I am honored to have been selected as Chair of Geography this last Summer and I will do my best to carry out the duties of the office effectively and in the interest of the whole Department. The Chair is a curious post at Berkeley; the powers are minimal, but the expectations large. One has the responsibility to give direction to the Department as a body, but cannot give directives to anyone. One must keep things in order without ever being seen to give any. It's a neat balancing act which no one can keep up for many years. So far everyone among the faculty, students and staff has been most gracious in helping me find my way and ours and the sense of collective purpose and overall agreement on goals is most heartening. The Department of Geography at Berkeley is in as fine condition as I have ever seen it in my two decades here. But the challenges are greater than ever, with University resources at a fifty year low and everyone shorthanded after almost 30% of the faculty took early retirement over the past three years. We came through the cuts rather better than most, and we are cautiously optimistic about new faculty recruitments coming our way in the near future.
Geography is an ever-changing field and new faculty bring new concerns and retirements leave voids that are really never filled. Alumni should not expect that things will ever be the same as when they were students here. Past greatness can be sustained but never reproduced: Sauer and Glacken passed the torch to Parsons and Vance who give way to Pred and Watts, and so it continues with brilliant young teachers such as Johns and Wells now making their mark. Chairs preside over the change but cannot control it; our decisions keep the house functioning, but the real life blood of intellectual discovery surges through the everyday body of teaching and research, of interplay among faculty and students year after year.
Geography remains a bright star at Berkeley, both for the university and for the discipline. Our intellectual pulse is strong, and is felt far beyond the confines of the Fifth Floor. Our presence is so considerable on the campus that we have found several faculty from other schools and departments who wish to affiliate with us in a more formal way, and we are taking advantage of the opportunity to bring them on board with joint appointments. Some are Geographers hired in other fields, while some feel limited by home fields where the geographic point of view is submerged. And Berkeley is changing. The new administration is encouraging new initiatives and cooperative efforts in new arenas such as environmental studies and is not keen on rewarding the core disciplines for standing pat. So we are trying to take the lead in areas where geography is strong (but often not well known) such as global environmental change, development and environment, place-based cultures, and urban studies.
It's an intriguing time of transition at the University, partly forced on us by external events (e.g., the California fiscal crisis) and partly brought on by generational and ideational shifts. The Geography Department must seize the moment to assert ourselves at a time when no discipline can rest on its laurels. The Faculty are committed to pulling together and to reworking everything from curriculum to research domains in order to keep the banner of Geography flying high over the University of California and ultimately over the battlements of American academe.
Richard Walker
Berkeley hosted the 1994 Meeting of the Association of American Geographers at the Marriott Hotel in San Francisco March–April. David Stoddart chaired the local arrangements committee, Allan Pred chaired the program committee and Paul Starrs (PhD'89) was in charge of field trips.
Attendance broke all previous records, over 4,000 registered. There were more than 600 separate session workshops, and 2,100 papers presented over the four-day meeting, widely judged "the best ever." Berkeley students and faculty were prominent participants in sessions throughout the conference. The Opening Session, on the Bay Area and Northern California, was addressed by Berkeley grad student Gray Brechin (surely a first!) as well as Gerald Haslam and Robert Dawson, authors of a much acclaimed book on the Central Valley.
The large field trip menu was a major feature of the meetings. Trip leaders included Berkeley faculty Dick Walker (Silicon Valley), Jay Vance (Sacramento RR Museum), Lisa Wells (salt marshes); Grad Students Gray Brechin, Tim Sturgeon, Norm Hetland, Eric Edlund, and Karl Malamud-Roam; and alumni Doug Powell (Sonoma Coast), Brian Godfrey, Tom Pagenhart, Mary Beth Pudup, and Vic Ryerson.
Michael Watts, who joined our faculty in 1978 as a political ecologist specializing in Africa, received AAG Honors at the annual meetings in San Francisco. The citation referred to his rigor ous and extensive scholarship on African agrarian change and his role in introducing ideas and methods drawn from political economy and so creating a cultural ecology of development that attends to influences external to the study area. His Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria and numerous articles have transformed scholarship in African Studies and beyond. Michael's outstanding teaching record at Berkeley, where he received a Distinguished Teacher Award in 1991, was also cited.
At the same Awards Banquet John (Jack) B. Wright (PhD'90) received the J.B. Jackson prize for 1994 for his book, Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West (University of Texas Press). Jack is in his third year of teaching at New Mexico State. The Jackson prize is dedicated to individuals whose thinking and writing encourages Americans to look thoughtfully at the landscape and human geography of their country. The prize, restricted to geographers, carries with it a $1,000 check.
Another award, the Anderson Medal of the AAG Specialty Group, went to William Garrison of Berkeley's Institute for Transportation and Traffic Engineering, known to us for his early role in geography's 'Quantitative Revolution' at the University of Washington but who has long devoted himself to the study of interaction between transport and spatial structure and the problems of technologic change in complex systems.
The Biogeography Specialty Group's Best Student Paper award went to Scott Mensing (PhD'93), for his paper at the 1993 annual meeting on "New Evidence for Pre-Mission Transformation of the California Grassland" (co-authored with Roger Byrne).
Orman Granger, our resident climatologist, is president-elect of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. David Stoddart, the outgoing president, gave his presidential address at the June annual meeting of the Association in San Francisco. That the Berkeley department of geography will have twice in a three-year period supplied the leadership of the regional arm of the prestigious AAAS is the more remarkable given the minor participation of geography as a profession in this interdisciplinary organization.
Apologies for the late release of the 1994 Itinerant Geographer. The change of chairs made it impossible to do the job during the summer and we had to wait for the Winter break to complete the work.
After 6 1/2 years at the helm, David Stoddart (Cambridge 1964) stepped down as Chair of Geography at Berkeley. At the Berkeley after hours AAG party, David surprised all assembled by announcing that his time was up and that he had submitted his resignation. David's shoes will be hard to fill: he brought extraordinary energy to Berkeley Geography and oversaw several significant changes in departmental staff and procedures. No doubt the hard years of budget cutting took their toll on David's enthusiasm for the job, but he deserves credit for taking the department through the hardest times at UC in 50 years.
After an inter-regnum lasting three weeks, with Michael Watts as Interim Chair, word came down that Richard Walker (PhD'76 Johns Hopkins) had been named the new chair. Dick joined the Berkeley faculty in 1975. He has established an international reputation in the areas of economic geography, urban studies, environmental regulation, and critical Marxist theory, and has co-authored two books, The Capitalist Imperative and The New Social Economy, and dozens of articles on a wide range of topics. He will continue as editor of Antipode.
Shifting gears from industry and the division of labor to the study of California and the Bay region, Walker has in recent years chaired the California Seminar, a gathering of Bay Area faculty and staff with a common interest in the culture and economy of the state, and has been prominent in organizing a new California Studies Association and annual California Studies conferences. He is now at work on a book (or two) on San Francisco and the Bay Area. A recent cover-story in the East Bay Express on commercial developments in nearby Emeryville prominently featured Dick. Dick became father two years ago to Zia Walker, who hopes to be elected Department Mascot. He'd really rather be gardening than chairing, but duty calls.
After a long hiatus UC Berkeley hosted the annual meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers at the Shattuck Hotel and the Berkeley Convention Center in September. Credit for the success of the meeting, which was widely acclaimed by those in attendance, goes to David Stoddart and Paul Starrs, University of Nevada. Staffers Natalia Vonnegut, Donald Bain, Charles Hadenfeldt, Margarete Monaghan, Theodosia Valrey, and Cherie Semans bore the brunt of the preparatory work. The Sauer Singers entertained the more than 100 in attendance at the annual banquet, addressed by Les Rowntree (San Jose State), who spoke on vegetation and fire in the Oakland–Berkeley Hills.
There were 107 papers presented during the three-day affair, which included a plenary session celebrating "Berkeley-type" Latin American research. A special exhibit of historical maps of the San Francisco Bay Area was arranged in the Doe Library with the assistance of Phil Hoehn, University Map Librarian. There was also a special session commemorating Homer Aschmann (PhD'54) to which it was a pleasure to welcome Mrs. Louise Aschmann. Jennifer Jones and Krisna Suryanata, PhD candidates, received awards for Outstanding Student Papers. Margaret Trussell (MA'60, PhD Oregon) was honored at a reception at the Shattuck Hotel by the Women's Caucus.
As is now well known, the University of California has just gone through its most dire budgetary crisis since the Great Depressionsharing the fate of the whole of California's economy and government so far in the 90s. Department budgets have been cut over the last 3 -4 years, by approximately 30% across the board, while early retirements (without new hires) has reduced the faculty by 28% at Berkeley (somewhat less at other campuses). Geography suffered the early retirements of two senior faculty in this period, or one-sixth of our number. The worst is now over and hiring will begin to pick up this year. We came through the crisis with our faculty, staff, and student funds largely intact, but we are in the process of rethinking curriculum and staffing strategies to adapt to a new era of slimmer budgets and administrative concern with restructuring the University for the next century.
With so many retirements at Berkeley, many new faces are appearing at the head of programs across the campus, and Geographers are taking a leading role in campus affairs. Michael Watts is the new Director of the Institute of International Studies, Beatriz Manz is in her second year as head of the Center for Latin American Studies, Orman Granger is continuing on the Graduate Council (second most important policy committee on campus), and Bob Reed is finishing up as head of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies.
In a 'doctoral exit survey' of 64 Berkeley departments and programs conducted by the Graduate Division, Geography came out at the very top in terms of overall student 'satisfaction.' We ranked especially high in three of the five categories listed, "teaching," "individual supervision," and "help with employment," falling off a bit in "level of support" and "advising."
