Canadian Academy to Name Medal for AAG Past President Ross Mackay
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC) has agreed to honor the memory of J. Ross Mackay, the world’s pre-eminent permafrost scientist of his generation, by striking a medal in his name that will recognize major, career-length achievements in Arctic research. Mackay served as President of the American Association of Geographers in 1969-70.
J. Ross Mackay, Canada’s pre-eminent Arctic scientist and a world authority on permafrost, passed away peacefully on October 28, 2014, at the age of 98. As a Past President of the AAG, he will be honored with a full memorial in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, scheduled for publication in 2017.
The RSC medal will be awarded in any field of Arctic research, whether natural science or social science.
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Annual Meeting
AAG To Offer On-site Childcare During 2017 Annual Meeting
CAMP AAG was a success in San Francisco and the AAG is again making an investment to provide full-time, professionally-managed and staffed on-site childcare services for the 2017 annual meeting in Boston. CAMP AAG will offer age-appropriate activities for children ranging from 6 months to 13 years of age (separated into age-appropriate groups) including curriculum-enriched, hands-on, creative activities, arts & crafts projects, active games, and more.
Interested parents will be able to register their children either online in advance or during on-site registration in Boston. Although the AAG strongly recommends advance registration online to ensure access to your desired time slots, registration will remain open throughout the annual meeting week directly at the on-site childcare facility.
The on-site childcare services will be provided by Accent on Children’s Arrangements, Inc. (ACCENT), which will design and run a children’s program called CAMP AAG. ACCENT will staff CAMP AAG with teacher professional child care providers who have completed ACCENT’s specialized training program. In addition, ACCENT’s on-site supervisors are CPR and Pediatric First Aid certified.
Here’s what a few parents said about their experiences: “Thank you for providing daycare and supporting working moms.” “Great initiative, AAG!” “Thanks for making it possible for me to attend the convention.”
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.
Geographies of Bread and Water in the 21st Century
MacDonald
By Glen M. MacDonald
Geography is a big discipline, both in terms of its global purview and the wide spectrum of scholarly perspectives geographers bring to bear. We should not be shy about applying ourselves to some of the biggest and most complex problems facing the world.
What could be a more critical problem then providing bread and water to support the planet’s population now and in the year 2050 when over 9 million people will depend on the finite resources of the earth for sustenance?
This past month the United Nations held a High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and issued its first tracking report on global sustainable development. U.N. officials noted that today approximately 800 million people suffer from hunger and 2 billion face challenges of water scarcity.
The AAG has issued a proposal for a new Advanced Placement course in Geographic Information Science and Technology (AP GIS&T).
All U.S. high schools, colleges, and universities are encouraged to review and support the proposal by visiting www.apgist.org.
AP GIS&T is designed to introduce high school students to the fundamentals of geographic information science and applications of powerful geospatial technologies for spatial analysis and problem solving. Together with AP Human Geography, AP GIS&T offers an opportunity to engage students in outstanding geographic learning experiences and promote awareness of the many college and career opportunities available in the discipline.
Pre-order ‘The International Encyclopedia of Geography’
The AAG and an international team of distinguished editors and authors are in the final stages of preparing a new major reference work for Geography: The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology.
This 15-volume work, published by Wiley both in hard copy and online, will be an invaluable resource for libraries, geographers, GIScientists, students and academic departments around the globe. Updated annually, this Encyclopedia will be the authoritative reference work in the field of geography for decades to come.
In response to the academic situation in Turkey, the AAG sent a letter to President Erdogan in May to “express our concern with ongoing reports in the United States that academics in Turkey who signed the ‘Petition for Peace’ have faced reprisals from the government.”
In the letter, the AAG also urges “the government of Turkey to be a leader by taking all possible steps to protect free expression and academic freedom by ending any efforts to punish signers of the petition.”
*AAG signed on only to the MESA letter on “Threats to Academic Freedom and Higher Education in Turkey” dated July 21, 2016.
ANNUAL MEETING
The Chinatown Atlas
In this first installment of the Focus on Boston series, Tunney Lee introduces readers to the Chinatown Atlas, a website that “tells the story of the development of Boston’s Chinatown (in the changing context of immigration and the physical and social growth of Boston and the region).”
