City
The Annals of the American Association of Geographers is seeking contributions for a Special Issue on “Social Justice and the City.”
We are seeking papers from a broad spectrum of scholars on social justice struggles in urban contexts. While we hope to be able to publish conceptual research drawing on now 40 years of cutting edge research in Geography on “social justice and the city,” we also hope to solicit papers on urgent contemporary issues, which will inform and motivate a broad audience of consumers and producers of geographic knowledge, from policy makers to grassroots activists. Learn More.
HeynenMcCarthy
‘Annals’ Welcomes Two New Editors
Our flagship journal, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, begins the new year with a change of editorship.
Bruce Braun and Richard Wright have completed their four year terms as editors of the Nature and Society, and People, Place and Region sections respectively. Their successors are James McCarthy and Nik Heynen.
James McCarthy is a Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. Nik Heynen is a Professor in the Department of Geography at University of Georgia. Learn More.
MEMBER AND DEPARTMENT NEWS
Martin
Leading Geography Historian and AAG Archivist Geoffrey Martin To Speak at Library of Congress
Dr. Geoffrey Martin, a prominent historian of American geography, will discuss “On the History of the Book —American Geography and Geographers: Toward Geographical Science” at 7 p.m. on Thursday, January 21, 2016, at the Library of Congress. This special event, which is free and open to the public, will focus on Martin’s most recent major work, and will include a display of related rare maps and atlases from the collections of the library’s Geography and Map Division. Opening remarks will be delivered by Ralph Ehrenberg, Chief of the Geography and Map Division, and Douglas Richardson, Executive Director of the Association of American Geographers (AAG). Learn More.
Kavita Pandit Named Associate Provost at Georgia State U.
Georgia State University recently announced the appointment of Kavita Pandit as Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, effective March 1, 2016. Pandit was AAG President in 2006 and currently serves as associate provost for international education at the University of Georgia.
Her previous academic administrative positions include senior vice provost for the State University of New York, as well as associate dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and head of the department of geography at the University of Georgia. Learn More.
Apply Now for Travel Grants for the AAG IGU 2016 Beijing Conference
AAG is now accepting applications for 2016 AAG NSF International Geographical Union (IGU) Conference Travel Grants. The application deadline has been extended to January 25. The conference will take place August 21-25 in Beijing, China. Learn More.
Gulf Research Program Accepting Applications for Exploratory Grants
The Gulf Research Program’s Exploratory Grants Funding Opportunity is now open. Applications are being accepted for innovative research projects that seek to break new ground in Informing Coastal Community Planning and Response to Environmental Change in Regions with Offshore Oil and Gas Operations. These grants will support the development and testing of new methods, technologies, and approaches that improve the capabilities of communities in coastal regions to successfully plan for, mitigate, and adapt to environmental change–specifically in the context of how these changes may affect or be affected by offshore oil and gas operations. Learn More.
MORE
January is National Mentoring Month: Join the GeoMentors Program
President Obama issued a proclamation last month designating January as “National Mentoring Month” in support of the Nation’s young people and to “honor those who give of themselves to uplift our next generation.” In the proclamation, the President states, “Working together, we can provide every child with the tools, guidance, and confidence they need to flourish and succeed.” Read the complete Presidential Proclamation – National Mentoring Month.
In observance of National Mentoring Month, the AAG welcomes everyone from the broad GIS community, across all disciplines and sectors, to consider volunteering with the AAG-Esri ConnectED GeoMentors Program to enhance GIS and geographic learning in US K-12 schools through the introduction of ArcGIS Online into classrooms across the country. Learn More.
Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.
Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).
Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.
Session Commemorating William Garrison To Follow Presentation of Garrison Award
Garrison Award & Tribute Sessions 3:20 p.m.–7:00 p.m., Thursday, March 31, 2016
An award session to present the paper selected for the William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography will be held at 3:20 p.m. on Thursday, March 31, 2016, at the AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Stéphane Joost, a former Garrison awardee and current Garrison Committee Member, will also deliver a presentation, “The geographic dimension of genomic diversity: from genome scans to whole-genome sequence data.”
Memorial presentations will follow the award segment of the session to commemorate Garrison’s life and work in geography. Brian J.L. Berry, Duane F. Marble, and Elizabeth Deakin will lead the talks. The session will conclude with a reception, permitting assembled participants and guests to pay tribute to and share their reminiscences of Bill.
William Louis “Bill” Garrison, one of the leaders of geography’s “quantitative revolution” in the 1950s and an outstanding transportation geographer, died last year on February 1, 2015, at the age of 90. The Garrison Award, which was named for Bill, supports innovative research into the computational aspects of geographic science. This award is intended to arouse a more general and deeper understanding of the important role that advanced computation can play in resolving the complex problems of space–time analysis that are at the core of geographic science. The award is one of the activities of the Marble Fund for Geographic Science of the American Association of Geographers (AAG).
