The first Asian-American Vice President?

There is a reason that Kamala Harris is referred to as an Indian-American and a Black, but not as an Asian-American.

It will confuse the life out of most of my fellow Americans when they look at Kamala Harris and search for the "Asian" in her.  Because ... in this country, Asian-American has come to mean people with roots in countries in the far east and southeast Asia.

Perhaps you are thinking that I am being picky.  No, I am not.

This has been an issue that I have been fighting ever since my graduate school days when I reminded many white Americans that I too am an Asian.

One of my favorite encounters on this topic was after graduate school, when I was working as a transportation planner.

An Anglophile colleague walked over to my work space during a coffee break to ask me a question.  She was reading a novel set in London, and was confused that the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi characters were being referred to as Asians.

I calmly explained to her that Asia is a continent, and it includes India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh too.  I added that people from Asia are Asians, as much as the French and the Czech are Europeans!

Her mind was blown!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a letter to The New Yorker, on this very topic.

In the essay on how television made Trump's presidency possible, Emily Nussbaum writes that “The Apprentice” attracted diverse contestants and audience.  Nussbaum notes: "It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants."  In that sentence, Nussbaum makes the same mistake that is often made here in the US--she identifies "Asian" as being separate from "Indian, and Middle Eastern," even though India and the Middle East are very much part of Asia.
In America, "Asians" has come to mean only those from from the far eastern edges of Asia--like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam.  Perhaps this resulted from our military entanglements with those countries.  But then given our military expeditions elsewhere, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one would think that by now we would have figured out that the people of those countries too are Asians!

I didn't care whether that would be published (it was not) but I had to get that off my chest!

I wonder what might have been the story if Kamala Harris' mother was not from Chennai, but from, say, Sikkim and, as a result, if her facial features were a tad different.  That would have been one heck of a lesson in world geography ;)

Stranded in the Falklands

I was a globally-curious political junkie of a college student when Margaret Thatcher went to war against Argentina.

As a colonizer-hating pinkie, I was against Thatcher and the UK, even if I had no idea about the issues.  Much later in my life, when I watched Groucho Marx, I wished I had known about "I'm against it!" as my guiding principle ;)

When I did find out from the atlas where the Falklands are, it shocked me that the UK would go to war so far away from home over some small islands.

The Falklands are practically a launching pad to the Antarctic and with barely any population, yet Thatcher was keen on fighting for it!

A year later, Reagan sent the US forces to invade Grenada.  Some simpaticos they were!

A few weeks ago, Larissa MacFarquhar wrote about how much the Falklands have transformed over the past couple of decades and are now at global crossroads.  A recent development there was about oil:

Since the nineteen-nineties, oil companies had been exploring the waters around the islands, and by the early twenty-tens it had become clear that substantial oil deposits existed in the basins offshore.

Money started coming in.

Well, all that was in an era before COVID-19.  Once the coronavirus took charge of the world, everything changed.

In late March, as the plague drew closer, and the planes stopped coming, the islanders, like people everywhere, sat at home and went online, trying to figure out what was going to happen. Oil prices had plunged since the pandemic began, and covid had been spreading among workers living in close quarters on rigs, so it seemed unlikely that drilling would start anytime soon. With restaurants closing in Europe, demand for fish was a fraction of what it had been, and that was in addition to the possibility that Brexit would result in European tariffs approaching twenty per cent. It was not yet clear what all this meant for the fisheries, but their revenues made up nearly two-thirds of the islands’ income, so any reduction would have an enormous impact. Tourism was the second-largest business, and that consisted almost entirely of cruise-ship passengers. Who was going to sign up for a cruise now? And if the tourists stopped coming restaurants and hotels would close. You weren’t allowed to stay in the Falklands without a job, so the people who worked there and didn’t yet have permanent residency might have to go home.
What would happen if planes stopped bringing in regular supplies? Would the islands become remote once more, hoping the deliveries came in, relying on homegrown food if they didn’t? In the old days, fruit was shipped in once a month—it was hard to grow anything on the islands other than berries—and people called mutton “365” because they ate it every day, sometimes for all three meals. Could that happen again? Would younger people who’d grown up in Stanley learn to slaughter sheep?

And what happens to the offshore oil exploration?  A gambler's loss:; "tapping some fields no longer makes economic sense"

[A] decade after the discovery of as much as 1.7 billion barrels of crude in surrounding waters, the British overseas territory known for sheep rearing and tension with Argentina looks as remote as ever. Rather than the next frontier, the project to extract energy risks being added to a list of what companies call “stranded assets” that could cost them huge sums to mothball.

The coronavirus has, in some ways, accelerated the shift away from fossil fuels, even as the sociopath in the White House continues to operate in his own world of alternative facts.  A tRumpian world in which coal is king, and oil is black gold.

I wonder if the stable genius knows where the Falklands are!

Don't ever say we didn't see this coming!

In a Thanksgiving post/column in 2014, I wrote:

While we in the US might feel sheltered from such an listing—however incomplete it is—of less than pleasant developments around the planet, the Ebola virus was a nasty reminder that we live in an interconnected world and that what happens in a remote part of West Africa will not necessarily stay in West Africa. The military conflicts around the world will force the US to act—a burden that comes with being the sole global superpower. Economic slowdown in Europe will affect us, given the highly interdependent economic web that links us to countries that we might not even be able to identify on a world map.
An old idea that is often mentioned, especially in academia, is that “war is God's way of teaching Americans geography.” We need to update that for the contemporary contexts. Now, any crisis is apparently how we Americans learn geography. Thus, thanks to Boko Haram, we were forced to look up Nigeria on a map. With Ebola in the news, there is a good chance that a few Americans were suddenly thrust with narratives about the historical connection between Liberia and slavery in the US. But then, if history provides any guidance, we perhaps passed on all the chances to learn geography.