Lee explains that the Atlas “uses a combination of text, photo, maps, and stories to track the complexity of the changes.”
Lead a field trip on the geographies of Boston and New England
New and returning visitors to Boston are looking to learn more about the city, Cape Cod, and New England. You can guide them through the rich cultural and physical geographies the area has to offer by organizing and/or leading a field trip.
Field trips also allow attendees to learn about different areas of geography in an interactive environment. Share what you know and propose a field trip today.
GeoCapabilities Launches Site for Developing Teachers as Curriculum Leaders
The GeoCapabilities project has produced a teacher training website that draws on principles of human capability development as an approach to preparing teachers as future curriculum leaders. The website explains these principles and also features four training modules. The modules are supported with workshop materials, additional key readings, and videos. The website is intended for use in both initial teacher training and the professional development for practicing teachers.
NCRGE Announces First Round of Transformative Research Grants
The National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE), a research coordination network funded by the NSF, has announced the first cohort of researchers funded by its Transformative Research grant program. Representatives from the three research groups receiving NCRGE grants will be featured on the program for the NCRGE Transformative Research Symposium that is being planned for the 2017 AAG Annual Meeting in Boston.
This symposium will be an all day event on Saturday, April 8, 2017, and will feature guest speakers, paper and panel sessions, and grant-writing workshops for geography education research.
Deadlines for some AAG awards are approaching in September. If you would like to nominate someone or apply on your own behalf, please follow the links highlighted in each award description below to the submission information on each award description page.
The Susan Hardwick Excellence in Mentoring Award is given annually to an individual geographer, group, or department who has demonstrated extraordinary leadership in building supportive academic and professional environments in their departments, associations, and institutions and guiding the academic and or professional growth of their students and junior colleagues. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2016.
AAG’s Enhancing Diversity Award honors those geographers who have pioneered efforts toward or actively participated in efforts toward encouraging a more diverse discipline over the course of several years. Deadline for nominations is September 15, 2016.
The AAG Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography is given annually to an individual geographer or team that has demonstrated originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography. Deadline for nominations is September 20, 2016.
IN MEMORIAM
Lee Pederson
Leland R. Pederson, Emeritus Professor of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, a Latin Americanist and a historian of geographic thought, died July 27, 2016, in Tucson, Arizona, at age 88.
Professor Pederson is survived by his wife, Lucy, and daughter, Lisa. Contributions in Lee’s memory may be made, per his wishes, in support of the University of Arizona’s School of Geography and Development through the University of Arizona Foundation. Read More.
PUBLICATIONS
Online Art Exhibition to Accompany ‘GeoHumanities’ Journal
The AAG’s newest journal, GeoHumanities, launched in 2015, is not only an exciting new forum for interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of geography and the humanities. It also provides the space for publishing more creative work which crosses over between the academy and practice.
The “Practices and Curations” section of each issue features a range of work not in traditional academic manuscript format. Pieces include poems, visual essays, commentaries on art installations and exhibitions, short stories, collaborations between academics and artists, and biographic reflections.
ADDENDA
Call for Manuscripts for The Pennsylvania Geographer
AGS Launches New Digital ‘FOCUS on Geography’
Elin Thorlund Joins AAG Staff as Research Assistant
Some of the artists and arts-practicing geographers whose work has been published in the Practices and Curations section of journal are now featured on a new website: the GeoHumanities Online Art Exhibition.
Environmental Sciences Section Editor Sought for ‘Annals of the AAG’
The AAG seeks applications and nominations for the Environmental Sciences section editor for the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. The new section editor will be appointed for a four-year editorial term that will commence on January 1, 2017. The appointment will be made by fall 2016. A letter of application that addresses both qualifications and a vision for the Environmental Sciences section should be accompanied by a complete curriculum vitae. Nominations and applications should be submitted by Friday, October 7, 2016. Learn More.
The Chinatown Atlas website tells the story of the development of Boston’s Chinatown (in the changing context of immigration and the physical and social growth of Boston and the region). It uses a combination of text, photo, maps, and stories to track the complexity of the changes.
Boston’s Chinatown is one of the few middle-sized Chinatowns that have survived from the Chinese Exclusion Act era. Today it is the economic, social and cultural center for working-class Chinese in the metropolitan area (mostly Cantonese and Fujianese speaking immigrants). It also serves East and Southeast Asian population and tourists.