The San Francisco Bay Area has more open space within its borders than any other metropolitan area in the United States, an intriguing state of affairs for a regional population approaching nine million people. While so much open space provides a scenic landscape and exceptional opportunities for outdoor recreation including hiking, biking, horseback riding, and hang gliding, it also supports the area’s most prevalent land use. From Santa Clara to Sonoma County — on private lands, regional parks, on habitat conservation and watershed lands — cattle ranching continues as the number-one land use in this famed tourist destination and hotbed of the knowledge economy and high tech industry. Whether the working ranches are on public or private land, many Bay Area ranchers represent a fourth, fifth, or sixth generation stewarding the land and their livestock, drawing on older traditions and practices of pastoralists and primary producers. Ranching or working rangelands describe the land use of over 1.7 million acres of the Bay Area’s 4.5 million acres of open space (PlanBayArea.org). Rangelands that produce both livestock products and ecosystem services are known as “working landscapes” in the Bay Area (Fig 1).
Fig 1: A hiker takes a landscape of grazing cattle, wildflowers, and broad views, walking through prime Checkerspot Butterfly habitat, Coyote Ridge, south of San Jose, California. (Photograph by Sheila Barry)
Ranching supports the Bay Area’s incredible biological diversity at the landscape and pasture level. Thirty-three percent of California’s natural communities are found in the Bay Area on only five percent of the state’s land, which makes this one of the nation’s most important biological hot spots (Bay Area Open Space 2012). At the landscape level, ranching maintains extensive open landscapes that were originally grassland or a tree-grass mosaic shaped by the burning practices of native Californians (Fig 2) (Diekmann et al. 2007). Oaks that are the most common native tree provide abundant acorns and rich game habitat. Spanish-Mexican colonists used the grasslands and woodlands for extensive livestock grazing well into the 1840s, and established some of the largest ranches in California. The Pt. Reyes National Seashore derives from what was originally a Mexican land grant.
Fig 2: Working landscapes make up a substantial portion of the San Francisco Bay area, as evident in this 2015 map by the California Rangeland Trust.
Large patches of open grazed grassland support a species-rich birdlife community, including along the southern range a slowly recovering population of the California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus). At the pasture level, ranching provides for biodiversity through grazing and associated rancher stewardship. Grazing reduces annual plant biomass, influences vegetation composition, affects vegetation structure, and provides the patches of bare ground needed by some species, such as the Ohlone tiger beetle (Cicindela ohlone) (Cornelisse et al. 2013). The endangered Bay checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas editha bayensis), California tiger salamander, burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia), and kit fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica) all benefit from livestock grazing, which manages vegetation and preserves needed habitat (Bartolome et al. 2014). In fact, the exclusion of grazing has resulted in the extirpation of some populations of these species from “protected sites” (Barry et al. 2015). Rancher stewardship includes development and maintenance of livestock water sources including stock ponds, pest management, debris clean-up, and forage improvement. In the San Francisco Bay region, ponds developed for livestock water provide half of the available habitat for the endangered tiger salamander (Ambystoma californiense).
Despite being the area’s most prevalent land use, cattle ranching largely goes unnoticed by much of the public. Ranching operations typically need up to 15–20 acres per cow per year. Few people realize that many of the Bay Area’s open spaces are managed with grazing until they come on to cattle grazing in a regional park. While there is support for ranching as a way of life with long traditions, the management of vegetation that without grazing could prove a fire hazard is a shared goal, brought starkly to light by the Oakland-Berkeley firestorm of 1991 that killed 25 people and destroyed some 3,300 dwellings at a cost of more than $1.5 billion. Today, significant areas of the 8,180 acre Stanford University campus are grazed for vegetation control, as are upper reaches of the 1,232 acres UC Berkeley campus, often by hired goat herds (Stein 2015).
Bay Area ranchers are particularly aware of the public’s interest in the rangelands they manage (Fig 3). At least partly because they often rely on leases from parks and conservation lands to complement their private holdings, many ranchers have learned to manage for native plant and animal species and fire hazard control. The California Rangeland Conservation Coalition, a statewide group focused on bringing ranchers, scientists, environmentalists, range professionals, and agencies together to support ranching and the conservation of grazing lands, enjoys strong support among Bay Area ranchers (https://carangeland.org). Working landscapes are also a prominent part of the Bay Area’s “foodscape,” widely appreciated by food-conscious Bay Area residents. On privately-owned ranch lands, ranchers use wildlife-friendly practices and improvements, sometimes partnering with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the California Department of Wildlife, or local Conservation Districts. Many have mitigation or conservation easements on their properties, providing more habitat, watershed, and connectivity than can be provided on public lands alone.