In the summary indices among the Social Sciences, Geography scored 2.16 compared to History 1.53, Poli Sci 1.29, Sociology 0.72, Anthro 0.38, Econ 0.15. The campus average for Social Sciences was 1.07, for Physical Sciences 1.08, for the Humanities 0.94.
It was only a few years ago that a similar survey among undergraduates (graduating seniors) similarly showed Geography leading the pack. This may have been restricted to the Social Sciences. We don't remember.
We were sorry to hear that Geography at UC Davis will be downgraded from a Department to a Graduate Group, losing its undergraduate teaching functions. Rumors to the contrary, the Berkeley Department has never been threatened and our standing with the Administration remains high.
Black shrouds hung over both the north and south ends of McCone Hall (formerly Earth Sciences) during the spring as engineers and administrators debated the building's future. After considerable money and time had gone into implanting structural steel rods to insure greater seismic stability, it was decided that the design was inadequate and that the steel work must be removed and a fresh start made. But money is short and liabilities in controversy. A new seismic plan has been drawn up which features a tower inserted into the front stairwell. It may actually improve the look of the building!
The whole building is due for a major renovation after 35 years of wear and tear. This would mean a major overhaul of the infrastructure (electricity, communications, elevators, etc) and a renovation of all hallways, offices, classrooms and laboratories. Research and teaching space is antiquated and often downright seedy. We need multimedia and computer-linked classrooms, as well as laboratory space for climatology and geomorphology. Staff and student office space is wholly inadequate, and there is no departmental lounge or student reading room. Our terrific computer facility is crammed to overflowing and badly needs new elbow room and additional machines. Offices and public spaces badly need repairs of falling ceilings, torn floors and battered walls.
Paleontology is ready to move out and into the new Valley Life Sciences facilities momentarily. Geography and Geology/Geophysics will both benefit by acquiring space vacated by Paleontology.
The move of the books from Doe Library to the new underground library in the glade between McCone (Earth Sciences) and the Doe Library was completed in time for the fall semester. The Map Collection is being housed in Giannini Hall until it can be moved back into a renovated McCone Hall.
| Fundraising has begun to match the McCone grant of $5 million to renovate the old Earth Sciences Building. We need your help. Anyone wishing to make a gift towards McCone Hall, please contact Professor Richard Walker, Chair of Geography. |
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Michael Watts was appointed as the new Director of the Institute of International Studies at the end of the summer. During the last twelve months he was invited to speak at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, New York University, and the University of Iowa. During the Winter he was invited back to his alma materUniversity College, Londonas a visiting professor for three weeks of lectures and seminars. He continues to work with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Social Science Research Council in various of their academic programs. Michael will also be a senior scholar in residence at the Townsend Humanities Centre on the Berkeley campus during the 1994-1995 academic year.
In keeping with the recent pattern of productivity in the Department, Michael and Mary Beth Pudup have a new son, Ethan Louis Watts, born January 19, 1995.
Michael's edited book on contract farming appeared during the spring ( Living Under Contract, University of Wisconsin Press) and various articles appeared in Progress in Human Geography, Society and Space, Economic Geography and in Money, Power and Space (Blackwell, 1994). He is continuing to work on decollectivization in the former socialist states, on his India fieldwork and is initiating new research on agrarian restructuring in California. In view of the recent arrival of his child, it is fairly safe to assume that none of these projects will ever be finished.
David Hooson's long awaited book is finally outGeography and National Identity (Blackwells, Oxford, 1994, $24.95). This theme is far more topical than it would have been a few years ago and the same applies to a book now in progress on Emerging Regions and Peoples of the Former Soviet Union (Cambridge U.P.). The new volume contains chapters by Berkeley graduates David Lowenthal, Mark Bassin, Vincent Berdoulay, Maria Dolors Garcia-Ramon, and Hong-Key Yoon, along with Hooson himself and luminaries like Paul Claval, Anne Buttimer and Oskar Spate. Current PhD student Lisa Husmann wrote a chapter on China.
David read papers at the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies at Honolulu in November and at the symposium of the I.G.U. Commission on the History of Geographical Thought in Marrakech, Morocco in February, as well as the APCG and AAG meetings.
Barney Nietschmann continues his work as a Pew Scholar in Conservation and Environment in Costa Rica and Nicaragua where he is helping establish the Miskito Coast Protected Area and an integrated system of community-run protected coastal areas along the Caribbean Coast of Central America. With Pew funds he has helped set up 'Ocean Initiative,' an action-based group that focuses on ocean conservation and ocean resource-environment mapping. The group is made up of Cal undergraduate and graduate students and includes Bill Alevizon, a marine ecologist (PhD UCSB'68) who has come to Berkeley to join Barney to work on several ocean projects. Watch for the National Geographic Magazine, which sent a three-person team to Nicaragua in April–May for an article on Barney's coastal-marine research and this region's little-studied marine biota and environments (the writer is Ken Brower, Barbara Brower's brother).
Barney recently accompanied President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro on a fact-finding visit to eastern Nicaragua. His article on "The Fourth World: Nations vs. State" appears in Reordering the World: Geopolitical Perspectives on the 21st Century (George Demko and William Wood eds., Westview 1994). This past year he lectured at a culture and wildlife conference at Tokyo and before the Society of Environmental Journalists at Duke University.
Bob Reed has been all but commuting to Vietnam this past year in connection with major new Berkeley campus involvement with that country. He chaired an international conference on "Vietnam: Development in Comparative Perspective" sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at the University of California in February 1994, and presented a paper entitled "Dalat and Baguio: Urban Contrasts in the Highlands of Vietnam and the Philippines." Over 200 scholars attended from Vietnam, the United States, and elsewhere. Bob also helped organize and participated in a scientific exchange on "The Economic, Social, and Environmental
Aspects of Development in Vietnam" in Hanoi and Tam Dao in August, 1993. It was sponsored by the East-West Center, the Center for Resources Management and Environment at the University of Hanoi, and UCB.
Bob received grants from the Henry B. Luce Foundation and the Pacific Rim Program to fund an international seminar on "Defining Highland Issues in Vietnam" (held at the East-West Center in July 1994). He co-Chaired the meeting with Dr. A. Terry Rambo of the East-West Center and Dr. Le Trong Cuc of the University of Hanoi. His presentation was entitled "From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital: Reflections on the Colonial Origins, Urban Transformation, and Environmental Impact of Dalat." Presently the co -chairs are editing selected papers for a volume on development in the mountain realm of Vietnam to be published by the East-West Center in English and Vietnamese. Bob also received a grant from the Pacific Rim Program for a joint research effort by UCB, the East-West Center in Honolulu, and the Center for Resources Management and Environment at the University of Hanoi. Hopefully a working paper series and an edited volume will emerge from this effort.
Bob chaired the Asian Geography Speciality Group of the Association for American Geographers in 1993-94, and continued as Campus Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
David Stoddart's year was an eventful one, beginning with a period with the Tropical Islands class in Tahiti. A free ride on a local schooner to the island of Huahine went fine until it was found that the vessel did not have the power to get back to Moorea: in the event it took 48 hours to make less than a hundred miles. But people did this all the time in the eighteenth century. In September 1993 he organized the annual meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers in Berkeley. In February he gave an invited theme lecture to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco, on conservation in the Indian Ocean. Then came the big onethe annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, also in San Francisco, for which he served as chair of the local organizing committee. He gave a memorial address for his long-time friend Ray Fosberg at the Smithsonian in May, and two nights later a retirement speech for Dick Chorley in Cambridge, England. Then came the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the AAAS, again in San Francisco, at which his presidential address was on 'Desert islands and discovery,' though it was really about Darwin. A number of papers on the history of coral reef studies were published (on Darwin, Dana, Davis and Walther), together with an obituary notice of Dr. Fosberg in the special Commemorative Issue of the Atoll Research Bulletin (390-396, 1994) devoted to him. This issue also included papers on the flora and the geomorphology of the Phoenix Islands co-authored with Dr. Fosberg.
Reworking Modernity: Capitalism and Symbolic Discontent has provoked a quite extraordinary review in the Annals AAG by Ed Soja, UCLA. It's in the form of somewhat obliquely if complimentary poetry (but then the text in question is itself hardly conventional). Recognizing European Modernities: A Montage of the Present , Allan Pred's latest book, will be out in early 1995. Prepublication responses have been enthusiastic, e. g.: "The combination of theoretical daring and empirical intricacy is, simply, stunning ... Part tour guide, part circus barker, part performance artist, part cultural critic, but always- and dazzlingly- human geographer ... [Pred] revisits and reinscribes modernism within critical social thought, relayering multiple pasts within our own precarious present," (Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia). Among Pred's other recent publications is an article coauthored with Michael Watts as a prelude to a book in progress of the same title: "Heretical Empiricism: The Modern and the Hypermodern" (Nordisk Samhallsgeografisk Tidskrift, 19, 1994).
During the past year Pred made two one-week trips to Scandinavia in addition to his usual extended summer visit to Sweden (where he was researching the political economy, cultural politics and spaces of racism in that country). On one of those trips he gave the plenary address at an international conference held in Oslo on international exhibitions and world's fairs. He also served as Program Chair for the highly successful San Francisco AAG meetings.
Lisa Wells is finishing up a field study in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she and Paleontology graduate student Michael Moore have been monitoring near shore water temperature and salinity through the season as it relates to coral growth. They use isotope chemistry to check on monthly changes over 150, even 300 years that should provide clues to ENSO-related climatic change. Lisa has been active in organizing recent interdepartmental seminars on the ecological and social dimensions of Global Change, featuring an impressive array of visiting lectures. The fall 1994 theme was "Land Use Change."
Michael Johns, in Mexico during the summer, is working on a book on economy and culture in Mexico City at the turn-of-the-century. His article "The Making of a Regional Elite: The Case of Rosario, Argentina, 1880-1920," appeared in the Journal of Urban History, February, 1994.
