Category: geography

I read a summary on the Geography of Africa today. Not the physical layout of Africa, but the geographical research areas of interest of the last 15 years. Its now clear to me that Africa has routinely gotten the shaft from its colonial and post-colonial neighbors. I couldn’t really use the phrase “got the shaft” in the overview of the subject for class, but its hard to think of a more succinct way to paraphrase it since, well, since Aristotle.

I had the impression that Africa was getting taken advantage of by imperial powers and banks, but it was mostly limited to hippie-speak. These were more in-depth looks at the horrible cascading of unforeseen consequences to land use change, the profit exporting of IMF and Worldbank improvement projects, and the dismantling of appropriate medical resources to cope with the diseases challenging the continent. Africa seems to be the test bed for ill-planned projects and poor management decisions.

Fortunately, there are plenty of people aware of this who are interested in fixing many of these problems. Hopefully this includes an understanding that change need not jump from pastoral to industrial in one step, and that the ability to sustain itself rates higher than the ability to raise cash-crops.

One important requirement for success in a capitalist system is efficiency. To be successful is often to be the most efficient at one or more factors (labor, resource acquisition or allocation, distribution, etc.) in one’s economic enterprise. Its odd then that those who are the most successful in a capitalist system would then choose to use their accumulated wealth in what seem to be non-efficient ways. The choice of automobile, home, appliance, property and so forth seem to unravel the overall efficiency the individual sought in the first place.

Sure, this is an obvious observation, but its part of something I’m working on. I’m not saying its wrong either. Maybe its part of some cosmic balance?

For those of you unfortunate enough to be trapped in a dark cubbie, or just out of sight, try the USDA’s Volcanocam.

This previous week’s readings sought to develop a background for the history of Geography both in the larger world sense and in the strictly American realm. It included a brief introduction to early Greek thinkers like Herodotus and Ptolomy, Arab geographers like As Idrisi, and more recent folks like Kant, Ratzel, Vidal, and Penck. The most humorous, and most easy to read, was a bit on Environmental Determinism by Ellen C. Semple. It was completely unscientific, anecdotal, and racist. Yet it was a very predominant way of looking at, if not justifying imperial behavior at the turn of the 20th century.

Though the basis for Environmental Determinism is rather simple, even elegant, it takes much larger and sweeping generalizations about peoples based on the environment in which they live. One of my favorite generalizations was that peoples from the mountainous regions of the Alps were incapable of creating art because of the abundance of beauty in Mountains. It was people from the lowlands of France and such that were creating the poetry of the day because the less aggressive landscape allowed their minds to create purely aesthetic works. I’m paraphrasing, but not by much.

This way of looking at peoples was naturally misused to defend the treatment of indigenous peoples, and justify expansion and other imperial practices. Many subsequent geographers have felt that this simplistic and unscientific theory is part of the reason that Geography as a discipline lacks a clear picture in our minds. In other words, Environmental Determinism did for Geography what Fascism did for Khaki.

Yesterday was my first day of class in the Geography graduate program at Portland State. I was a little nervous leaving work on the busiest day of the year, but was able to forget about it for a while and get excited about going back to school again.

The majority of the class was introductory stuff like Syllabus and reading material, but we also looked at the department and talked about other happenings. The class is pretty small and seems to have a fairly wide variety of people and interests.

Something that immediately stood out to me was the amount of reading to be done. It also seemed somewhat foreign to me that we have to “make photocopies” of the material to read. Having worked with instructors to create PDFs of reserve material so they could be fetched online at one’s leisure has warped my perspective on the matter. Maybe I’ll bring it up.

Now I’m looking for bibliography software (or a web app) so I can keep track of all this stuff as I read it in case I need to refer back to it. So far, BibDesk takes the cake, but I’m looking for something a little bigger – like an online personal depot that can also store my electronic copies of this content. Heck, Moveable Type could probably work.

Anyway, I’m started and relieved to hear that 3+ years for the program is about average. I’m a slow reader, you see.

The Guardian estimates that Microsoft has lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business because of lacking in geographical knowledge among its developers. To address the problem, the company is going to start having geography classes to avoid future “bloopers.” (The Guardian misspelled the word. Ironic)

Just so I wasn’t a superior feeling jerk, I took the survey myself. I scored a perfect 20. The survey is quite simple, and I’m still a superior feeling jerk.

I don’t think Microsoft is any more to blame than any other corporation. Hell, they provide some great tools, like MapPoint and Terraserver. But I do agree that we as a nation really need to improve our geographic understanding. The survey’s highlights show American’s to be especially lacking. I guess I’ll just have to become a geography teacher someday.

My third entry on this site was about Gavin Menzies presenting his case to the Royal Geographical Society for China discovering the Americas before Columbus or other Europeans.

Last night I checked out a DVD from our library that chronicles Menzies’ theory. The documentary, 1421 – the year China discovered America? is split into two hours. The first develops Gavin’s version of the voyages of Zheng He, a eunuch admiral from the Ming Dynasty. Oddly enough – many of the emperor’s officials were eunuchs, and we had to look the word up because, you know – we thought it meant castrated bed chamber attendant. Well, it does in Greece. In China however, eunuchs were pretty much bureaucracy, but castrated.

Anyway, Zheng He sailed around most of the Indian Ocean with the massive Ming fleet. These voyages have been confirmed by stone carvings around the various location. Menzies argues that Zheng He, or one of his admirals, or even one of his deputies sailed past the Cape of Good Hope, up the western coast of Africa, and ultimately across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and on to Florida and maybe even as far as Rhode Island. It was all very interesting and exciting.

The second hour of the documentary was directed by some one else, and pretty much spends its time deconstructing all of Menzies’ arguments, asking experts in their respective fields about the evidence that Menzies has offered. It was somewhat disappointing because it really takes a lot of the wind out of theory. But it also points out the lack of concrete evidence for the theory.

All in all, Menzies has a great theory with some rather large holes. Its certainly a charming one, and the documentary is quite entertaining and informative. The thrust of his argument is that the great explorers that are credited with the discovery of the Americas already had maps of the new world and someone had to already have been there for these maps to exist. Menzies thinks it was the Chinese.

Today while looking through a box of old archived photos and publications for the school, I found this aerial photo of the campus I work at from what I estimate to be the early 1970’s. I was so impressed with the photo, it’s inclusion of Mt. Hood, and the lack of surrounding neighborhoods that I had to scan it.

Thursday Michelle, Jason, Scott and I went down to Patagonia to see Douglas Lorain’s slide show and discussion about 100 great hikes in Oregon. The show was timed with the release of his new book, 100 Classic Hikes in Oregon, and was quite an impressive collection of both stories and images. One of the most appealing aspects of the show was that he includes a best time to visit, which is often missing from many books. In Summary – Don’t go anywhere in July because of flies and mosquitos.

One of the most inspiring parts of the show were the images of places in Oregon that I didn’t know even existed. I know Oregon to have plenty of beautiful locations, but I didn’t know it had some of the great granite wonderlands like the Alpine Lakes Wilderness of Washington. Now, all I need is some time and gas money to visit these places.

Finding parking in The Pearl was a challenge. There was a block party up near Rogue, a massive party and concert at a Jamison Square, live window galleries, a farmers market, and throngs of fit, hip, and attractive people. As a new urbanist, I should have been ecstatic at this proof of life, but at the time I just wanted to park and get to the slide show. It took half an hour to find a spot, and another 15 minutes off my life from the seething anger and stress that parking creates in me. Chill dude, Go by Street Car.