William Garrison

Bill Garrison, one of the leaders of geography’s “quantitative revolution” in the 1950s and an outstanding transportation geographer, passed away on February 1, 2015, at the age of 90.

William Louis Garrison was born in April 1924 and raised in Tennessee. During the Second World War he did meteorological work for the US Army. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Peabody College in Nashville and a doctorate in geography from Northwestern University.

In 1950 Garrison moved to the University of Washington and, as a young faculty member, led the way in revitalizing the field of geography through the use of scientific methods. In particular, he came up with the idea of using of statistics and computers to study and better understand spatial problems. Thus began an immensely exciting and important period in the history of geography, the so-called “quantitative revolution.”

Under Garrison’s supervision at the University of Washington were a number of doctoral students who were also interested in scientific approaches to spatial problems. They included Brian Berry, William Bunge, Michael Dacey, Arthur Getis, Duane Marble, Richard Morrill, John Nystuen and Waldo Tobler, and were dubbed the “space cadets.” Starting with computing systems such as the IBM 604 and IBM 650 they went on to be instrumental in the evolution of geographic information systems.

In 1960 Garrison moved to Northwestern University and subsequently had stints at University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois and University of Pittsburgh, before moving to University of California, Berkeley in 1973 as a Professor in the Civil Engineering Department.

By this time Garrison’s interests had shifted to transportation. His work at Berkeley focused on how innovation and technological change occurs in large transportation systems. This included an interest in alternative vehicles and the future of the car. He was genuinely able to ‘think outside the box’ in envisioning a better and more efficient transportation future; for example, he organized the first ever U.S. conference on Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems.

Garrison made invaluable contributions to the Transportation Engineering Program in the department, expanding and strengthening the planning and policy elements of the curriculum. From 1973 to 1980 he was also Director of the university’s Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering (later renamed the Institute of Transportation Studies). During his tenure he set out to broaden its scope beyond transportation and traffic engineering. He believed in the value of interdisciplinary work and drew in colleagues from the departments of City and Regional Planning, Economics, Geography, Public Policy and Sociology.

He served on numerous national committees advising the Bureau of Public Roads, Department of Transportation, Department of Commerce, and Bureau of the Census, as well as the National Science Foundation, National Science Board, and National Research Council. He also served as consultant to non-profit and business organizations, and had a stint as Chairman of the Transportation Research Board.

Garrison retired from UC Berkeley in 1991 as Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Emeritus Research Engineer in the Institute of Transportation Studies but that was by no means the end of his academic career. Post-retirement publications included the book Tomorrow’s Transportation: Changing Cities, Economies, and Lives with Jerry Ward (2000), the report Historical Transportation Development (2003), and two editions of the book The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Deployment with David Levinson (2005, 2014) which drew on his work in Austria examining the growth trajectories of various transportation technologies.

Garrison was a long-time member of the AAG, having joined in January 1947. His early contributions to the discipline were recognized in 1960 with an award for Meritorious Contributions in the annual honors. In 1994 two of the AAG Specialty Groups also bestowed their highest honors upon him for his outstanding contributions: the Edward L. Ullman Award from the Transportation Geography Specialty Group and the James R. Anderson Medal from the Applied Geography Specialty Group. Beyond the AAG he received the Roy W. Crum Award from Transportation Research Board in 1976 and the Award for Distinguished Contribution to University Transportation from the Council of University Transportation Centers in 1998. In 2000, his “space cadets” reunited to honor his 50 years of inspirational leadership in geographical and transportation sciences.

An AAG award was also established in his name. The biennial William L. Garrison Award for Best Dissertation in Computational Geography aims to encourage students to use advanced computation for resolving the complex problems of space–time analysis that are at the core of geographic science.

Garrison was one of the most important geographers of the twentieth century. When introducing him as the speaker at the 2007 Anderson Distinguished Lecture in Applied Geography, Ross Mackinnon described him as “a true ‘Mount Rushmore’ figure in modern American geography.”

Bill is survived by his wife Marcia and their four children, Deborah, James, Jane and John; his three children from his first wife Mary (who predeceased him), Sara, Ann and Helen; as well as 16 grandchildren, and one great grandchild.

 

Further reading

Barnes T. J. (2001) “Lives lived and lives told: biographies of geography’s quantitative revolution” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (4) 409–429

Garrison, W. L. (2002) “Lessons From the Design of a Life” in Peter Gould and Forrest R. Pitts (eds.) Geographical Voices: Fourteen Autobiographical Essays Syracuse University Press

DeVivo, M. S. (2014) Leadership in American Academic Geography: The Twentieth Century Lexington Books

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2015 AAG Honors Announced

The AAG will confer AAG Honors, the Association’s highest honors, to eight individuals for their outstanding contributions to the advancement or welfare of geography. Each year, the AAG invites nominations from the membership, which are then presented to the AAG Honors Committee for consideration.

The AAG Honors will be presented at the upcoming AAG Annual Meeting in Chicago, Ill., during a special awards luncheon on Saturday, April 25, 2015.