Orman Granger continues to serve on the Graduate Council, and several other committees on campus. Orman will also take on Graduate Advisor responsibilities in the Department. He has a chapter on the "Geography of Small Tropical Islands" in George Maul, ed., Small Island Oceanography, American Geophysical Union, 1994. Orman also has a long area study report for the International Ecorefugee Project of the Climate Institute, Washington, D.C.: Climate, Environmental Degradation, and Ecorefugees: Crisis of Non-Sustainable Development in the Greater Caribbean Region (1994). He is completing a textbook, Climate and Climatic Change, scheduled for next spring from Wiley.
Beatriz Manz has been busy as Director of the Center for Latin American Studies. In addition to running a Masters and PhD program, the Center coordinates all Latin America related activity on campus. She gave out Awards to three Latin American dignitaries invited to the campus: Guatemalan Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, President Jean Bertrand Aristide and Chiapas Bishop Samuel Ruiz. Beatriz dedicated an inordinate amount of time during the Spring semester fighting the Federal Government on a major grant decision affecting the CLAS: in a historic reversal for the Department of Education, Berkeley obtained the three year Title VI grant it had inexplicably lost. Viva. An outside committee brought in to review the CLAS declared that in just six months at the helm she had dramatically reversed the Center's declining fortunes.
Beatriz travelled to Chile and Guatemala on a Pacific Rim planning grant for research on agricultural export's effects on labor force and households. As a member of the Inter-American Foundation Doctoral Research Fellowship Program she was in Quito, Ecuador recently advising fellows on their on-going research throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. She is making preparations for a final trip for completion of a community-based research project in the Ixcan rain forest of Guatemala.
Beatriz published papers: "Exodus, Resistance and Readjustments in the Aftermath of Massacres," in Ricardo Faela, Massacres in the Jungle, Westview Press, 1994; "Elections Without Change: The Human Rights Record of Guatemala," Latin American Studies Into the Twenty-First Century: New Focus, New Formats , New Challenges. Deborah Jakubs (ed.), University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Forthcoming: "Fostering Trust in a Climate of Fear," in E. Valentine Daniel and John Knudsen, (Mis)Trusting Refugees, University of California Press, 1995; "Reflections on an Antropologia Comprometida," University of California Press, 1995.
Ted Oberlander was honored by fellow geomorphologists at the San Francisco AAG meeting, receiving the geomorphology specialty group's 1994 Distinguished Career Award "for innovative thought in arid lands geomorphology." The portion of the citation identifying Ted as "an artist and a geomorphologist in one" was a bit embarrassing, as TMO has long insisted that his blackboard sketches were always done in such a hurry that it pained him to look at them! The award was accepted by Ted's long-time friend and former colleague at Cal, Herb Eder, now Chair of the Dept. of Geography and Anthropology at Cal State University at Hayward. At convention time TMO and wife Barbara were enjoying a 7-week browse through South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia (13 internal flights including Cessna and helicopter, and 6 car rentals). Ted found the geomorphic enigmas to be at least as fascinating as the political ones. On the basis of what was seen, he recants all his glib lectures on erosion surfaces, bornhardts and savanna scarps, and says he has developed a new respect for L.C. King.
The fat but costly Geomorphology of Desert Environments (Chapman and Hall, 1994) contains two chapters by Ted, "Global Deserts: A Geomor phic Comparison" and "Rock Varnish in Deserts: Significance in Arid Lands Research". TMO's work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has changed his thinking on several seemingly serendipitous results of rock varnish research with Ron Dorn in the 1980s.
Appointed to a "jury de thèse" by the Université de Paris XI, Hilgard O'Reilly Sternberg participated during October 1993 in the "Habilitation" exam of Dr. Jean-François Dumont. Following the examination, Hilgard and Carolina drove through France and Italy, returning to the U.S. from Rome. From April to June 1994, there was field research in Brazil, continuing work centered on Holocene climatic variability in Amazonia, and a new project based on observations of contemporary oscillations of water level in pseudo-karstic lakes on the crest of Serra Sul, part of the Carajás massif in Pará. In June –July 1994, Sternberg gave an invited plenary paper at the 48th Congress of Americanists in Stockholm. Following the Congress, the Sternbergs spent some days at the University of Turku, as guests of the Chancellor, Geographer Olavi Granö. The purpose of this trip was an exchange of views with the interdisciplinary group of Finnish geologists and biologists now active in Amazônia.
Jay Vance, completing his manuscript on North American railroads, conducted a tour group in Europe fall 1993. He summered at his Queen Charlotte Islands retreat.
David Parsons, son of Jim and Betty Parsons , has been made director of the new US Forestry Service Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, Missoula MT. Jim has been editing the Emeriti Times, quarterly newsletter of the UCB Emeriti Association.
Doty Valrey, Student Services Assistant, has left us, after almost seven years, for Geology (lured by a nice salary boost). At a farewell reception in mid-May she was given an excursion package to Las Vegas as a gift from students, staff and faculty. Doty has been replaced by Luda Requadt. Luda comes with several years experience with undergraduate and graduate students in Nuclear Engineering and the School of Education. She holds an M.A. in Russian Literature from Columbia University.
The front office has a new look. Natalia Vonnegut, Department Manager, has moved to Room 509. Luda and Charlie Hadenfeldt thus have much needed new elbow room in 501. And thanks to Margarete Monaghan, the green and violet paint is gone from 501 replaced with a bright off-white.
Margaret Monaghan (AB'85) organized another hugely successful map sale in late January 1994. She will be organizing the upcoming Departmental Open House scheduled for April 29, 1995.
Cherie Semans's (PhD'87) cartographic predilection led to some interesting opportunities and situations this last year. She was approached by KPFA to appear on a talk show about maps called "Brainstorm". In early August Cherie and one of her former students, Jane Sterzinger (AB'92), appeared on a local cable program known as "Cross Talk." Once again the emphasis was on mapping, and many of the spring cartography students' maps of Sausalito were featured. Several years ago Cherie and Don Bain began taking the students into different urban and suburban areas to get an "out-of-the-classroom" mapping experience. Most U.S.G.S. maps are quite out of date, particularly in regard to urban expansion and roads. Old town in Sacramento, a revitalized section of Suisun City, and most recently Sausalito have been used for field checking of maps. Sausalito, a town with a rich maritime and military shipbuilding history, is today a tourist haven. It also has over a 100 year legacy of floating homes. Cherie, a former houseboat dweller, has been following and documenting these changes over the last 20 years. In fact, this became a topic for presentation at the APCG and the AAG meetings.
Cherie was elected into the Society of Women Geographers, an organization with an impressive membership of women with a broad range of interests and background. Lastly, Cherie continues on doing geographic outreach into local schools. During 1993/94 she taught California geography in her son's fourth grade class every Tuesday. This fall Cherie's youngest son Robert enters kindergarten which will probably mean dusting off the kindergarten geography lessons.
In early August Cherie began an association with the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics and Recreational Sports which involves mapping their facilities. The first project was an information guide that details Memorial Stadium with additional maps of campus access. Using air photos and campus plans and maps, she has compiled one map that shows the Berkeley campus, the Clark Kerr campus and the Strawberry Recreation area. Assisting Cherie in the project were former students Matt Knudsen, Jane Sterzinger and Penny Brown . Don Bain provided technical expertise on the two-sided color document. Twenty-five thousand copies were printed and available for the first football game on Sept. 17. She is extending the project by creating an emergency evacuation plan for seismic and fire conditions.
Don Bain continued as manager of the computing facility and with teaching the computer class in the fall and cartography class in the spring. Locally held geography conferences kept Don busy. He co-authored a paper with Lisa Hamilton at the 1993 APCG conference on "The Digital Slide Show". He also participated in a group session with Cherie Semans and Jane Sterzinger on the town of Sausalito. The digital media topic was revisited in March at the AAG meeting in San Francisco where, due to shortcomings in the event's technical support, he was forced to give a traditional slide show illustrating the potential of the digital slide show! Don also designed the conference logo and the "Berkeleycentric" T-shirt.
In June, thanks to a Professional Development grant, Don travelled to Whistler, British Columbia, to participate in the first Summer GIS Insti tute. Being a compulsive geographer, he took time before and after the conference B.C. It rained 13 of the 16 days he camped out, and snowed once, making return to California a pleasant relief.
Don and his wife, Nora Weldon, have taken responsibility for landscaping the townhouse development where they live 40 acres above Wildcat Canyon behind El Cerrito. By the end of the 93-94 planting season, the project's second, over 1000 plants had been established, mostly California natives. Two areas of oak-bay forest that had been obliterated by landslide stabilization are being restored, complete with complementary shrubs and vines, including the rare shrub Leather wood (Dirca occidentalis), still extant on the property. Don's favorite project is an area he has planted exclusively with species endemic to Southern California's Channel Islands.
Charlie Hadenfeldt travelled through France, Italy, Denmark, and Spain for six weeks this summer. In Paris, he visited Maggie Roessler, a visiting scholar in the Department some years ago.
Nat Vonnegut continues to keep the whole operation up and running, including the production of the Itinerant. She also co-chairs the Social Sciences Managers Group in the College of L&S and is a member of the L&S Administrative Advisory Committee.
1993-94 saw a great increase in the use of internet resources in the department. For the first time almost all graduate students and most faculty had e-mail accounts, and for many e-mail rapidly became an essential tool. Widespread use of the front-end program Eudora, which gives unix mail a Macintosh inter face, made e-mail friendlier and more accessible. Many students became avid participants in usenet (network news) and enjoyed exploring the World Wide Web with the program NCSA Mosaic. During the summer a geography depart ment internet server was established, along with the Geo-Images server.