Fig 3: Rancher Ned Woods grazes cattle on East Bay Park land, near Mt. Diablo and Walnut Creek, California. (Photograph by Lance Cheung, NRCS, USDA)
A recent study used social media to understand public interest and perceptions of cattle grazing on parklands (Barry 2014). Many park users visiting Bay Area grazed parks shared positive views about cows and grazing on Flickr™ expressing an enjoyment of the pastoral scene and their recognition the grazing animals as “happy cows.” A few negative comments (under two percent) made it clear that some park users, especially those with dogs, are bothered by manure. Of greater concern to park managers, some park users expressed a fear of cows. Some stated a desire to overcome their fear but there seemed to be uncertainty about what could happen or how to respond to the presence of livestock. If you run across cattle on your Bay Area wanderings, give them their space, and keep dogs far away, since to livestock a dog is a predator. Cows really just want to eat the grass and will generally ignore you if you let them. Park managers may be able to overcome negative perceptions and fear of cows on public lands via education. With over 2.5 million visitors to grazed parks per year in the Bay Area, there is a growing opportunity to educate and explain why Bay Area open space is not open space but instead, constitutes well-stewarded places supporting and benefiting from cattle and sheep ranching.
Further Reading and References
Barry, S. (2014). Using Social Media to Discover Public Values, Interests, and Perceptions about Cattle Grazing on Park Lands. Environmental Management 53: 454-464. DOI: 10.1007/s00267-013-0216-4
Bartolome, J., B. Allen-Diaz, B., et al. (2014). Grazing For Biodiversity in California Mediterranean Grasslands. Rangelands 36(5): 36-43. DOI:10.1525/california/9780520252202.003.0020
Cornelisse, T. M., M.K. Bennett, & D. K. Letourneau. (2013). The Implications of Habitat Management on the Population Viability of the Endangered Ohlone Tiger Beetle (Cicindela ohlone) Metapopulation. PLoS ONE, 8(8), e71005. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071005
Diekmann, L., L. Panich, and C. Striplen. (2007). Native American Management and the Legacy of Working Landscapes in California. Rangelands 29 (3): 46-50. DOI:10.2458/azu_rangelands_v29i3_diekmann
Our flagship journal, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, begins the new year with a change of editorship.
Bruce Braun and Richard Wright have completed their four year terms as editors of the Nature and Society, and People, Place and Region sections respectively. Their successors are James McCarthy and Nik Heynen.
James McCarthy is a Professor in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. He is perfectly placed to edit the Nature and Society section of the Annals as his own research interests center around nature-society relations including political ecology, environmental policy and social movements, environmental history, and environmental politics.
McCarthy has considerable editorial experience in the field of nature-society geography including as editor of two major volumes – The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology (June 2015) and Neoliberal Environments (Routledge, 2007) – and three special issues of journals (Environment and Planning A, Geoforum and Antipode). He has also served on the Editorial Board of the Annals since 2008.
James is looking forward to leading this pivotal section of the Annals: “I consider nature-society research to be an absolutely essential area of scholarship for geography and for society, and the Annals to be the discipline’s leading journal in this critical domain. I am honored to have the opportunity to help recruit, develop, and publish the very best of geographic nature-society scholarship in the Annals.”
Nik Heynen is a Professor in the Department of Geography at University of Georgia. He has diverse interests including urban geography, urban political ecology, environmental justice, politics of race, urban social movements, and science and technology studies, which are well-suited to managing the breadth of manuscripts received in the People, Place and Region section of the Annals.
Heynen has considerable editorial experience including seven years in various editorial capacities at Antipode and was founding editor of the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Book Series at the University of Georgia Press, which to date has published 25 books with another 20 in process.
Nik is particularly excited about his new role: “At this point in my career, because of active research I have underway, I do not think there are many journals I would be as interested in editing as the Annals due to both the important disciplinary role it plays but also because of the diverse range of research results it publishes at such a high-quality.”
The AAG, the Publications Committee, and the rest of the Annals editorial team would like to express their heartfelt thanks to Bruce Braun and Richard Wright for their hard work over the last four years. They have presided over thriving sections, managing a heavy workload of manuscripts while ensuring that high quality and rigor was maintained.
The Annals of the AAG publishes six times a year (January, March, May, July, September and November) with one issue per year being a special themed issue. The upcoming March 2016 Special Issue is on Geographies of Mobility. See the contents of the latest issue or browse all past issues. If you are interested in submitting a paper to the Annals,please refer to the information for authors.
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A near-capacity crowd gathered on January 21, 2016, in the Geography and Map Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to hear a talk by the doyen of the history of geography, Dr. Geoffrey J. Martin, Professor Emeritus at Southern Connecticut State University and the official archivist of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) for more than 30 years.
Rebecca Solnit: ‘Mapping the Infinite City’ – A talk on the ‘infinite trilogy’ of atlases
Explore the Growing List of AAG 2016 Field Trips, Workshops and Excursions
