IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Online Geospatial Program students and their families gathered for a reception at the Dutton Institute before attending the fall 2017 Commencement. For most, it was their first time setting foot on campus and meeting their instructors face-to-face. Graduating students are pictured. Front row left to right: Pamela Kanu, Ginger Anderson, Jaclyn Meade Cardillo, Ben Ogle, Angelo Podagrosi. Back row left to right: Jackie Silber, Tim Naegeli, Nate Roberts, Doug Sexton.
GOOD NEWS
- Anthony Robinson was featured in a College of EMS Twitter faculty video over the winter break.
- Mallory Henig (’12) will be starting a career with Conservation International at their headquarters in Arlington, VA as a Development Coordinator. “I would also like thank Denice Wardrop and Joe Bishop for taking me to Peru and the Amazonia in 2011. Their faculty-led study abroad experience really helped me understand the importance of the natural environment around the world, and I do believe that firsthand experience assisted me and getting this new career opportunity.”
- Weiming Hu was elected to fill the grad rep position fall and spring 2018.
COFFEE HOUR
The opening Coffee Hour for the spring 2018 semester will be January 19, 2018. The speaker will be Richard Schroeder. His talk is titled, “Ode to the Extreme Huntress.”
NEWS
Creating Safe Spaces at AAG Meetings for All
Derek Alderman with Lorraine Dowler
Hollywood, The Hill, and the nation’s newsrooms have been exposed as spaces of sexual harassment, misconduct, and even assault. Yet, sexual harassment and discrimination are neither unique nor new to these highly public industries and this misconduct is unfortunately common to most workplaces. Indeed, conservative estimates suggest that 60% of all women have been victims of sexual harassment while a Harvard study found that number to be almost 90 percent for women ages 18 to 25.
From Coal Town to Trail Town
There’s a national story line about parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania that goes like this: as the steel and coal industries fade, small towns here are literally dying out. Young people move away because there’s a lack of jobs. But for the past twenty years, some entrepreneurs have quietly been working on a different narrative — one that harnesses the region’s natural beauty to build the economy. And their slow climb is starting to bear real fruit.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Health-environment futures: Complexity, uncertainty, and bodies
Nari Senanayake, Brian King
Progress in Human Geography
First Published December 27, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517743322
The relationships between human health and the environment have captivated scholarly attention across a number of disciplinary and policy domains. This article reviews emerging health-environment research, which we categorize into three themes: complexity, uncertainty, and bodies. Although there have been robust contributions to these thematic areas from geography and the social sciences, we argue that integrating them into an analytical framework can extend geographic perspectives on scale, knowledge production, and human-environment relations, while also incorporating valuable insights from cognate fields. We conclude by reflecting on the normative contributions of this framework for research and policy.
Social Vulnerability to Climate Change in Temperate Forest Areas: New Measures of Exposure, Sensitivity, and Adaptive Capacity
Alexandra Paige Fischer & Tim G. Frazier
Annals of the American Association of Geographers Vol. 0 , Iss. 0,0
https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1387046
Human communities in forested areas that are expected to experience climate-related changes have received little attention in the scholarly literature on vulnerability assessment. Many communities rely on forest ecosystems to support their social and economic livelihoods. Climate change could alter these ecosystems. We developed a framework that measures social vulnerability to slow-onset climate-related changes in forest ecosystems. We focused on temperate forests because this biome is expected to experience dramatic change in the coming years, with adverse effects for humans. We advance climate change vulnerability science by making improvements to measures of exposure and sensitivity and by incorporating a measure of adaptive capacity. We improved on other methods of assessing exposure by incorporating climate change model projections and thus a temporal perspective. We improved on other methods of assessing sensitivity by incorporating a variable representing interdependency between human populations and forests. We incorporated a measure of adaptive capacity to account for ways socioeconomic conditions might mitigate exposure and sensitivity. Our geographic focus was the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. We found that fifteen of the region’s seventy-five counties were highly vulnerable to climate-related changes due to some combination of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Nine counties were highly vulnerable because they ranked very high in terms of exposure and sensitivity and very low in terms of adaptive capacity. The framework we developed could be useful for investigations of vulnerability to climate change in other forested contexts and in other ecological contexts where slow-onset changes might be expected under future climate conditions.