The best place name ever

So, making major life-changing decisions like leaving your teaching-centered institution for a Big 10 research-centered institution takes up a lot of time. Who’d'a thunk it? It’s not official yet, but unofficially, it’s off to Midwestern State U next year for me and my spouse. More on that later, as it continues to sink in that this is actually happening.

On to more important things (or at least more interesting ones). A friend of mine went to Malta over winter break and brought back a copy of the bus map for me (I’m an easy person to get souvenirs for). Besides being one of the most confusing and yet plainest transit maps I’ve seen (and just how many bus routes do you need in a place that’s only eleven miles by eleven miles?), it has some really wicked keen place names. I would expect place names in Malta to be a fascinating combination of Italian, Arabic, Turkish, and English, and they don’t disappoint.

Tarxien. Senglea. Qrendi. Ghaxaq. (Too bad you can’t use these in Scrabble.) Siggiewi. Naxxar. Dingli. The runner up is Kuncizzjoni, but the coolest name on the map, and possibly the coolest place name ever, is:

M’Xlokk.

I rarely ever say this about names or words in other languages, because I hate sounding like a dumb American who thinks English is the only acceptable language and anything else is weird or abnormal, but I have no idea how you pronounce that. But I love it.

(Aha! Five minutes of Googling has determined that it appears to be an abbreviation for Marsaxlokk, where the “x” has a “sh” sound. Still looks cool to me.)

 

Globalization and transportation

As wary as I am of any move to restrict border crossings because of the often racist motivations behind those restrictions, this is problematic. As part of NAFTA, we agreed to allow Mexican trucks full access to our roads, and we’re finally being forced to give it a try. There’s two main problems with this: 1) safety concerns because there are no restrictions on the number of hours Mexican truck drivers can work (and driver fatigue is a major cause of road accidents), and 2) pollution concerns, because of higher levels of sulfur in the diesel south of the border and trucks that aren’t held to U.S. emissions standards (much less California standards).

The article notes that there is a California law requiring that Mexican trucks meet U.S. emissions standards, but “It remains unclear, state environmental officials said, what that law will mean for the new pilot program.” In other words, NAFTA’s Chapter 11 provision means that Mexican trucking companies could sue California or the U.S. for environmental regulations that cost them money. So, in other words, all of the gains that California has achieved in improving air quality over the last few decades are about to go out the window in the name of global trade.

 

Heavy cloud but…no rain

So, it looks like SoCal is on its way to the driest winter ever, based on the current rainfall totals. Yet another example of the Mediterranean climate; after nearly breaking the record for the most rain in a winter a couple of years ago, now they’re on their way to breaking the record in the other direction. Gotta love that “average” rainfall.

Of course, this winter might just be a taste of things to come, as climatologists think we’ve been in an unusually wet period over the last century or so. As global weather patterns shift, SoCal could be looking at a lot less moisture, so that the small water districts that are able to use groundwater and snowmelt are going to have to rely on outside sources like the Colorado River or the L.A. Aqueduct, putting a tighter and tighter squeeze on those sources.

Makes me glad I’m probably moving back to the Midwest this year…

 

Chicago Olympics?

I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic many times, since I’m a) from Chicago originally and b) interested in the Olympics from a professional POV, but right now I wanted to get this on the record before I forget:

How much do you want to bet that Mayor Daley shut down Meigs Field in 2003 so he could use Northerly Island as part of an Olympic bid?

 

Innovation and Silicon Valley

“Geography matters!” says the New York Times. Or, more grandiosely, “When It Comes to Innovation, Geography is Destiny.” Now, “geography as destiny” generally makes geographers twitch; too many shades of the racist environmental determinism that marred the discipline in the early Twentieth Century, too many shades of the ancient Greeks decreeing that dark-skinned people were lazy because of their climate and blond-haired, blue-eyed people were too hard-working because of their climate and that people born around the Mediterranean, like the baby bear, were just right. (This is also why a lot of geographers disapprove of Jared Diamond’s work, but that’s best saved for another post.)