That was in 2014.

In a post in 2015, I wrote:

In the NY Times, Gates had authored an op-ed:

The Ebola epidemic in West Africa has killed more than 10,000 people. If anything good can come from this continuing tragedy, it is that Ebola can awaken the world to a sobering fact: We are simply not prepared to deal with a global epidemic.

More than 10,000 dead.  From a disease. Caused by a virus. Yet, we--in the US and the rest of the world as well--pretty much don't care.  Which is all the more why Gates reminds us even if we care not about the 10,000 dead, and the epidemic that continues to infect people, well, perhaps we will at least take notice if we think that we too might get affected by some global epidemic.

Of all the things that could kill more than 10 million people around the world in the coming years, by far the most likely is an epidemic. But it almost certainly won’t be Ebola. As awful as it is, Ebola spreads only through physical contact, and by the time patients can infect other people, they are already showing symptoms of the disease, which makes them relatively easy to identify.
Other diseases — flu, for example — spread through the air, and people can be infectious before they feel sick, which means that one person can infect many strangers just by going to a public place.

Are you listening now?

I believe that we can solve this problem, just as we’ve solved many others — with ingenuity and innovation.

As committed as he is to the cause, it requires more than well-funded nonprofit organizations and foundations.

That was in 2015.

The global pandemic has arrived now in the form of COVID-19.

If even I from a small town in a valley far away from the places of power and fortune could have been worried about a strange disease that can quickly spread all over the world and, therefore, contemplated about the urgency for a global structure to deal with it when it arrives ... well, shame on the US for being so under-prepared for this Coronavirus!

One more thing that 63 million Americans need to be think about for having elected as their Dear Leader a sociopath who is nothing but a narcissist with an orange face paint! 

Making Topophiles out of Navigational Idiots

I was a FOB graduate student when I heard people all jazzed about something called a "monarch butterfly."  I simply could not understand the hullabaloo.

This was back in the dark ages before Google and Wikipedia and the rest.  One had to talk to people or search for information in the library in order to get questions answered.  I chose the easier route and asked a few people what the deal was with the monarch butterfly.

When they explained it to me, well, I too was jazzed, and I too started talking about it.  And, during my one and only camping experience ever, I even got to see a few of those butterflies.

What is so special about them?  This butterfly migrates. Over thousands of miles.  A tiny butterfly!

We knew little about this remarkable feat until relatively recently, when the Canadian entomologist Frederick Urquhart made his discoveries. After searching for hiding places where his country’s monarchs might be hibernating, and not finding any, he got the brilliant idea of tagging 300,000 butterflies with a number and a request (obviously in minuscule writing) to let him know where the animal had been found. He eventually learned that Canadian monarchs travel all the way to Texas and Mexico. They get there by orienting to the sun’s position in the sky, or if it is cloudy, with the help of polarized light. In 1976, Urquhart made front-page news with his announcement of an overwintering site in the Mexican mountains. Since then more such sites have been discovered, always at high altitude, each one packed with millions of butterflies.

NPR's Ari Shapiro asks David Barrie, who has authored a book on Supernavigators whether humans have  "innate abilities to navigate the way that other animals do."  To which Barrie says:

Well, I believe we do, but we have to cultivate them. The trouble is that we've been civilized now for a little while, and we've become more and more dependent on technology. You know, 800 or 900 years ago, the magnetic compass came into use, and then we had, you know, the sextant and the chronometer and so on. Now we've got GPS.
GPS is a marvel. I mean, it is an astonishing technological achieve, but our increasing and exclusive reliance on it is turning us into kind of navigational idiots. We're losing the ability to exercise our natural skills. And from my perspective, almost more sadly, we're being more and more cut off from the natural world as a result. We no longer look up from our little glowing screens and observe the world around us. And I think we may discover that this has quite profound implications both for our physical health but also for our spiritual health, too.

There is more and more evidence that ditching GPS is good for our brains:

In a study published in Nature Communications in 2017, researchers asked subjects to navigate a virtual simulation of London’s Soho neighborhood and monitored their brain activity, specifically the hippocampus, which is integral to spatial navigation. Those who were guided by directions showed less activity in this part of the brain than participants who navigated without the device. “The hippocampus makes an internal map of the environment and this map becomes active only when you are engaged in navigating and not using GPS,” Amir-Homayoun Javadi, one of the study’s authors, told me.

Given that such brain research is new, and a smartphone GPS is even newer, there is much yet to be understood:

What isn’t known is the effect of GPS use on hippocampal function when employed daily over long periods of time. Javadi said the conclusions he draws from recent studies is that “when people use tools such as GPS, they tend to engage less with navigation. Therefore, brain area responsible for navigation is less used, and consequently their brain areas involved in navigation tend to shrink.”

There are plenty of other benefits, big and small, tangible and intangible:

Finding our way on our own — using perception, empirical observation and problem-solving skills — forces us to attune ourselves to the world. And by turning our attention to the physical landscape that sustains and connects us, we can nourish “topophilia,” a sense of attachment and love for place.

Aha, I can now call myself a topophile too!

There goes the neighborhood!

It is very difficult, extremely difficult, to make most of us accept something that we wish we did not have to.  Which is why I have, for instance, stopped even attempting to reason with trump supporters--even if they might have some modicum of decency within them. 