Equipment in the main computer lab was upgraded piecemeal, mostly by adding more memory (up to 24 mb) and larger monitors. The first PowerMac arrived late in the year. The department's fileserver, The Great Kahuna, was upgraded to a 68040 machine with 16mb RAM, 3.5 gigabytes disk space, and EtherNet and was still overloaded. EtherNet connections became more common in the department, beginning to relieve the bandwidth problems associated with LocalTalk.
As usual Don Bain taught the course "Introduction to the Use of Computers in Geography" in the fall semester, and Cherie Semans taught "Cartographic Representation" in the spring. The cartography curriculum was updated to Aldus FreeHand 4, a major change, but worth the effort. This year was the sixth using FreeHand the Facility originally adopted the program while it was still in beta testing, and has used every subsequent version. What was at first an experiment in adapting new computer tools to traditional map drawing has become the professional standard for publication quality cartography.
Day to day computer work in the department was greatly facilitated by the computer facility interns: Fall semester: Chris Ditto, Chris Langevin, Rosan Primeau, Jason Sadler, Eurydice Thomas, Christina Wong, Rich Worthington; Spring semester: David Catechi, Arnold Engelmann (with Chris Ditto, Chris Langevin, Jason Sadler, and Christina Wong returning).
An exciting new development in Macintosh software appeared in the spring programs designed specifically for rendering three-dimensional landscapes. VistaPro works from USGS DEM's (digital elevation models), and is fast and fun. KPT Bryce is a more sophisticated program, and specializes in photo-realistic rendering of imaginary landscapes. Rendering times, however, can run into many hours, or days, even on the fastest machines.
At the end of the year the last "compact" Macs (Plus and SE models) were removed from service. The oldest of these ran 24 hours a day for ten years one will be retained to add to the department's collection of antiquated geography equipment, alongside the brass and mahogany surveying equipment, spline weights, and Leroy lettering sets.
The Geography Computing Facility's Geo-Images project, conceived by Don Bain in collaboration with Jim Proctor at UC Santa Barbara, made steady progress throughout the year. Under the original Santa Barbara curriculum development grant, 900 slides from the collections of Bob Reed, Paul Starrs, Cherie Semans, and Don Bain were digitized onto Kodak Photo-CD. The base-size images (roughly television resolution) were then processed using Adobe PhotoShop software, and saved with JPEG compression. Identifying data, keywords, and captions were provided by the photographers and recorded along with thumbnail images in Kodak Shoebox (an image database program). This part of the project was managed by Lisa Hamilton.
The result is an archive of images useful in teaching geography, which can be searched, sorted, arranged into slide shows, and viewed on any network-connected computer on the Berkeley campus using the Shoebox software. Images can be browsed by individuals from computer labs, offices, even dorm rooms, or shown to whole classes in digital media-equipped classrooms.
In the spring semester, visiting professor Jim Miller contributed a set of images of daily life in Morocco, and set a new standard for caption writing and keywording. The collection was much enhanced by a beautiful map of Morocco drawn by Jason Sadler. This brought the total Geo-Images collection up to 1000.
During the summer Don Bain annotated Jim Miller's collection with html (hypertext markup language) tags and brought it up on the World Wide Web. Users equipped with appropriate browser software, such as NCSA Mosaic, can read Jim's captions, and, by clicking on the image title, can view quarter-size versions of the slides. It is anticipated that by fall 1994 the entire Geo-Images collection will be available to computer users worldwide over the internet.
Next on the Geo-Images development list: new sets of slides from Berkeley geographers, to broaden the collection to cover more physical geography and additional parts of the world; air photos, space images, scanned artwork, and historical photographs (possibly including the department's lantern slide collection); and more custom-drawn maps. Key enhancements to the WWW server will include indexing (to allow searching for images by place or keywords), and clickable maps (click on a map to see a list of images of that area).
Anxious to have a look at Geo-Images? You will need a reasonably fast computer with 8-bit or better color display, an internet connection, and http browser software (such as NCSA Mosaic or Netscape Navigator, available for Macintosh, MS Windows, or X-Windows). Open the url "http:/ /geogweb.berkeley.edu/geoimages.html" (do not type the quotes).
Total enrollment in 1993-94 geography courses: 1,943. Courses with enrollments exceeding 100Fall: 1 (Byrne), 130 (Watts), 133 (Nietschmann). Spring: 110 (Walker).
Geography courses remain popular with undergraduates, but enrollments have been flat for the last few years. In order to keep abreast of changing issues of interest to students, a reorganization of lower division courses (unchanged since the 1950s) is in the works, with proposals going forward on World Regions, Peoples and States; Global Restructuring; The Ocean World; Global Ecology and Development; Global Environmental Change; California and the Pacific Rim; and Mexico and the U.S.
Geographer John Radke (PhD UBC), of Landscape Architecture, is offering a course on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) cross-listed in Geography. And so, along with Don Bain's popular Computers in Geography offering and Cherie Semans' inclusion of computer work into her Cartography class, we move (if belatedly) into the modern world.
Cherie Semans's cartography class not only instills the principles and techniques of traditional cartography, but an upgraded version of Freehand 4 has been introduced as the vehicle for computer cartography. This is the second year for Cherie's introductory map reading, a course designed to fill a gap for students who can't devote the time necessary for regular cartography yet want a good grounding in map reading and analysis. Students are not only taught to glean useful information from maps, but learn to approach maps and graphics with a critical eye for misrepresentation of data. One of the problems arising from the proliferation of computer mapping software is the production of maps by individuals who are untrained in cartographic theory. The result is a lot of garbage (Cherie collects examples of such offerings. So please send copies of anything that you think qualifies).
Michael Watts and Postdoc Priya Rangan taught a special seminar in the Fall on Nature and Society. While Dick Walker and Tim Clark, from Art History, jointly taught a seminar on Consumer Society and the City with support from the Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Summer Session faculty for 1994: Cherie Semans (PhD'87) [Intro to Cultural Geography and Map Reading], and PhD candidates Lisa Husmann [China and Central Asia] and Liz Vasile [Urban Field Geography]. Summer Sessions this year initiated two six week sessions, in addition to the regular 8- and 10-week programs.
Peng Gong (PhD Geography, University of Waterloo) has been appointed assistant professor of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM) at Berkeley. Formerly at the University of Calgary his field includes remote sensing and GIS.
Fundraising has become a regular part of Berkeley life in these financially hard times. The Geography Department depends on the generosity of its alumni and friends for vital supplementary funds that support major lecture series, student awards, cartography, computing, field geography and student travel to conferences and research areas. We ask you once again to give aid and succor to these causes. All checks great and small are greatly appreciated.
In addition, there may be some of you in a position to do more for the Geography Department and the University of California. If so, we would like to speak with you to explain our needs and the possible forms such assistance can take. There is a major campaign in progress to raise $1 billion for the Berkeley campus by the year 2001, and such funds can be earmarked for specific purposes such as support of Geography. There are two kinds of funding opportunities, one for buildings and one for academic programs.
The academic programs campaign is an effort to raise significant funds for support of research, teaching and students. The Geograpy Department has outlined a number of worthy targets, including Distinguished Professorships, student research and fellowship grants, and computer teaching, cartography and GIS. These are part of a larger package in support of the whole of the Social Sciences. Information is available through the Department or the Campus Development Office in Berkeley.
We have a special need for funding for McCone Hall's renovation (see page 5). The McCone Foundation gave the university about half the money necessary for a full upgrade, i.e. $5 out of $10 million. The National Science Foundation has pitched in another $1.5 million or so, but the departments occupying McCone need to help come up with the remainder. McCone houses the Department of Geology and Geophysics and the Seismographic Station, as well as the Earth Sciences Library, along with the Geography Department.
Our portion of the fundraising is 3/4 of a million dollars. It's enough to make one gasp. We probably won't have to come up with that much, in the end, but we need to make a major dent in it. So, if anyone of you loyalists out there has the means (or knows of someone who might be inclined) to make a significant gift or bequest in support of McCone Hall or a particular facility, such as our Computing Laboratory, please contact Professor Walker (510 -643-8226; walker@garnet.berkeley.edu).
WE NEED YOUR HELP
At the 1994 Commencement exercises held under the oaks in front of McCone Hall Saturday May 21 some 64 geography majors received Bachelor of Arts degrees. A record 13 PhDs were also awarded as well as four MAs. Abby Friedman (Phi Beta Kappa) of Virginia, recipient of the departmental citation, spoke for the undergraduates while Tim Krantz did likewise for the graduates. The Commencement Address was by Carl Anthony, President of Earth Island Institute and Director of the Urban Habitat Program. He spoke movingly and with eloquence on "Race, Place, and Environmental Justice."
Outstanding Graduate Teaching awards went to Jolyn Eichner and Victoria Randlett. Richard Worthington received the Lucille McClish Oberlander Award in Physical Geography.
Professor Richard Walker, in his first public act as new departmental chair, directed the proceedings, welcoming graduates and guests and expressing his appreciation of the importance of the new responsibilities that he faces.
The Sauer Singers again entertained. Barney Nietschmann Jr.'s Pacific Rim Creations catered the reception that followed.
During the Spring semester James Miller (PhD Texas) of Clemson University (South Carolina) taught the Geography of the Middle East, remaining on during most of the summer. He was supported by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies as well as by Geography. Our thanks to Jim for adding measurably to the life of the Department.
