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Recognizing: Yi Fu Tuan (The Father of Humanistic Geography) 

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Recognizing: Yi Fu Tuan (The Father of Humanistic Geography) 

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https://www.aag.org/memorial/yi-fu-tuan/

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Yi-Fu Tuan, a towering intellectual figure and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus of geography died Aug. 10 at UW Hospital in Madison at age 91, with a dear friend and former student, Charles Chang, by his side.

People think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so on. But it is also about place - its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential."

-Yi-Fu Tuan
Tuan was a prolific writer and deep thinker who was known as the father of humanistic geography. A movement within the field of human geography, humanistic geography arose in the 1970s as a way to counter what humanists saw as a tendency to treat places as mere sites or locations. Instead, a humanistic geographer would argue, the places we inhabit have as many personalities as those whose lives have intersected with them. And the stories we tell about places often say as much about who we are, as about where our feet are planted.

It was Tuan who gave rise to the recognition among geographers that the intimacies of personal encounters with space produce a "sense of place."

"People think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so on," Tuan said. "But it is also about place - its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential."

Time, age, sadness, loss, goodness, happiness, and the concept of home are all themes Tuan explored at length in his more than 20 books, including his best-known work, "Space & Place," as well as "Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search for Meaning." In his later years, Tuan turned to introspection with his most recent books: "Who Am I? An Autobiography of Emotion, Mind and Spirit" and an addendum, "Who Am I? A Sequel." Both works look back on the author's early life in China and his rise to become one of America's most innovative intellectuals.

Born in 1930 in Tianjin, China, Yi-Fu Tuan was educated in China, Australia, the Philippines and the United Kingdom. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Oxford and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

Yi-Fu Tuan joined the faculty of the Department of Geography at UW-Madison in 1983, was named John Kirtland Wright Professor of Geography in 1985 and was named a Vilas Research Professor that same year, before attaining emeritus status in 1998.

His influence on the field of geography was enormous.

"For decades, Yi-Fu Tuan's work shaped the thinking of generations of geography students and academics," says Lily Kong, human geographer and president, Singapore Management University. "His place in the geographical canon is undoubted. His shaping of humanistic geography contributed to important philosophical shifts in the discipline."

By emphasizing humans as thinking, dreaming, imagining beings who experience the world - capable of goodness, beauty and truth as well as greed, cruelty and domination - he showed us how all of these traits are reflected in our spaces, places and landscapes."

-Tim Cresswell
Tuan was beloved by his students, both graduate and undergraduate alike. He often shared meals with undergraduates and enjoyed visiting the State Street Starbucks to listen in on, and sometimes join, students' conversations about their studies.

"Yi-Fu Tuan insisted on the importance of the "human" in "human geography," says Tim Cresswell, a graduate student of Tuan's at UW-Madison who is now Ogilvie Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. "By emphasizing humans as thinking, dreaming, imagining beings who experience the world - capable of goodness, beauty and truth as well as greed, cruelty and domination - he showed us how all of these traits are reflected in our spaces, places and landscapes."

Tuan opened geography to scholars in other disciplines, according to Cresswell, and invited thinking on what geography had to offer our understanding of the human condition. Tuan's work was cited and celebrated by scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences, as well as by writers and professionals outside academia.

After his retirement, Tuan remained an emphatic presence on campus. Through his books, essays, and letters, as well as through innumerable conversations with students, Tuan continued to profoundly influence scholarship and thinking. An article about Yi-Fu Tuan in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 years after his retirement from UW-Madison, claimed that the geographer "may be the most influential scholar you've never heard of." His world-renowned stature was complemented by a kind and generous demeanor, an intense curiosity about the world, and a keen interest in how his beloved department was evolving over the years. He was a model university scholar and citizen, says Kris Olds, a professor in the Department of Geography.

In Oct. 2012, Tuan was awarded the Vautrin-Lud International Geography Prize, the highest honor a geographer can receive. In 2013, he received the inaugural American Association of Geographers Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography, created to recognize "originality, creativity, and significant intellectual breakthroughs in geography."

One of Tuan's most unique contributions may be his "Dear Colleague" letters, composed over decades and sent to colleagues and friends, relating observations and changes in his daily life against a backdrop of larger political, educational, and social change.

"I do not know what Yi-Fu would like to say to everyone at the department in his last 'Dear Colleague' letter on Earth," says Charles Chang. "But I do know that in his first 'Dear Colleague' letter from (hopefully) Heaven, he would like to thank them for their support over all these years."

Chang also pointed to a story Tuan shared in an unpublished manuscript entitled "Summing Up," in 2019.

"One day, as I walked down State Street, I heard the voice of a child behind me saying repeatedly, 'Are you a student?' Tuan wrote. "I ignored the question, for it could hardly be addressed to me. But I got curious, turned around, and asked the child, 'Now, look here, do I look like a student?' His reply, 'Yes, you have a backpack.' Well, that made my day! I have a backpack, which means that I am a student still open to life."

"In a broad sense," Chang says, "he was always open to life. He remained an active learner of the cosmos, of human goodness, to the end."
Reprinted with permission from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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AAG - Yi-Fu Tuan - By Mary Ellen Gabriel Yi-Fu Tuan, a towering intellectual figure and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus of geography died Aug. 10 at UW

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https://centerforthelivingcity.org/janejacobs

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Jane Jacobs and the Center

In 2005, in collaboration with Jane Jacobs, a small group of accomplished urbanists and activists founded The Center for the Living City to build on Ms. Jacobs' work. The Center's purpose is to expand the understanding of contemporary urban life and inspire civic engagement and creative responses for the urgent advancement of social, economic and environmental justice.

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail. The impact of Jane Jacobs's observation, activism, and writing has led to a 'planning blueprint' for generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists to practice.

Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism which would change over time according to how they were used. With an eye for detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and self-organization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centered approach to urban planning in both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the expansion of expressways and roads. She lived in Greenwich Village for decades, then moved to Toronto in 1968 where she continued her work and writing on urbanism, economies and social issues until her death in April 2006.

A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work, and play.

Books

Dark Age Ahead, Random House, 2004.

The Nature of Economies, New York: Modern Library/ Random House, 2000.

A SCHOOLTEACHER IN OLD ALASKA: The Story of Hannah Breece, Owen Sound, Ontario: Ginger Press, 1995.

Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, New York: Random House, 1992.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations, New York: Random House, 1984.

A Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty, New York: Random House, 1980.

The Economy of Cities, New York: Random House, 1969.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House and Vintage Books, 1961.

Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs, edited by Max Allen, Owen Sound, Ontario: The Ginger Press, 1997.

Articles

"Downtown is for People," Fortune, April 1958.

"Vital Little Plans," in Conference Report titled, "Safdie/Rouse/Jacobs: An Exchange."

"Putting Toronto's Best Self Forward," Places, 7:2.

"Market Nurturing Run Amok," Openair-Market Net, October 1995.

"Why TVA Failed," The New York Review of Books, vol 31, no. 8, May 10, 1984.

Essay on Charles Dickens's Hard Times, in The New York Review of Books, 48 (12), July 19, 2001.

Introduction to the new edition of Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Introduction to the new edition of The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, New York: Modern Library, 2002.

Introduction to the new edition of Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain, New York: Modern Library, 2003.

This is a story about our global urban future, in which nearly three-fourths of the world's population will live in cities by the end of this century. It's also a story about America's recent urban past, in which bureaucratic, "top down" approaches to building cities have dramatically clashed with grassroots, "bottom up" approaches. Around the world today, among rising powers such as China and India, new mega-cities are being built "top down," with little or no input from those who inhabit them, or from the communities who have been displaced to make way for their construction. By bringing back to life the struggles and battles over urban planning in the 20th century United States, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City shows that anti-democratic approaches to city planning and building are fundamentally unsustainable; a grassroots, "bottom up" approach is imperative to the social, economic, and ecological success of tomorrow's global cities.

In the words of American urbanist Jane Jacobs:

"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." - Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The film highlights Jane Jacobs' magisterial 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she single-handedly undercuts her era's orthodox model of city planning, exemplified by the massive Urban Renewal projects of New York's "Master Builder," Robert Moses. Jacobs and Moses figure centrally in our story as archetypes of the "bottom up" and the "top down," respectively. They also figure as two larger-than-life personalities: Jacobs-a journalist with provincial origins, no formal training in city planning, and scarce institutional authority seems at first glance to share little in common with Robert Moses, a high prince of government and urban theory fully ensconced in New York's halls of power and privilege. Yet both reveal themselves to be master tacticians who, in the middle of the 20th century, became locked in an epic struggle over the fate of the city. In three suspenseful acts, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City gives audiences a front row seat to this battle, and shows how two opposing visions of urban greatness continue to ripple across the world stage, with unexpectedly high stakes.

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Juliet Page, Pierre Lagrange, Bernard Lagrange
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Chris Dapkins

SELECTed Articles about Jane Jacobs

We are continually gathering articles and materials for this collection, so check back often. We invite you to contribute to this collection by emailing info@centerforthelivingcity.org.

2019
Spotlight: Jane Jacobs, AD Editorial Team, May 4 2019. ArchDaily.
2018
Jane Jacobs and the Power of Women Planners, Roberta Brandes Gratz, March 8, 2018, City Lab [reposted as part of Women Make Cities (International Women's Day)]

The Kind of Data We Mine Will Determine the Kind of City We Live In, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, March 3, 2018, The Hindu
2017
Studies in Emergent Order & Organization, Vol 4/ Issue 2+3, Cosmos & Taxis.
2016
Milestones: 100 Years of Jane Jacobs, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Architectural Record

Jane Jacobs, An Urban Ecologist, Seth Zeren, Strong Cities

The Prophecies of Jane Jacobs, Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic

Jane Jacobs's Street Smarts, Adam Gopnik , The New Yorker

How Jane Jacobs changed the way we look at cities, Saskia Sassen, The Guardian

Celebrating Jane Jacobs, Sara Polsky,Curbed
2013
Jane Jacobs Was Right: Gradual Redevelopment Does Promote Community, The Atlantic Cities

2011

Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,The Design Observer Group. Author, Thomas Campanella

2009

In with the old, out with the new, Macleans. Brian Bethune, August 6, 2009.

"Jane Jacobs, Social Critic Who Redefined and Championed Cities, Is Dead at 89", New York Times, 2006.

" Jane Jacobs, Robert Moses And City Planning Today", Gotham Gazette, 2006.

1998

Lowry, Christopher, " Jane Jacobs: Prophet of Globalization? Yes, but with a (Local) Human Face", Behind the Headlines . vol. 55. no. 2. January-Mary 1998.
1997
Saunders, Doug, "Citizen Jane," The Globe and Mail, 11 Oct 1997.

Kapusta, Beth, "How Jacobs Changed a City," The Globe and Mail, 11 Oct 1997.

Hume, Christopher, "Jacobs sees humanity among urban concrete," Toronto Star, 18 Sep 1997.

Martin, Sandra, "An urban legend," Maclean's, 20 Oct 1997.

Barber, John, "Jacobs embraced as economic guru," The Globe and Mail, 15 Oct 1997.

Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler, September 2000.

Urban planning guru Jane Jacobs on the traps we set for ourselves, by Anne-Marie Tobin, Canoe, March 27, 2000.

The Convention Follies, Part 5: A Conversation with Jane Jacobs, by Hank Bromley, ARTVOICE, vol 11 num 30, July 27, 2000.

City Views: Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her legacy, by Bill Steigerwald, Reason Magazine, June 2001.

Urban Economy and Development: Interview of Jane Jacobs, by Roberto Chavez, Tia Duer, and Ke Fang, The World Bank Group, February 4, 2002.

Cities and Web Economies: Interview with Jane Jacobs, by Blake Harris, The New Colonist, December 1, 2002.
It's Everyone: A Panel Discussion with Jane Jacobs, Olivia Chow, Joan Doiron, Marilou McPhedran, Lisa Salsberg and Sue Zielinski.

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Jane Jacobs - The Center for the Living City

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In 2005, in collaboration with Jane Jacobs, a small group of accomplished urbanists and activists founded The Center for the Living City to build on Ms. Jacobs' work. The Center's purpose is to expand the understanding of contemporary urban life and inspire civic engagement and creative responses for the urgent advancement of social, economic and environmental justice.

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https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/person/chris-jackson

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Chris Jackson is a geologist and adventurer and was one of the 2020 Christmas Lecturers.

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https://geog.umd.edu/facultyprofile/nakalembe/catherine

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Nakalembe, Catherine | GEOG | Geographical Sciences Department | University of Maryland

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Dr. Nakalembe is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, the Africa Program Director under NASA Harvest, and a member of the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team on which she serves as the Agriculture and Food Security Thematic Lead.

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https://www2.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/wmw/

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Dr. Warren Washington became one of the first developers of groundbreaking atmospheric computer models in collaboration with Akira Kasahara when he came to NCAR in the early 1960s. These models, which use fundamental laws of physics to predict future states of the atmosphere, have helped scientists understand climate change. As his research developed, Washington worked to incorporate the oceans and sea ice into climate models. Such models now include components that depict surface hydrology and vegetation as well as the atmosphere, oceans, and sea ice.

He has more than 150 publications and an autobiography, Odyssey in Climate Modeling, Global Warming, and Advising Five Presidents. An Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling, written by Washington and Claire Parkinson in 1986 and updated in 2005, is a standard reference in the field.

Washington's past research involved using general ciculation models and the Parallel Climate Model (PCM). His current research involves using the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to study the impacts of climate change in the 21st century Both models were used extensively in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment, for which NCAR scientists, including Washington, and colleagues around the world shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Washington has engaged in research for over 50 years, and has given advice, testimony, and lectures on global climate change. Dr. Washington has been a member of the President's National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere and has had presidential appointments under the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations. More recently, he served on the National Science Board as a member (1994-2006) and as its chair (2002-2006).

Washington has many awards, including being a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Meteorological Society (former president), the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a past President of the American Meteorological Society and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. Dr. Washington has honorary degrees from Oregon State University, Bates College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst as well as the Vollum award from Reed College. In 2010, he was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama, the nation's highest science award "for his development and use of global climate models to understand climate and explain the role of human activities and natural processes in the Earth's climate system and for his work to support a diverse science and engineeringworkforce."

He has served on a number of National Research Committees of the National Academies, and is currently serving as chair of the Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

Education

Washington was born and grew up in Portland, Oregon. He became interested in science in grade school, going on to earn a bachelor's degree in physics and master's degree in meteorology from Oregon State University. His next step was to Pennsylvania State University for a doctorate in meteorology. In 1963, he joined NCAR as a research scientist.

As the second African-American to earn a doctorate in the atmospheric sciences, Washington has served as a role model for generations of young researchers from many backgrounds. He has mentored dozens of graduate students, as well as undergraduates in the UCAR-based SOARS program (Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science). In 1999, Washington won the Dr. Charles Anderson Award from the American Meteorological Society "for pioneering efforts as a mentor and passionate support of individuals, educational programs, and outreach initiatives designed to foster a diverse population of atmospheric scientists."