But, just because we don't like a truth, well, that truth does not simply disappear. Instead, it keeps raising its head over and over again, despite our attempts to ignore it or to whack it down the hole. We don't like our views upended and we will do our best to resist the truth.

No, this post is not about trump; though the latest detailed NY Times report might as well be a classic example of what this post is about.

For a long time, I have been blogging that choosing your parents well makes one hell of a difference. (you can now see why that NY Times piece on trump also fits here.)  But, we resist the idea that so much of our future depends on that accident of birth.  Providing evidence that researchers have gathered, I continue to point out this out.

Way back in 2011, for example, I quoted Branko Milanovic (via Catherine Rampell)

an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were)

That goes against the idea that we prefer to believe--that individuals can and should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and they can and will succeed. “I built what I built myself.”

More evidence on this: The American Dream Is Harder To Find In Some Neighborhoods

Note it says neighborhoods.  Now check back with that Milanovic statement.

So, what does the latest piece say?

A new online data tool being made public Monday finds a strong correlation between where people are raised and their chances of achieving the American dream.
Harvard University economist Raj Chetty has been working with a team of researchers on this tool — the first of its kind because it marries U.S. Census Bureau data with data from the Internal Revenue Service. And the findings are changing how researchers think about economic mobility.

Like with climate change, here too we can have researchers do study after study.  Like with climate change, people will dis the studies just because they don't support their preferred view of the world.  The truth doesn't depend on what we prefer though.

Chetty found that if a person moves out of a neighborhood with worse prospects into to a neighborhood with better outlooks, that move increases lifetime earnings for low-income children by an average $200,000. Of course, moving a lot of people is impractical, so researchers are instead trying to help low-performing areas improve.

If Mohammad can't go to the mountain, then we have to explore ways in which the mountain can get to Mohammad.  This is where public policies come in--policies that can address this accident of (mis)fortune.  Policies on  "early childhood development, college and career readiness, family stability and strong social networks, ... segregation, ...pre-K programs and affordable housing."

Those are exactly the kind of issues that trump and the Republicans love to talk about, right?  As in how they can kill such programs and policies!  There is, according to them, a miracle drug that cures all: tax cuts for those who were born in the correct neighborhoods!

“I built what I built myself.” My ass!

Geography at birth

For a while now, I have been blogging about the (mis)fortunes that come our way just because of our parents.  Who we are born to makes a huge difference in life.  Every time I blog along those lines, the frequent (and now the only) commenter, and others have disagreed with me.  (Check this out, or this, for instance.)

I have also blogged in plenty about luck. Dumb luck.

Thus, I have never really cared much for people bragging about how they made it all by themselves.  Not that he brags, but consider Bill Gates.  It is not as if he created his fortunes after growing up in the projects.  I was not born a Dalit and my father was not a manual scavenger.  The truly rags to riches, rising from the utterly disadvantaged, is a rare exception.  Most of us have only built upon the accident of birth.

To quite some extent, the cosmic dice rolled in our favor, which is why you and I are interacting here.

I started thinking as a social scientist on the role of circumstance and luck in how lives turn out. It's a sobering experience to realize just how many variables are out of our control

Yep.  That's what I have been saying for a long, long time.

What about intelligence and hard work? Surely they matter as much as luck. Yes, but decades of data from behavior genetics tell us that at least half of intelligence is heritable, as is having a personality high in openness to experience, conscientiousness and the need for achievement—all factors that help to shape success. The nongenetic components of aptitude, scrupulousness and ambition matter, too, of course, but most of those environmental and cultural variables were provided by others or circumstances not of your making.

Choosing your parents well has given you one hell of an advantage, dear reader!

Michael Shermer wraps up his column--his 200th for the Scientific American--with this:

There should be consolation in the fact that studies show that what is important in the long run is not success so much as living a meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.

Ahem, I have been saying this, too, for the longest time.  Damn, I am good!

Who cares for the brown-skinned in the colonies!

Life just happens way too fast.

Only a month ago, in my response-comments to this post, I wrote:

Yep, it is a colony. Like how Puerto Rico is. Like how American Samoa is. Without using the word "colony" John Oliver describes that condition in the video that I had embedded. 
And we treat them that way because, ahem, they are brown-skinned.

And then Hurricane Maria happened.  The lives of three million Puerto Ricans completely devastated.  It is a huge humanitarian crisis.

But, apparently Americans do not care.  Why so?

Many Americans don’t realize that what happened in Puerto Rico is a domestic disaster, not a foreign one.
A new poll of 2,200 adults by Morning Consult found that only 54 percent of Americans know that people born in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, are U.S. citizens.

Now, leave alone the notion that we ought to respond to a humanitarian crisis wherever that might be.  But, we can and should care at least about fellow citizens, right?  But, then how many Americans know that fellow citizens include the people of Puerto Rico, Guam, St. John, ...  More importantly, how many of the fascist's solid base know about these fellow-citizens?

Inaccurate beliefs on this question matter, because Americans often support cuts to foreign aid when asked to evaluate spending priorities. In our poll, support for additional aid was strongly associated with knowledge of the citizenship status of Puerto Ricans. More than 8 in 10 Americans who know Puerto Ricans are citizens support aid, compared with only 4 in 10 of those who do not.

We Americans are now behaving like how the Bastard Raj and its cigar-chomping bastard did during the famine in Bengal, which was after all only a colony with brown-skinned people!

Tribalism in the 21st century!

