IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The Creek Fire burns in California’s Sierra National Forest in 2020. The megafire burned more than 379,000 acres. Image: Ryan Waugh
GOOD NEWS
The deadline is October 21, 2021 at 5 p.m. for undergraduate and graduate student fall academic enrichment award applications
The Bike Den, a community space that offers DIY bike repair and maintenance, located on the ground level of the new West Deck at West Campus, is open Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, 1–6 p.m., during the fall semester.
Welcome to the new cohort of geography graduate students who have their orientation this week.
NEWS
From Penn State student to professor, landscape scientist Douglas Miller retires
Douglas Miller, who earned three degrees from Penn State; worked as a research assistant, research associate and professor in two colleges; and created and led the Center for Environmental Informatics for 20 years, retired in July and was granted emeritus status.
Historic fire regimes lay groundwork for future forest management in western US
Fires in semi-arid forests in the western United States tended to burn periodically and at low severity until the policy of fire suppression put an end to these low-intensity events and created the conditions for the destructive fires seen today. Understanding the benefits of these periodic fires and the forest structure that they maintained may help land managers and communities avert megafires in the future, according to researchers.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
Emic Views of Community Resilience and Coastal Tourism Development
Ryan S. Naylor & Carter A. Hunt & Karl S. Zimmerer & B. Derrick Taff
Societies
https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsoctx/v11y2021i3p94-d611607.html
Coastal communities are among the most rapidly changing, institutionally complex, and culturally diverse in the world, and they are among the most vulnerable to anthropogenic change. While being a driver of anthropogenic change, tourism can also provide socio-economic alternatives to declining natural resource-based livelihoods for coastal residents. The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of small-scale cruise tourism on coastal community resiliency in Petersburg, Alaska. Exploring these impacts through resiliency theory’s lens of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, we employed ethnographic research methods that emphasize emic viewpoints to determine how residents see this form of tourism affecting the resiliency of valued community culture, institutions, and traditional livelihoods. Findings indicate that with purposeful engagement in niche cruise tourism involving boats with 250 passengers or less, and an active rejection of the large cruise ship industry, Petersburg exhibits increased adaptive capacity to promote the resilience of valued community institutions and heritage. This work draws needed recognition to the diversity of activities that fall under the label of cruise tourism, including the distinct implications of smaller-scale, niche cruise tourism for the resilience of coastal communities. It also highlights the need to capture emic perspectives to understand the politics of community resiliency.
Regionally divergent roles of the South Korean state in adopting improved crop varieties and commercializing agriculture (1960–1980): a case study of areas in Jeju and Jeollanamdo.
Hong, Y.
Agriculture and Human Values
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-021-10232-y
The South Korean government’s historical efforts to introduce improved crop varieties have been ambiguously successful. State-bred rice varieties helped achieve national food production goals during the Green Revolution of the 1970s, but these varieties were highly unpopular and were abandoned soon, as the government stopped promoting them. This paper contrasts that experience with the simultaneous successful introduction of an improved variety of tangerine (Citrus unshiu) as a cash crop in Jeju Province. Smallholders of Jeju found space for the high-return fruit in the existing land use system, including the partial conservation of agrobiodiversity without critically risking their subsistence-based food security. Citrus in general was a spatially less-demanding crop that farmers could partly co-cultivate with subsistence crops, while state-bred rice varieties occupied farmland exclusive of other varieties and rice’s double crops. Additionally, by employing political ecology, this paper asserts that the different roles of the state in introducing the two crops and the different regions were other factors behind such divergent adoption outcomes. Considering rice, the state was highly interventionist, because the government depended on rice-producing regions to “feed the nation”; with regard to non-staple-crop production in low-productivity, hard-to-develop regions like Jeju, in contrast, the government gave farmers more autonomy, thus allowing farmers to determine their own space and pace for citrus adoption. The study critically investigates the variable of spatial compatibility between a crop and the land system and sheds light on the current development mission to harmonize the cultivation of food and cash crops.
Visualizing water-energy nexus landscapes
Robb, D., Cole, H., Baka, J., & Bakker, K.
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water
https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.1548
Over the past decade, the water-energy nexus (WEN) has emerged as a prominent framework with which to analyze and visualize interconnections between energy production, freshwater resources, and the hydrological cycle. The WEN is a fundamentally geographic concept embedded in landscapes. WEN analyses often include landscape visualizations, yet these are rarely conceptually rigorous; consequently, the visual-representational dimensions of WEN analyses remain relatively weak. Our paper addresses this gap through a meta-review of 503 WEN visualizations sourced from 336 scholarly articles. Based on this analysis, we argue that WEN visualizations often depict complex landscapes as technical systems, while eliding broader considerations of the multiscalar, spatiotemporal, and hydrosocial dimensions of water and energy. In response to these limitations, we offer an alternative approach to visualizing hydrosocial landscapes that draws upon parallel work in geography and cognate disciplines. In the concluding section of the paper, we formulate a set of interdisciplinary recommendations to guide the production of more theoretically-informed nexus visualizations grounded in the concepts of spatiality, temporality, and hydrosociality.