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Dr. Warren Washington's staff page with publications, presentations, and other infomation

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/mary-anning-forgotten-fossil-hunter-british-jurassic-coast

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If you had lived in Victorian times, you'd have spotted her, perhaps, at the foot of Church Cliff to the east of Lyme Regis, a seaside town on England's southwest coast. She'd have a wicker basket in one hand, a small geologist's hammer in the other, and be dressed in a plaid coat and cape made of heavy wool-it is chilly by the shore. Her small dog, Tray, would have been skittering by her side.

What you might not have known then is that Mary Anning was arguably the greatest fossil hunter of them all, "the princess of paleontology," a contemporary called her. In Victorian England, in an era of amateur scientists, fossil hunters were nearly always men.

Anning was born in Lyme Regis, which sits on one of the great fossil deposits from the Jurassic era. Known as the Jurassic Coast, the 95-mile stretch of red sandstone, shale, and chalk cliffs between Old Harry Rocks in Dorset, and Orcombe Point in Exmouth, is Britain's only natural UNESCO World Heritage site.

"It's the only visible and accessible coast that covers the whole age of the dinosaur," says David Tucker, director of the Lyme Regis Museum. "Think of layers of sedimentary rock laid down in the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Ages-like a layer of sponge, cream, and another layer of sponge cake tilting on its side. You are going through 185 million years of history."

(See how these prehistoric icons are getting a modern reboot).

Lyme Regis has a literary history, too: Beatrix Potter ( Peter Rabbit), Henry Fielding ( Tom Jones),and J.R.R. Tolkien ( Lord of the Rings) visited this seaside watering hole.In Persuasion, Jane Austen describes its "principal street almost hurrying into the water," and the town's "pleasant little bay, which, in the season, is animated with bathing machines" Miss Austen, who came for a stay, might have passed Mary Anning along that street, suggests Tucker.

Then, as now, fossils were the souvenir of choice. Anning, whose family was poor, hunted and sold them to supplement their income-a skill she learned from her father.

In 1811, her brother Joseph found a skull protruding from an eroding cliff face. It took months for Mary to carefully uncover a skeleton of the first Ichthyosaurus described as such in London. She was 12 years old. Her other important discoveries include the first complete Plesiosaurus-as well as the complete fossil of a flying reptile, Britain's first Pterodactylus.

The majority of her finds ended up in museums like the Natural History Museum in London, but she remained unsung. She found fossils; others got the credit.

An eminent French anatomist unjustly accused her of fraud. "The world has used me so unkindly," she wrote a friend. "I fear it has made me suspicious of all mankind." Gideon Mantell, a physician and fossil hunter himself, who visited her "dirty little shop" in 1832, churlishly called her a "prim, pedantic, vinegar looking, thin female." (Kate Winslet plays Anning in the recent film Ammonite, in which Anning falls into a lesbian relationship with Charlotte Murchison, a geologist. The characters were real; the romance, fiction.)

Scientists came and, with a whiff of patronizing amusement, consulted her. "She is a very clever, funny creature," said an American geologist who met her. Not only did she find fossils, she sketched and studied them. Her work added proof that species can become extinct, helping pave the way for Darwin.

When she died of breast cancer at the age of 47 in 1847, as science historian Hugh Torrens points out, the city seemed to mourn-not for Anning herself but, a notice asserted, for the "serious loss to the town as her presence attracted a large number of distinguished visitors ... able to appreciate her genius."

Late recognition

"She sold what she found. Her fossils are credited to the rich man who donated them to museums, rather than the poor woman that found them. It's not so much about gender as class. Today, she would be running a department at Oxford or Cambridge," Tucker says.

Still, she was not without recognition, particularly in the last decade of her life. In 1838, the British Association for the Advancement of Science gave her an annuity. In 1846, she was made the first honorary member of the Dorset County Museum. And when she died, her death was noted in the journal of the Geological Society-which would not admit women for another half-century.

(This woman is fighting to restore Mongolia's rich natural heritage: dinosaur fossils.)

The Lyme Regis museum itself sits on the site of Mary's house and shop, which deteriorated years ago. Her gravestone and a commemorative window can be found in St. Michael's Parish Church.

"But the real monument is going down to the beach in summer and seeing how many kids are there hunting for fossils," Keith Moore says. Moore, head librarian of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's academy of sciences, travels down from London several times a year for a fossil-hunting break. Among his finds: a beautifully preserved ammonite immediately claimed by his sister, and a fossilized fish, bony teeth still in place.

"It's the excitement of the chase," he says, "finding something lovely and learning about it afterwards-a cross between stamp collecting and Indiana Jones."

Digging for fossils

"The Jurassic Coast has been around for millions of years and will continue to be available for everyone to enjoy once the current situation has been resolved," the Jurassic Coast Trust advises. When that happens, young and old can follow in Mary Anning's footsteps and hunt fossils on the beach.

The section of the Jurassic Coast around Lyme Regis boasts a well-supported collecting code for professional fossil hunters. Professionals can sometimes extract from the rock shelf and occasionally the cliffs with landowner permission, but specimens should first be offered to the museum for purchase. The general public can hunt the beaches at Lyme and Charmouth, the two safest points on the coast, but amateurs are warned to stay away from the cliffs, as rockfalls can happen, and to beware of tides. And leave your geological hammer at home.

(Why now is the golden age of paleontology.)

The Lyme Regis Museum offers fossil hunting walks, as does the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre.

Those averse to gritty hands can admire someone else's find: the 7.9-feet-long pliosaur skull-"the world's biggest bite," uncovered by an amateur collector and displayed in the Dorset County Museum.

A local ice cream shop scoops Jurassic-inspired flavors, like Dig-A-Saurus and Ammonite Bites, made by the Dorset-based Purbeck Ice Cream as a fundraiser for the Jurassic Coast Trust.

The coronavirus pandemic has challenged communities and disrupted travel. Be sure to research your destination and take safety precautions before, during, and after your journey. For National Geographic reporting on the pandemic, click here.

Cathy Newman, a former editor at large for National Geographic, has written for the Economist, NPR.org, and the Wall Street Journal. Follow her on Twitter.

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The forgotten fossil hunter who transformed Britain's Jurassic Coast

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Mary Anning and her most important dinosaur finds went unsung, but her legacy now draws travelers to southwest England.

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https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/About/History/Obituaries-2001-onwards/Obituaries-2016/Jane-Ann-Simpson-Professor-Jane-Plant--1945-2016

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Pioneering geochemist who acted as a role model for young women in geology, who wrote persuasively about her prolonged battle with cancer

Jane Plant, who died on 4 March 2016, will be remembered for her significant scientific achievements; as a role model for young women in geology; and her brave, prolonged fight against cancer. Born Jane Ann Lunn, in Woodville, Derbyshire, she was the only child of Ralph and Marjorie ( née Langton) Lunn, village shopkeepers. Educated at Ashby Grammar School she went to Liverpool University in 1963, graduating with first class honours in geology and the prize for the best degree in her year.

Joining the Institute of Geological Sciences (now the British Geological Survey - BGS) she was assigned to the Atomic Energy Division, headed by Stanley Bowie. Recognising her potential, she was entrusted with responsibility for a geochemical reconnaissance programme, beginning in the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Establishing protocols which were later adopted world-wide, teams of university students collected stream sediments during the summer months, with the winter months spent in analysis and interpretation.

Working with collaborators like Janet Watson, she used the data to examine the geological and metallogenic evolution of the British Caledonides, leading to a PhD from Leicester University (1977) and a special merit promotion (1983). As sampling moved southwards the programme broadened, creating a geochemical database, which could be applied to economic, health and environmental issues.

In 1990, she joined the BGS Directorate, heading the newly-formed Minerals, Environment and Geochemical Surveys Division, while continuing her scientific work. Her achievements were recognised by her peers with numerous awards. She was appointed CBE in 1997 for services to Earth sciences, elected President of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (2001-02), became a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1999-2005) and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2012).

She retired from the post of BGS Chief Scientist in 2005 and was appointed Anglo-American Professor of Geochemistry at Imperial College. Here she pursued her interests in the links between geochemistry and health with the same passion which had characterised her BGS career. These interests were partly stimulated by her own battle with breast cancer which had first affected her in 1987.

By 1993, she had beaten cancer five times but the prognosis was poor. Struck by the low incidence of breast cancer among Chinese women and the absence of dairy products in their diet, she immediately adopted a mainly vegan regime, forgoing all dairy produce. Her cancer disappeared rapidly and she became convinced of a link between cancer and diet, writing of her experiences in a book Your Life in your Hands (2000). Other books followed, but to her disappointment her ideas were never accepted by the medical establishment.

Jane died at home, in Richmond upon Thames from a blood clot following chemotherapy. An early marriage was dissolved, leaving her with the name Plant, which she used professionally. She later married BGS colleague and trusted collaborator, Peter Simpson. She leaves Peter, three children and six grandchildren, an army of friends and a scientific legacy which will remain as a lasting memorial.
John Mather

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The Geological Society of London - Jane Ann Simpson (Professor Jane Plant, 1945-2016)

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Pioneering geochemist who acted as a role model for young women in geology, who wrote persuasively about her prolonged battle with cancer Jane Plant, who died on 4 March 2016, will be remembered for her significant scientific achievements; as a role model for young women in geology; and her brave, prolonged fight against cancer.

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https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html

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Mary Anning: the unsung hero of fossil discovery

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Mary was a pioneering palaeontologist and fossil collector. Her lifetime was a constellation of firsts.

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https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/203134/qa-christmas-lecturer-talks-geoscience-climate/

https://www.rigb.org/explore-science/explore/person/chris-jackson

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Professor Chris Jackson discusses the Christmas Lecture 'Planet Earth: A User's Guide', and the importance of role models in diversifying science.

Chris Jackson is Professor of Basin Analysis at Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering.

An accomplished academic and science communicator, he will give one of three Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on climate change - including its history, and the natural and human processes that drive it.

Caroline Brogan caught up with him to find out more.

Firstly, how did it feel to be asked to give the world-renowned Christmas Lectures?

I was shocked, honoured, and scared, in that order! It was certainly a surprise, but I'm very excited to discuss the importance of geoscience in understanding and tackling climate change.

It's also a chance to highlight the merits of geoscience at a time when the field is struggling with student numbers and public perceptions. Although the field is linked to fossil fuel exploitation, which demonstrably drives climate change, geoscientists have huge and important roles to play in the conversation around climate change, and they will be invaluable in helping us meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

So what's the link between rocks and climate change?

A far more expansive record (of climate change) is preserved in the rocks around us and beneath our feet. Professor Chris Jackson Department of Earth Science and Engineering

The climate, which has always been driven by natural forces like ocean dynamics, volcanic eruptions, and the Earth's position in the solar system, has been fluctuating for billions of years - but within a relatively short timeframe, humans have essentially become their own geological force.

It's important to look at the Earth's geological history to put our own influence on the climate into context. Although humans have continued to record ongoing climate fluctuations on their timescale, a far more expansive record is preserved in the rocks around us and beneath our feet. My lecture will focus on what studying rocks teaches us about climate change since the Earth first came to be - including in the current period, known to some as the Anthropocene.

Using natural climate fluctuations as a baseline means we can pinpoint and understand our influence, by measuring both the speed of change and the extremes it brings. For example, we can look at the chemistry of rocks to tell us how the climate and temperatures have changed over geological time.

How might the COVID-19 pandemic affect climate change?

The pandemic has ground many human processes and systems to a halt - a 'pause effect' that saw reduced urban air pollution and even reductions in global Earth vibrations. While this, as well as the health implications, are devastating for many, the pandemic could present new opportunities to take action as countries make drastic changes to infrastructure, jobs, travel, and investment.

You're an accomplished academic and science communicator, as well as the first Black scientist to give a Royal Institution Christmas Lecture. How important is racial and gender diversity in science and outreach?

Improving diversity in science, and more generally in positions of power, will underpin a much better society. Professor Chris Jackson Department of Earth Science and Engineering

Hugely - I think it's the most important thing to be talking about right now. In the UK there are 22,000 professors. Of these, 25 are Black women and 265 are Black men. There are two Black geoscience professors, both men; one of those is me.

The reasons for this imbalance are varied, but it undoubtedly includes the fact that white men have historically been in charge, and have therefore dictated who has power and influence in our society.

Improving diversity in science, and more generally in positions of power, will underpin a much better society - one where we measure success by based on a far broader set of metrics than simply money, power, or prizes, all of which often reflect access to opportunity and privilege.

So how can more Black people and women have a seat at this table?

The extremes (climate change) brings will overwhelmingly affect the most disadvantaged among us globally. Professor Chris Jackson Department of Earth Science and Engineering

Essentially, if we want to improve socioeconomic conditions for lots of people globally, we should empower them and help them realise that they can change the world. They need to know that their views and concerns are valid.

This is especially important in the context of climate change, as the extremes it brings will overwhelmingly affect the most disadvantaged among us globally. This is a time where empowering these people is vitally important.

Role models who positively inspire and support people play a big role in empowerment. For example, it's important for children to be exposed to positive role models who look like them and are from similar backgrounds. If Black children don't see Black scientists in the news or in documentaries, in a similar way to how children are exposed to white scientists, it's easy for them to feel that the scientific space isn't for them.

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm really interested in the evolution of the Earth and how this is reflected in mountains, volcanoes, tectonic plates, and even in the sediment found in rivers, beaches, deserts - areas known as sedimentary basins.

Our group looks at the changing dynamics of these basins, which are affected by, and provide clues about, past tectonic activity. To do this we use seismic reflection data to essentially x-ray the earth deep beneath us, even in areas currently under several kilometres of water.

I am also continuing my science communication work, which largely involves riding my bike to schools to teach kids about rocks, or climbing into volcanoes for BBC documentaries!

The 2020 Christmas Lectures, given by Professor Jackson, oceanographer Dr Helen Czerski, and environmental scientist Dr Tara Shine, will be filmed at the Royal Institution on 15, 17 and 19 December 2020 and broadcast on BBC Four between Christmas and New Year.

Tickets to the live filming of the Christmas Lectures are usually available via a ballot in September open exclusively to Ri Members and Patrons and UK registered schools. Due to the necessary Covid-19 restrictions this year, the Ri is currently evaluating whether a live audience will be possible and is due to make a decision shortly. Find out how to become a member of the Royal Institution and apply for tickets.

Follow Professor Jackson on Twitter.

All images credited to Paul Wilkinson Photography.
See the press release of this article

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Q&A: Christmas Lecturer talks geoscience, climate change, and diversity | Imperial News | Imperial College London

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Professor Chris Jackson discusses the Christmas Lecture 'Planet Earth: A User's Guide', and the importance of role models in diversifying science.

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https://www.asianscientist.com/2016/12/features/as100-7-asian-scientists-save-earth/

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7 Asian Scientists Who Love The Earth

These scientists are at the forefront of the fields of environmental sciences and geology across the region.

AsianScientist (Dec. 12, 2016) - The world we live in holds untold beauty and magnificence in its forests, jungles, deserts and oceans. Through their research, these scientists are committed to their protection, conservation and biodiversification, down to the very last coral reef.

1. Aflredo Mahar Lagmay

Lagmay, a professor at the National Institute of Geological Sciences, University of the Philippines Diliman, received the 2015 Plinius Medal from the European Geosciences Union for his research into natural hazards and disasters in the Philippines, in particular volcanic hazards, earthquakes, typhoons, landslides and floods. He is also executive director of the Department of Science and Technology Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards (NOAH), a flagship program for disaster risk reduction and management in the Philippines.