In this case, the lack of media attention could lead people to ignore Puerto Rico’s plight. Our sympathies for other people depends in part on whether we see them as fellow members of our tribe. Without more coverage, it may be easy to forget that the people suffering are our fellow Americans.

How did the fascist talk about Puerto Rico?

"This is an island sitting in the middle of an ocean. It’s a big ocean, it’s a very big ocean."

And how does he know about the people there?

"I grew up in New York, so I know many people from Puerto Rico. I know many Puerto Ricans. And these are great people."

The demagogue tweeted a lot more about the NFL than about Puerto Rico!  This is the guy that 63 million, including past commentators here, voted for!  Shame on them!

Did you know that I am an Asian-American?

First, read the following sentences from an otherwise wonderfully informative essay:

Iraq taught us the cost of going to war against an adversary that we do not fully understand. Before we take a radical step into Asia, we should be sure that we’re not making that mistake again.

Do you see what I see?

No?

"Before we take a radical step into Asia" is the key there.

That phrasing seems to ignore that Iraq is in Asia.  (Afghanistan, too, is in Asia.)  So, it should be phrased as "Before we take another radical step into Asia." Right?

Perhaps you are thinking that I am being picky.  No, I am not.

In the US, "Asians" has come to mean only people from the Far East: China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam,  and maybe even the Philippines.  This has been an issue that I have been fighting ever since my graduate school days when I reminded many white Americans that I too am an Asian.

One of my favorite encounters on this topic was post-graduate school, when I was working as a transportation planner.  An Anglophile colleague, Marilyn, walked over to my work space during a coffee break to ask me a question.  She was reading a novel set in London, and was confused that the Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi characters were being referred to as Asians.  I had to explain to her that Asia is a continent, and people from that continent are Asians, as much as the French and the Czech are Europeans!

A couple of months ago, I wrote a letter to The New Yorker, on this very topic.

In the essay on how television made Trump's presidency possible, Emily Nussbaum writes that “The Apprentice” attracted diverse contestants and audience.  Nussbaum notes: "It also featured contestants from Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern backgrounds, and, in Season 5, recent immigrants."  In that sentence, Nussbaum makes the same mistake that is often made here in the US--she identifies "Asian" as being separate from "Indian, and Middle Eastern," even though India and the Middle East are very much part of Asia.
In America, "Asians" has come to mean only those from from the far eastern edges of Asia--like China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam.  Perhaps this resulted from our military entanglements with those countries.  But then given our military expeditions elsewhere, like in Afghanistan and Iraq, and one would think that by now we would have figured out that the people of those countries too are Asians!

I didn't care whether that would be published (it was not) but I had to get that off my chest!  This time, I am not going to bother writing to that magazine again about Iraq being in Asia.  It is a losing battle!

Understanding the past and shaping the future

I have sent this across to the editor ... perhaps it will be published. If not, hey, you read that here ;)
****************

Thanks to Donald Trump’s election, and his statements and policies since the inauguration, students in my introductory economic geography class seem to be significantly more eager than ever to connect the academic discussions to the real world happenings. On their own!

During routine discussions on population dynamics, when my lectures usually put students to sleep reminding me of the hilarious scene in “Ferris Bueller's Day Off,” one question from the back row nearly jolted the class. A student asked, “Why is Portland so white compared to the other cities that I have been to?” Before I could respond, another question rang out: “Isn’t Oregon itself way white compared to even Washington?”

In my fifteen years of teaching at Western Oregon University, I have not been asked these questions even once in any of my classes. I doubt that these questions were merely a coincidence.

In responding to the students’ questions, and thanks to the technology in the smart classroom, I projected on the screen maps about the Great Migration from the American South and how very few came to Oregon. I pulled up a few photographs of African-Americans in Oregon, including about Vanport, in the Portland area. And about Oregon’s own “Trail of Tears.” The maps and photos were worth more than the proverbial thousand words.

As discussions died down, a student from a town in the Willamette Valley remarked that it now made sense to her why I am the first non-white teacher she has ever had in her entire life as a student—all the way from kindergarten through college.

Of course, as an outsider—first from India, and then from California—this whiteness in Oregon, and hence my brownness, was one of the first things that I had to quickly understand about this state that has been a wonderful home to me.

If this post-election politics has given us an incentive to understand these important issues, then we may as well put that to good use.

In the educational world of geography, there are many formal avenues for all of us to further explore and understand questions like the ones my students asked.  One such avenue is the Geography Awareness Week.  

The National Geographic Society created the “Geography Awareness Week to raise awareness to this dangerous deficiency in American education and excite people about geography as both a discipline and as a part of everyday life.”  Many centers affiliated with this activity have selected “civil rights” as the theme for the Geography Awareness Week in 2017, which will be during November 13-19.  

Civil rights has distinct geographic patterns and impacts. While we usually think of the American South, states like Oregon too have had, and continue to have, issues related to civil rights. 

We do not have to wait until the "Geography Awareness Week" in order to understand civil rights issues. As we plan for our excursions around the state during the gorgeous Oregon summer, I hope more among us will also spend some time stopping by the numerous places that will help us understand who we were and, therefore, who we want to be in the future.

The birth of inequality

One of the advantages in blogging my understanding of the world is this: I can easily check for myself whether I might have "flip-flopped" on issues.  Of course, because I am not a politician, I go with logic and evidence, which means that I even if I change my position it is not because I am trying to please somebody but because the evidence compels me to.