The AAG Honors will presented in the following categories (select a name to view citations):

AAG Lifetime Achievement Honors:
John P. Jones, III, University of Arizona
Bobby Wilson, University of Alabama

AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors
Tony Bebbington, Clark University
Ruth DeFries, Columbia University

AAG Gilbert White Public Service Honors:
Elizabeth Oglesby, University of Arizona

AAG Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors:
John Frazier, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Rita Gardner, Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

AAG Gilbert Grosvenor Geographic Education Honors:
Michael Solem, Association of American Geographers

AAG Distinguished Teaching Honors:
No award will be presented in this category this year.

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AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors: Anthony Bebbington, Ruth DeFries

The 2015 AAG Distinguished Scholarship Honors is presented to Dr. Anthony J. Bebbington and Dr. Ruth DeFries.

Bebbington will receive this award for his exceptional record of scholarly achievement and policy relevance in the fields of development studies, natural resource management, and sustainable livelihoods.

DeFries is being recognized for the contributions that she has made to our understanding of the patterns and impacts of anthropogenic landscape change, and for her ability to link that research to larger international policy discussions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation.

Citations for Anthony J. Bebbington and Ruth DeFries follow. 

Anthony Bebbington, Clark University

Bebbington

Dr. Anthony J. Bebbington is awarded the Association of American Geographers 2015 Distinguished Scholarship Honors for his record of achievement in development and environmental studies especially his path-breaking research on natural resources, poverty reduction, livelihoods and sustainable development in the Andes and beyond, and its recognition by policy makers and practitioners of development.

This recognition is most evident in his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, a rare tribute to a relatively young scholar. Bebbington is noted for his interdisciplinary approaches in the fields of development studies, political science, economics, agriculture science, and geography. His research has contributed to the understanding of sustainable rural development, natural resource management, poverty, and social movements such as indigenous and grassroots organizations, especially in Latin America and the Andean region. He has combined extensive fieldwork in Peru and Ecuador, with institutional analyses to promote the understanding and respect of farmers and indigenous knowledge, the role of non-governmental organizations, the value of social capital to development, and the agency and empowerment of people and communities in the developing world. Bebbington’s publications include more than 20 edited or co-authored books, many in Spanish, and numerous journal articles and book chapters such as highly cited papers in World Development, the Annals of the AAG, and Economic Geography.

In addition to his experience in academia, his work informs economic policies in international development agencies such as the World Bank, the CGIAR, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. These applied aspects of his work have fueled his ability to engage in both applied and theoretical approaches with indigenous groups, as well as global development programs.

Bebbington has taught geography and development at the University of Manchester and the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he is currently Director of the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. He has supervised a large number of graduate students who have gone on to careers in academia, NGOs and government. His scholarship and policy insights have also had influence through his work with the World Bank, the International Institute for Environment and Development, and the Overseas Development Institute.

It is with great pleasure that we recognize Dr. Bebbington’s extensive and profound contributions to the fields of geography and development studies more broadly.

Ruth DeFries, Columbia University

DeFries

In recognition of the significant and extensive contributions that she has made to our understanding of the impacts of anthropogenic landscape transformation on climate, biogeochemical cycling, and biodiversity, Dr. Ruth DeFries is awarded the 2015 Association of American Geographers Distinguished Scholarship Honors.

 

DeFries is currently Denning Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia in 2008, she was professor in the Geography Department at the University of Maryland, served as senior project officer with the Committee on Global Change at the National Research Council (NRC), and taught at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University and her B.A. in Earth Science, summa cum laude, from Washington University in St. Louis, MO.

Driven by losses due to expanding human infrastructure, timber harvesting, resource extraction, and agricultural activities, habitat conversion remains the leading threat to global biodiversity. DeFries is credited with transforming the way that scientists track and analyze changes to the planet’s vegetation through the use of satellite imagery, which can cover large areas at repeated time intervals. Landscape transformation may, however, have far reaching impacts beyond the direct conversion of species habitats. Research conducted by DeFries emphasizes the intersections among land use, agriculture, climate and conservation throughout the tropics, with a focus on the Amazon and India. In particular, her work has illuminated the widespread consequences of changing the extent and pattern of Earth’s vegetation, including the effects on emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change, the loss of habitat for other species, and the potential movement of disease vectors.

Throughout her career, Dr. DeFries has published over 120 refereed journal articles and book chapters. These have appeared in many of the top journals in the world, including Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Climate Change, PLos One, Global Change Biology, Remote Sensing of Environment, Ecology and Society, Journal of Biogeography and Conservation Biology, among many others. In recognition of her achievements, she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. She is also a fellow of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, the Ecological Society of America, and the American Geophysical Union, and she has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Fulbright Program. She is a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Fifth Assessment) and a member of the NRC’s Board on Environmental Change and Society. She is also a former Chair of the NRC’s Ecosystems, Land Use, and Biodiversity Panel of the Decadal Survey for the Earth Sciences, Vice-chair of the NRC’s Committee on Earth Studies, Space Sciences Board, and member of the NRC’s Committee on the Assessment of NASA’s Earth Science program.