So, geography as destiny. The reporter did interview Anna Saxenian, author of one of the classic studies on Route 128 and Silicon Valley that is cited in pretty much every paper about the clustering of high-tech economic activity. But they missed Ann Markusen, who has pointed out that Silicon Valley is not the example of pure innovation and market-driven ideas that everyone thinks it is. Silicon Valley is where it is and is as successful as it is because of the subsidies provided by the U.S. government via military contracts. Lots and lots of them. Markusen’s Gunbelt follows a path from the Bay Area around through the Southwest and South, home to not just a lot of military bases, but a lot of high-tech innovation centers that were originally funded by the military.

Geography: what is where, why is it there, and why should I care?

 

GIS in danger

Geographic information systems, or GIS, has radically changed geography and mapping over the last few decades. As I tell my students, on the one hand, GIS means that anyone with access to the software can make a map, making cartography a much more populist endeavour. On the other hand, GIS means that anyone with access to the software can make a map; the quality and cartographic integrity of computer-generated maps isn’t where it used to be now that anyone can push some buttons.

But that’s a rant for another day. I had a long post planned today in response to a couple of interesting articles in the Sunday paper(s), but that can wait for tomorrow. I came across a news story that’s extremely important for GIS and mapmaking in general. Basically, a group of engineers and surveyors is suing the federal government because a law from 1972 requires that all “surveying and mapping” work contracted by the federal government must be done by a company licensed in engineering or surveying. In other words, any GIS application that receives money from the U.S. government would have to be done by a licensed engineer or surveyor. As the legal briefing paper on the Association of American Geographers’ website says:

 

What goes around, comes around, in Butte

Another story on artists reviving a neglected urban area, in this case Butte, MT. They mention in the article that Butte has not suffered from the influx of tourists and second-house-buyers (i.e., rich Californians) that the other major cities in Montana have, which makes it a great place for artists to rehab and work. But they don’t mention the near-inevitable follow-on from artists inhabitating a neighborhood, which Sharon Zukin and others have noted so many times: gentrification. Where is the market for these people’s work; where is the market for the Butte Silver Bow Arts Foundation? I mean, it’s great that the downtown is being revitalized, and it’s great these artists have some place to produce their work. I’m just skeptical that it can last for more than 10 years before they’re priced out to Great Falls or wherever else is left.

On the other hand, there is one cool part of this urban renaissance that is unique to Butte:

“And there is hope for a kind of artistic reparation. An art collection amassed by William Clark, the copper tycoon, is in the Clark Wing that he financed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. The arts foundation would like to bring it to Butte, at least on temporary loan, after the gymnasium at the Y.M.C.A. is converted into a gallery to be called the Museum of Fine Arts Butte.

“For Mr. Clark to amass his collection cost Butte economic, cultural and environmental devastation,” Mr. Bodish said. “Butte has been sacrificed for America. Bringing part of this collection back temporarily is a gesture of their understanding how important Butte was in American history. It closes the loop.”

Amen. We talk in geography and other social sciences about “sacrifice zones”, places like Yucca Mountain or Hanford, WA, that are expected to suck it up and be polluted zones for decades or centuries or millenia. Butte in particular has long been a symbol of the devastation wrought by mining, not just in terms of the environmental effects, but the fact that because it’s a primary economic activity, there’s no value added in the community. They’re left with the arsenic and other poisons in the watershed, and the economic benefits go outside to the copper companies. It would be even better if William Clark’s wealth was going to clean up the Berkeley Pit, the largest Superfund site in the country, but at least this is a start.

 

Rain, rain, don’t go away!

From the L.A. Times: “A total of 11.61 inches of rain was recorded in 2006 at the National Weather Service’s downtown Los Angeles weather station located on the campus of USC. In contrast, in February of 2005 just over 11 inches of rain fell during that month alone.”