Through this post, I want to merely say "I told you so!" ;)

For ever, it seems, I have been blogging that the hype about the world being one's oyster overlooks the reality, which is that on an average eighty percent of one's economic success in life is determined by two simple facts--the geography of where one was born and raised, and the parents.  I have explored this in many posts, like in this one on "choose your parents well."

More evidence along those lines:

What is the most striking consequence of deepening income inequality? Could it be the rise of social immobility?
A report recently released by the Russell Sage Foundation — “Opportunity, Mobility, and Increased Inequality” — concludes

that 60 percent of those born into a bottom-quintile family will themselves be in the bottom two quintiles of the income distribution at age forty, and that 56 percent of those born into a top-quintile family will be in the top two quintiles of the distribution at age forty.

I told you so!

Not only do “children of affluent parents graduate from college at substantially higher rates than children of low-income parents,” according to Bradbury and Triest, “the gap persists even when controlling for ability in the form of test scores.”
They cite data showing that

a child’s earnings in adulthood reflect parental investments in his/her human capital (education) as well as his/her endowment of earnings capacity and market luck. That endowment, in turn, is determined by the reputation and “connections” of their families, the contribution to the ability, race, and other characteristics of children from the genetic constitutions of their families, and the learning, skills, goals, and other “family commodities” acquired through belonging to a particular family culture.

I told you so!

Now, keep in mind that I have also been worrying for a long time about the rapidly evolving technological changes are making the economic issues worse.  Which is why I am going to tell you "I told you so" even before I bring to your attention the excerpt:

Are there economic forces at work that are inexorably worsening equality of opportunity regardless of government intervention?
Bradbury and Triest implicitly raise this issue when they point out that

Nations or eras with greater disparities in pay levels according to educational attainment will, other things equal, have higher intergenerational earnings elasticities, hence, lower mobility, because any level of intergenerational correlation in education translates into greater differences in earnings and, hence, higher correlation of parent and child earnings.

This is precisely what has happened in the United States. From 1979 to 2012, the earnings gap in inflation-adjusted annual pay between high school and college graduates has grown from $17,411 to $34,969 for men and from $12,887 to $23,280 for women, according to data compiled by David Autor, an economist at M.I.T.
In other words, the economy, by increasing the wage premium for high skill jobs requiring college degrees or more, is working to exacerbate the problems documented in the Russell Sage report.

If only we would understand such issues and systematically work towards developing a new social contract, about which I have been blogging about for ever--even as recently as three months ago!

But, very serious people do not want to engage in discussions on developing a new social contract for these times.  There is only one alternative then: Choose your parents well!

A man. A place. A meaning.

A few years ago, the Association of American Geographers recognized Barry Lopez as an "honorary geographer."  It is to recognize "excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers."  I understand that sentiment--after all, I do not have any formal education, from the undergraduate through the doctorate level, in geography and, yet, have been gainfully employed as a geography instructor for nearly a decade-and-a-half.

Lopez lives in Oregon, not far from my home.  He, too, is a transplant, from across the continent.  A writer of the highest caliber, reflecting on life by observing places, especially the natural environment.  In this recent essay, Lopez writes:

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

The themes of existence, the inconsequential lives that we lead, and attempting to create a meaning through experiencing a place, are all regular features of this blog.  Existential loneliness was also very much a part of Anomalisa that I watched last night with the friend.  Which is perhaps why that paragraph appealed to me.

I am convinced that if we paused to think about our existence we would then realize the crisis within.  I suppose we do our best to avoid thinking about it.  Or, we try to lighten that crisis by making meaning via our affiliations with everything from family and friends to football teams and faiths.  When we strip all those affiliations away, the existential loneliness is all that remains.  Of course, to some extent, these are all age-old questions that humans have been grappling with.

Lopez writes:

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

Indeed.  Whether it is Pattamadai and Sengottai, or Neyveli, or Calcutta, or ... the deep desire to know about them and understand them has been a wonderful blessing in terms of how much they have helped me know about myself.   I even routinely tell students that, without going into autoethnographic details--understanding the world, understanding the peoples, is a wonderful way to understand our own country and our own place in the grand scheme of things.  

Back to Lopez:

Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.

Yes. To pay attention. To observe the place.  To be patient. To be in the here and the now.  I suppose it is not easy to translate those ideas to everyday life!

    

Our own felicity we make or find

"Have you ever read my school's Golden Jubilee book?" asked my father.

I know that the school that he attended in the village is an old one, founded many decades ago.  Yet, I had forgotten that the school dates back to the late 19th century and the book that he was referring to is from 1941-42.

The down-the-memory-lane essays by two distinguished alumni were a treat for this pretentious intellectual and writer.  One of them was certainly a classy essay that was about the school days, which were from 1900.  It vividly brought to life the personalities--the headmasters and the teachers--and the few students who were mentioned.  A piece of writing of the highest caliber, in which wonderfully woven was the quote from Oliver Goldsmith, "Honour sinks where commerce long prevails."

I had never come across that quote.  Yet again, I am humbled by how little I know.

Google gave me the source of that quote,  It is from Goldsmiith's poem, The Traveller.  It turns out that the poem is about one of my favorite topics--the pursuit of happiness.  Wikipedia offers this:

The dedication to The Traveller sets out Goldsmith's purpose:

I have attempted to show, that there may be equal happiness in states, that are differently governed from our own; that every state has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess.

He begins the poem by extolling the happiness of his brother Henry's simple family life. Then, from a vantage-point in the Alps, he surveys the condition of the world. Every nation, he says, considers itself the happiest, but this is only because each nation judges by its own standards. In fact, happiness is probably equally spread, though in different forms which tend to be mutually exclusive.