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Awardees

2015 AAG Enhancing Diversity Award

The AAG is pleased to bestow an annual award honoring geographers who have pioneered efforts toward or actively participated in efforts toward encouraging a more diverse discipline over the course of several years.

This year, we are proud to award Wendy Jepson with the AAG Enhancing Diversity Award.

Dr. Jepson teaches Environmental Justice at Texas A&M University, sharing in her students an understanding of the economic and social problems inherent in environmental inequalities.

Wendy keenly understands the importance of increasing diversity in our discipline. In her role as Chair of the Texas A&M University Faculty Senate Committee on Diversity she has contributed to diversifying both faculty and student bodies.  As director of undergraduate education in her department, she is spearheading a renewed recruiting effort to bring in diverse students. Wendy has also been working closely as a mentor to students who are the first in their family to attend college, as well as their parents.

For her service to diversity and as an active participant in efforts to achieve excellence through equality and inclusion, the AAG recognizes Wendy Jepson.

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Drug Policy and Mass Incarceration in Chicago

Chicago’s status as one of the great American cities is well deserved. This remarkable metropolis is justly celebrated as a hub of music and the arts, as home to some of the world’s most iconic architecture, and for its vibrant public life, anchored in its extensive network of parks and beaches. At the same time, however, Chicago also has the dubious distinction of exemplifying some of the worst aspects of the American city. Teachers of urban geography have long drawn on Chicago for examples of racial segregation and red-lining, white flight and decaying public housing, police violence and the suppression of political dissent, gentrification and ghettoization. To this list we can add what is arguably one of the most pressing social justice issues of the day: mass incarceration and the war on drugs that fuels it.

While the “war on drugs” may no longer be as fashionable a term as it once was—President Obama’s former “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske distanced the administration from the term in 2009—the policies that characterize it continue to be politically expedient. Policies which purport to be “tough” on crime such as mandatory minimum sentences and stop-and-frisk enforcement tactics still represent the standard approach to the issue of drug crime, and politicians of any stripe question them at their peril, such is their continuing appeal with voters. But the war on drugs, now in its fourth decade, is showing increasing signs of strain as governments at all levels grapple with the financial and social costs of a system that has, at this point, incarcerated more people than at any point in history.

It is difficult today to believe that as late as the 1970s, there were so few people in US prisons—under 350,000 in 1972—that mainstream scholarship could predict the end of prisons within a generation. Instead, the US prison population has quintupled since that time, today topping two million people[1]. This dramatic growth is inseparable from the expansion of imprisonment for drug offences: 1.5 million people were arrested for drug violations in 2012—over 80% for simple possession—and more than half of the people currently in federal prison are incarcerated on drug charges[2].

Scholars often point to deindustrialization as an integral component of the phenomenon of mass incarceration. As the American economy sloughed off its industrial workforce, rendering a huge segment of the population superfluous to the economy, the prison system expanded to incorporate this surplus[3]. Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore note that in the starkly racialized West Side of Chicago—an area emblematic of both deindustrialization and mass incarceration—some 59,000 people worked in the area’s factories in 1972, a number that fell to 10,600 by 2006; meanwhile, retail jobs that depended on this sector dropped from 35,000 to 5,200[4]. In these communities, where the official unemployment rate among African-American men exceeds 30%, and where one in seven adult men is incarcerated and fully 70% are burdened with criminal records limiting their employment opportunities, it is easy to see how critical scholars refer to mass incarceration and the war on drugs as nothing less than a system of racial control, or in Michelle Alexander’s formulation: a “new Jim Crow.”

Illinois’ prison system has echoed trends in incarceration nationwide. The state prison population quadrupled from 1973-1991 and increased a further 55% by 2000, overwhelming the system’s capacity despite 21 new prisons being built during that time[5]. As elsewhere, this new prison population comes in significant part from the war on drugs. Nationwide, Illinois incarcerates the greatest proportion of people for marijuana possession compared to higher-level trafficking charges (tied with Texas), and the state boasts the third highest disparity between Blacks and whites in terms of those incarcerated for possession[6].

At the same time, there are voices calling for change, from activists protesting racial disparities in the policing of drug laws and the expansion of stop-and-frisk tactics, to harm reductionists working to mitigate the harms associated with illegal drug use and the criminalization of users, and even fiscal pragmatists concerned with runaway prison budgets. Documentaries such as Eugene Jarecki’s The House I Live In and Michelle Alexander’s popular book The New Jim Crow have raised the profile of these debates. Nevertheless, the current state of drug law reform appears profoundly ambivalent. From Colorado to Alaska to Washington, DC, states are easing penalties, decriminalizing, and even legalizing marijuana. Cities such as Chicago and New York have moved in the direction of marijuana decriminalization, making it a ticketable offense in most cases, and over the past decade, New York State has revised some of the most egregious of its mandatory sentencing laws. New models of substance-abuse treatment prisons are being developed, such as the Sheridan Correctional Center in Illinois. And the Obama administration’s Fair Sentencing Act lowered the sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine in 2010, which had long sentenced (largely African-American) defendants to prison terms 100 times longer than those (largely white) sentenced for powder cocaine. At the same time, however, the federal government continues its ban on federal funding for basic harm reduction measures such as needle exchange programs, and critics have pointed out that many of these progressive developments fail to address the root problems created by mass incarceration and prohibitionist drug policy.