(Photo: University of Philippines Diliman)

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: Shutterstock. Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Asian Scientist Magazine is an award-winning science and technology magazine that highlights R&D news stories from Asia to a global audience. The magazine is published by Singapore-headquartered Wildtype Media Group.

Related Stories from Asian Scientist

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7 Asian Scientists Who Love The Earth - Asian Scientist Magazine

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These scientists are at the forefront of the fields of environmental sciences and geology across the region.

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https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/Library-and-Information-Services/Collection-Highlights/Women-and-Geology/Etheldred-Benett

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Etheldred Benett (1775-1845)

Silhouette of Etheldred Benett, [?1837]. Published in: H B Woodward, 'History of Geology' (1911). One of the only three known likenesses of Benett, made during a trip to Bath.

Etheldred Benett was born on 22 July 1775 at Pyt House, Tisbury, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of Thomas Benett. The geologist and botanist Aylmer Bourke Lambert, her sister-in-law's half brother, encouraged her and her sister Anna Maria to study natural history. Whilst her sister concentrated on botany, Benett took up the newly fashionable study of fossils.

By at least 1809, Benett had begun to acquire a significant collection of material. Her independent wealth (she never married) meant that she was able to collect high quality specimens from the many working quarries in the area, as well as from her holidays to the Dorset coast. Such was the importance of her collection that it became the first port of call for geologists studying the Wiltshire area. In addition Benett was in regular correspondence with geologists such as James Sowerby [who included drawings of a large number of her specimens in his 'Mineral Conchology'], George Bellas Greenough [who included the stratigraphical information she provided in his map of 'England & Wales'], Gideon Mantell and William Buckland. She also sent duplicate specimens to museums all over the country (including the Geological Society) and published books on her collection.

Her unusual first name and achievements in what was perceived to be the masculine science of geology, meant that she was regularly mistaken for a man. For instance in 1836 the Natural History Society of Moscow made her a member but the diploma was ascribed to 'Dominum [Master] Etheldredus Benett'.

Section of Chicksgrove Quarry, 1815

'Sketches of fossil Alcyonia...', 1816

Lithograph of a fossil sponge, [1819]

Watercolour of a meteorite, [1825]

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The Geological Society of London - Etheldred Benett (1775-1845)

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Silhouette of Etheldred Benett, [?1837]. Published in: H B Woodward, 'History of Geology' (1911). One of the only three known likenesses of Benett, made during a trip to Bath. Etheldred Benett was born on 22 July 1775 at Pyt House, Tisbury, Wiltshire, the eldest daughter of Thomas Benett.

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The Challenges of Fieldwork for LGBTQ+ Geoscientists

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The Challenges of Fieldwork for LGBTQ+ Geoscientists

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https://eos.org/features/the-challenges-of-fieldwork-for-lgbtq-geoscientists

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Fieldwork is often framed as central to geoscience research. What fieldwork comprises varies across geoscience disciplines and can encompass everything from wilderness treks, oceanographic cruises, and class field trips to museum and laboratory visits, trips to research centers, and attending conferences around the world. What varies just as widely, unfortunately, is how safe field research and work-related travel are to the geoscientists who must perform it.

There is increasing awareness of the hazards of sexual harassment and assault in the field-based sciences and a growing understanding that fieldwork is not always accessible for geoscientists with varying physical abilities or young families. However, there has not been a deliberate focus on challenges faced by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community in the geosciences with respect to fieldwork.

This is not to say that interventions for other discrete groups cannot help members of the LGBTQ+ community. People are complex, and their identities intersect many realms-there are, of course, LGBTQ+ geoscientists with disabilities and those with young children. However, it is often assumed that interventions intended to help one minoritized group will help all such groups-"a rising tide lifts all boats" approach. For instance, in the seminal study on harassment in the field [Clancy et al., 2014], the authors noted that "our results cannot adequately speak to the experiences of people of color or [LGBTQ+] individuals because they are under-represented in our fields and therefore our dataset, but the experiences reported by our respondents are likely reflective of a broader climate for members of various minority groups."

But without data, this widely held assumption cannot be assessed. One of the biggest barriers to supporting the LGBTQ+ geoscientist community is that to date, there have not been many systematic attempts to describe and understand this community. Individual geologists have shared their stories in places like 500 Queer Scientists or in the media, which is a crucial way of increasing visibility, but storytelling does not help assess the needs and challenges of the community as a whole.

This lack of information is not limited to the geosciences. Every 2 years the National Science Foundation publishes reports on the state of "women, minorities and persons with disabilities" in science and engineering but has not yet collected information on LGBTQ+ scientists. There have been some efforts to collect data about LGBTQ+ scientists in physics and chemistry, as well as across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. One 2016 study surveyed 1,603 LGBTQA STEM professionals, including 108 geoscientists, although the data were only published in aggregate [Yoder and Mattheis, 2016].

First, Quantify the Community

To better understand the needs and struggles of LGBTQ+ geoscientists, we launched a survey in fall 2019.

To better understand the needs and struggles of LGBTQ+ geoscientists, we launched a survey in fall 2019 that grew out of one author's (M.R.D.) attempt earlier that year to connect with his own community. As part of a presentation to an on-campus branch of the organization Out in STEM, he tweeted an informal survey trying to understand the concerns of other LGBTQ+ paleontologists. The results revealed that many of these scientists felt unseen, unheard, and unsupported in their field. The responses to the informal survey prompted us to conduct an official survey of geoscientists, modeling ours on that of Yoder and Mattheis [2016]. Once we were granted permission from the human subjects board at our university, we conducted the survey online, as studies have shown that this is the best way to collect information related to identity [, 2016].

On the basis of 261 responses, we found that the geosciences contain a diverse LGBTQ+ community. Most participants identified as cisgender women (47%) or as transgender (an umbrella term that includes transgender man, transgender woman, nonbinary, genderqueer/genderfluid, agender, and other identifiers for people whose gender does not strictly match the gender they were assigned at birth; 31%), with 22% identifying as cisgender men. Diverse sexualities are also represented, dominated by bisexual/pansexual/queer identities (52%), followed by gay/lesbian identities (34%), and then asexual/demisexual/romantic-spectrum identities (14%).

These results also revealed that the composition of the LGBTQ+ community in the geosciences is different from what has been found in STEM in aggregate, as well as in physics in the United States and the United Kingdom. By comparison, there are fewer gay men and a higher proportion of women and nonbinary/genderqueer and bisexual people in the geosciences. The racial demographics of LGBTQ+ participants in our survey were similar to those of the geosciences as a whole, as 83% of the respondents were white, 8% were Asian, and 7% were Hispanic/Latinx, while the remaining 3% were Black, Native American, or Pacific Islander.

Then Quantify the Problem

Although the survey asked about many experiences in the geosciences track, we were particularly struck by the data we collected on fieldwork and remote research. When asked about experiences with fieldwork or remote research, almost 55% of respondents indicated that they had been in an area where they did not feel safe because of their identity, expression, or presentation. Furthermore, about a third of the respondents indicated that they have refused to do fieldwork because of concerns for personal safety related to their identity. The need for these concerns becomes clear when looking at a world map highlighting where LGBTQ+ identities are not protected or are even criminalized (Figure 1). Even in places where these identities are not categorized as unlawful, the dominant culture may not be LGBTQ+ friendly.

These findings are striking, both in their scale and in how widespread they are. For instance, Clancy et al. [2017] conducted a methodologically similar study of astronomers and planetary scientists identifying those likely to feel unsafe in their workplaces because of gender (women, 35%; men, 1%) and race (women of color, 28%; men of color, 1.5%; white men and women, <1%). Our data show that a majority of individuals in all demographic groups identified by Clancy et al. who also identify as LGBTQ+ have felt unsafe with fieldwork or remote research experiences, and 34% refuse to do fieldwork over fears related to their identity. In fact, 62% of cisgender white men reported feeling unsafe in the field due to their LGBTQ+ identity; the only group that reported feeling more unsafe was cisgender women of color (75%). Cisgender women of all races and transgender people of color reported the highest rates of refusing to do fieldwork because of safety issues (50% and 46%, respectively).

Support Is Lacking for Graduate Students

Another troubling finding of our survey is that LGBTQ+ graduate students (29%) are significantly less likely than professors (57%) to have opted out of fieldwork in a specific locality because of safety fears. This is not surprising given the power imbalances present in graduate programs; a graduate student's research is often done in consultation with faculty advisers as part of a larger research agenda, which means that relative to faculty, students typically have far less control over their field site selection.

This power imbalance speaks to the need for graduate programs to develop adequate support and mentorship for LGBTQ+ graduate students, a need that is echoed in the survey responses. Most respondents (87%) reported that increased LGBTQ+ mentorship would have been helpful during their time as a student. Responses indicated that faculty support for the LGBTQ+ community was low both inside and outside the classroom, with 85% and 69% of respondents, respectively, reporting rarely or never experiencing such support. These two metrics are correlated: A student who experiences in-class support is likely also to have experienced out-of-class support.

Compounding the lack of available support, the overwhelming majority (85%) of respondents felt that other LGBTQ+ people in geology were not visible during their time as a student, presenting a challenge to them to even seek out and solicit mentorship. An even greater majority (91%) expressed that greater visibility and representation of LGBTQ+ people in geology would have been helpful during their time as a student, both in the field and at their home institution.

Using Data to Support LGBTQ+ Geoscientists

It's clear that existing interventions to make the geosciences more inclusive are not sufficient for LGBTQ+ geoscientists.

Given that almost all respondents wished for visible representation and that individuals in all demographic groups have felt unsafe doing fieldwork or remote research, it's clear that existing interventions to make the geosciences more inclusive are not sufficient for LGBTQ+ geoscientists. These findings are key for developing solutions for challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ geoscientist community.

Advisers, employers, and institutions need to be aware of safety issues associated with fieldwork and to educate themselves about potential dangers to LGBTQ+ geoscientists at field sites. However, the need for support and mentorship goes beyond the field [Mulcahy et al., 2016]. In the classroom, support for LGBTQ+ students starts with professors confronting homophobia, using inclusive language, and using students' preferred pronouns. Out of the classroom, faculty and staff can engage in supportive academic advising, visible allyship, and diversity training. Such gestures may seem small but are, in fact, tremendously meaningful. LGBTQ+ students report that a crucial part of their overall success is having a mentor to whom they are comfortable disclosing their identity.

Over the past few years, the geosciences community has been trying to broaden participation by making fieldwork and conferences more accessible and welcoming. Our survey makes clear that we need to reach out further to explicitly support the LGBTQ+ community. An important place to start is with education and awareness that allow our LGBTQ+ colleagues to be safe and feel supported in the field.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Patrick Getty, T. K. Morton, Khye Blue, and Colleen Wynn for feedback on the initial survey and A. Bradley for providing additional data. We received approval from the Human Research Protection Program at the University of Kansas (IRB ID: STUDY00144586) for human subject testing for the survey.

References

Clancy, K. B. H., et al. (2014), Survey of academic field experiences (SAFE): Trainees report harassment and assault, PloS One, 9(7), e102172, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0102172.

Clancy, K. B. H., et al. (2017), Double jeopardy in astronomy and planetary science: Women of color face greater risks of gendered and racial harassment, J. Geophys. Res. Planets, 122(7), 1,610-1,623, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JE005256.

McInroy, L. B. (2016), Pitfalls, potentials, and ethics of online survey research: LGBTQ and other marginalized and hard-to-access youths, Social Work Res., 40(2), 83-94, https://doi.org/10.1093/swr/svw005.

Mulcahy, M., et al. (2016), Informal mentoring for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, J. Educ. Res., 109(4), 405-412, https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.979907.

Yoder, J. B., and A. Mattheis (2016), Queer in STEM: Workplace experiences reported in a national survey of LGBTQA individuals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, J. Homosexuality, 63(1), 1-27, https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2015.1078632.

Author Information

Alison N. Olcott ( olcott@ku.edu) and Matthew R. Downen, University of Kansas, Lawrence
Citation:
Olcott, A. N.,Downen, M. R. (2020), The challenges of fieldwork for LGBTQ+ geoscientists, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO148200. Published on 28 August 2020.

Text © 2020. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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The Challenges of Fieldwork for LGBTQ+ Geoscientists - Eos

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A new survey reveals the unique issues that traveling for research poses for LGBTQ+ scientists. The data should help us create solutions that foster safety and inclusion.

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Recognizing Geology’s Colonial History for Better Policy Today

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Recognizing Geology’s Colonial History for Better Policy Today

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https://eos.org/science-updates/recognizing-geologys-colonial-history-for-better-policy-today

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At the University of Minnesota (UMN), we are reckoning with the story we tell about geology in our state. In the 19th century, the belief in manifest destiny drove white settlers to expand rapidly into the West, leading to the widespread removal of Indigenous Peoples from their homelands, genocide, and harm to their knowledge systems and lifeways. Geological mapping played a significant role in identifying which lands were profitable for U.S. settlement through gold and other natural resource extraction. The Minnesota Geologic and Natural History Survey was founded in 1872 and restarted in 1911 as the Minnesota Geological Survey (MGS) under UMN's Newton Horace Winchell School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The original purpose of the survey was to economically evaluate the " mineral kingdom " of Minnesota; today, the MGS mission is to identify and support stewardship of water, land, and mineral resources. The program was named for and first led by Newton Horace Winchell-a pioneering geologist discussed in most UMN geology courses. Winchell led mapping surveys, sometimes accompanied by the U.S. military, including George Armstrong Custer, into Indigenous land that directly led to mining explorations, white settlement, and, eventually, U.S. takeover of these lands through violence and coercion.

Geologists learn about Newton Horace Winchell's discoveries stripped from the violence that followed or made them possible.

But geologists-including the ones serving at MGS today-learn about Winchell's discoveries stripped from the violence that followed or made them possible. Although geologic mapping of the state contributed to advances in the stewardship of natural resources and public health, we must acknowledge the cost of these benefits. As two white geologists in the MGS and the UMN School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, we and our colleagues are making efforts to integrate lessons from our regional history into our policies that govern our relationships with Indigenous Peoples. Not only will this critical reflection acknowledge racist actions and the immense pain caused by them, but it also will allow the MGS to conduct ongoing work more justly, by collaborating with tribal neighbors to decide how and where MGS performs its mapping.

Geologic Mapping and Land Dispossession

First, we must look back at our history, starting with the U.S. government-funded expeditions to map west of the Mississippi River in the early 19th century. These expeditions included naturalists who described the surrounding nature and geology in works credited today for advancing the knowledge of the geography of Minnesota. These surveys inspired settlers to move to Dakota and Ojibwe homelands in what the U.S. government began calling the territory of Minnesota on the basis of the Dakota name, Mni Sóta Maḳoce.

These surveys were not the first scientific understandings of these landscapes. Indigenous Peoples have always had their own knowledge systems and sciences of Earth [see , 2019; , 2020; , 2019; Reano and Ridgeway, 2015]. To the Dakota and Ojibwe, some rocks and metals such as pipestone and copper hold deep spiritual importance and animacy. Indigenous place-names and maps also reveal a rich understanding of place [see , 2018; , 2018]. Generations of European and American explorers relied extensively on Ojibwe and Dakota guides to navigate the waterways and landscapes of Minnesota.