The poem is from 1764, when "nations" meant different from how we think of nations now.  We could, therefore, even think of cultures, and the sentence reads very well: "Every culture, he says, considers itself the happiest, but this is only because each culture judges by its own standards."  We could also bring that down to the individual level, and it still  makes sense that we would judge happiness by our own respective standards.

I located a site that had the entire poem.  As tempting it was to note "tl; dr" I gave it a quick read.  The poem, certainly philosophical, is loaded with thoughts, place names, and events, all of which require careful reading.  I can easily imagine the essayist remembering the impressive headmaster reciting the poem and interpreting it for the class.  I wish I had that kind of a teacher even now who would  provide me with the kind of a thrilling and memorable learning experience that the essayist had as a school-boy in the classroom more than a century ago.

Wikipedia further notes that Goldsmith concluded the poem with the philosophical notion that wherever we might be--England or America or France or Italy--happiness comes from within:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find

May you also find or make your own felicity.

'Tis Thanksgiving. Remembering the year that was ...

As we sit down for the Thanksgiving meal with friends and family, perhaps all of us can be thankful for one thing—the year with strange and unexpected developments is coming to an end.

Who would have thought that this country would ever end up panic stricken about Ebola? So panicky we became that the photograph of a nurse biking in a small town in Maine caused quite a few, who were thousands of miles from the Pine Tree State, to worry that they, too, caught the dreaded virus infection. We became so involved with the panic over nothing that we even forgot the thousands in West Africa who continue to suffer from the illness.

Ebola came in time for us to worry about the state of the world just when the Israel-Gaza conflict ended. Of course, the end of the bombing campaigns does not mean that peace has descended upon that troubled geography. Not far away, a ruthlessly barbaric outfit that grew out of the ashes of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) has quickly become a force to reckon with. And the number of name changes this outfit has had in a matter of few months—Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Islamic State (IS)—has made the casual observer feel like there are multiple versions similar to the number of Agent Smiths in “The Matrix” movie series.

The big European story is, of course, about how Russia swallowed up the Crimean Peninsula. One day Crimea was a part of Ukraine, and the next day it became a Russian territory. Russia is not done with gobbling up Ukraine’s land, with more military incursions expected.

The perils of Pakistan continue, with the same old formula of a weak and ineffective government that is constantly trying to keep the powerful military away. The story of its life ever since its birth in 1947! Meanwhile, suicide bombers continue to strike, with a recent one near the border with India killing nearly sixty and injuring another estimated hundred. Terrorists have warned that the next incident will be in India.

If you are like me, every once in a while you wonder whatever happened to the more than 300 girls who were kidnapped in Nigeria. Remember all that Facebook and Twitter activism to “bring back our girls”? But then that was such a long time ago and Ebola has completely taken over our panic-stricken collective consciousness.

The global economy continues to be in a state of flux. Economists keep warning about the Euro area on the verge of a recession and, perhaps, deflation as well. An economic contraction while prices keep falling is one awful combination, which will surely be worrisome to the millions of unemployed youth, especially in the southern countries of Spain, Italy, and Greece.

While we in the US might feel sheltered from such an listing—however incomplete it is—of less than pleasant developments around the planet, the Ebola virus was a nasty reminder that we live in an interconnected world and that what happens in a remote part of West Africa will not necessarily stay in West Africa. The military conflicts around the world will force the US to act—a burden that comes with being the sole global superpower. Economic slowdown in Europe will affect us, given the highly interdependent economic web that links us to countries that we might not even be able to identify on a world map.

An old idea that is often mentioned, especially in academia, is that “war is God's way of teaching Americans geography.” We need to update that for the contemporary contexts. Now, any crisis is apparently how we Americans learn geography. Thus, thanks to Boko Haram, we were forced to look up Nigeria on a map. With Ebola in the news, there is a good chance that a few Americans were suddenly thrust with narratives about the historical connection between Liberia and slavery in the US. But then, if history provides any guidance, we perhaps passed on all the chances to learn geography.

Whether or not we learnt anything, not unlike my students, we are thankful that the tumultuous and eventful year is coming to an end. But, of course, just because the calendar year is ending, all those problems won’t simply go away. It will be a long while before the public health professionals declare an end to the current Ebola outbreak. The geopolitical tensions in the Levant, Ukraine, and Pakistan, will continue irrespective of the month and the year. Above all, there is really no respite from one certain scary development—when the calendar flips to 2015, the campaigning for the November 2016 elections will begin!

I loved the pickles from India--not spicy at all ...

People who know me might be surprised from the title of this post that, in the first place, I even had pickles from India.  And, perhaps shocked that I didn't find them spicy, given how "bland" my tastes have become over the years that I have been living outside the old country.

True, it has been years since I had Indian pickles.  This past December, when my mother made mango pickles at home, and despite her making it the least spicy that she could possibly make, my nose picked up the pungent chili smells and advised me to stay away.

So, what gives?  How come I had pickles from India and didn't find them spicy?

The clue lies in the phrasing: I didn't write "Indian pickles" but "pickles from India."

For lunch, I made myself one of my favorite sandwiches--grilled ciabatta bread, with pepperjack cheeese, thinly sliced red onions, capers, kalamata olives, and greens.  Served it on a plate, along with chips and pickles.  Pickles as in the tiny, baby, cucumber pickles.

While eating, which is rarely with any company anymore, I read.  Or watch TV.  Today, I had nothing to read.  And, I didn't feel like watching TV either.  So, I read whatever was in front of me.