One illustration of how seemingly progressive shifts in policy can reproduce or conceal underlying problems can be seen in Chicago’s recent move toward marijuana decriminalization. In late 2011, a small number of city aldermen called on police to stop arresting people for the possession of small amounts of marijuana, because of the grossly disproportionate effect that enforcement was having on Black and Latino communities. Shortly afterwards, Alderman Danny Solis, a close ally of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, announced his intention to table an ordinance making low-level possession punishable by fines and community service rather than arrest and jail time. The ordinance passed in 2012 and Chicago now has two years of experience with decriminalized marijuana.

This move, however, has failed to precipitate a sea change in the city’s drug policing. To begin with, the new law still grants police the power to arrest people for possession—the only difference is that it gives them the discretionary authority to opt for ticketing instead. For a variety of reasons, police have been less than eager to forgo arrests in favour of ticketing. While arrest rates have dropped somewhat, they remain troublingly high at 2.3 times the national average[7]. From August 2012 through February 2014, only 1,725 of the new tickets were issued, while 20,844 arrests were made for possession[8]. Researchers at Chicago’s Roosevelt University calculate that 93% of possession violations have resulted in arrest since the passing of the new law, with only 7% leading to a ticket[9]. Worse, these arrests appear to conform to the same racist patterns that initially spawned calls for reform. Prior to the new laws coming into effect, Mick Dumke and Ben Joravsky noted in the Chicago Reader that “African-Americans account for 78% of those arrested, 89% of those convicted, and 92% of those jailed for low-level possession in Chicago”[10]. Put another way, African-Americans were 15 times more likely to be arrested for simple possession than whites—this, despite clear evidence that these groups use marijuana at essentially the same rates[11]. These glaring disparities have not changed appreciably in the wake of the city’s experiment with decriminalization, and some evidence suggests they may have worsened. Since the passing of the law, the Reader reports that 78% of those arrested for possession were Black, 17% were Hispanic and only 4% white[12].

The failure of police to shift from arresting marijuana users to issuing citations may be related in part to administrative and bureaucratic pressures. Officers report that citations require as much police time as arrests do, negating the savings of time and money that were touted as one of the rationales for the shift. However, such considerations do not explain the stark geographical disparities in rates of arrest versus citation across different communities and municipalities. While 93% of possession violations in Chicago resulted in arrest, in suburban Evanston, the majority (69%) of those same violations ended with the issuance of tickets[13]. Within the City of Chicago, disparities in arrest rates between neighborhoods actually increased following the implementation of the new laws, with poor, racialized neighborhoods like Garfield Park having arrest rates seven times higher than the city average and 150 times higher than Edison Park, the overwhelmingly white neighborhood with the lowest rates[14]. In Chicago, such geographical disparities mean racial disparities. The majority of arrests continue to take place in neighborhoods that are more than 90% non-white and the 25 neighborhoods with the highest arrest rates are almost all over 90% African-American[15]. As the authors of the Roosevelt University study pointedly remark, “Geography, not justice, determines whether marijuana possession results in a fine or an arrest.”[16]

It is this racially uneven geographical pattern of arrests that gives us our clearest sense of why the new ticketing ordinance has been so little adopted by police. Scholars critical of domestic drug policy have long argued that the war on drugs has never been about drugs. Rather, drug law enforcement has provided a pretext for intensified policing of racialized communities—communities like those on the West Side of Chicago, described above[17]. Under the aegis of enforcing drug laws, police are given remarkable latitude to stop, search, and arrest (predominantly) young men of color. These police powers have been steadily expanded over the past four decades of the war on drugs, from limitations to the Fourth Amendment such as stop-and-frisk and other warrantless searches, to financial incentives such as drug forfeiture laws and federal policies like the Byrne program which provided military hardware to police departments. Given such a trajectory, and considering the effects that this transformation has had on contemporary policing, it was always unlikely that police in Chicago would suddenly switch to issuing tickets. Possession arrests are a tactic with broader utility than simply controlling substance use—they serve as one of the principle means by which police physically regulate the bodies of young men contained in racialized neighborhoods.

Change to this situation is likely to come only with considerable political will—something conspicuously absent in the Rahm administration, which has seemingly introduced this legislation only to back away from actually implementing it[18]. Beyond the administration, a host of different voices compete to influence the debate. Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle continues to advance (moderately) progressive legislation around mass incarceration and drugs. Activist groups such as Critical Resistance have established chapters in Illinois, pushing for more radical changes to the “prison industrial complex,” while local organizations like Chicagotorture.org publicize the abuses suffered by people at the hands of the Chicago Police Department. And Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy himself recently declared the entire war on drugs to be a “failure” (albeit in the context of calling for tougher sentences for gun crimes—a proposal which would inevitably further criminalize many of same people targeted by drug laws).