The Department continues to be popular with visiting scholars. We hosted the following research associates during the course of the year:
William Alevizon, Marine Ecology/Fisheries Biology Consultant
Carmen Concepcion, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow
Sallie Marston, Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona
Leticia Menchaca, Centro de Ciencias de la Atmósfera, UNAM, Mexico
Stephanie Pincetl, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow
S. Ravi Rajan, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow
Päivi Oinas, Helsinki School of Economics
Haripriya Rangan, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow
Tony Smith, Philosophy, Iowa State University
Noritaka Yagasaki, Geography, Yokohama National University
Geography continues to provide a haven for an impressive number of visiting research scholars supported by the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Post-doctoral Fellowship Program in Natural Resource Economics. In any year a dozen or more generous awards are made through the UCB Graduate Division. Successful proposals must have a broadly institutional or historical orientation, and cannot be narrowly quantitative or policy-oriented. A gratifying number of Wantrup scholars have chosen to affiliate with the Department of Geography (five are currently here), often from other disciplines. Paul Starrs (Nevada Reno) and Deborah Santana Berman (SUNY-Albany) are Berkeley geography PhDs who have recently held these generous awards.
Siegfried von Ciriacy-Wantrup (1906-1980) left Nazi Germany in 1936. After a short stint at the Rockefeller Foundation he joined the faculty of the Department of Agricultural Economics. At the time Geography was in Giannini Hall, just down the corridor; because of mutual interests and philosophies, relations with our department were close. For two years the Geography graduate seminar on Natural Resource Conservation was a joint offering by Professors Sauer and Wantrup. The two men, so different in many ways, here found a common intellectual meeting ground. Wantrup held the geography faculty and grad students in high regard while he cared little for the econometric bias in his own department. His Resource Conservation Economics (1952) was considered a ground-breaking text. From 1961 to 1965 he presided over an interdisciplinary faculty seminar that met bi-monthly for dinner and discussion at the Faculty Club, featuring distinguished visitors from many disciplines. Focused on the then little-considered theme of growth and its consequences, it was supported by a grant from the Conservation Foundation and sponsored by the Chancellor's Committee on Natural Resources (See Natural Resources: Quantity vs. Quality, S.V. Wantrup and James J. Parsons, eds., UC Press 1967). Earlier he had played a crucial role in university-wide conferences on Water Development and on California Development Problems.
A life-long bachelor, he was an avid hunter in the Germanic tradition. He owned ranches on the Mendocino Coast (now a part of the State Parks System) and another in Pope Valley, Napa County. The latter he bequeathed to the Napa County Land Trust. His residual monetary wealth, amounting to several million dollars, went to endow the Ciriacy-Wantrup fellowships.
The "Tea Talk" series has moved from its traditional Thursday spot to Wednesdays at 4:00. With support from Dean William Simmons of L&S and Dean Joseph Cerny of the Graduate Division speakers during the past year have included Béatrice Schwarz (MA'90), Zaiem Baksh (Auckland), Gray Brechin, Rebecca Skinner, Lee Klinger (NCAR), Craig ZumBrunnen (PhD'73), Walter Alvarez (Geology), Derek Gregory (UBC), Barney Nietschmann, Lisa Ely (Penn State), Doris Sloan (Environmental Sciences), James O'Connor and Barbara Laurence, Jean François DuMont (ORSTOM), Steve Cunha (UC Davis), Haripriya Rangan, Andrew Leyshon (Hull), Daniel Knudsen (Indiana U.), James Miller (Clemson), Nigel Allan (UC Davis), Christine Rodrigue (Cal State Chico), Patrick Kirch (Anthropology), and Päivi Oinas (Helsinki).
Mrs. Gertraude Kinet donated 7657 slides to the department, which she organized, researched and catalogued. The slides, taken by her late husband Urbain J. Kinet (1909-1989), represent a lifetime of Kinet's travelling the globe. Mr. Kinet, born in Belgium, lived and travelled throughout Africa from 1938 up until the independence of the Belgian Congo in 1960. After moving to the U.S., his first job was with the California Academy of Sciences. He later took his M.A. degree in Geography from San Francisco State University. These studies were interrupted for a 1965/66 expedition to Antarctica. He taught at San Francisco State University and at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, where he also worked as a biomedical specialist at the Hooper Foundation. Kinet was primarily interested in tropical and antarctic regions, and had wide-ranging interests including volcanology, botany, ichthyology, ornithology, biogeography, limnology, herpetology, medical geography, and archaeology.
Michael Watts and Mary Beth Pudup, January 19, 1995, a son Ethan Louis.
To Karl Zimmerer (PhD'88) and Medora, October 12, a son Stephen Jacob.
To Martin Lewis (PhD'87) and Karën Wigen (PhD'90), April 7, a son Evan Karl.
To Jerry Emory (MA'85) and Jeannie, in March, a daughter Samantha.
To Ying Yang Petersen (PhD'93) and Evan, in September, a son Jay.
To Marie Price (AB'84, PhD Syracuse) and Rob, in March, a son Joseph Warren Crandall.
To grad student Julie Guthman, a son, in May.
To grad student Jinn-Yuh Hsu, a daughter in early Spring.
To new PhD Tad Mutersbaugh, a daughter in December.
Grad student Jennifer Jones and James Payton, August 6.
Clyde Wahrhaftig, 74, emeritus professor of geology and long-time friend of the department, teacher and adviser to many of our physical geographers, in San Francisco April 8.
Jean Gottmann, 78, distinguished French geographer whose Megalopolis (1961), a study of the Eastern Seaboard, and other writings on regional and urban geography attracted wide attention. His career was always international in style, with simultaneous professorships at Oxford and the Sorbonne. In 1966 he was Visiting Professor of Geography at Berkeley.
Ray Fosberg, 85, Smithsonian Institution botanist and renowned authority on the Pacific Islands, in Washington DC September 25, 1993. A long-time friend and counselor of many geographers, he was Sauer Memorial Lecturer in the department in 1980 (now published as Atoll Research Bulletin 395 (1994), 1-13: 'Story of an oceanic archipelago'). David Stoddart has written an extended appreciation of him in the Atoll Research Bulletin, through which the two men helped create coral reef and island studies as an autonomous branch of science.
John Parsons, 41, geographer son of Jim and Betty Parsons, June 27, 1994, of AIDS-related causes. A native of Berkeley, he graduated, like his brother and sister, from UC Davis, going on for a Master's in Geography (Cartography) at the University of Kansas. After four years with a Berkeley geologic consulting firm he established himself independently as Eureka Cartography. It became a respected map-making concern of 10-12 employees, including several UC Berkeley geography graduates, that gained a national reputation for the quality and innovativeness of its work, using Aldus FreeHand software on Macintosh computers to create products often remarked on for their esthetic quality.
Zachary Jackson, 30, June 14, 1993. Zach was a senior student in our program who was planning to enter law school in 1994.
National Geography Awareness Week was celebrated in the department by a Student-Faculty potluck at Haas Clubhouse, Strawberry Canyon Recreation Area, November 19.
From the Delphi Internet, origin unidentified: "A survey of recent hirings at the Gourman List top 25 geog programsFor the period of the last 15 years the following schools placed the most graduates in positions in top programs (in order): Berkeley, Wisconsin and Colorado (tie), Kansas and Minnesota (tie), Ohio State, Penn State and UCLA (tie). . . ." Maybe they have something there. Look at this listing of appointments or locations of the 50 PhDs graduated from the Berkeley department in the past eight years, 1987-1994:
Brower Texas/Portland State Milukas Lahmayer International, Frankfurt Pudup UC Santa Cruz Semans UC Berkeley Lewis Wisconsin–Madison Stine CSU Hayward Voeks CSU Fullerton / University of Brunei Dobkin Independent Scholar, San Francisco Eley Alaska-Fairbanks/U.S. Fish & Game Raburn Consultant Zimmerer Wisconsin–Madison Bernhardson Travel guide writer (CSU Hayward) Sicular Consultant for Alameda County/others Starrs Nevada–Reno Stevens LSU Fondahl Northern British Columbia Gaubatz University of Massachusetts Sullivan Denver Walsh Independent Scholar Huang National Taiwan University Wright New Mexico State Jarosz Washington McDonald Hawaii Wigen Wisconsin–Madison (History) Argenbright Western Washington University Rice Fulbright (Guatemala) Cartier Oregon Lee Seoul National University Orvis LBL/Tennessee Henderson Colgate University Proctor UC Santa Barbara Blumler SUNY Binghamton Ellison Australian Institute of Marine Science (post doc) Muldavin UCLA Neumann Florida International Berman SUNY Albany Griggs Cape Town Page Colorado–Denver Mitchell Washington Hoffmann AAAS Fellow (AID) Howard Armstrong State, Savannah Schroeder Rutgers Clapp Toronto Cook Cambridge (post doc) Whitesell Michigan State Mensing Nevada–Reno Suryanata UC Berkeley Mutersbaugh Iowa Larson CSU Hayward Hsu National Taiwan University
David Miller (PhD'53), Wisconsin–Milwaukee, calls attention to an appreciative note on our late lamented colleague in Australian Geographical Studies 31(2):249. In reviewing David Livingstone's The Geographical Tradition: Episodes on the History of a Contested Empire (Blackwells 1992) J.M. Powell (Monash) writes: "This arresting book . . . is easily the best intellectual history of geography since Clarence Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967). No doubt the two volumes will be twinned but that would be misleading. There was a stand-alone quality to Glacken's eloquent treatiseit was a well-rounded narrative with a kind of dignified reserve and scholarly authority which was assisted by the selection of a cut-off point at the end of the 18th century, before the full 'institutionalization' of geography."
Elsewhere the reviewer pits Berkeley's David Stoddart's "strong advocacy of a rejuvenated regional geography with the capacity to bond the physical and human camps . . . . ." against advocates of a narrower definition of the field.