Ah yes, the Mediterranean climate. It’s always annoyed me when weather forecasters talk about rainfall being below or above “normal,” because in the climate of Southern California in particular, there is no normal. There’s only average. And we hardly ever hit average, as the figures above show. Mike Davis’s City of Fear includes a rant about this very subject, and I’m sure I can’t match Davis’s rantiness, but it’s still an interesting topic.

It’s also a good example of how our preconceptions about the environment play into how we study it. It’s only been in the last few decades that climatologists have started to consider the Mediterranean climate as driven by catastrophic events, not by the concept of equilibrium that we associate with the humid midcontinental or marine west coast climates of the Eastern U.S. and Europe. Huge swings in terms of rainfall and temperature are perfectly normal for the Mediterranean climate, which is located (besides the obvious parts of Europe, West Asia, and North Africa) along the tips of southern South America, Africa, and Australia. And, of course, California, which means the Mediterranean climate has a disproportionately large share of the population in relation to the land area it covers.

Except here (and in Australia), most of the inhabitants are first- or second-generation dwellers, having come from more regular, “normal” climates. They see these extremes of rainfall as abnormal, something very strange. And they build and dwell as though average rainfalls were normal, as though the typical 11 inches a year was something they would receive every year, not an average of years of plenty and years of want. On the other hand, they do have to prepare for those years of plenty with huge flood control systems to compensate for all of the absorbant wetlands that have been paved over, kind of like having to build the mall parking lot big enough for the day after Thanksgiving, and wasting all of that asphalt the rest of the year. As I tell my classes, it wasn’t until I moved to California that I realized blue lines on the map don’t always correspond to actual water, just concrete ditches.

 

My “research team”

So, being at a teaching-oriented institution like I am, with no graduate program and nothing but little tiny research grants, I decided to see if I could get a research team of sorts going via independent study. So I have five undergrads working on two different projects for me this term (plus another who’s doing her own thing). So far, since the quarter got off to a very sluggish start due to circumstances largely outside my control (like the weather), nothing much has happened. I’m worried that with only 7 weeks left in the term, nothing much is going to happen, and I’m going to have to assign grades to these folks based on a tiny amount of work, and they’re going to get 4 credits for doing basically nothing.

I’ve never supervised students before, so I haven’t had to deal with the delicate balance between checking in on them and nagging. This quarter, I’m only coming in two days a week most weeks, and there isn’t a lot of time during the day for me to connect with them. I suppose I’m going to have to start scheduling a half an hour or so to talk with each of them and make sure they’re getting stuff done. And that they’re learning, ’cause the point is not just to make them research slaves, but to help them practice and enhance their GIS skills.

It’s just so hard to get engaged on a project when the odds are good that I’m leaving when the year is up. I want to be at a more research-focused university (though not exclusively research-focused), and my husband has a number of issues with his current institution as well. So I’m being hesitant about community-based learning projects (though I am doing one with my class this term; more on that in another post), or applying for mini-grants for next year, or networking with other people on campus, because it takes a lot of time and (for me) emotional effort to do that. And if I’m not going to reap the benefits, or if I’m not going to be here to hold up my end of the bargain, then why start in the first place?

So that’s one advantage of the independent study, is that it’s over in a quarter. It’s a project that’s basically repeating the same process in a couple of dozen different locations, so it can be expanded or contracted quite easily. I just hope I don’t forget that since I got a course release from the college for this quarter, I have to do some of the research, too…

 

You’re the pride and joy of Illinois…

I’m sure I won’t be the only commentator to notice that this is going to be a Midwestern Super Bowl, just like it was a Midwestern World Series. And as exciting as it would have been to see the Bears crush the Patriots again, it’ll be even better to see them defeat some Hoosiers. Illinois and Indiana in the Super Bowl: who’d'a thunk it?

“Bear down, Chicago Bears
Make every play clear the way to victory
Bear down, Chicago Bears, put up the fight with the might so fearlessly
We’ll never forget the way you thrilled the nation
With your T formation
Bear down, Chicago Bears
And let ‘em know why you’re wearing the crown
You’re the pride and joy of Illinois
Chicago Bears, bear down!”