In the matter of drug policy, then, as with so many social issues before, Chicago is marked by contradiction, reminding us that even apparently progressive change often retains the most problematic features of that which it replaces. In such a political landscape, it remains to be seen whether—and how—Chicago’s policing of the racialized poor might be transformed for the better. If we are committed to change that is genuinely progressive, we will need confront the fact that the war on drugs and mass incarceration have always been projects of racial and class control, not public safety or public health. Changing the status quo will require not just reform to existing laws, but also a profound reconfiguration of the city’s relationship to so many of the citizens who make Chicago a great American city.

–Jesse Proudfoot

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0024

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James Newman on Illinois Politics

You might say Quinn/Rauner was a squeaker, and Durbin/Oberweis was a cakewalk. Here’s why you’d be wrong.

The outlook was bleak nationwide for Democrats as the nation approached mid-term elections. Despite improvements in employment, troop drawdowns in Afghanistan, and increasing numbers of insured persons under the Affordable Care Act, the public’s confidence in the Obama Administration had sunk to record low levels. Most Democrats facing election contests sought to distance themselves from the very programs they had enthusiastically supported just a few years, or even months, earlier, eager to dissociate themselves from the President’s waning popularity. By the time Election Day rolled around, Democrats had resigned themselves to declining numbers in the House of Representatives with all of its two-year terms in contention; in the Senate, even their most optimistic hopes were for a 50-50 split (in which Vice President Joe Biden would be able to cast deciding votes), while more realistic expectations were that they would become at least a slim minority.

ELECTION NIGHT IN ILLINOIS SELDOM LACKS FOR DRAMA, AND THE 2014 MIDTERM ELECTION WAS NO EXCEPTION.

The Democrats best hopes were to hold on strong at the state level, among governorships and state legislatures. It was in this atmosphere that the party nervously eyed the State of Illinois, whose embattled Democratic governor Pat Quinn continued to be shadowed by the spectre of his predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, who had been ousted amidst a swirl of corruption charges. (Quinn had ascended to the governor’s chair in 2009 upon Blagojevich’s removal, and had eked out a narrow margin over Republican Bill Brady in the 2010 election.) Years of excessive capital spending and increases in public pension commitments had skyrocketed Illinois to a precarious financial position. In 2014 Quinn faced businessman Bruce Rauner, a highly-successful businessman in several private equity firms who had campaigned on the promise of restoring fiscal responsibility and integrity to the state.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin was considered to have a relatively safe course to re-election against dairy magnate Jim Oberweis, who was perceived by much of the electorate to be closely tied to the Tea Party and held extremely conservative views that were at odds with the extensive “blue” voter base in Illinois. Oberweis had failed twice before in attempts at statewide office, failing to progress past the primaries in a previous US Senate bid and the 2010 governor race. Finally gaining public office in the Illinois Senate, he leveraged that 2012 electoral success to position himself as the Republicans’ 2014 US Senate candidate. Durbin’s status as senior senator, his overall popularity among the electorate, and Chicago’s propensity to deliver massive Democratic margins were expected to propel Durbin to a relatively comfortable victory.

Election night in Illinois seldom lacks for drama, and the 2014 midterm election was no exception. While in the Senate race, challenger Jim Oberweis conceded to incumbent Dick Durbin just hours after the polls closed, incumbent governor Pat Quinn held fast to the possibility of victory, still declining to concede the race as of late Wednesday morning. It’s only reasonable to conclude that Durbin/Oberweis was a cakewalk, and Quinn/Rauner was a squeaker. Reasonable, but wrong – in fact, just the opposite can be argued. Application of geographic analytic tools sheds light on why this is true.

While Quinn had won only four counties in 2010, his vote margins were slim and he was carried to victory on the strength of the overwhelming margin in the perennial Democratic stronghold of Cook County. In 2014, within hours of poll closings, it was clear that this was not to be Quinn’s night – he had lost the downstate Democratic counties of St. Clair & Jackson, and his margin in Cook County was going to fall well short of his 2010 margin, and would not be nearly enough to eke out a victory for him this year.

An analytic tool called Rank-Mobility Index (RMI) helps to explain just how and where Quinn’s support fell apart. Sheer number of votes is not important in itself; rather, the vote margin between the candidates tells the story when viewed on a county-by-county basis. RMI reveals where Democratic vote production succeeded and fell short, and suggests how those changes manifested themselves in the final outcome.

To determine the RMI, the statistic of interest – in this case, vote margin for Quinn over Rauner – is computed for each county. To adjust for the effects of county size, this figure must be normalized to margin per 1000 persons of voting age (MpK). The counties are then ranked 1-102 based on their MpK for the 2010 election, and again for the 2014 election. RMI is then computed as (R2010‑R2014)/(R2010+R2014); the resulting value can range from ‑1.0 to +1.0. The power of the RMI is two-fold:

  • it recognizes that large changes in rank are more significant than small changes, BUT . . .
  • it also recognizes that equal changes are more significant among high ranks than among low

So, for example, in 2014, the ranks for Lake & McHenry counties were 16 and 42, respectively, while in 2010 their ranks had been 7 and 33. Both fell 9 ranks from 2010 to 2014, but Lake County’s RMI of ‑0.391 shows its shift to be more significant than McHenry’s RMI of ‑0.120.