Friends will be interested that Clarence and Millie's daughter Karen, under the name Karen Kijewski, has made it big as an author of detective novels. Her Kat Colorado, a new breed of private eye, is featured in each of the five mysteries currently in print ( Kat's Cradle, Katapult, Katwalk, Wild Kat and Copy Kat), all as paperbacks, published by the likes of Doubleday, Bantam, and Avon; more are coming.
Ravi Rajan (PhD Oxford), on a two-year post -doc in the department, is currently working on Glacken's papers in Bancroft Library and on Clarence's and other's role in the 1956 Princeton Conference on Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth.
Robert Sack, humanist geographer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has named his newly endowed chair the Clarence Glacken Professorship as a tribute to our former colleague.
The 13th Carl O. Sauer Memorial Lecture was given by William M. Denevan (PhD'63), retiring professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, on October 11. Bill's lecture was on "Prehistoric Riverine Settlement in Amazonia."
Denevan, distinguished cultural geographer and Latin Americanist, has been at Madison throughout his academic career. His strong cultural, ecological, and historical orientation is reflected both in his own numerous publications and the work of his students, who include such well-known geographers as Barney Nietschmann, B.L. Turner II, Kent Mathewson and Dan Gade. Both his MA thesis on the Pine Uplands of Nicaragua and his dissertation on the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia, were published in the University of California Publications in Geography.
Denevan's major role in opening up the archeologically significant role of the sophisticated "raised field" agriculture of pre-Columbian tropical America has brought him widespread public recognition. In later years he has been the leader of a major interdisciplinary study of Andean terracing and causes for the widespread abandonment of these remarkable engineering achievements, especially in the spectacular upper Colca Valley of southern Peru. His other work has focussed on the complex and controversial issue of pre-Columbian population estimates for the Americas in which his widely cited edited volume from the University of Wisconsin Press (2d edition 1992) stands as a landmark. This and his several related essays on New World historical demography and the nature of subsistence farming brought him widespread attention in the public press during the recent Columbian Quincentenary celebrations.
Forty-two alumni and friends have contributed nearly $12,000 to the Carl Sauer Memorial Lecture Fund in response to a recent campaign to insure continuance of the series.
Next Sauer Lecture is Wednesday, September 20, 1995Robin Donkin, Cambridge.
Homer Aschmann. The Evolving Landscape: Selected Writings of Homer Aschmann. Johns Hopkins (under contract).
Tom Bassett (co-editor). Land in African Agrarian Systems. Wisconsin, 1993.
George Carter. Pre-Columbian Chickens in America. Texas A&M (in press).
William C. Clarke and Randy Thaman, eds. Agroforestry in the Pacific Islands: Systems for Sustainability. United Nations Press, Tokyo 1993.
William Denevan. Native Population of the Americas. 2d. ed. revised. Wisconsin, 1992.
Brian Godfrey. Brazil: Geography of a Tropical Giant. American Geographical Society Around-the-World Program. 1994.
Paul Groth (PhD'83), Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. $35.00 cloth, 1994.
David Harris (co-editor) Modelling Ecologic Change. Institute of Archaeology, University of London.
Jeongman Lee. Wonpyongchon Village and the Modernization of Korea. Harul Academy, Seoul (in English).
Martin Lewis. Green Delusions: an Eco-critique of Radical Environmentalism. Duke 1992.
Martin Lewis. Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital and Environmental Degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, 1990-1986. UC Press, 1992.
David Lowenthal. Heritage Against History. Free Press (in press).
James J. Parsons. Las regiones tropicales americanas: Vision geográfica de James J. Parsons. FEN, Bogotá, 1992.
Richard Peet. Global Capitalism: Themes of Social Development. Routledge, 1991.
Rowan Rowntree (co-editor). The Ecological City: Preserving and Restoring Urban Diversity. Massachusetts 1994.
Fred Simoons. Food in China. CRC Press, 1991.
Nigel Smith (with others). Tropical Forests and Their Crops. Comstock 1992.
Michael Storper (co-editor). Pathways to Industrial and Regional Development. Routledge 1992.
Lee Talbot (co-author). Crisis and Opportunity: Environment and Development in Africa. World Bank 1992.
Yi-Fu Tuan. Passing Strange and Wonderful. Island Press 1993.
Tom Vale (co-author). Time and the Tuolumne Landscape: Continuity and Change in the Yosemite High Country. University of Utah 1994.
Thomas Veblen (co-editor). Plant Succession: Theory and Prediction. Chapman and Hall, London 1992.
Don Vermeer (co-author) Geophagy: Perspectives on a Worldwide Practice. Gordon and Beach.
H. Jesse Walker (co-editor). The Evolution of Geomorphology. John Wiley 1993.
Robert West. Sonora: Its Geographic Personality. Texas 1993.
Robert West (co-author). Aboriginal and Colonial Mining in Spanish America. LSU (in press).
Bret Wallach. At Odds With Progress: Americans and Conservation. Arizona 1991.
Kären Wigen (PhD'90), The Making of a Japanese Periphery 1750-1920. $42.50 cloth, 358 pp., 35 maps, 1994.
Glyn Williams. The Welsh in Patagonia. University of Wales, 1991.
Ann Withington. Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics. Oxford 1991.
John B. Wright. Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West. University of Texas Press. 1993.
Nori Yagasaki. Immigrant Agriculturalists: a Study of Japanese Society in California (in Japanese). Kokon Shoin, Tokyo, 1993.
Wilbur Zelinsky (co-author). The Emergency Evacuation of Cities. Bowman & Littlefield.
Wilbur Zelinsky. Cultural Geography of the United States. 2nd ed. revised. Prentice-Hall, 1992.
Guggenheim Fellowships have gone to 13 Berkeley geography PhDs and an additional two MAs since their establishment in 1926. Six faculty (seven if one with a Berkeley doctorate is included) have also been Guggenheim fellowsAAG Newsletter, June 1994.
Although the term 'Berkeley School'or the so-called 'Berkeley type' of historical cultural study survives, it represents only one of the diverse approaches that have characterized the department in the post-Sauerian years. Faculty and student concerns have expanded to include other ways and other agendas, providing inspiration for what might be called a 'Berkeley Renaissance.' In an overarching paper in Progress in Human Geography (18:2, 1994) a UBC geographer, David Demerrit, contrasts the favorable reception given Carl Sauer and the practitioners of the Berkeley school of landscape studies by environmental historians such as Cronon, Worster, and Crosby with the pre -emptive dismissal by claimants to the "new cultural geography," e.g. Duncan, Daniels, Cosgrove. The former, he argues, have seized on Sauer's writings about human influences on and accommodation to the land for their intellectual pedigree. The latter, caricaturing the Berkeley school as "overemphasizing mere description of artifacts on the landscape and ignoring processes that give these objects meaning," follow the new fashion of describing landscapes as 'texts,' representing 'contested processes of signification', and so on. Such new ways of viewing our discipline are seen as signaling "a proclivity to set aside the hiking boots preferred by Sauer for the patent leather shoes more appropriate to fieldwork in the cafes and art museums ...." Take your pick.
For "deep" geography one could not do better than "Development Theory and Environment in the Age of Market Triumphalism," the introductory essay in the first of two theme issues of Economic Geography (v. 69, nos. 3 and 4) on Environment and Development by Richard Peet (PhD'68) and Michael Watts, the editors. Part 2 (Number 4, October 1993) is virtually an all-Berkeley issue with articles by Judith Carney (PhD'86) and Richard Schroeder (PhD'93) on their Gambian work and Lucy Jarosz (PhD'90) on Madagascar as well as book reviews by five PhD candidates, Susanne Friedberg, Victoria Randlett, Carolyn Trist, James McCarthy and Sharad Chari.
The 12th Western Humanities Conference, held at Stanford in October, had the theme "Remapping Cultural Space: The New Geographies." Dick Walker, Michael Watts and Allan Pred each chaired sessions. David Harvey (Johns Hopkins) was the keynote speaker.
Re-Reading Cultural Geography (University of Texas Press, 1994, 520 pp., $24.95 paper, $50.00 cloth) is a collection of essays and commentaries by well-known cultural geographers edited by a group of Texas and Louisiana geographers that is being heralded as a successor to the widely used Mikesell and Wagner volume ( Readings in Cultural Geography (1962). Among the 27 contributors: Doughty, Mikesell, Nietschmann, Parsons, Salter, Wagner and Zimmerer.
Tom Bassett (PhD'84) is chair of the Cultural Geography Specialty Group, Stan Stevens (PhD'89) is its secretary-treasurer, and Karl Zimmerer (PhD'88) is regional representative for the central region.
At UCLA the Urban Planning program, formerly with Architecture, has been moved to a new School of Public Policy and Social Research and with it Michael Storper (PhD'82) and Susanna Hecht (PhD'82).
Berkeley cultural plant geographers are the focus of attention in three different papers in the April-June 1993 issue of Economic Botany. Two Indian geneticists contest the claims of Carl Johannessen (PhD'59), University of Oregon, that sculpted maize ears appear on the 13th century Somnathpur Temple near Mysore, arguing on linguistic and botanical grounds that they must be instead "sculpted fruit made of pearls." Other papers in the same issue build on earlier studies by Henry Bruman (PhD'40), UCLA emeritus, on the historical geography of coconuts and by Mark Blumler (PhD'92) on the domestication of lentils.
Bill Speth's perceptive piece on "Carl Sauer's Use of the Past' appears in the Yearbook APCG 55:39-65, 1993. David Hooson's review of David Livingstone's The Geographical Tradition, "masterly and stimulating", appears in the same volume, pp. 166-167.
Sauer's 1956 The Education of a Geographer is the foil and framework for Roger M. Downs' (Penn State) "Being and Becoming a Geographer," Annals AAG, June 1994. He uses Sauer's remarks in that presidential address as a dated but provocative basis from which to set the agenda for our subject's response to the challenges and opportunities being opened up by the newly adopted National Geography Standards. He emphasizes the importance of including geography in the curricula reform and the help that will be needed from professional geographers "in making the conversion from national generalities to local particulars."