In 1837, the U.S. government began promulgating a series of treaties that forced the Dakota and Ojibwe people to cede most of their land. One concession would lead directly to another. A geological report by David Dale Owen, published in 1852, mapped the mineral potential of land ceded in the 1851 Dakota Land Cession Treaties, as well as land still held by the Dakota and Ojibwe. Owen documented, for example, unceded tracts of bedrock along the north shore of Lake Superior in the Arrowhead region of Minnesota. This report likely aided mining companies in persuading the federal government to acquire the land-which they did 2 years later in 1854.

The federal government paid pennies on the dollar to the Dakota on the value appraisals gave the land at the time, turning it into wealth that the UMN continues to benefit from today.

Minnesota was granted statehood in 1858, and in 1865, the Minnesota legislature appointed Henry H. Eames as the first state geologist. Eames produced two annual reports that focused on the region north of Lake Superior, where he claimed to have found a major gold deposit. In the heady gold rush that followed, a " quasi-military organization" made up of former soldiers recently returned from the Civil War set up shop as the first gold mining company at Lake Vermilion. They settled in unceded lands where the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa resided. To avoid violence, the Bois Forte Band ceded their land surrounding the lake and were forced to accept a smaller reservation farther northwest. But the "second California," as Eames boasted to potential financiers in New York, never materialized because Eames's claims of gold turned out to be fraudulent. The damage was done, however, and geologic mapping and mining research around the lake turned to focus on the nearby massive iron ore deposits.

Indigenous land dispossession not only resulted from geological mapping; it actually funded some of the surveys. The Morrill Land-Grant Act handed over 145 square miles (375 square kilometers), 98% of it ceded Dakota territory, to the State of Minnesota, which later assigned the benefits of the act to the University of Minnesota in 1868. Additional lands were granted specifically to fund the Minnesota Geologic and Natural History Survey in 1873. The federal government paid pennies on the dollar to the Dakota on the value appraisals gave the land at the time, turning it into wealth that the UMN continues to benefit from today.

Our Stories of Geology

Winchell's legacy is still discussed in modern textbooks and biographies published as recently as 2020. These works largely excuse or ignore the racism embedded in his views and the ethics of his science as being a consequence of a different time. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and activist Leanne Simpson points out in her book As We Have Always Done, however, that this type of thinking normalizes the white, settler perspective and erases the perspective of Indigenous Peoples. She asks, "Whose historical context and whose standards" are we evaluating history based upon? Winchell's legacy must also be evaluated in the historical context and standards of Indigenous Peoples.

Early in his career as survey director, Winchell and other scientists accompanied George Armstrong Custer in the 1874 Black Hills Expedition, an expedition that advanced the dispossession of Lakota homelands. Sioux scholar Nick Estes explains in his book Our History Is the Future that the Black Hills-He Sapa in the Lakota language-are "the heart of everything that is" to the Lakota people and sacred to more than 50 Indigenous nations. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie banned U.S. citizens from entering the Lakota reservation encompassing the Black Hills except for those employed and authorized by the U.S. government to do so. Custer's military obtained this authorization by claiming the expedition was for reconnaissance, whereas the geologists, including Winchell, said they were looking for fossils. The expedition's miners actually struck gold, and the rush of white settlement and U.S. land claims that followed were in clear violation of the treaty. Although Winchell himself may not have been seeking gold, he chose to participate in a military expedition on Lakota territory prominently connected with gold exploration and the drive for U.S. expansion. Yet the ethics of this research are not widely discussed, if at all, in the history of geology presented at UMN or in biographies.

Without this context, Winchell and his research appear unattached to the ongoing genocide and land dispossession of Indigenous Peoples as the U.S. expanded into the Midwest during the 19th century. Geology is not neutral within the politics of colonization, a point further developed and expanded in Kathryn Yusoff's book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. How we tell the story of geology either contributes to the status quo of colonization or challenges these privileged narratives to open up the possibility for a more just future.

Opportunities for Change

In 2019, we at the UMN School of Earth and Environmental Sciences were given an opportunity to better understand our science's history when one of the Minnesota tribal nations asked for their lands to be excluded from a MGS geologic map in progress. They believed that publicly available geologic information could jeopardize protection of their lands and that the MGS would not inform the tribe of all the potential uses of data collected. At first this request bewildered MGS geologists, who were not properly taught our discipline's history, but then spurred movement within the organization to learn about our region's treaties and the relationship between tribal sovereignty and geologic mapping.

These rights mean that each tribal nation can and should make its own decision on what geologic information the MGS can collect and how geologic mapping might affect its people.

The MGS researchers learned that each tribal nation within the footprint of Minnesota and throughout the U.S. retains its sovereignty and, along with all Indigenous Peoples, has the right to self-determination. These rights mean that each tribal nation can and should make its own decision on what geologic information the MGS can collect and how geologic mapping might affect its people. With this knowledge, the MGS began to create its first policy for mapping and collecting data on tribal lands. We began by reaching out to the UMN senior director of American Indian Tribal Nation Relations, who advised the MGS to reach out to each tribe's environmental resources program directors. In these meetings, MGS leadership shared its mission along with the mapping projects that would affect the tribe's lands. Next, the tribal environmental resources directors asked their tribal government to vote on their involvement in the MGS project. Some tribes wanted updated geological maps from the MGS, whereas other tribes stated they already had the capacity to make their own maps and thus declined permission for the MGS to survey their land.

The new policy states that MGS will offer opportunities to tribes to consult on surveys and other operational activity that may affect their land, water, or other natural resources, even if that activity is not directly on their land. MGS now requires explicit permission from tribal governments to collect new data on tribal lands and will also, upon request, "gray out" tribal lands on geologic maps and related products. Although the MGS has customized its policies to honor specific requests made by the sovereign Indigenous nations in our region, we modeled them generally on policies of both the U.S. Geological Survey and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

As our experience demonstrates, geologists must understand how the many discoveries in our discipline were actually made; otherwise, our work will continue to further the colonization of Indigenous Peoples. We must learn the complete history of geology's relationship with colonization, invite reflection from Indigenous Peoples, and require our scientific community to understand and respect tribal sovereignty through our policies. This work must extend to our geoscience classrooms as we train the next generation of Earth and environmental scientists, consultants, and regulators. Students, faculty, staff, and researchers within the MGS and the UMN School of Earth and Environmental Science have raised these demands, supported by national efforts calling for this work.

The academic department within the UMN School of Earth and Environmental Sciences is also beginning to take action. The department is in the process of recommending American Indian studies courses for undergraduates and graduate students on our website and in advising meetings. Faculty and students continue to assess whether collections contain specimens that were stolen from Indigenous Peoples and are developing repatriation procedures. Indigenous Earth scientists and scholars are being invited to speak at department geology seminars as well as lunchtime justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion talks. Students and faculty are reviewing and editing department curriculum to ensure that it respectfully includes Indigenous Peoples' histories and the colonial legacy of geoscience and geoengineering in Minnesota. Faculty and students are working with Indigenous scholars to create a land and water acknowledgment and develop policies for our department to work more ethically on Indigenous homelands. These actions are only the first steps, and we have a lot left to learn on this journey.

We still have many questions to discuss together: What should the MGS do with historical maps, data, and projects published without tribal consent? How can the MGS redress harms and incorporate the perspectives and knowledges of Indigenous Peoples?

MGS geologists have embarked on composing a detailed report on their program's past and ongoing colonial practices, which will be published on the MGS website. We also are continuing to refine our policies for geologic mapping on tribal lands. Building and maintaining respectful relationships with tribal governments will require time and accountability from the MGS, as another recent UMN-tribal collaboration has demonstrated. We still have many questions to discuss together: What should the MGS do with historical maps, data, and projects published without tribal consent? Can the MGS provide services to tribes in stewarding their land, mineral, and groundwater resources? How has the UMN geological research supported mining industries at the expense of Indigenous Peoples' treaty rights, economic prosperity, self-determination, and access to sacred sites? How can the MGS redress harms and incorporate the perspectives and knowledges of Indigenous Peoples? Fundamentally, how can the MGS and the geological community develop and follow ethics that account for and disrupt this discipline's entanglement in colonization?

Reimagining Our Science Together

Colonialism is ingrained within much of geology's foundation. Geologic institutions must be forthright in recognizing the role scientists in our field have played-and continue to play-in the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples from their lands around the world and, consequently, disrupting their lifeways and knowledge systems. We also have an opportunity to make the practice of our science more just, as well as deeper and more expansive, by critically understanding our past, stopping and redressing harms, and building respectful relationships with Indigenous Peoples for an equitable exchange of knowledges. Our work at MGS and at the UMN Earth and Environmental Sciences Department is far from done, but we look forward to reimagining our science and how it can support the well-being and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.

Acknowledgments

This paper would not have been possible without the guidance, support, and feedback from Mike Dockry (UMN forestry professor), Margaret Watkins (Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa water quality specialist), Kari Hedin (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa watershed specialist), Tony Runkel (MGS lead geologist), Hannah Jo King (UMN natural resources, sciences, and management graduate student), Crystal Ng (UMN hydrology professor), Laura Paynter (UMN public policy graduate student), Erick Moore (head of UMN Archives), the UMN American Indian and Indigenous Studies writing workshop, the UMN Institute for Advanced Studies Land-Grant/Land-Grab Fellowship cohort, the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE) Pods, and the Kawe Gidaa-naanaagadawendaamin Manoomin project team.

This news article is included in our ENGAGE resource for educators seeking science news for their classroom lessons. Browse all ENGAGE articles, and share with your fellow educators how you integrated the article into an activity in the comments section below.

References

Brooks, L. (2018), Awikhigawôgan ta Pildowi Ôjmowôgan: Mapping a new history, William Mary Q., 75(2), 259-294, https://doi.org/10.5309/willmaryquar.75.2.0259.

Cartier, K. M. S. (2019), Keeping Indigenous science knowledge out of a colonial mold, Eos, 100, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EO137505.

Daniel, R. (2019), Understanding our environment requires an Indigenous worldview, Eos, 100, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EO137482.

Evans, K. (2020), The river's lizard tail: Braiding Indigenous Knowledges with geomorphology, Eos, 101, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EO148717.

Reano, D., and K. Ridgway (2015), Connecting geology and Native American culture on the reservation of Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, USA, GSA Today, 25, 26-28, https://doi.org/10.1130/GSAT-G235GW.1.

Smith, M. (2018), Learning from the Dakota: Water and place, Open Rivers Rethinking Water Place Commun., no. 11, editions.lib.umn.edu/openrivers/article/learning-from-the-dakota-water-and-place/.

Author Information

Maddy Nyblade ( nybla002@umn.edu), University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis; and Jenn McDonald, Minnesota Geological Survey, St. Paul
Citation:
Nyblade, M., J. McDonald (2021), Recognizing geology's colonial history for better policy today, Eos, 102, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021EO162069. Published on 07 September 2021.

Text © 2021. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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Recognizing Geology's Colonial History for Better Policy Today - Eos

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The Minnesota Geological Survey has contributed to the dispossession of homelands from Indigenous Peoples. The agency is creating more just policies.

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https://www.rachelcarson.org/

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https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai

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Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was the founder of the Green Belt Movement and the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. She authored four books: The Green Belt Movement; Unbowed: A Memoir; The Challenge for Africa; and Replenishing the Earth. As well as having been featured in a number of books, she and the Green Belt Movement were the subject of a documentary film, Taking Root: the Vision of Wangari Maathai (Marlboro Productions, 2008).

Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, a rural area of Kenya (Africa), in 1940. She obtained a degree in Biological Sciences from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas (1964), a Master of Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh (1966), and pursued doctoral studies in Germany and the University of Nairobi, before obtaining a Ph.D. (1971) from the University of Nairobi, where she also taught veterinary anatomy. The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, Professor Maathai became chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and an associate professor in 1976 and 1977 respectively. In both cases, she was the first woman to attain those positions in the region.

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Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) was the founder of the Green Belt Movement and the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. She authored four books: The Green Belt Movement; Unbowed: A Memoir; The Challenge for Africa; and Replenishing the Earth.

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Meet 13 Asian and Asian Diasporic Nature and Environment Writers

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Meet 13 Asian and Asian Diasporic Nature and Environment Writers

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https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/meet-13-asian-and-asian-diasporic-nature-and-environment-writers

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For far too long, Asian Americans have been overlooked in conversations on climate change and the natural world. In a Yale School of Climate Change Communication report that purports to reveal which racial groups care most about climate change, for instance, the results for Asian Americans were unavailable, raising concerns over the low sample size. However, the inability to retrieve data on Asian communities-whether because of language barriers or questions over which ethnic groups are considered Asian American-reveals a more insidious concern: that Asian Americans have always been an afterthought in the national imagination.

Since the Atlanta spa shootings last March, however, in which eight women of Asian descent were murdered, alongside the ongoing surge of violent attacks against Asian elders, Asian American community members and allies have been tirelessly organizing on social media and in the streets to #StopAsianHate. By extension, conversations on the Asian American experience are becoming more common in popular culture. But still, the discourse on how Asian communities are affected by the climate crisis continues to be largely dismissed in a country in which environmentalism remains a movement dominated by white people.

The reality is this: Asians and Asian diasporic folks have always been on the front lines of the environmental justice movement-whether that looks like Richmond, California's Southeast Asian community organizing against the expansion of Chevron's massive oil refinery or the millions of farmers in India protesting for fair labor conditions amid extreme drought and flooding.

Furthermore, Asian and Asian diasporic folks have been contributing to the growing body of academic writing, poetry, fiction, and reportage on the environment for a while now, breaking the mold of what it means to relate to the natural world by doing so through the lens of migrants, children of immigrants, third-culture kids, and Global South communities on the front lines of the climate crisis. For AAPI Heritage Month, we'd like to recommend 13 incredible Asian and Asian diasporic nature and environment writers. From an environmental historian who wrote a memoir about her journey through the mountains of Taiwan to reclaim her ancestral past, to a Native Hawaiian's essays calling for the protection of Indigenous land from the expansion of corporate control and the American empire, these authors will open your eyes to new, critical perspectives on the environment, fostering cross-cultural understandings that'll remind you that our hope for a sustainable future is universal.

Sonia Shah is an award-winning Indian American journalist who has written about science, politics, and human rights for outlets such as The Nation, PBS NewsHour, and Mother Jones. Although she was raised in New York by parents who practiced medicine, she frequently visited Mumbai and Bangalore to see her working-class family, piquing her desire to investigate the ways in which inequality operates within and between societies. Marrying questions of migration with scientific inquiry, Shah demystifies mainstream science narratives through her deeply nuanced reporting, producing stories that unpack the problematic notion that the coronavirus originated from exotic animals, the complicated distinction between native and invasive species, and more. She's also an author of multiple critically acclaimed books such as Crude: The Story of Oil (2004), Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years (2011), and Pandemic: Tracking Contagions From Cholera to Coronaviruses and Beyond (2017). Her latest-Amazon's best science book of 2020-isThe Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, a collection of reportage on how global migration, pathologized as a disruptive force to Western society, is critical for preserving biodiversity and ensuring the survival of humanity. Migration is not a problem, Shah argues, but the solution to the climate crisis. During this critical moment in which climate migration is on the rise and racist narratives around immigrants are fueling xenophobia, Shah's work is more salient than ever.