In 2014, Cook was the only county to provide a net positive vote margin for Quinn. Thus, in Table 1, the MpK values are negative, reflecting that Quinn fell short by that number of votes for every 1000 persons of voting age. The county with the best improvement was Fulton, which in 2010 had a negative MpK of ‑35.4073; this improved to ‑6.7540 in 2014, which moved Fulton County up from 8th‑best to 2nd‑best in producing a Democratic margin. Franklin County, on the other hand, declined from ‑21.3725 MpK to ‑117.1895 MpK, dropping it from 6th-best to 43rd-best and resulting in a large negative RMI.

Charting the RMIs on the map thus provides insight into details of Quinn’s performance. The blue counties, denoting improvement in Democratic vote production, form a swath from northwest to east-central Illinois, taking in primarily rural counties with lower voter counts. Meanwhile, Cook County shows a decline in performance (while retaining the number 1 rank, its MpK fell from 126.3259 in 2010 to 98.1427 in 2014), as do the collar counties and southern counties. Significantly, the key downstate counties of St. Clair, Jackson, and Alexander all showed rather strong decreases in Democratic voter production, and indeed all turned from blue to red in the 2014 election.

Turning to the U.S. Senate race, the differences between the 2008 margins and 2014 margins are much more dramatic than the 2010-2014 changes in the governor’s race. As usual, Cook County Democrats turned out in numbers sufficient to offset downstate Republicans and tip the balance to Durbin. But the breadth and depth of the Republican margins, especially when compared to the almost-all-blue map of 2010, is certainly an attention getter. Once again, RMI helps to reveal the story within the story.

The strongest gains in Democratic vote production were in three far-southern counties – Jackson, Alexander, and Pulaski, two of which had already demonstrated a strong Democratic margin in both the 2008 Senate race and the 2010 governor’s race. Central Illinois, from Bureau & LaSalle counties in the north to Effingham & Jasper counties in the south, demonstrated a solid Republican upswing, especially in Putnam, Mason, and Macon counties. Those changes in relatively low population counties may not have been, by themselves, significant – until Democratic bastion Cook County is considered. The effectiveness of Democratic vote production in Cook actually declined relative to the other counties in the state – making it all the more important for Durbin to put in a strong showing downstate. Of the top five counties in voter production in 2008, however, three – Putnam, Gallatin, and Mason – fell to the bottom five in 2014. Lake County, recently more evenly split between the parties than most of the other collar counties, edged into the top five RMI by moving from 27th rank to 11th, but that was primarily by virtue of even worse performance by other counties, as Lake’s MpK fell from 172.8010 to 7.5804.

One last key question is this: How did the candidate perform compared to other candidates of the same party? In particular, with major statewide offices such as Governor and U.S. Senator, did one race either help or hinder the other? Using RMI to compare Democratic vote production for the governor’s race vs. the U.S. Senate race suggests that Durbin, while mostly coasting toward a fairly comfortable victory, may well have been hampered by Quinn’s unpopularity. Those counties showing improved vote production for Senate vis-à-vis all other counties are mainly clustered in the far downstate region of the state. Meanwhile, the populous counties of the north, and particularly the northeast, demonstrated a strong decline in effectiveness in vote production, Lake County being the only significant exception. Perhaps Democrats came out in stronger numbers for Quinn in light of his anticipated contest, while showing disinterest in Durbin’s expected easy cruise to victory.

The only numbers that ultimately matter, of course, are the final statewide vote tallies. But putting the power of the RMI to use helps to show that there’s a lot more to the story than revealed by the raw numbers.

Acknowledgement to Dr. Richard Greene, Department of Geography, Northern Illinois University, for contributions to the methodology included in this analysis.

James W. Newman
Department of Geography
Northern Illinois University

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0022

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AAG Member Eric Lambin Wins Volvo Environment Prize

Prize-winner uses satellites to reveal human impact

The 2014 winner of the Volvo Environment Prize, Professor Eric Lambin, is a remote sensing pioneer using advanced data collection and satellite images to understand land use and the influence of humans on the planet.

 

Satellites catch sweeping images of Earth, every hour, day and night. Eric Lambin, who divides his time between Stanford University in California, and Université Catholique de Louvain in his native Belgium, has for decades developed methods of analysing these satellite images by linking them to socioeconomic data. By doing that, he and his research colleagues can track land use changes on the impact of trade and demand for biofuels or food crops. His research has focused on trying to bridge two disparate communities – remote sensing scientists and human ecologists.

This technique, sometimes called the people-to-pixels approach, can, with faster computers and improved data, make it possible for businesses, NGOs and governments to better monitor in almost real-time environmental impacts from human activities.

A world without forests would challenge life on earth. Deforestation was earlier mostly perceived as a result of population growth. In his research, Professor Lambin has demonstrated that it is not as simple as that. In reality there are intricate and complex patterns, even cascade effects of human activities that affect the forests and other natural resources. Eric Lambin points to statistics showing successful reforestation in Vietnam.