In a city known for its ethnic neighborhoods, Chinatown was always different. It was not where most Chinese lived. It was established to serve the laundrymen who lived in isolation in other neighborhoods and industrial towns. They came into Boston on Sundays to socialize in the company of their countrymen. Even as laundries gave way to restaurants and immigration laws changed, Chinatown remains until today the center of social life and provided the necessary goods and services for working class Chinese.
The Chinese were not welcome in the city and numerous efforts were made to remove them. Early efforts were street widenings, the location of the Elevated Railway, the mass arrest of suspected illegal immigrants and the growth of the garment industry. As the city grew, highway construction, the expansion of the Tufts Medical Center and urban renewal posed continuous threats to the viability of the community. More recently, the resurgence of downtown Boston has increased rents and land prices making it difficult for community businesses and low-income renters to stay in the area.
However, the community survived earlier threats through perseverance and ingenuity. Institutions such as family associations and language schools were founded to form the backbone of the community. It learned to protest and lobby against complete urban removal that had diminished or destroyed Chinatowns in cities like St. Louis or Washington, DC. At the same time, the city and the state became more committed to neighborhood concerns and public participation. As a result, the community-owned affordable housing and public facilities built with public help has enabled most low-income residents to stay.
The organization of the website. The components are the eras, essays about specific topics (e.g. garment district and community organizations) and personal stories. The eras are completed but the other sections are still in progress.
The eras as organizing principle. They are mostly defined by the changes in the immigration laws – Chinese Exclusion Act, the War Brides Act, the 1965 Immigration Act. Equally important is the context of the city and region.
Maps on specific topics to help understand both the locational and social factors involve. E.g. although Chinatown was predominantly males of working age and called a “bachelor society” the analysis of the census shows the slow but clear growth of families from 1900 to WWII even under the Exclusion Act.
Articles from the historic Boston Globe. Given very sparse records and no memoirs, the digital files proved to be valuable resources for important events and daily life.
Photos from the Chinese Historical Society and archives (Boston Public Library, Historic Boston, Boston Globe etc.)
Focus on Boston is an on-going series curated by the Local Arrangements Committee to provide insight on and understanding of the geographies of Boston and New England. The 2017 AAG Annual Meeting will be held April 5-9, 2017, in Boston.
Elin Thorlund Joins AAG Staff as Research Assistant
The AAG is pleased to announce that Elin Thorlund has joined the association staff as a Research Assistant at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. Elin served as an intern at the association during the spring 2015 semester, as well as during the AAG annual meetings in Chicago and San Francisco.
She will contribute to numerous areas of the AAG, including membership, accounting, journals, operations and annual meeting.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in geography with minors in Spanish and global studies in the arts and humanities from Michigan State University. As an undergraduate, she co-authored a paper in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers Volume 106, Number 3.
In her free time, Elin enjoys spending as much time in the outdoors as possible.
Geographies of Bread and Water in the 21st Century
Geography is a big discipline, both in terms of its global purview and the wide spectrum of scholarly perspectives geographers bring to bear. We should not be shy about applying ourselves to some of the biggest and most complex problems facing the world. What could be a more critical problem then providing bread and water to support the planet’s population now and in the year 2050 when over 9 million people will depend on the finite resources of the earth for sustenance? This past month the United Nations held a High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development and issued its first tracking report on global sustainable development. U.N. officials noted that today approximately 800 million people suffer from hunger and 2 billion face challenges of water scarcity.
Of course, the challenges of food and water scarcity are not homogenously distributed across a “flat earth.” Looking at the 2015 – Hunger Map prepared by the U.N. World Food Programme, we can see an uneven geography where undernourishment afflicts less than 5 percent of the population in North America, Europe, Australia and considerable portions of South America and Asia. In stark contrast, across large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa greater than 25 percent to 35 percent of the population are undernourished. Similarly, the world is not flat when it comes to water scarcity. The U.N. World Water Assessment Map displays a geography that contains some elements of the Hunger Map, but also some important differences. According to the U.N. World Water Assessment Programme, water scarcity also afflicts much of sub-Saharan Africa, but water scarcity also extends in a broad stroke across Northern Africa, the Near East and into southern and central Asia as well. Areas such as northern Mexico and the adjacent southwestern United States and southeastern Australia are also experiencing water scarcity.