The pickles bottle was in front of me.  I read the label, nutrition information, and ingredients.

And that is when I found the small print there: "Product of India"

Holy crap!

Who woulda thunk it!

All these years in Oregon, I have often bought this very brand of pickles--because I like the garlic that gives it a kick.  The only other bit of information I knew about this brand was its self-promotion as "A Northwest Favorite," which, according to the website:

NALLEY® Pickles has captured the taste of the Northwest since 1918... literally! Growing from our first crunchy pickles made near Tacoma, Washington, to our current wide selection of more than 40 pickle and relish products, we take great pride in creating flavorful spicing recipes specifically for tastes of our Northwest community – a claim only NALLEY® Pickles can make! Why? Because NALLEY® Pickles is sold only in the Northwest.

Northwest?  Now, after reading that fine print, I think they mean that it is sold in the Pacific Northwest, while the product is from India's northwest!

To further contradict their claims about being a regional specialty, the label on the bottle notes that it is distributed by a company that has its office in Illinois.  Hmmm, so, when did Illinois stop being in the Midwest and become a part of the Northwest?

I suppose this is yet another example of life in these modern times when very little of what we see is "real."  Whether pickles or politicians, it is all about false claims and marketing.  At least, these "northwest" pickles from India are tasty enough for me to keep buying them.

But, hey, that chili in the "very mild" pickles that mother made was all real.  Too real for my life :)

The British Raj and I: a love-hate relationship, part II

The duties of the rulers of the land are simpler and less arduous.  These duties are to protect the forests which regulate the supply, to keep the ancient irrigation works in thorough repair, and to utilize the surplus water escaping to the sea, by constructing supplementary works.  All these measures have been, or are being taken; and Tinnevelli, with its busy port of Tuticorin, is among the most flourishing districts of British India.

That is from an article, "Irrigation in Southern India," which is on the Tamraparani (Tamrabarani) river system.  It was published in The Geographical Magazine--December 1, 1874.

Yes, 1874!

First, a back-story on what led me to reading this old piece from a time long, long ago.  In a recent telephone chat, my father said he was writing a few things down about the village--Pattamadai--and some of the neighboring villages and towns.  To keep himself busy, while, perhaps, passing along something useful to later generations.

This village is hot and dry, thanks to its location on the leeward side of the mountain ranges.  Thus, the river, Tamrabarani, and an irrigation channel--the Kannadian Channel--play important roles.  Sociocultural stories are tightly interwoven with the river and the channel.

A couple of years ago, I had shared with my father a newspaper article that I had read about these water bodies.  He wanted me to send that to him.

But, now, I was no longer keen on that news item.  The curious guy that I am, well, I wanted to know more than a simple news item. 

Which is how I ended up reading that 1874 article on the Tamrabarani river system.

As I noted in this post on the anicut at Srivaikuntam, there is quite a bit of constructive British activities that I have to grudgingly acknowledge.  That anicut is also to help irrigate the farmlands with waters from the Tamrabarani.  Those foreign rulers did get a few things right.

Free India, on the other hand, seems to have squandered the opportunity to build on what the British left behind.

Independent India and the democratically elected governments at the federal and state levels did not carry out the closing remarks of the 1874 article.  Contrary to its call "to protect the forests which regulate the supply, to keep the ancient irrigation works in thorough repair, and to utilize the surplus water escaping to the sea, by constructing supplementary works" the post-1947 governments did nothing to augment the water systems and have practically done everything possible not to protects the forests.

As the article noted, "there can be no more short-sighted policy than to allow the villagers to waste and destroy forests on the preservation of which not only the prosperity but the very existence of the population of a whole district may be involved."

Alas, wasted and destroyed they have been.

The result: the dry and hot geography has become drier and hotter.  Last January, when I was there, it was insanely hot.  It was January, with the hottest periods a couple of months into the future!

I understand from my father that the Kannadian Channel is now nearly dry, when it ought to be full and plenty, and that a farm labor migration to nearby towns is well underway.

Stories like this make me wonder, sometimes, whether the dysfunctional democracy that "rules" India now was worth the struggle for independence.  Would the British have taken better care of the anicuts and forests and, thereby, the peoples?

The apple doesn't fall far from ... Kazakhstan?

A high school friend was on a business trip in, yes, Kazakhstan.  The women there are pretty, he adds.  Where are the women not pretty, right?  Another high school classmate puns (in Tamil) that the country should then be called Azhaghastan (Azhagu = beauty)

I wrote to them that he guy's alibi in going there is that he is checking out the apples :)

Why apples, you ask, to which I reply: it is the geographic home for all the apples of the world. 

Well, until yesterday, as Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"

Even in blogging, the only note I have had on Kazakhstan was on a completely different topic!

I was diving back home and listening to The World, when the show's host, Lisa Mullins, posed the geoquiz about the origin of apples. 

I would never have thought that apples originated from the mountains of Central Asia. 

Even more hilariously educational was the hypothesis on how perhaps the fruit spread: animals ate the best of the fruits, and then the seeds passed through their guts, which then led to new plants in new places.

And, of course, the roles of the Silk Road, the Roman Empire, the wanderers ... and then eventually to the US, and now we associate Washington with apples.  Who woulda thunk it was a story out of Central Asia!

I will add this to my repertoire of fun stories for my classes. 