“It seemed like a success story. But when we looked at all the data and compiled all information locally and nationally, we discovered that use of wood had simply shifted to imported wood, increasing deforestation in neighbouring Cambodia and Laos.”

This type of research is vital in planning for a transition to sustainability and is a focus area for this year´s Volvo Environment Prize laureate. Eric Lambin adopted the people-to-pixels approach as young doctoral student in Sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-1980s and has expanded it throughout his career.

In the words of the Jury, “Eric Lambin has successfully bridged social, geographical and biophysical disciplines in order to advance the global understanding of land use change and what it means for human wellbeing”.

Besides his academic research Eric Lambin is also reaching out to broader audiences. His most recent book, “Ecology of Happiness”, asks us to take a look at the impact of nature on ourselves, rather than the conventional approach of discussing human impact on the planet. The natural world, he argues, is essential for human wellbeing and pleasure-seeking. Preserving nature is not only good for a portfolio of ecosystem services; it is essential for us in order to be happy.

Eric Lambin is professor at the Earth & Life Institute and School of Geography, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium and at Environmental Earth System Science, School of Earth Sciences and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, California.

Phone: +61 2 6125 4588

The Volvo Environment Prize was founded in 1988 and has become one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes. It is awarded annually to people who have made outstanding scientific discoveries within the area of the environment and sustainable development. The prize consists of a diploma, a glass sculpture and a cash sum of SEK 1.5 million and will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 26 November 2014.

For more information about the 2014 laureate and the Volvo Environment Prize: www.environment-prize.com

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Governance and Policy Living within Ecosystems Planning and Development
AAG Staff
AAG Staff
Annual Meeting

Glen MacDonald on Remembering John Muir

Remembering John Muir on the Centennial of His Passing:
Writer, Naturalist, Scientist, Activist, Geographer?

[Glen MacDonald also is organizing a featured panel session, “Geographers on John Muir: Assessing His Legacy and Relevance After 100 Years,” for the 2015 AAG annual meeting in Chicago, April 21-25. More information will be available soon.]

John Muir died in Los Angeles, California on Christmas Eve, 1914 with the pages of an unfinished manuscript on Alaska beside him in his hospital bed. As we mark the centenary of Muir’s passing what might we say about him from the perspective of Geography? Muir can claim many titles — writer, naturalist, scientist and environmental activist. Can we also consider him a geographer? Certainly Muir worked and wrote in a very formative period for American Geography and the Association of American Geographers. Although he received honorary degrees from the University of California, Wisconsin, Harvard and Yale, Muir never earned a formal university diploma. He did, however, attend the University of Wisconsin for two years starting in the 1860’s. Alas, this was long before the establishment of the Department of Geography there. But then founding lights of the AAG, including William Morris David, educated in the 19th century like Muir, did not hold degrees in the then incipient field of geography either. In Muir’s case his academic interests focused on chemistry, geology and botany. Through Ezra Carr, a Professor of Natural Sciences, Muir was likely introduced to the then revolutionary theories of Louis Agassiz regarding Pleistocene glaciation and this became a lifelong interest. Muir would also become acquainted with the controversial theories on evolution articulated by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. Although Agassiz was to remain deeply hostile to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the ideas of both of these men were highly influential in the thinking of Muir as well as creators of the AAG such William Morris Davis. More than this though, Muir, like Davis and every geographer of the time, was profoundly influenced by that foundational figure of modern geography, Alexander von Humboldt. Indeed, in 1866 Muir wrote to his mentor and confident Jeanne Carr “How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt!” Muir’s regard for Humboldt, his intellectual development in the natural sciences and his intense interest in combining both geology and botany reflects the same scholarly, and at the time revolutionary, crucible that formed the science of Davis and Clements. By inclination and available education he was arguably as much a geographer as many of the founders of the AAG.

A scan of a more than 100-year-old photo of Muir by C. F. Lummis taken in 1901.
Owned by: Glen M. MacDonald
John Muir Memorial Chair
Distinguished Professor of
Geography,
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and
The Institute of the Environment and Sustainability
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA
90095-1524
310-825-5008
[email protected]