As if the current global food and water situation is not troubling enough, the prognosis for the future indicates even more challenges ahead. In 2009, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization produced in a hallmark report that concluded increasing human population size coupled with economic growth, urbanization and demands for high-quality food products will result in the need for a ~70 percent increase in agricultural productivity by 2050. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization this would require some 3 billion tonnes additional cereal production each year, as well as an additional 200 million tonnes of meat production. The U.N.’s estimates on future water scarcity are also not reassuring. The World Water Assessment Programme concludes that by 2025, some 1.8 billion people will be living in areas with significant water scarcity.
The impacts of anthropogenic climate change on agricultural productivity at 2050 are not entirely clear. As an example, in a 2012 review published in Plant Physiology, David Lobell and Sharon Gourdji suggested that even under pessimistic scenarios it is unlikely that net global declines in agriculture will occur at 2050. On the other hand, a 2014 study published in Nature Climate Change by Senthold Asseng and a number of co-authors including Charles Jones of the Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland and Fulu Tao of the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences concluded that with each additional degree of warming, global wheat production could decline by 6 percent.
The conclusions of the U.N. World Water Assessment Programme in terms of future water scarcity are concerning. Under current climate change scenarios, it is possible that close to 50 percent of the world’s population will be living in regions experiencing high water stress as early as 2030. Although the greatest number of regions likely to be afflicted by severe water scarcity lie in sub-Saharan Africa, there is little cause for those in highly developed countries to be sanguine. The Colorado River reservoir system upon which much of the Southwest receives water and hydroelectric power is already facing unprecedented low-water stresses. A recent paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Julia Vano and others, including Dennis Lettenmaie, now at the UCLA Geography Department, suggests that over the 21st century the river is likely to experience decades of flow significantly lower than observed in the 20th century when the reservoir system was developed.
Wheat harvest in Gujerat, one of the top 10 wheat-producing states in India. Due to recent aridity, India may need to import some five million metric tons of wheat in 2016-17. (Photo courtesy of Glen M MacDonald)
Just as today, forecasts for the future of food and water resources indicate that regional variability will be a key feature of scarcity and a critical component in addressing global challenges. Geographers have helped lead the way in appreciation of this. Diana Liverman, now at the Department of Geography of the University of Arizona, pointed this out almost 25 years ago in her work such as that with Cynthia Rosenzweig, on “Predicted effects of climate change on agriculture: A comparison of temperate and tropical regions.” More recently, William Easterling, a geographer at Penn State, and his co-authors of the chapter “Food, Fibre, and Forest Products” in the 2007 International Program on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment provide important and clear elucidation of the spatial heterogeneity in the agricultural impacts of climate change. The food and water challenges are inherently geographical in nature and the spatial scales we need be concerned with range from the global to the national and down to the individual field. Considered from a biological and physical environmental perspective one can clearly see the role that agricultural geographers and geographical hydrologists, climatologists and pedologists can and have been playing. However, it will take more than that from our discipline.
Consider again the maps and reports that the U.N. has produced on hunger and water scarcity. If environment, in the form of climate or soils etc., were the sole determinant of hunger or water scarcity we would expect neat correspondence between food challenges and isotherms or isohyets etc., but that is not the case. Rather we see much spatial diversity in these patterns, which can be attributed to differing socioeconomic conditions. In some cases, countries with undernourishment rates of less than 5 percent, lie adjacent or close to countries with rates of more than 25 percent or greater than 35 percent. This is particularly true in Africa, but is also seen in parts of South America, Central America and Asia. Water scarcity also shows such national heterogeneity. The U.N. World Water Assessment is explicit in separating those regions, such as the American Southwest, suffering from physical water scarcity and those, such as sub-Saharan nations, suffering from economically induced water scarcity. Environment has a role in the geography of food and water scarcity, but clearly the causes arise from a more complex amalgamation of environment with socioeconomic factors.