For the second year in a row Jory Hecht, son of Barry Hecht (MA'72), was California's representative in the National Geographic Society's Geography Bee, travelling to Washington in June for finals in which ten students from across the country participated. The event was carried on national TV. Six million contestants in the 12 -14 year age class participated nationwide. The winner, a Bozeman MT youth, came up with the location of the Tagus river in the final denouement. Jory, who attends Albany Middle School, also competed in the International Geography Bee sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society in London. His father heads an East Bay environmental consulting firm.
Not all the geography PhDs on the campus are in Geography. Transportation and Traffic Engineering houses Bill Garrison, Architecture Paul Groth, City and Regional Planning John Radke and ESPM Claudia Carr. Nor are our own graduates in teaching posts necessarily in Geography departments. Besides Paul Groth in Architecture at Berkeley, Kären Wigen and Tom Howard are in History departments, Jerry Fish in Biology, and several others (e.g. Susanna Hecht, Michael Storper, Susan Christopherson) are in Environmental Studies or Planning related programs. Our own faculty, of course, includes graduates in Geology and Anthropology.
A new volume of J.B. Jackson essays, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, Yale, 212 pp., 1994, $22.50, continues and further elaborates the author's iconoclastic view of landscape history. The volume is quite handsomely illustrated with photos and wood-cuts of the vernacular forms he critically analyzes, from parks and gardens, to mobile homes, cars, and roads. The book was reviewed at length and with warm appreciation, in the New York Review of Books for July 14, 1994. "This is Jackson (the indefatigable octogenarian) at his bestlucid, provocative, iconoclastic, elegant." Jackson formerly taught at Berkeley in both Landscape Architecture and Geography. He gave the Sauer Memorial Lecture in 1978.
Larry Handley (former grad student) now with the National Biological Survey, Lafayette LA, has edited two large poster maps of changing land use and habitat in the San Francisco Bay margins, published by the agency in cooperation with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the AAG. They were distributed in the 'packets' prepared for the San Francisco AAG meetings.
At least five AAG Specialty Groups offer prizes named after Berkeley geographers. Latin Americanists have their Sauer Award, Historical Geography its Andrew H. Clark Award and Religion and Belief Systems similarly honors David E. Sopher. Then there is the Luten Award of the Energy Group and the Wagner and Mikesell 'best student paper' award of the Cultural Geography Specialty Group.
Editors: Antipode (Walker), Economic Geography (Peet), Documents d'Analisis, Barcelona (Garcia), Himalayan Research Bulletin (Brower).
Editorial Boards: Geographical Review (Godfrey, Lowenthal, Tuan), Annals AAG (Bassin, Christopherson, Watts), Society and Space (Pred, Christopherson), Economic Geography (Watts, Christopherson), Progress in Human Geography (Lowenthal), Antipode (Heiman, Samatar), Journal of Geography (Salter), Post-Soviet Geography (Hooson), Mountain Research and Development (Brower, Veblen).
The national AAG meetings in San Francisco featured an unprecedented number of special sessions celebrating the achievements of Berkeley graduates of the past. To wit:
Fred Kniffen 1900-1993 (PhD'30): Two heavily attended sessions with nine papers honored the "93 Years of Scholarship" of the holder of the second geography PhD awarded at Berkeley. A distinguished cultural geographer with strong ties with anthropology, he spent his entire academic career at Louisiana State University. The program organizers were Jess Walker (MA'54) and Miles Richardson, both of LSU.
Robert West (PhD'46): A session organized by William Doolittle (Texas) on West's recent book on The Personality of Sonora featured four authorities on that north Mexico state. All emphasized the distinctive historical-geographic approach and the intimacy with the area it reflects, based on hands-on field and archival experience.
William Denevan (PhD'63): Three special sessions honoring the retiring University of Wisconsin geographer were organized by his student Kent Mathewson (LSU) and PhD candidate Bill Gartner. Two of the sessions (all related to Latin American themes) featured established students of Bill (Nietschmann, Byrne, Turner, Knapp, Siemans, Mathewson) while a third was dominated by his current PhD candidates.
Sauer–Hahn–Simoons (PhD'56): Two spirited sessions on the origins of plant and animal domestication gave special attention to the non - economic (ritual) motivation generally supported by the so-called 'Berkeley School.' The organizer was Christine Rodrigue (Chico) of the sponsoring Socialist Geography Specialty Group. New evidence presented continues to support the argument for SE Asia as a major hearth of Old World crop domestication à la Sauer's Agricultural Origins and Dispersals, and Simoon's Mithan study. The participant list was dominated by a second (and third) generation of cultural geographers tracing back to Berkeley rootsBaldwin, Palmieri, Krim, Blaut, Blumler.
At Louisiana State a part of the Old Geology Building of the Geoscience Complex has been named the Fred B. Kniffen Wing. Kniffen (PhD'30), Berkeley's second Geography PhD, died in May 1993 at 93. A cultural geographer, he spent 64 years at LSU, playing a major role in building a department "recognized as one of the most distinguished in the United States." Students and colleagues have established an endowed professorship in his name.
Culture, Form, and Place: Essays in Cultural and Historical Geography, Kent Mathewson, ed., (Geoscience and Man 32, 356 pp., Louisiana State University 1993) is a collection celebrating 75 years of cultural-historical geography at the LSU department especially the contributions of Kniffen and Bob West (PhD'46) to that program. In it Jim Parsons (PhD'48) contributes a piece on Marigolds and the Cult of the Dead in Puebla-Tlaxcala.
Dan Stanislawski, 91 (PhD'44), our most senior alum, continues to prosper at his Oxford street home with frequent visits to the department and the Faculty Club. After Dan comes Les Hewes, 88, (PhD'40) and Webster McBryde, 86 (PhD'40). Les, in his 13th year as editorial adviser of the Great Plains Review and working on his early experiences in and around Oklahoma's Cherokee Strip, was traveling in Europe (Elderhostel) this summer. Web McBryde continues as a private consultant working out of his suburban Washington home.
Both Stanislawski and Hewes gave papers at professional meetings during the past year, Dan at the APCG and Les at the AAG. Old researchers never stop researching.
Esther Rostlund, widow of fondly remembered one-time faculty member Erhard Rostlund (1900-1961, PhD'51), although bed-ridden continues to reside at their Eunice street home in Berkeley. She celebrated her 89th birthday recently. On our faculty for 15 years, Erhard taught in the field of cultural geography and natural resources conservation.
W.J. (Bill) Talbot, an early U.K. research fellow in the department and visiting professor 1949-50, writes from Austria wondering if he may not be the last surviving 1931 vintage member of the original South Hall department. Bill went on to launch geography at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 1937 and was its chair for many years. Since 1982 he has spent the (southern hemisphere) winters in Europe or with his daughter in the East. He last visited Berkeley in 1966. He promises to look through his files and bookcases for any contributions he might make to the department when he returns to the Cape.
George Carter (PhD'42), retired at Texas A&M, reports a book in the incubator at his university's press on Pre-Columbian Chickens in America. George continues to feel vindicated by new evidence of Early Man that is being reported such as a possible mammoth kill at Anza-Borrego Park and Olduvai-level tools in Siberia, perhaps even before the Himalaya uplift!
Bob West, emeritus at Louisiana State University, has been organizing his b/w photo collection from a lifetime of field work in Latin America, from the Rio Grande to the Southern Cone. So far some 4,000 of his better negatives have been converted into enlarged prints. Each print carries a detailed caption on the back, with all captions computerized so that any object of interest can be recalled using the photo code number. Two prints are being made from each negative with one remaining at LSU, and the other probably to go to the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Library at UT Austin. His several thousand color slides will be donated to the LSU geography department.
With former student Alan Craig Bob has edited a volume of 18 essays on Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America that should appear as Geoscience and Man No. 33 (est. 350 pp., $20 pre-publication price) before the end of the year. Two of the contributions will be Bob's own.
David Lowenthal (MA'50), University College London, reports a new book, Heritage Against History, on how individuals and groups deal with legacies, is due out shortly with Free Press. A revision of his life of John Perkins Marsh is in the works. David has been lecturing at European universities on such Lowenthal-ish themes as soundscapes, landscape heritage, authenticity in material culture, and national identity. There have been recent articles in Progress in Geography, History Today, Museum Management and Curators and chapters in three books on related subjects.
Reflective exchanges on the seminal 1961 Annals paper by Lowenthal, "Geography, experience and imagination" is featured by Progress in Human Geography (June 1994) in its series 'Classics in Human Geography Revisited.' It is described as a 'precursor' both of perception studies in geography and the humanistic mood that was to surface in the 1970s, an excursion into the realm of the personal, the subjective, the self-conscious to then little explored but which has since become 'the habitual haunt of much social science.'
A special program on "Environmental Dynamics" honored David Miller (PhD'53), emeritus at Wisconsin–Milwaukee, at the AAG West Lakes Division meetings in October in Milwaukee. Dave's work on the interface between climate and landscape, beginning with his classic study of snowfall in the Sierra Nevada, has had wide influence.
An anthology of the writings of Wilbur Zelinsky (PhD'53), retired at Penn State, is scheduled for publication by the University of Iowa Press in time for the Christmas trade. Don Meinig does the Foreward. Wilbur's piece on Conventions appears in the Annals AAG; another, establishing the surprisingly recent (post World War II) origins of the term "ethnicity," is in Geographica Slovenica No. 34.
A collection of the essays of the late Homer Aschmann (PhD'54) together with commentaries by friends and associates on Homer's life and work is being edited by Mike Pasqualetti (AB'65, PhD UC Riverside) and Elliot McIntire.