Manchester-born writer and journalist Anita Sethi draws creative inspiration from the natural world. On top of her writing on culture and environment for outlets like BBC Wildlife, The Guardian, and The Observer, Sethi's nature writing has been anthologized in collections including (2016), Seaside Special: Postcards From the Edge (2018), and the upcoming collectionWomen on Nature (2021). She's also a vocal advocate in the movement to diversify the outdoors, sharing her experiences hiking in England as a South Asian woman of Guyanese and Indian descent. Her debut memoir, I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain, released in April, recounts Sethi's journey exploring the Pennines-a range of hills and mountains known as "the backbone of Britain"-after being a victim of a racially motivated hate crime during a hiking trip. "I've been racially abused before and told so many times where I do and don't belong," Sethi tells The Bookseller. "But when this man told me to go back to where I'm from, I thought: Enough is enough. This is my home!" Meditating on race, womanhood, nature, and belonging, Sethi documents her process of moving past trauma as she rekindles her relationship to the outdoors. Critics describe this memoir as "a brilliant and important book."

Born in New York City, Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American poet whose work transcends genre. An author of 11 books of poetry, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Poetry Review, Sze is an expert observer of the natural world, writing vivid, lyrical prose at "the intersection of Taiost contemplation, Zen rock gardens, and postmodern experimentation" (as described by critic and writer John Tritica). Rich with scientific inquiry, Sze's poetry is informed by conversations with scientists, whether via a dinner with Nobel Peace Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann or a mushroom-hunting trip with renowned mycology expert Bill Isaacs. In Ginkgo Light (2009), Sze contemplates the meaning of survival and resiliency in the wake of nuclear collapse at Hiroshima through the perspective of a ginkgo tree, a woodpecker drilling a utility pole, a 1,300-year-old lotus seed, and other mundane natural phenomena. Likewise, Sight Lines (2019) surveys the rugged terrain of the Anthropocene as he navigates the ecological and emotional consequences of a planet-in-crisis through an array of human and nonhuman voices: a lichen on a ceiling, a man behind on his rent. His latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021), continues to grapple with an endangered planet. "Our actions here and now have profound effects on the farthest reaches of the planet," Sze tells the Brooklyn Rail. "I can simply invoke climate change to show how we are all living, affecting, and damaging our planet together."

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a Chinese American anthropologist whose research lies at the nexus of feminist studies, the Anthropocene, and globalization. An author of multiple ethnographies, such as In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place(1993), which surveys the Meratus Dayaks, a marginalized community of people who reside in the depths of the South Kalimantan rainforest in Indonesia, and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2004), which highlights the communities that comprise the labor supply of global natural resource markets, Tsing's fascinating research has now come to the forefront of anthropological inquiry. Her latest, heralded by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best nonfiction science and economics books of 2015, isThe Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. The 352-page book takes readers on a journey through the globalized commodity chain of the matsutake mushroom-from a Southeast Asian village of matsutake mushroom pickers in the middle of an Oregon forest to the clearcut pine forests in northern Finland-in search of answers to an existential question: What can this rare, highly sought-after fungus teach us about sustainability? Tsing is also one of the editors of the anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017), which challenges readers to rethink their relationship to the earth, and is the cofounder of Feral Atlas, an interactive, multimedia platform where users can learn about the ecological relationship between nonhuman species and infrastructure.

Known as both an "environmental hero" and "Monsanto's worst nightmare," Indian writer, scientist, activist, and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva is one of the most influential environmental leaders of our time. Her activism began in 1991, when she became a vocal critic against the Asian green revolution (a modern, scientific approach to address the widening Asian food crisis in the '60s), which favored large-scale industrialized food production. Shiva rallied Indian farmers to resist corporate-led monoculture by encouraging local, regenerative farming practices that preserve native seed strains. "Food is a weapon," Shiva asserts in the documentary The Seeds of Vandana Shiva. "When you sell real weapons, you control armies. When you control food, you control society. But when you control seed, you control life on Earth."

Shiva engaged in regenerative agriculture movements across Africa, Latin America, and eventually, the United States, where in 1999, she pioneered the national crusade against genetically modified crops, accusing multinational biotech corporations like Monsanto as well as the US government of indoctrinating " food totalitarianism" onto the world. More recently, Shiva has been brought on as a political commentator in the media-one of her latest appearances being on Russell Brand's podcast Under the Skin, in which she writes off Bill Gates's book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster as "rubbish" for offering tech-giant solutions that she predicts will spur a new wave of colonization of Indian land and food production.

Throughout her career, Shiva has written over 20 books, including Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in the Age of Climate Crisis (2015), Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2015), Biopiracy: The Plunder and Nature of Knowledge (2016), and Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit (2016).

Indian writer and environmental and human rights activist Arundhati Roy is one of the world's most salient voices of our current moment. An award-winning novelist and prolific essayist, Roy's unapologetic commitment to systemic change bleeds through her prose. She is most known for her fearless, controversial essays criticizing the Indian government's role in perpetuating the nation's political, social, and environmental injustices against marginalized communities-especially farmers, Adivasi, Dalits, and other groups on the lower rung of its caste system. In her 1999 essay "The Greater Common Good"-included in her essay collection The End of Imagination (2016)-Roy reports on the communities that opposed the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in the Narmada Valley, a project that would have resulted in major flooding and waterlogging, the obliteration of rich natural habitats, and the displacement of millions of the poorest people-all in the name of "national progress." "Big Dams are to a nation's development what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal," Roy writes. "They're both weapons of mass destruction."

More of Roy's commentary on the current state of environmental affairs can be found in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2018), an epic that interweaves issues from the Indian vulture crisis and the predicament of captive zoo animals to filthy polluted rivers, deforestation, and mushrooming slums. She is frequently brought on as a political commentator in progressive news outlets. In a Democracy Now interview, she argues that capitalism is "a form of religion" by unpacking the backwards logic of natural-resource extraction. "There's a psychotic refusal to understand that the survival of the species is connected to the survival of the planet," Roy says. "Can you look at a mountain and not just calculate its mineral worth?"

Born in Shantou, a town in the Guangdong Province near Guiyu, the largest electronic waste site in the world, popular Chinese science fiction writer Chen Qiufan draws literary inspiration from the ways in which humans alter the environment. When he toured the Guiyu facility for the first time, Qiufan was floored by what he saw. "Metal chassis, broken displays, circuit boards, plastic components and wires, some dismantled and some awaiting processing, were scattered everywhere like piles of manure, with laborers, all of them migrants from elsewhere in China, flitting between the piles like flies," Qiufan writes in the introduction of his award-winning book (2013). Inspired by his visit, Waste Tide is set in a dystopic future China and follows Mimi, a poor "waste girl" who works in the Silicon Isles, the global capital for e-waste based in the southeastern coast of the country. One day, an American cargo ship (part of Project Waste Tide) arrives at the site and carries over a virus that infects Mimi, rendering her conscious of injustice. A class war between the eco-terrorists and the waste workers ensues. "I try to stir up the awareness of the truth that all of us are equally as responsible for the grave consequence of mass pollution happening across the globe," Qiufan tells British sci-fi journal . "If we continue to fall into the trap of consumerism and blindly indulge in newer, faster, more expensive industrial products, one day we may face trash that is nontransferrable, unavoidable, and unrecyclable."

In addition to authoring Waste Tide, Qiufan is a prolific writer for print and digital magazines, publishing over 30 short stories of speculative fiction in outlets like Clarkesworld, , and China's Harper's Bazaar. His second novel, AI 2041: Ten Visions for our Future, comes out in fall 2021.

While professor and poet Kazim Ali may not be an environmental writer in the conventional sense, his relationship to the earth is a prevalent theme in his work. Born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian, and Egyptian descent and raised in Canada and the US, Ali never felt like he belonged to a particular place, especially as a queer person of color. An author of 18 books-a series of poetry, novels, memoirs, and translations-Ali probes questions of history's role in identity. Silver Road: Essays, Maps, and Calligraphies (2018) is a collection of poetry that charts a path toward an existential, philosophical understanding of the self through a hodgepodge of subjects: quantum physics, sixth-century Chola Empire sculptures, and of course, climate change. His reflections on alienation and the environment are deeply explored in his most recent book, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (2021), a memoir that takes Ali back to Jenpeg, Canada, where he immigrated as a child. Nestled between the boreal forests and waterways of Manitoba, Jenpeg is now the site of a hydroelectric dam that is under construction, threatening the local Pimicikamak community's water supply and culture. Eager to learn more, Ali revisits Jenpeg and spends a week meeting and talking with members of the Pimicikamak community to seek answers to questions about land and power, and to better understand where his story fits within the community. "The provincial and federal governments should have known the value of what the community was giving when they agreed to allow the damming of the river," Ali tells Foreword Reviews. "They should have respected that gift."

Bonnie Tsui is a New York-born Chinese American journalist who writes stories on climate change, the environment, and culture, ranging from the shark fin trade in Hong Kong to the plight of Cal Fire pilots in the age of the megafire. As a child of swimmers and as a competitive swimmer herself, she always possessed a deep affinity for the water. "I just always remember feeling more comfortable and happy in the water, actually, than on land," Tsui told NPR. "There's just this sense of magic that you get from being in the water and buoyancy that you just don't have on land." Looking to explore humanity's relationship to water more deeply, Tsui wrote (2020)-a blend of science, memoir, and deep reportage that reveals what it is about water that seduces and brings us closer to one another. She tells the stories of Olympic champions, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, an Icelandic fisherman who survived a shipwreck after swimming six hours back to shore in hypothermia-inducing water. She also edited A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise (2007), a collection of 20 stories from young writers exploring their relationship to nature. Her latest book, Sarah and the Big Wave-an illustrative story of the first woman to surf Mavericks-comes out this month. Tsui's writing consistently offers fresh insights into what we can learn from the earth, and how it connects us all.

Jessica Lee is a Taiwanese, British, and Canadian nature writer and environmental historian who is fascinated by environmental aesthetics and botanical history. She is also the founding editor of The Willowherb Review, a digital platform that amplifies nature writing by emerging and established writers of color. Lee's writing breaks away from the nature literary canon, offering incisive insights into the threads between land, culture, and belonging. In her latest book, Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains & Coasts in Search of My Family's Past (2020), Lee traverses the ecological landscape of her ancestral homeland-hiking Taiwan's towering mountains and biking its flatlands in search of rare birds-to unearth the secrets from her past after she accidentally discovers a collection of letters written by her immigrant grandfather. Interweaving personal narrative with observational wit, Two Trees Make a Forest casts a critical gaze upon the colonial explorers who shaped our understanding of the land as an attempt to highlight how geographical forces are intertwined with our family stories. Lee sets out to answer similar questions in her first nature memoir, Turning: Lessons From Swimming Berlin's Lakes (2018), in which she embarks on a mission to swim the 52 lakes that surround Berlin, rain or shine. Lee's words extend beyond the page, producing radio stories on natural history and writing personal essays for digital media outlets. Curious about the role that forests play in our imaginations? Lee's three-part radio series on the BBC breaks it down. Interested in expanding your worldview on the role nature plays in the formation of diasporic identity? Lee's Catapult column investigates the relationship between nationalism and cherry blossoms, the cultural dimensions of soybeans, and what the mango reveals about migration. All in all, Lee's writing is paving the way for fresh voices in nature literature.

Khairani Barokka is a London-based Indonesian writer, poet, and interdisciplinary artist whose work centers disability, decolonization, and the environment. Barokka's ballad, Indigenous Species (2016), tells the story of an Indigenous young girl who's abducted and smuggled onto a boat that floats upstream into the deep recesses of the Indonesian river, passing by a landscape ravaged by ecological destruction and corporate greed. (2017)-Barokka's first full poetry collection-examines the state of human existence in the age of the Anthropocene, drawing connections between climate change, sexuality, violence, nature, desire, and the body. She furthers a similar line of questioning in Ultimatum Orangutan (2021), her second and latest poetry collection. Translating to "people of the forest" in Indonesian, Ultimatum Orangutan offers a raw, provocative glimpse into how colonialism fuels environmental injustice in Indonesia through the exploitation of humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Asked in a Mongabay interview about the power of literature in the fight against environmental destruction, Barokka asserts that "no artwork is passive." She explains, "What happens as a result of affecting people's hearts and minds is up to the individual, but change happens as a result of people recognizing the urgency of environmental and Indigenous rights issues."

Published in 15 countries, Barokka's work can also be found in literary publications such as the Poetry Review, The New Inquiry, and The Rialto as well as in a spectrum of academic anthologies and journals.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a kānaka maoli (Native Hawaiian) academic, activist, and poet who studies and writes about identity, generational trauma, and cultural resilience. Her foray into the national spotlight took place at 18 years old, when President Barack Obama invited her to perform a poem at the White House titled " Kumulipo," a story about the loss of Hawaiian identity in the wake of American empire. Since then, she's dedicated her life to fighting to preserve Hawaiian culture through the protection of land and Mother Earth. In the late summer of 2019, Osorio was an activist on the front lines of a movement led by Native Hawaiians to stop the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the peak of Mauna Kea, a sacred site that's rooted in Hawaiian cosmology and Polynesian culture. Protesters, who call themselves kia'i, or "protectors," claimed that the construction of the telescope would've ravaged the native ecosystem of the land, and in return, their culture. Thus, Osorio was inspired to join them.

During the 2021 Sundance Festival, a documentary on the Mauna Kea movement, This Is The Way We Rise, premiered, featuring a scene in which Osorio is huddling with the protectors on the asphalt, chained to a cattle guard, in an action to obstruct development. "The only way we can survive this climate catastrophe, the only way we can survive how capitalism has ravaged our environment, is if we pay closer attention to Native people and the things that they've been doing for generations," Osorio tells . "At the end of the day, Native people and people of color building solidarity with one another is what is going to save our lives."

Osorio also writes about her relationship to the land in essays such as "No Seed Left Unturned" in the second volume of the journal Value of Hawaii, and This Is Not a Drill: Notes on Surviving the End of the World, Again, nowin its third volume. Her debut book, Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha, ʻĀina, and Ea, which translates to "myth, love of the land, and sovereignty," respectively, will be available for purchase in September 2021.

Scholar, poet, and environmentalist Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous Chamoru (Chamarro) from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is also an English professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa, who teaches creative writing, eco-poetry, and Pacific literature. A scholar of many literary talents, he is the coeditor of five literary anthologies, author of two spoken word poetry albums-Undercurrent (2011) and Crosscurrent (2017)-as well as five books of poetry. His latest, 2020's Habitat Threshold (winner of a gold Nautilus Book Award) is an experimental poetry collection that explores the ecological plight of his homeland-from the impacts of environmental injustice to the ravages of global capitalism-and challenges readers to critically reimagine what a sustainable future may look like. "When a species goes extinct, so much is lost," Perez tells The Guardian. "Not only from the environment and the ecosystem but culturally as well. We lose our cultural connection to these important species, and we lose the deep meaning that they added to our lives." Even though Perez doesn't consider himself an activist, he aims to use poetry as a vehicle to raise political awareness that inspires empathy, community engagement, and environmental protection. He's performed his poetry at the 350.org Climate March in Honolulu, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress, a Hawai'i Conservation Alliance conference, and many other advocacy-centered events.