This blog entry by itself will be a convincing answer to the student, "J," who asked me yesterday what I do for fun :)

Mapping Weed. No, not the town in California

Yes, pot prices! ht

Geography and the global income inequality divide

A few months ago, I noted here from Catherine Rampbell's review of Branko Milanovic's The Haves and Have Nots

an astounding 60 percent of a person’s income is determined merely by where she was born (and an additional 20 percent is dictated by how rich her parents were)

As much as geographers hate any variation of the idea of geographic determinism, various factors, including border controls, do make it an irrefutable fact that income and wealth for most of us are determined by where we are born.

Joshua Keating offers another chart from Milanovic's book, looking at the gini coefficients (a reminder: smaller numbers mean less unequal distributions)

And this advice:

because "inequality is now determined more by where you live than the class you belong to." The best way to change your lot in life, it seems, is to move.

If only people had as much freedom to move as capital has, right! 

Of course, the other side of the argument is whether we need to focus on the growing inequality, or whether the growing prosperity deserves greater attention.  That calls for a serious debate, right?

For now, the lack of a freedom to move means that:

The typical person in the top 5 percent of the Indian population, for example, makes the same as or less than the typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American population. That’s right: America’s poorest are, on average, richer than India’s richest — extravagant Mumbai mansions notwithstanding.

The ones who want tight controls over migration unnecessarily worry, out of heights of self-interest, a Camp of the Saints scenario, as if that dystopia is all that is possible when people are allowed the freedom to move.

Email of the day: geography job offer!

My first thought, and the only thought, on reading the following email that was waiting for me in my inbox, is that this is a new way to phish?

Good Morning
My  name is [name] today I was surfing the internet and I found your email contact on the Dept University's website. I am presently looking for tutor for my son [name], we live here in England and he has completed high school last summer back home in Slovakia.
He has been soccer camping for the past month and we feel it is a forward for us to get him a tutor to in Geography of America as he likes to travel and his interest apart from soccer are in Geography and Earth Sciences. He scored  a B in Geography recently in his Cambridge O"Level exam  and we are hoping he becomes a Geographer or Geologist.
Let me know your hourly rates and also time during the week and on week ends you will be available to coach him (total number of hours you can use with him a week).Please let us hear from you soon as he would be in America in a couple of days/week to stay with my sister in-law for the time been and I will very much appreciate it very much if you can introduce me to someone qualified in the case you are not available.
Thanks

Hey, PT Barnum, it is getting increasingly difficult to prove you wrong, man! :)

A tale of two cities: Portland and Chicago

Lots of "city" news especially the last couple of days.

First, it turns out that Chicago's up and down ride the roller-coaster of economics and demographics continues:

A larger-than-expected exodus over the past 10 years reduced the population of Chicago to a level not seen in nearly a century.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that during the decade ended in 2010, Chicago's population fell 6.9% to 2,695,598 people, fewer than the 2.7 million reported back in 1920.
After peaking at 3.62 million people in 1950, Chicago underwent a half century of decline that ended only when the 1990s boom years produced a small gain in the 2000 count. At that time, the city loudly celebrated its comeback.
But the recent recession accelerated a migration both to the metropolitan area's farthest suburbs and to the Southern U.S. Chicago nonetheless is expected to remain the nation's third-largest city, behind New York and Los Angeles and just ahead of Houston, for which final census numbers aren't in yet.
The exodus took a big chunk out of the city's black population in particular, shrinking it to 887,608 from 1,065,009, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

Second, and in contrast to Chicago, it turns out that cities like Portland attract youth from all over, even when they are fully aware of the rather bleak economic conditions there.  Not entirely news to us, but, more evidence of the continuing trend.

Twenty years ago, the percent of people with college degrees in Portland was lower than the national average. Now, it's more than 10 points higher — about 40 percent. And Cortright says the grads aren't just coming for high-tech jobs. ...
Oregon economist Christian Kaylor says he can think of only one explanation for the migration into Portland: the quality of life.
Kaylor says wages there are sometimes 20 percent lower than in Seattle or San Francisco. But people keep coming. In fact, Portland's appeal is part of why the city's unemployment rate tends to be about a point higher than the national average.
"In recessions, Portland tends to see population growth, even as we lose jobs," Kaylor says. "So one of the reasons we have that higher unemployment rate is because people do continue to move here even as jobs disappear."

So, what is it about cities, right? 

Ed Glaeser was on the Daily Show last night talking about cities, which is what his latest book is about.  I have seen him up close and personal at a conference--it was last year at the AAG Annual Meeting, and I was in the front row!  I was particularly looking forward to seeing him in live action after having read a lengthy profile ...  Glaeser is one non-stop bullet train from the time he begins to speak, and boy does he cover a lot of intellectual territory above and beyond economics itself.  One can easily see why he is a Ivy-Leaguer :)

The Daily Show
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

David Brooks apparently liked Glaeser's book and arguments a lot, and writes:

Cities magnify people’s strengths, Glaeser argues, because ideas spread more easily in dense environments. If you want to compete in a global marketplace it really helps to be near a downtown. Companies that are near the geographic center of their industry are more productive. Year by year, workers in cities see their wages grow faster than workers outside of cities because their skills grow faster. Inventors disproportionately cite ideas from others who live physically close to them.

But, does that mean that Glaeser is right?  I am not so sure.  Hi-tech has equally made it possible for dispersal of population.  So, the city might not necessarily be the kind of a 19th, or even 20th century city where one found dense urban cores for employment or residence or both.  The 21st century city might not have that much in common with the old model, when it comes to that "physically close" that Brooks and Glaeser write about.  As the Chicago and Portland stories tell us, city growth and decline in the 21st century might have dynamics that are very different from our old stories.