Like Davis, Muir was a sharp observationalist-inductivist who moved beyond the descriptive confines of natural history and sought to explain nature rather than simply observe and record. Within the earth sciences, Muir’s work on glacial features and evidence of past glaciation coupled with his theory on the glacial origins of Yosemite and other Sierra Nevada valleys stands as an important and lasting contribution. Physical geography is sometimes delineated from geology through its attention to modern processes and landforms. In this regard Muir showed a similar inclination. He was the first to discover living glaciers in the Sierra Nevada. This work, published in 1873 in the American Journal of Science and Arts must have been particularly sweet for Muir as it reinforced his position in a well-known scientific disagreement with Josiah Dwight Whitney, a Professor of Geology at Harvard and head of the California Geological Survey, who argued, incorrectly, that the Yosemite Valley was a tectonic feature. However, if geography is indeed the integrative science, then Muir was to more than equal many founders of the AAG in his desire and capability of spanning the earth and life sciences. Muir wrote many descriptions of the distributions of montane and alpine flora, but my favorite, and certainly most integrative was his study of the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum). In his 1876 monograph published as a Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Muir analyzed the contemporary distribution of the species along the west slope of the Sierra Nevada, noted its environmental relations and particularly its disjunct distribution. The latter he attributed to the fragmentation of its range by Pleistocene glaciers emanating from the High Sierra. Now, today we know Muir had an overstated belief in the extent and role of glaciation and new research shows that the geographic distribution of giant sequoia may largely be explained by micro-climate, but the questions he asked remain topical. Muir also presaged the current focus of many geographers on the long-term trajectories and uncertain future of plant animal species in the face of human impact. Consider his pondering the future of the giant sequoia in his 1876 “What area does Sequoia now occupy as the principal tree? Was the species ever more extensively distributed in the Sierra during post-glacial times? Is the species verging on extinction? And if so, then to what causes will its extinction be due? What have been its relation to climate, soils and to other coniferous trees with which it is associated? What are those relations now? What are they likely to be in the future?” These are the same questions biogeographers are asking about a multitude of endangered species.

Muir’s scientific work and his writings were no doubt well known by many of the founders and first members of the AAG. What of his actual engagement with professional geography and his regard by the discipline at that time? It is notable that Muir was a member of the Committee for Arrangements, along with William Morris Davis and a number of eminent geographers for the 8th International Geographic Congress in 1904. His impact on our discipline clearly transcended his passing. It is striking to me that the 1958 Honorary Presidential Address by John Leighly at the first Annual Meeting of the AAG to be held on the west coast was entitled “John Muir’s Image Of The West.” I was alerted to Muir’s quote regarding von Humboldt through Leighly’s speech. Today, 100 years past his death, although citations to Muir’s scientific papers may be sparse, his ideas on the importance of past glaciations and his books such as My First Summer in the Sierra or Our National Parks remain widely known by geographers investigating questions of physical geography, conservation or human-nature perception and interactions. As Muir is in the pantheon of thinkers who developed modern environmentalism and conservation, it would be hard to find any geographer who has not been exposed to the work and philosophy of Muir in the course of their education. Geographer activists knowingly or unknowing are also taking a page from his book, most strikingly developed during his emotional and ultimately failed attempt to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley. For generations these ideas have undoubtedly helped formulate the thinking of geographers and through them the course of the AAG. So, although never formally a trained geographer, Muir was drawn by the same forces of curiosity and cross-disciplinary inquiry that have propelled geographers and geography over the past century.  I am inclined to consider him a true geographer and one of our seminal figures. As he so fervently desired in 1866, Muir was and is “a Humboldt.”  (John Muir: Born April 21, 1838, Dunbar, Scotland; Died December 24, 1914, Los Angeles, CA)

Glen MacDonald is distinguished professor and inaugural John Muir Memorial Chair in Geography at UCLA. He engages Geography with scholars, policy makers, writers, artists, activists and others to look at contemporary nature and people issues in the American West.

Glen MacDonald also is organizing a featured panel session, “Geographers on John Muir: Assessing His Legacy and Relevance After 100 Years,” for the 2015 AAG annual meeting in Chicago, April 21-25. More information will be available soon.

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0019

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Changing Human Populations Governance and Policy Living within Ecosystems
Glen M.MacDonald
Glen M.MacDonald

Robert Hutton

Long-standing member of the AAG, Robert “Bob” Hutton, of Alexandria, VA, passed away on October 19, 2014, at the age of 82.

Hutton received his Bachelor’s degree in Russian Studies from Haverford College, PA, in 1954. He also spent the summers of 1953 and 1954 at a Russian Summer School held at Middlebury College, VT.

He then enlisted in the Army, receiving a sharp shooter commendation during Basic Training much to his own surprise as he was blind in his right eye! He served during the Korean War from 1954 to 1957, specializing in languages.

Following this he continued his education at Columbia University, NY, graduating with a Master’s degree in the Geography of East Asia in 1962. His final thesis was titled “Trade Relations between Japan, Communist China, and the Soviet Union.”

Hutton then spent his career working for the National Security Agency and the Library of Congress, retiring from the latter in 1998.

During his retirement he had many hobbies, one of which was wine. He said that his background in geography helped him to understand the soil and climatic conditions important to the production of wine. As a member of the American Wine Society and a writer for various wine journals, he traveled to wine events including the Vin Expo in Bordeaux and the London Wine Fair.

Hutton joined the Association of American Geographers in 1962 and maintained his life-time interest in geography. He was delighted to attend the Annual Meeting in New York in 2012 to receive recognition for his 50 years of continuous membership.

After his first wife died in 2007, he remarried in 2010. He is survived by his sister Elizabeth MacDonald; four children, Edward, Charles, Grace, and Susan; and six grandchildren.

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New Books for Geographers

New Books: October 2014

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). Authors interested in reviewing books should also contact the Editor-in-Chief ([email protected]).

October, 2014
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Changing Human Populations Governance and Policy Networks and Connections
AAG Staff
AAG Staff