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Meet 13 Asian and Asian Diasporic Nature and Environment Writers

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Expand your perspective on the environment

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https://www.josarsby.com/danoneill

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Field biologist, wildlife filmmaker and tv presenter

Dan O'Neill is an experienced field biologist, wildlife filmmaker, explorer, and presenter, who specialises in remote and challenging environments.
Film work
Dan's brand new five-part series Giants ( Curiosity Stream), premiered in May 2023. It sees Dan undertaking five epic expeditions to find the biggest beasts to have walked the planet.

Recently, Dan filmed Hawk Boy for the BBC's The One Show, and work for BBC Earth includes Snow Leopards: Ghosts in the Snow - a four-part docu-series which follows his expedition with the Snow Leopard Trust into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan. In Dan O'Neill Investigates, he explores the illegal wildlife trade and animal cruelty, and in After We've Gone, shows how nature thrives after humans leave.

In 2020, Dan travelled to rebel-occupied western Mindanao, to learn the conservation story of the most endangered raptor on the planet, the Philippine eagle. His film, Queen of Birds, which documented his journey, has been viewed over 2.3 million times.
Expeditions
Dan has led numerous scientific expeditions, often to track and monitor endangered species. An experienced field technician, he's camera-trapped for jaguars and other large mammals across the Neotropics from Guyana to Mexico and he assists the Snow Leopard Trust in Central Asia.

Most recently, in June 2023, Dan led a six-week scientific study in Cusuco, Honduras, capturing and ringing tropical forest birds and camera-trapping large mammals.

In 2021, supported by indigenous people, he led an expedition in search of jaguars which he documented in Last Eden: Guyana.
Speaker
A popular speaker, Dan's extensive knowledge, storytelling expertise and exuberant personality allow him to connect with audiences of all backgrounds, ages, and interests.

Key topics include sustainability, conservation, LGBTQIA+, extreme environments, and motivation.
Speaker testimonials:
"Dan's personal style of storytelling is truly moving and inspiring." Jayson Ibanez, Philippine Eagle Foundation

"Dan was an absolute delight to work with. He gave an inspiring talk to our college and university students who were fascinated and intrigued in equal measure." Jamie Cash, Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies
Interests
In 2022, Dan collaborated with Grammy award-winning musician Imogen Heap to co-create the music behind Climate of Change, hosted by Oscar-winning Actress Cate Blanchett. They also released a double-album Chordata Bytes I & II in-line with COP27.

Dan is a passionate advocate for the LGBTQIA+ community and his work has been featured in The i, Broadcast Magazine, Gay Times, and Trippin. A campaign with Attitude magazine, saw Dan work alongside world-class drag artist Bimini, to raise the profile of protecting our oceans. #SeaOurFuture.

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Dan O'Neill Documentary Filmmaker, Field Biologist, Creative Producer, & Explorer

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LGBTQ+ History Month: Key players in Environmentalism

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LGBTQ+ History Month: Key players in Environmentalism

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https://butterfly-conservation.org/news-and-blog/lgbtq-history-month-key-players-in-environmentalism

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It's no secret that many LGBTQ+ Scientists have contributed to conservation efforts around the world and made a significant difference to how we understand our environment. LGBTQ+ History Month is always a time to celebrate and spotlight those in the queer community that have made a difference, to bring attention to their stories and achievements.

Izzy Bishop (She/They)

Featured in 500 Queer Scientists, Dr Izzy Bishop is a queer scientist that has specialised in freshwater conservation. Her research works to understand the quality of freshwater ecosystems across the globe. Additionally, she leads a global citizen science project, Freshwater Watch which works to monitor and protect the health of rivers, lakes, streams, ponds, and wetlands.

Dr Bishop also enjoys being able to share science and educate people - even through the mode of stand-up comedy.

Rachel Carson (She/her)

Rachel Carson, a US conservationist wrote Silent Spring in 1962, which has since been accredited with founding the global environmental movement. The book was a result of Carson's studies on the chemical DDT and other pesticides in natural habitats.

Her earlier work focused on aquatic biology and her work as a nature writer in the 50s produced The Sea Around Us and Under the Sea Wind, both of which were hugely successful. Carson was later awarded the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work in Conservation and for inspiring the environmental movement that also lead to establishing the U.S Environmental Protection Agency.

Ceci (They/them)

Ceci Pineda, is a gender non-conforming advocate for climate justice. Based in the U.S Ceci has also been an organiser as part of the Audre Lorde Project, an organisation for LGBTQ+ people of colour that focuses on radical nonviolent activism. People of colour are facing the brunt of the climate crisis so it's important and significant to learn of the people who are supporting this cause and fighting for justice.

They are also a graduate of Brown University in Environmental Studies and is currently working towards climate justice through regeneration, education, and music.

Dan O'Neill (He/Him)

Dan O'Neill is a wildlife presenter who was openly told to play down the fact that he is part of the LGBTQ+ community. Speaking to The Independent O'Neill stated while he'd always dreamed of becoming a biologist and wildlife presenter, there were no clear LGBTQ+ role models having adventures on TV. He also spoke of the name-calling he had experienced and the advised suppression of his identity from people he worked with, as well as the stereotypes about gay people he had encountered.

It's up to us as individuals to become more educated in order to dispel harmful stereotypes and, instead, create a more inclusive and tolerant society with more brilliant and diverse people working together to save our planet. Together, we are stronger.

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LGBTQ+ History Month: Key players in Environmentalism

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It's no secret that many LGBTQ+ Scientists have contributed to conservation efforts around the world and made a significant difference to how we understand our environment. LGBTQ+ History Month is always a time to celebrate and spotlight those in the queer community that have made a difference, to bring attention to their stories and achievements.

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Project to reveal barriers faced by disabled people when adopting eco-friendly lifestyles

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Project to reveal barriers faced by disabled people when adopting eco-friendly lifestyles

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https://www.hw.ac.uk/news/articles/2022/project-to-reveal-barriers-faced-by-disabled.htm

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Project to reveal barriers faced by disabled people when adopting eco-friendly lifestyles

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Potential discrimination faced by disabled people when trying to adopt greener lifestyles is to be explored in a new project.

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5 Black heroes of the environmental movement

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5 Black heroes of the environmental movement

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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/black-environmentalists-justice-climate-change/

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5 Black heroes of the environmental movement

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From environmental justice advocates to scientists and social entrepreneurs, these people have all worked to raise awareness of climate change and protecting the planet.

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Celebrating Black Geographers for Black History Month

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Celebrating Black Geographers for Black History Month

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https://geog.ufl.edu/2021/02/01/celebrating-black-geographers-for-black-history-month/

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Geography is a diverse field. Throughout the month of February, we will be highlighting the work of Black Geographers, some of whom are #GeoGators.

Special thanks the University of British Columbia Department of Geography for their excellent A reading list of Black geographers, which inspired this project.

Keith is a GeoGator alum, a Lecturer in the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland, and a National Geographic State Geography Steward. He is a fluvial geomorphologist.

Arrianna Marie is a Medical Geographer and an Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching focuses include the application of spatial analytic/statistical/epidemiologic methods to study interactions between health(care) policies, healthcare access and utilization and underlying, population-level health inequities, and identify points of intervention at structural- and system-levels. She has ongoing collaborative research projects exploring birth outcomes (preterm birth and low birth weight) among Black immigrants in segregated neighborhoods, maternal telehealth use, and the disparate effects of rural hospital closures on acute care access.

James Chuma spent half of his 32 years on five expeditions. Eight of these years were spent with David Livingstone and travelled to London after Livingstone's funeral. With Abdullah Susi, he worked with Livingstone's friends and family to establish the legacy of the Scottish explorer (see image below). Chuma was held in high esteem by all British explorers he worked with and was known for his reliability, resourcefulness and commitment.

In 1881 he was presented with a silver medal by the Royal Geographical Society and a sword, in recognition of his contributions. In 1879-80 he joined Joseph Thomson and Keith Johnston on the Royal Geographical Society expedition to the Central Lakes. Chuma was baptised in 1865 when he added James to his name.

Adetoye was a Nigerian Geomorphologist who authored several geomorphology textbooks and endowed a prize in geomorphology, as well as being an advocate for environmental education.

Asha is an Assistant Professor at Clark University. Her work links mobilities studies, post-colonial and black studies, critical race theory and studies of urban informality. She is particularly interested in popular, improvised and often unofficial urban practices deployed by black and migrant groups, and her research looks at how those practices impact how cities are understood, planned and mapped.

Clyde was an Associate Professor of Black studies and acting director of the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, and editor of In the Wake of Hurricane Katrina: New Paradigms and Social Visions.

Milton was a Brazilian geographer and geography scholar who had a degree in law. He became known for his pioneering works in several branches of geography, notably urban development in developing countries. He is considered the father of critical geography in Brazil. Santos was a recipient of the Vautrin Lud Prize, and a posthumous recipient of the Prêmio Anísio Teixeira, awarded every five years by the Brazilian agency for the improvement of higher education personnel to distinguished contributors to research and development in Brazil.

Andrea is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University and the founder of the Texas Freedom Colonies Project. Her research frames planning & historic preservation practices as avenues to social justice. She situates her work on African diasporic planning, grassroots planning, community development, and planning history within critical race, insurgent planning, cultural geographies, and heritage studies. Andrea has recently published "Performance as place preservation: The role of storytelling in the formation of Shankleville Community's Black counterpublics", "Black Placemaking in Texas: Sonic and Social Histories of Newton and Jasper County Freedom Colonies", and "Haunting as Agency A Critical Cultural Landscape Approach to Making Black Labor Visible in Sugar Land, Texas".

Susi travelled widely inside and outside Africa, founding a 'station' in the Congo called Leopoldville, which later became Kinshasa. Susi worked alongside David Livingstone for 20 years on several expeditions. In 1881, Susi joined Henry Morton Stanley on an expedition up the Congo River. Afterwards, it is believed that he sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to reach Zanzibar. Between 1883 and 1891 he worked with the Universities Mission to Central Africa as a caravan leader. Susi was awarded a medal by the Royal Geographical Society.

Catherine is an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Maryland, the NASA Harvest Africa Program Director, and a member of the NASA SERVIR Applied Sciences Team on which she serves as the Agriculture and Food Security Thematic Lead. She researches applications of satellite remote sensing and machine learning to agriculture and food security, land use and land-use change mapping, water resources, and climate change, and supports several capacity-building in the use of remote sensing for agriculture monitoring and research. Catherine is a 2020 Africa Food Prize Laureate for her dedication to improving the lives of smallholder farmers by using satellite technology to harness data to guide agricultural decision-making.

Celeste is an Assistant Professor at Temple University. Her research explores spatially interconnected struggles around structural racial, economic, and gender violence. She uses critical qualitative and quantitative methods-often in collaboration with community organizations and leaders to generate evidence of and for more livable and equitable geographies. Her latest research explored connections between slavery-era and more contemporary Black flight from and place-making beyond racial police violence.

Adam is an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota. He researches Black geographies, African diaspora, political geography, critical theory, political movements.

Alex is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on contested nature-society relationships, with attention to Black socio-spatial epistemology and struggle, global environmental change, and environmental justice. He focuses on Jamaica, where he has conducted research on agricultural livelihoods, conservation and development, Maroon communities, and human-dimensions of climate change. Alex has also conducted field research in the Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and the Republic of South Africa. He combines qualitative fieldwork methods, archival research, and discourse analysis.

Amobi is a PhD student at the University of Florida, a Hydrogeomorphologist, and an Earth System Scientist who studies the Apalachicola River with Dr. Joann Mossa. He has a M.Sc. in Geography and a B.Sc. in Geography from the University of Ibadan, and is pursuing a M.Sc. in Water and Environmental Management from Loughborough University, United Kingdom, while he completes his doctoral work.

Kemi is an Assistant Professor and Director of The Black Embodiments Studio at the University of Washington. Her writing and curatorial projects use performance as a site and methodology for theorizing the contours of contemporary black queer life. She has two books under contract: Feels Right: Black Queer Women's Choreographies of Belonging in the Neoliberal City (Duke University Press) and Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press), co-edited with Kareem Khubchandani and Ramón Rivera-Servera. Her most recent writing has appeared in GLQ, Women & Performance, and the in Routledge Handbook of African American Art History.

Tiffany is an Associate Professor at Georgia State University. She researches Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora, Black Feminisms, Native Feminisms, Critical Geographies, Conquest, Settler Colonialism, and Imperialism. Her book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies argues that scholarly traditions within Black Studies that examine Indigenous genocide alongside slavery in the Americas have forged ethical and generative engagements with Native Studies-and Native thought-that continue to reinvent the political imaginaries of abolition and decolonization.

Brandi is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City https://uncpress.org/book/9781469654010/black-in-place/, explores how aesthetics and race converge to locate or map blackness in Washington, D.C. and demonstrates the way that competing notions of blackness structure economic relations and develop land in the gentrifying city.

Brittany is about to start as an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College. Her research and teaching interests include West Africa, United States, African Diaspora; security/militarism; nature/environment; race/empire; expertise/international development; politics/political theory. She has received many awards - most recently a McMillan-Stewart Fellowship at Harvard University and a Gaius C. Bolin Dissertation and Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Studies at Williams College.

Camilla is an Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz. She is a critical human geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist broadly interested in the racial politics of migration and citizenship, inequality, social movements, and Black geographies. Her research focuses on African Diaspora, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, African American / Black Studies, Immigration, Activism, Discrimination and Inequality, Labor and Social Movements. She currently serves as Chair of the Black Geographies Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.

Yvette is a Core Professor at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota. Her research interests are Culturally Responsive Pedagogy, education consulting, traditional African education, youth development, and urban social geography. She is a published author, community advocate and founder of both the Dream Big Institute and The Pye Foundation of Education and Literacy.

Rashad is an Associate Professor at Arizona State University. His research explores how race, sexuality and gender are informed by geography. His most recent work, "Spatializing Blackness," (University of Illinois Press, 2015) examines how carceral power within the geographies of Black Chicagoans shaped urban planning, housing policy, policing practices, gang formation, high incarceration rates, masculinity and health. Most recently, he is working on a musical geography of the Minneapolis music scene.

Rita is a Senior Researcher/Evaluator at the Canadian Poverty Institute. Her expertise is in evaluation, poverty, vulnerability and marginalization, resiliency building, and gender studies. She brings a critical and decolonizing lens to her work and is particularly passionate about including lived experience voices in research, policy, and practice. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Development Studies at the University of Calgary with teaching and research involvements in gender, community engagement, mental health promotion, and Study Abroad programs.