Famine in Africa today chillingly illustrates the complexity of the food security problems we face in terms of causal factors and solutions. According to the U.N., a current climatic drought, coupled in some regions with the occurrence of damaging flood events, has placed as many as 18 million people in need of food assistance in countries such as Malawi, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. At the same time, civil war in South Sudan is a major contributor to a food crisis facing almost five million people while in Nigeria the barbarity of Boko Haram terrorists is a major factor in placing over 4 million people in risk of famine. In all these countries, external food aid from global sources is a critical short-term solution to avoid mass starvation. However, the cost of this for the six other countries mentioned above will be over $500 million and is largely paid for by more developed countries beyond Africa. It is sobering to consider that in 2011 over 100 Republican congressional representatives called for the defunding of a principal contributor to such efforts, the U.S. Agency for International Development. Politics and economics far distant from crisis zones of food and water scarcity can have a huge impact. In the longer term, solutions will include locally improved agriculture and water systems, but that is not likely to completely suffice. Food transference, along with maintaining the global political and economic ability for such transfers, will remain a critical component of famine relief and the overall food and water security of the planet. Thus, solutions must also consider a global perspective in terms of the earth’s overall capacity to meet the total food and freshwater needs of over 9 billion people by 2050. This is a challenge that reaches far into the realms of economic, transportation, political, cultural and conflict geography.
There is hope that the food and water challenges we face can be surmounted as we move through the 21st century. It is important to remember that although much remains to be done, there has been remarkable progress made in terms of alleviating global famine over the past 50 years. Up until the 1970’s, great famines killed an average of 1 million people annually and this has declined to as low as 50,000 people today, according to some estimates. Similarly, since 1990, there have been improvements in access to safe drinking water in places such as sub-Saharan Africa where such access has risen from 50 percent to 60 percent of the population. Looking forward, a recent study led by Wolfram Mauser of the Department of Geography at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Germany and published in Nature Communications estimated that with improved farm management and more efficient spatial allocation of crops, the global food biomass requirements by 2050 could be met even if there was no expansion in world cropland area.
The importance of geography and the geographical perspective in feeding and watering a world population that is climbing to some 9 million people, was recognized in the 2010 National Research Council study “Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences.” A chapter was devoted to “How Will We Sustainably Feed Everyone in the Coming Decade and Beyond?”. The chapter outlines the ways in which geographical research contributes to understanding and solving the global food challenges and then posits some critical research questions for geographers. I invite you to read the full chapter for further exposition and consider the research questions raised there. Here I will simply quote the concluding statement:
Sustainably feeding Earth’s population over the coming decade and beyond requires better understanding of how food systems interact with environmental change, how they are connected across regions, and how they are influenced by changing economic, political, and technological circumstances. The geographical sciences’ analysis of food production and consumption, when coupled with recent conceptual and methodological advances, can provide new insights into this critically important research arena.” (p 65).
What role then can the AAG play in furthering this strategic area of geography? We are fortunate to have many talented geographers working across a broad spectrum of the discipline who have direct or ancillary contributions to make in their research, teaching and public communication. We also have specialty groups in Geographies of Food and Agriculture and Water Resources that bring together like-minded geographers to work directly on these issues through research and education. Those working in the geographical tradition of political geography, notably the members of our Cultural and Political Ecology specialty group, have long grappled with the complex environmental and socioeconomic nexus that influences development and sustainability — particularly in the global south. This helps provide a foundation for integrated multi-perspective work. However, I think we can do more to build from this. We can further promote innovative research and educational initiatives on food and water within the dedicated specialty groups mentioned, but we must also work to build even greater linkages to other geographers and our other specialty groups to develop grand and cross-cutting initiatives that tackle the complex environmental, technological, economic, social, political and cultural nexus that is at the heart of providing bread and water for the world’s populations. In such efforts geographical information sciences and remote sensing are key skills that geography brings to bear along with the perspectives noted above. Sessions at our annual meetings and special issues in our journals that seek to tackle these truly grand questions of feeding the world from multiple, but integrated, geographical perspectives form an important pathway. Inviting experts from outside geography to our meetings and to work with us on our research and educational activities will also contribute to this goal. Finally, helping our members share their research and geographical perspectives on world food and water issues with the public, is an important contribution our association can make. The global garden and its fountains are in need of help, and we, as individual geographers and as an association are an important part of the solution.
Join the conversation and share your thoughts on Twitter #PresidentAAG or leave a comment below.
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