Salomé is a Project Scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, a geography PhD Student at the University of British Columbia, and a National Geographic Explorer. She researches the distribution of marine communities, such as deepwater coral and kelp forests associated with seamount (underwater mountain) habitats in the Galapagos Marine Reserve. Salomé has a background in biogeography with a strong focus on climate change and has worked with marine ecosystems and fisheries in the Caribbean, Canada, and Ecuador. Salome strives to: a) stalk and study the lives of unexplored ocean creatures, b) generate interest, love and respect for the blue planet, c) produce useful information to support its protection and sustainable use, and d) connect with woke humans from all walks of life who seek and drive forward positive change for coastal communities and the ocean. Salomé wrote about the relationship between being a geographer and a marine scientist for the University College London Geography Department in " How I evolved from being a UCL Geography graduate to a marine scientist in the Galápagos ".

Danielle is an Assistant Professor of Geography at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research traces the roots of contemporary environmental conditions in the U.S. South, specifically in black towns dating back to the post-Bellum era. She has also written about the legal dimensions of environmental justice and equity in food systems. Danielle is the former Race and Place Editor editor at Scalawag, a magazine devoted to Southern politics and culture, and the current Board Chair of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network.

Christopher is a Master's student at the University of Florida and a Human Geographer who studies atmospheric science, disaster risk reduction, risk communication, and emergency management with Dr. Kevin Ash. His research focuses on concurrent risks posed by tornadoes and the COVID-19 pandemic and residents' emergency sheltering perceptions and behavior likelihood. He has a B.S. in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology.

Brian is an Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He researches computing technology, capitalism, and the state and his recent publications look at the history of digital technology in the criminal justice system in the United States.

Samuel is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Coast and the Research Coordinator at the Centre for Gender Research, Advocacy and Documentation (CEGRAD). He researches migration, refugees, gender and development, and environmental politics. Samuel's most recent publications are: "Conceptualising obstacles to local integration of refugees in Ghana", published in Refugee Survey Quarterly (2019) with Miriam Grant; and "Revisiting the host-refugee environmental conflict debate: Perspectives from Ghana's refugee camps", in Canadian Journal of African Studies (2020), also with Miriam Grant.

Pat is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham. Her research brings together the study of international development, culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. She is lead researcher on the Caribbean In/securities and Creativity (CARISCC) research network, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and is chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies, co-editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and secretary of the RACE group of the Royal Geographical Society.

Daniel is a Professor of Geography, Environmental Studies & Tourism at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Daniel Tevera is a Human Geographer with research interest in food and the city, Zimbabwean migration and environmental security in Southern Africa. His early work focused on livelihoods and spatial strategies in the informal economy, migration geographies, and environmental security. However, it is the domain of food and the city that his recent work focuses on. He has served as an expert participant in policy debates around Temporary Labour Migration Schemes in small countries (Commonwealth), African migration (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa), and Migration Policy Framework for Africa (African Union).

David is a GeoGator alum who completed his doctoral studies at the School of Forest Resources and Conservation, where he researched public engagement with science.

Joe is a Professor of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University and former Dean of Urban Affairs Programs from 1984 - 1997. His research interests are urban social geography, residential segregation, immigration and socioeconomic neighborhood inequality in multi-racial societies. He is the author or co-author of 8 books.

Robyn is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She is a Vanier Scholar holding a Faculty of Arts & Science Top Doctoral (FAST) fellowship and is an award-winning researcher whose writings are regularly taught in universities across North America and Europe. Her research explores Black diaspora, empire, borders, abolition, social movements, and policing. Robyn recently published Police Abolition/Black Revolt in TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies.

Jovan is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-leads the Economic Disparities research cluster in Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. Jovan's research is concerned with the articulations of racialized poverty, which he examines through questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair. He has conducted research in Jamaica on these topics, which culminated in his monograph, Scammer's Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica. He is currently at work on his second monograph based on research conducted in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which traces the consequences of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

Ellis is an Assistant Professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Adams' work examines the social, political, institutional, and governance dimensions of environmental and natural resources, particularly water. Trained as a human environmental geographer with expertise bridging the natural and social sciences, he is broadly interested in nature-society relations. His research to date has primarily focused on understanding human-water interactions in different urban contexts in the Global South.

Naya is an Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz. As a geographer and cultural worker, she focuses on Black geographies of health and healing in North and Latin America. She practices community-based and arts-based research. She is a current Anne S. Chatham Fellow in Medicinal Botany (Garden Club of America) and a former national Culture of Health Leader (2017-2020), reimagining health with a cohort of community builders from around the United States.

Akin is a Nigerian geographer. He was the first African president of the International Geographical Union, the first African to be elected as a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences, is known as the 'Father of African Geography', and received the Vautrin Lud Prize. He wrote Urbanization in Nigeria and is the Chairman of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy.

Sharlene is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Geography and Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto. She studies race, gender, property/land rights, postcolonial feminist political ecology, international development, and tourism in Latin America.

Zainab is a PhD student at the University of Florida and an Earth System Scientist who studies tropical cyclones with Dr. Corene Matyas. She has a M.S. in Applied Meteorology, University of Reading, United Kingdom, 2018 and a B.S. in Atmospheric Science and Meteorology, North Carolina A&T State University, 2017

Sidi Mubarak Bombay (c.1820-1885)

Bombay worked with many British explorers in Africa, including Burton, Speke, Grant, and Stanley. He covered 5,970 miles overland, mostly on foot, and traced the source of the Nile. He spoke many languages and was granted a silver medal and a pension from the Royal Geographical Society in 1876. Learn more about Bombay's life at The Royal Geographical Society's Hidden histories of Black geographers.

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If you would like to share the story of a Black Geographer, please send an email to Mike Ryan Simonovich.

Credit: Mike Ryan Simonovich

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Celebrating Black Geographers for Black History Month

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Geography is a diverse field. Throughout the month of February, we will be highlighting the work of Black Geographers, some of whom are #GeoGators. Special thanks the University of British Columbia Department of Geography for their excellent A reading list of Black geographers, which inspired this project.

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Is Geography coming out of the closet? Why queer geography matters.

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Is Geography coming out of the closet? Why queer geography matters.

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https://bloomsburygeographer.com/2022/01/09/is-geography-coming-out-of-the-closet-why-queer-geography-matters/

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Adapted from his brilliant first-year essay, praised heavily by the Geography department, Brendon Koh discusses the value of thinking geographically about the queer community.

Illustration courtesy of Yana Marchuk

'Queer' is inherently a term that is contested and often reconstituted (Watson 2005). For the sake of providing a working definition for this discussion, I will interpret 'queer' as a catch-all term for sexual and gender minorities, including those who do not adopt a specific label (Gorman-Murray and McKinnon 2015). Consequently, thinking geographically about these individuals - or Queer Geography - encompasses an examination into how place and space contribute to the construction of gender and sexual identities, queer practices, and communities (Mayhew 2009).

To progress as a discipline, there is a need to acknowledge and examine the geographical imaginations of marginalised groups that have traditionally had their voices excluded or silenced

The value of thinking geographically about queer communities can be considered through the lens of academia, where it can add to progressive discourse within the discipline of Geography and provide a more comprehensive understanding of spatial ontologies (Knopp 2007). Historically, the discipline of Geography was shaped in the West by elite, white, male scholars and the foundation of modern Geography comprises their geographical imaginations (Domosh 1991: 97). To progress as a discipline, there is a need to acknowledge and examine the geographical imaginations of marginalised groups that have traditionally had their voices excluded or silenced (Driver 2001: 7).

Thinking geographically about queer communities hence disrupts the mainstream, heteronormative narrative in geography and introduces concepts of sexuality and gender identity to the geographical agenda (Hubbard 2007: 154). In studying the spaces around us, an analysis through a queer lens adds additional layers of meaning as we explore how queers interact with and shape the spaces they inhabit. For instance, the home is typically imagined as a refuge, but studies by Andrew Gorman-Murray find that the sanctity of the home may not hold true for queer individuals as they may be equally subjected to the scrutiny and regulations faced in public places (Gorman-Murray 2012).

Ironically, public places such as bars may instead become more homelike for queer individuals (Gorman-Murray 2006). Such research serves to "uncloset spaces that are otherwise heteronormatively represented" (Brown and Knopp 2008) and pluralise the imaginations associated with them, deepening our understanding of how space is interpreted by different groups. Beyond the analysis of spaces, a queer approach helps to unpack and demystify other geographical phenomena such as labour flows, globalisation and public health (Oswin 2016). A study by Larry Knopp into "queer quests for identity" (Knopp 2004) expounds on the journey that gay men and lesbians embark on, moving from homophobic areas to more accepting places in order to safely develop and express their identities. Knowledge of these queer mobilities can then feed into our understanding of the causes behind wider labour flows and migration patterns. Therefore, thinking geographically about the queer community adds value to the discipline of geography by introducing alternative voices into academic discourse and deepening our knowledge of various geographical phenomena.

Illustration courtesy of Yana Marchuk

However, the value produced is often distributed unevenly among members of the queer community. Even as the narrative of the once-silenced queer community bubbles to the surface of the discipline, the geographical imaginations of minorities within the community are often excluded (Haritaworn 2007). Gavin Brown critiques the over-emphasis on homonormativity in existing literature and calls for closer attention to other queer identities such as transgendered and non-binary individuals (Brown 2007: 218).

The current value to academia is situated within homonormative grounds as the geographies of other queer identities remain relatively unexplored and their relations to space have yet to be unraveled. Existing discourse in queer geography or geography of sexualities also reinforces a Eurocentric worldview based upon the experience of white, middle-class members of the community (Hubbard 2018).

To exemplify, Western scholars attempting to study the lives of queer Muslims in Western countries have portrayed Islam as a symbol of oppression and an opposing force that holds them back from sexual expression in a liberal country, neglecting the ability of queer Muslims to actively reclaim their religion (Rouhani 2007). By pushing forth a Western ideal of queerness, the experience of non-Western queers are brushed past or misconstrued. Thus, the value in pluralising geographical imaginations may only hold true for the most privileged members. More needs to be done to fully realise the voices of non-homosexuals and people of colour.

Image courtesy of Johara Meyer

Besides its value to academia, thinking geographically about the queer community brings value to the queer community itself by ensuring its survival. From the inception of Geography, geographical knowledge has been shaped by the information humans need for survival (Bonnett 2008); People think geographically out of necessity. Thinking geographically about the queer community entails an understanding of the spaces they inhabit and in particular, the carving of queer spaces in juxtaposition to heteronormative spaces which remains essential for survival.

To the queer community, heteronormative spaces are perceived to suppress and silence queer desires and actions (Valentine 2000) whereas queer spaces are constituted as protective spaces from violence and discrimination (Nash 2011). So far as society continues to operate under a heteronormative paradigm in which queers face prejudice.

"Queer spaces will remain something queers cannot not want"
(Oswin, 2016, pp.100).

A geographical understanding of what and where queer safe spaces are can shape day-to-day movement or even larger scale migration as queers seek spaces where they are free from violence and free to express their identity or fluidity, ensuring both their physical survival as well as survival of their queerness. This resonates with our earlier discussion on "queer quests for identity" (Knopp 2004) as queer individuals move to accepting places for survival. Looking beyond the survival of individual queers, a geographical approach can contribute to the survival of the queer community's culture. Mapping and making visible queer spaces enable the consolidation of a "collective identity, community, history, and belonging" (Brown and Knopp 2008: 55). Projects such as The Gay and Lesbian Atlas have discovered concentrations of same-sex households in rural US counties (Gates and Ost 2003), telling an inspiring story that queerness can survive even in harsh peripheries and that queerness is everywhere (Brown and Knopp 2008: 42).

Image courtesy of Queering The Map

More recent efforts such as Queering the Map¸ an online collaborative mapping tool, provides a platform for the sharing of diverse queer experiences in relation to space and crafts a visible queer narrative (Raffa 2020). Geographical analyses of queerness can thus solidify the queer identity and culture by recording or delivering narratives about queer experience. Hence, thinking geographically protects the survival of individual queers and facilitates the growth of a unifying queer culture.

Thinking geographically about the queer community does not always result in surplus value. It is potentially problematic as the visibility of queer spaces can instead threaten the queer community. By mapping and making sense of queer spaces, be it informally or via academic research, these spaces become more visible. In turn, this visibility has resulted in increasing consumption of queer spaces by non-queer individuals and disrupts the homogeneity in them (Rushbrook 2002). In Amsterdam, the number of exclusively lesbian clubs has declined as straight clubbers, intrigued by the exotic queer experience, visit these spaces and introduce heterosexual norms as well as the male gaze into the space, leading to feelings of displacement among lesbians (Ekenhorst and van Aalst 2019).

Rising visibility of queer spaces has also been linked to increased incitement to violence (Skeggs 1999) as they become easy targets for discriminatory attacks. A case study of Jerusalem contends that it is precisely the visibility of the Jerusalem Open House as a queer space that has made it unsafe (Hartal 2018). Thus, when queer spaces enter the geographical imaginations of the non-queer public, they run the risk of 'de-queering' the space and we may observe an eventual erosion of safe spaces for the queer community.

Thinking geographically about queer communities has had positive implications on the discipline of Geography, by broadening our understanding of geographical phenomena, and the queer community, by supporting the survival of individual queers and shared queer culture. Though, it would be remiss to ignore the contested and problematic aspects, namely the unequal academic treatment of minorities within the queer community and the erosion of queer spaces. Nonetheless, I believe that thinking geographically about the queer community has important implications and discourse in this area should be further developed.
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‌Brown, G. (2007) 'Conclusions and Future Directions, or Our Hopes for Geographies of Sexualities (and Queer Geographies)' in K. Browne, J. Lim and G. Brown (eds) Geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics, Hampshire: Ashgate, 215-23.

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Mayhew, S. (2009) A Dictionary of Geography, 4 th ed., New York: Oxford University Press.

Nash, C.J. (2011) 'Trans experiences in lesbian and queer space', The Canadian Geographer, 55, 192-207.

Raffa, T. (2020) Affective Claims to Digital Space: An Analysis of Queering the Map.

Rouhani, F. (2007) 'Religion, Identity and Activism: Queer Muslim Diasporic Identities' in K. Browne, J. Lim and G. Brown (eds) Geographies of sexualities: theory, practices and politics, Hampshire: Ashgate, 169-79.

Rushbrook, D. (2002) 'Cities, Queer Space, and the Cosmopolitan Tourist', GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 8(1), 183-206.

Skeggs, B. (1999) 'Matter out of place: visibility and sexualities in leisure spaces', Leisure Studies, 18(3), 213-32.

Valentine, G. (2000) From nowhere to everywhere: Lesbian geographies, Binghamton: Harrington Park Press.

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Is Geography coming out of the closet? Why queer geography matters.

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Adapted from his brilliant first-year essay, praised heavily by the Geography department, Brendon Koh discusses the value of thinking geographically about the queer community. Illustration courtesy of Yana Marchuk 'Queer' is inherently a term that is contested and often reconstituted (Watson 2005). For the sake of providing a working definition for this discussion, I will...

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I Am Alone: Single women and the Nepal earthquake

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I Am Alone: Single women and the Nepal earthquake

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https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/i-am-alone-single-women-and-the-nepal-earthquake-617348/

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Haiti has long faced severe natural and human-created hazards due to its location in the Caribbean hurricane zone and to widespread deforestation. Hazards including storms, floods, and droughts have highly destructive impacts on buildings, land, water, livestock, and people in Haiti. The poorest Haitians, including low-income women, children, and elderly people, are especially vulnerable. The [...]

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I Am Alone: Single women and the Nepal earthquake - Oxfam Policy & Practice

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The earthquake and aftershock which struck Nepal in 2015 affected more than 8 million people and severely damaged infrastructure including schools, health centres and homes. Existing gender inequalities in Nepal meant that single women were particularly affected in the aftermath, receiving inadequate assistance and being least able to be heard.

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https://www.rgs.org/geography/black-geographers/hidden-histories/

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For every European who ventured into Africa there was a team of often a hundred people - men and women - composed of mainly African gun-bearers, porters, servants, guides, interpreters, soldiers, and cooks. Rather than being the work of Europeans alone, exploration was a joint project.

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Leroy Cooper: Toxteth riots lensman's Liverpool love letter

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Leroy Cooper: Toxteth riots lensman's Liverpool love letter

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-65349727

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It added: "Accompanied by text written by Leroy himself, the images chosen reflect on themes including racism, justice, the transatlantic slave trade, community, inequality, empire, migration, pride, solidarity, culture, family and regeneration."

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Leroy Cooper: Toxteth riots lensman's Liverpool love letter

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The man whose arrest sparked riots says his photos tells the real story of the people of Toxteth.

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One Big COP Out: A Postcolonial Critique of COP26

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One Big COP Out: A Postcolonial Critique of COP26

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https://bloomsburygeographer.com/2022/01/02/one-big-cop-out-a-postcolonial-critique-of-cop26/

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Robyn Moffat explores the contradictory nature of COP26 and stresses the need for a postcolonial approach to climate activism.

"To make a real change, we need a seat at the table" were the impassioned words of activist Catalina Santelices Brunel, representing Latinas for Climate, at COP26 this year. In theory, the United Nation's Coalition of the Parties' Climate Change Conference should offer a moment of liminal space, in this case, a geopolitical space that exists amidst positionalities and national borders (Bhabha 1994). Yet, the reality was rather a site of the unhomely uncanny, an "unheimlich" space (Bhabha 1994, 14), for nations outside of the imperially-nostalgic 'West' (hooks 1992).

While front-line postcolonial states, predominantly in the 'Global South',now bear the impacts of climate change (Gosine and Teelucksingh 2008), COP26 reproduced a neo-colonial ordering of nations to distract from the 'West's' disproportionate responsibility for the climate crisis. To explore this postcolonial critique, this essay will first examine who was invited versus who was excluded from COP26 to illustrate how it produced what Homi Bhabha (1994) describes as the unhomely uncanny for nations outside of the 'West'. Then, the essay will consider how the materiality of COP26 marketed green-capitalism for the "white palate" to intentionally obscure the fact it was funded by some of the globe's largest polluters (hooks 1992, 39). Finally, the essay will problematise the event's location of Glasgow to further demonstrate how it failed to create a liminal space and instead performed an "imperialist nostalgia" thatbell hooks (1992, 24) warns of.

Image courtesy of Johara Meyer

Within its 'Presidency Programme', COP26 involved representatives from all 197 countries (UNCCC 2021) - while at first, it appears that every nation effectively had a "seat at the table", the reality was less so. Due to Covid-19 vaccination hoarding in much of the 'West', countries that were unable to access vaccinations for an equally fast immunisation rollout, largely postcolonial nations, ultimately had their "seat at the table" minimized in their inability to physically reach Glasgow or in their reduced representative team (COP26 Coalition 2021). Here, logics of the border functioned as they intended (Bhabha 1994): to exclude nations outside of the hegemonic 'West' and to reinforce a sense of European superiority and power (Oyewumi 1997, 1). Moreover, while nation-state representatives - the political elite - could access the 'Presidency Programme', grassroots climate activists from across the globe were excluded. Activists had access through just two means: (1) amongst the COP's carefully curated 'Green Zone' or (2) outside on the streets of Glasgow. Although a point of 'access', the COP's 'Green Zone' functioned to greenwash the event's sponsors that included large-scale polluters such as NatWest, Unilever, and Google. More crucially, the 'Green Zone' promoted the damaging notion of individualised responsibility that encourages a deeply problematic environmentalist discourse serving a neoliberal, white supremacist, and hetero-patriarchal system of logics that are presently driving the climate crisis (Bhabha 1994). The curated 'Green Zone', then, can be viewed as a material space that intentionally operated to diminish system transformation ambition and shift perceptions of accountability from governments and industry to individuals. Further, through a process of deliberate greenwashing, defined as marketized sustainability without accountability (Mulligan 2015), the 'Green Zone' simultaneously courted what hooks (1992) describes as an imperially-nostalgic audience while excluding the 'other' in its uncanny arrangement (Bhabha 1994).

By further problematising the COP26 'Green Zone', it will become evident how areas curated for the public were strategically deployed to greenwash the event itself but also to mislead an audience excluded from the 'Presidency Programme'. Here, exists what could be described as a double neo-coloniality (Bhabha 1994). First, those at COP26 who represented nations and industry were shielded from any real responsibility for the climate crisis in their physical separation from the public, climate justice activists on the streets of Glasgow, and voices from climate disaster front-lines. To add, while it's generally agreed that young people have driven much of recent political pressure on climate action and brought a necessarily urgent yet hopeful perspective "to the table" (Nature 2021), climate negotiations at COP26 were undertaken in an intentionally secretive manner that excluded these groups outside of "palatable" public figureheads such as Greta Thunberg - a figure adopted to represent the people's voice in much of political debate on climate change (hooks 1992, 39). Secondly, the 'Green Zone' exemplifies the greenwashing of capitalism which deployed a particularly pervasive neo-colonial strategy when you consider who was interacting with it - actors outside of the political elite such as climate justice activists, students, and importantly, 'Western' journalists responsible for the dissemination of information to the wider public body. Beyond its neoliberal individualistic message, the materiality of the 'Green Zone' - its polished and aesthetic appearance - obscured COP26 sponsors' accountability and minimised the voices of environmental justice activists outside of the event such as COP26 Coalition.

Image courtesy of Johara Meyer

To further exemplify how COP26 was organised in a way that stunted a just climate action approach, instead mainstreaming technocentric fixes that reproduce a neo-colonial ordering of nations, the location of Glasgow only strengthened an already hegemonic and "imperially-nostalgic" eurocentric discourse (hooks 1992, 24). While an event like the COP should offer what Bhabha (1994) describes as a liminal space - a space providing the conditions for all actors to have a "seat at the table" - the location of Glasgow produced an "unheimlich" space that failed to facilitate this (Bhabha 1994, 14). When you consider how Glasgow is embedded in multiple geometries of power (Massey, 1994): first, its role as one of the United Kingdom's primary ports during the transatlantic slave trade of cotton; second, being that it was an in-person event despite the ongoing global pandemic; and finally, the disregard for the climate impact of air travel, evidence of the event's neo-coloniality becomes more overt. To further substantiate this claim, we must look to leaders such as Simon Kofe, Tuvalu's foreign minister, who made a speech knee-deep in seawater directly from the low-lying postcolonial Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu to highlight the reality of rising sea levels (The Guardian 2021). Moreover, while all 197 countries had at least one representative invited to COP26, discussion surrounding the unequal sharing of the Covid-19 vaccine was left unaddressed despite its known interconnectedness with climate change, climate action, and social justice. The failure to offer a fair "seat at the table" for all stakeholders at COP26 is just one example of how the event strengthened 'Western' superiority and environmentalism devoid of social justice (Oyewumi 1997). Rather then, the event is a perfect example of how the 'West' can currently actualise its "imperialist nostalgia" through somewhat 'palatable' means (hooks 1994, 24).

To conclude, a postcolonial critique of COP26 offers us insight into how the 'West' continues to order the globe's nations in a hierarchical structure that echoes European Imperialism. Through the use of strategies such as exclusion, greenwashing, and a focus on individualised climate action rather than collectivised climate justice, COP26 successfully failed to provide everyone with a "seat at the table" and consider the question of who is most responsible for the climate crisis. Paradoxically, while responsibility lies with 'Western' nations, COP26 managed to distract from this and instead once again reassert 'Western' superiority (Oyewumi 1997). On a final note, the conference's failure to commit to a phasing out of coal is just another example of a business-as-usual approach the 'West' continues to repackage for the "white palate" (hooks 1992, 39).
References:
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. "Locations of Culture." In The Location of Culture, Oxford: Routledge, pp. 1 - 28.

COP26 Coalition. 2021. "People's Summit For Climate Justice." COP26 Coalition, November 20, 2021. https://cop26coalition.org/peoples-summit/

Gosine, Andil and Teelucksingh, Cheryl. "Environmental Justice: A Brief History." In Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada: An Introduction, Toronto, 2008: Edmond Montgomery Publications, pp. 1 - 62.

hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." In Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, 1992: South End Press, pp. 20 - 39.

hooks, bell. "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators." In Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, 1992: South End Press, pp. 115 - 131.

Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis, 1994: University of Minnesota Press.

Mulligan, M. An Introduction to Sustainability: Environmental, Social and Personal Perspectives. London, 2015: Routledge.

Nature. 2021. "Young People Will Be The Key To Climate Justice." Nature, October 10, 2021. https://www-nature-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/articles/d41586-021-02843-6

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. The Invention of Women Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minnesota, 1997: University of Minnesota Press.

The Guardian. 2021. "Tuvalu Minister To address Cop26 Knee Deep In Water To Highlight Climate Crisis And Sea Level Rise." The Guardian, November 8, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/08/tuvalu-minister-to-address-cop26-knee-deep-in-seawater-to-highlight-climate-crisis

UNCCC. "COP26." UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, November 30, 2021. https://ukcop26.org/

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One Big COP Out: A Postcolonial Critique of COP26

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Robyn Moffat explores the contradictory nature of COP26 and stresses the need for a postcolonial approach to climate activism. "To make a real change, we need a seat at the table" were the impassioned words of activist Catalina Santelices Brunel, representing Latinas for Climate, at COP26 this year.

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Why Birmingham’s super-diversity is a strength, and not a surprise

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Why Birmingham’s super-diversity is a strength, and not a surprise

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https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/blog/birmingham-blog/post/1205/why-birmingham%E2%80%99s-super-diversity-is-a-strength-and-not-a-surprise#:~:text=Figures%20from%20the%202021%20census,diverse%20cities%20in%20the%20UK.

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Why Birmingham’s super-diversity is a strength, and not a surprise - The Birmingham Blog

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does the climate change movement have a class problem?

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does the climate change movement have a class problem?

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https://i-d.vice.com/en/article/9kxyv3/climate-change-movement-class-intersectionality

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Does the climate change movement have a class problem?

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Environmental activism is frequently associated with the white middle class, but it's an issue that disproportionately affects working class people and people of color. Without addressing that dissonance, the movement can't move forward.

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How 'placemaking' is tearing apart social housing communities

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How 'placemaking' is tearing apart social housing communities

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/27/london-placemaking-social-housing-communities-tenants

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oyce (not her real name) was in east London long before the Cereal Killer cafe, moving from East Ham to the Carpenters estate in Newham months before her son was born in 1972. She doesn't describe a life of luxury: "We had young children, we had three bedrooms, [but] it was warm." Nor was the community on the estate devoid of problems, but she made friends among her neighbours and was able to put down roots with the kind of security that is becoming increasingly rare.

She says her flat was in "perfect condition" apart from some ceiling damp, the result of a forgetful neighbour with a quick-running bath. So when she received a letter from Newham council in 2010 advising that the whole estate was going to be decanted for "refurbishment", it came as a surprise.

Her fears were quelled when the council confirmed that once the refurbishment was over, residents who wanted to return would be more than welcome to do so (subject to availability). But seven years on, Joyce has not returned, and more than 400 properties on the estate sit empty. With the glistening Olympic stadium looming over it, the fate of the Carpenters estate represents an all-too-familiar story for social housing tenants across the capital.

Joyce moved to a nearby housing association property in 2011, avoiding the anxiety of having to negotiate a whole new area. Yet when I ask if she would move back into the Carpenters estate, her "yes" is unequivocal. She recently returned to visit her old flat with a member of the Focus E15 housing campaign group, and declared with a big smile that "I felt like I came back home."

Between 2012 and 2017, Newham council rehoused more than 3,000 homeless families outside of the borough. Meanwhile, some London councils are shipping households as far away as Newcastle. So why are so many homes sitting empty when demand is grossly outweighing supply? Joyce doesn't mince her words: "I think it's because of the area and the potential in the area and they just want to make more money."

Newham argue that it consulted the residents repeatedly between 2004 and 2009 but "every option was too expensive to be feasible as the costs outweighed the value of the leaseholders' properties and council-owned flats". Instead it tried to sell the properties to University College London.

UCL was interested but ultimately withdrew from the estate following protests from its staff and students, as well as local residents. Selling to a university doesn't scream of greed like signing it all away to an offshore company. But it would have generated "cultural capital", which is a key component of "placemaking", a vital stepping stone in attracting much more affluent people to an area.

Writer and academic Anna Minton describes how "placemaking" involves creating "'innovation clusters' - ideally featuring a university, commercial space, shops, restaurants and perhaps an art gallery, all alongside luxury apartments". The fizz of culture and luxury are a cocktail that few deep-pocketed developers can resist. But this commitment is almost always to the detriment of social housing tenants, who are shooed out of the way. When the radical Hungarian architect Ernő Goldfinger designed the well-known Balfron Tower in Poplar, nearby in east London, he did so with the tenants in mind. He put all the bedrooms on the eastern side of the building so residents could enjoy the sunrise, while balconies are on the west to take in the sunset.

Yet those enjoying the personal touches of the tower are now doing so at sky-high London rents. Poplar HARCA, the housing association that manages the homes, started " decanting" residents from the property in 2008 saying that they would "possibly but not probably" have a "right of return" once the refurbishment was complete. Not a single one did. This decision to let all the flats at market rates coincided neatly with Poplar HARCA's plans to regenerate the nearby Chrisp Street market to "create a thriving town centre".

Elsewhere in London, Southwark's council's decision to demolish the Elephant and Castle shopping centre and surrounding homes to make way for a new university campus will likely result in a loss of social housing and significantly decreased space for local businesses. In all these cases, the social tenants were treated like cattle, herded elsewhere with minimal consultation about their wishes. What is left unsaid is the apparent attitude that they should just be happy to have a roof over their heads at all.

Yet Joyce talks about the Carpenters estate more like a lost sweetheart then a collection of bricks and mortar. "It's like losing someone. You had made plans with that person, you were going to spend the rest of your life with that person. Then suddenly they change their mind. Obviously, it puts a dent in your everyday."

The new Newham mayor, Rokhsana Fiaz, has changed tack from the previous council regime, promising that the fate of the estate will be decided by local residents and recommending that people whom the council displaced should be allowed back. Let's hope this a genuine promise rather than empty words. "Placemaking" wrenches social housing communities away from their homes because they don't fit in with the developer's dream. It's heart-breaking.

Nye Jones is a freelance writer and housing campaigner. @nyejones92

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How 'placemaking' is tearing apart social housing communities | Nye Jones

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It's gentrification by any other name, helping councils to force out tenants and decimate public housing, says the freelance writer Nye Jones