Richard Schwartzlose (MA'56), Scripps Institute of Oceanography, is editor of a revised edition of Gulf of California: Bibliography of Marine Sciences (English and Spanish editions), University Autonomo de Baja California, Ensenada 1992.
Yi-Fu Tuan (PhD'57) writes of Nature and the esthetic experience in his latest book, Passing Strange and Wonderful (Island Press, 288 pp., 1993, $25, but a surprising $5.95 in the Daedalus spring catalogue). It has received an extravagant accolade from the renowned sociologist/historian Simon Schama, who writes in a review "It is high time that Yi-Fu Tuan was recognized as one of the most remarkable and creative figures in the intellectual life of our time. No one has written about the relationship between culture and nature with more subtlety and power. His work has always linked landscape with psychology, and has brought together the rigor of philosophy with the economic delicacy of poetry . . . (this) is yet another treasure to hoard and cherish." An earlier volume by Tuan, Dominance and Affection (on pets) recently has been published in Italian (La Natura Forzada ....).
Guileless and self-effacing, Yi-Fu has written, in appreciation of this newsletter: "When I went to Berkeley in 1951 I offered to carry wall maps for Mr. Sauer as he and I walked across the courtyard to Hilgard Hall. He smiled kindly and said he could manage. I had offered because, in the arrogance of youth, I thought Mr. Sauer much too old to carry those heavy scrolls on his bent (so I remembered him) shoulders. Well, how old was he? A youngster of sixty-twoprecisely my age in this year of our Lord! In the forty odd years since that memorable exchange between a great man and a greenhorn, wall maps have largely disappeared from the geography classroom, students no longer think of offering a helping hand, and, perhaps most regrettable of all, wise profs themselves seem increasingly an anachronism. What an honor to be mentioned in the Itinerant Geographer!"
Carl Johannessen (PhD'59) was back in India once more at the end of the year with National Geographic support looking for the 'cinching evidence' on such Old World domesticates as sunflowers, corn, and peanuts on pre-Columbian temple colonnades. And he has an eye cocked towards the Chinese realm too. Confident that he is onto something, he writes "One just hopes for the breaks."
David Watts (MA'59) reports that his West Indies text has been issued in Spanish by Alianza Ediciones, Madrid. He has also published, with a Korean associate, a first book on the plant geography of Korea (Kluwer 1993). David was recently proposed for a Personal Chair in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of Hull.
Margaret Trussell (MA'60, PhD Oregon) has published a paperback, North of the Golden Gate: More Fireside Tales to Share, a retrospective essay on childhood joys of family and the simple life growing up in Sonoma County. $10.95, Talking Mountain Publishing Co., Box. B-621, Bodega Bay, CA 94923.
Bill Denevan (PhD'63) hosted a house party at his Sea Ranch place in Sonoma County after the AAG meetings that set a new standard for 'retirement' celebrations. He stepped down in January after nearly 30 years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A few months earlier he had been lionized at a 'Homenaje' at the provincial Universidad del Beni at Trinidad in the Bolivian Amazonia for his work there on pre-Columbian agriculture ('camellones' and causeways). A recipient of an honorary degree from the university, he was described as the el pionero of archeological research in the Llanos de Mojos.
Bill co-authors with his student, the late John Treacy, an incisive review of the literature on agricultural terracing world-wide in "The Creation of Agricultural Land Through Terracing," a chapter in The Archeology of Garden and Field, Naomi Miller and Kathryn Gleason, eds., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1994.
David Harris (PhD'63), University College, London, is reported on good authority to be president of the Pre-Historic Society in that city.
Frequent Flyer? Lee Talbot (PhD'63), international environmental adviser based in McLean, Virginia, traveled over 150,000 miles in 1993. Included were three trips to China, four to Africa, five to Europe, and one to Latin America. Lee and Marty's oldest son, Lawrence, graduated from Berkeley in December.
Charles Markham (PhD'67), emeritus at CSU Fresno and currently a resident of Boulder City NV, writes of his wartime experiences as a meteorologist in a recent issue of Weatherwise.
Richard Peet (PhD'68), Clark University, with Michael Watts has an article in Economic Geography, "Development Theory and Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism," July 1993.
Bret Wallach (PhD'68), University of Oklahoma, has Fulbright funding for a 3-year research project on Palestinian agriculture on the West Banktwo months each summer starting in 1995.
A Wall Street Journal review (March 8, 1994) points to an unpardonable number of bald geographical errors, misstatements, and omissions in the New Columbia Encyclopedia. The unsparing author Bret Wallach. Readers of this presumably 'authoritative volume', he suggests, "will be preparing themselves to live on an information superhighway that will exist, for all intents and purposes, nowhere. . . . As for Columbia University, where this once magnificent encyclopedia was conceived? It is ahead of the curve, having abolished its Department of Geography years ago."
Bret's latest manuscript, on landscape esthetics and the impact of 'the culture of development' in non-urban Asia (The Beauty We Lose . . .) will be published by Yale University Press.
William C. "Bill" Clarke (PhD'68) retired from the Universities of the South Pacific (Suva) and Melbourne and now living in the outskirts of Brisbane, Australia, was until December a Research Scholar at the Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, where he hoped to complete "a less elegant, more regionally based Yi-Fu Tuan" type study on the esthetic appreciation of plants. His book on agroforestry in the Pacific area, jointly edited with Randy Thaman (MA'68), has been published by the United Nations University Press. It includes a chapter by Bryce Decker (PhD'70). Bill also has a substantial review paper on the relevance of indigenous knowledge to sustainable agricultural development in The Margin Fades, E. Waddell and P. Nunn, eds., Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, Suva.
Elinore Barrett (PhD'70), retired this year after 25 years at the University of New Mexico, where Berkeley grads Donald Brand, Roy Gordon, Yi-Fu Tuan and David Harris have at one time or another all been on the faculty. One of Elinore's last moves was to convince the state legislature to issue a proclamation insisting that the subject of Geography be given greater support in the university. They have been heard.
Kit Salter (PhD'70) steps down from the chair at the University of Missouri for the coming year to recover from the trauma of the floods of last summer and to get back to research. His theme, the 'road' as a geographical agent. He insists that he is standing completely back both from university administration and any commitments to the National Geographic-sponsored drive to upgrade the status of geography in the schools (e.g. the new National Education Goals) while he attempts to catch up at least part way with his gifted wife Kathy who is making a name for herself as a commentator on Nature and small town life at their Breakfast Creek, Hartsburg, MO, home.
Tom Meierding's (MA'70) "Marble Tombstone Weathering and Air Pollution," appears in the Annals AAG, December 1993.
Cal Wilvert (PhD'71), Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, writes of "SpainEurope's California" in Journal of Geography, March/April 1994 and of Almeria's sand-bed agriculture under plastic in Focus, 43(1), Spring 1993.
Tom Vale (PhD'73) completed his three-year term as chairman at Wisconsin-Madison this spring. He will be on sabbatical during 1994-95, planning to work on a book on nature protection.
Rowan Rowntree (PhD'73), Pacific SW Forest and Range Experiment Station, Albany CA, is a part of the Science Team of the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project, a $7-million Congressionally mandated study being carried out under the direction of the US Forest Service.
Roger Barnett (PhD'73), University of the Pacific, is the author of two Working Papers of the UC Transportation Center: No. 113 on the High-Speed Rail Systems of Italy and Sweden, and No. 114 on High Speed Rail in Britain. Two earlier reports in the same series by Peter Hall are concerned with high-speed rail projections for California.
Kurt Rademacher (MA'73), naturalist with Nature Conservancy, was a featured speaker at a recent symposium on 'Ishi,' the renowned 'wild' California Indian, at the Oakland Museum. Kurt continues to lead up-scale eco-tours for potential major donors to the Conservancy.
Peter Shields (MA'73), with the Foreign Service for the past 15 years, is currently posted to the U.S. Embassy, Lagos, Nigeria. He is an old African hand by now, with earlier stints at Pretoria, Salisbury, Monrovia, Khartoum, and Abidijan. He finds Nigeria a particularly interesting place to work, "one of the few countries in post cold-war Africa where the U.S. still has a significant policy interest with Big Oil and the Congressional Black Caucus ensuring that the Administration maintains its focus on that country." The Shields are the parents of four daughters, ages 5 through 12.
Jack Schmidt (MA'74, PhD Johns Hopkins University) is on the faculty at Utah State University, Logan.
Betsy Burns (PhD'74), Arizona State, who has been serving on the AAG Council as treasurer of that organization, is president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. She was also recently appointed Director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Research on the Tempe campus. Her article on Vance's analysis of commuting applied to Tempe appeared in the APCG Yearbook vol. 54, 1992. Also on the elected AAG Council: Don Vermeer (PhD'64), George Washington University.
Phil Kane (PhD'75) retired at Cal State Northridge in January and is reportedly keeping busy at his country property in Ventura County.
Tom Veblen (PhD'75), having completed his three-year term as department chair at the University of Colorado-Boulder, spent most of 1993-94 in Argentina on a Faculty Fellowship with support from NSF and the National Geographic Society. In Colorado he is conducting research on the effects of climatic variation on fire regimes in Rocky Mountain National Park and on human impacts on fire regimes in the wildland /urban interface in Boulder County. His Clark University lecture "A Geographical Perspective on Forest Dynamics in the Southern Andes of Chile and Argentina," published as a separate in the Wallace W. Atwood Lecture Series, No. 7, pp. 1-35, is noteworthy for its introductory pages on the recent emergence of biogeography as a major research sub-discipline in our field, with a special salute to the role of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley department.
Tom has had recent (1993) papers in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia, Journal of Vegetation Science and others in press (jointly authored) in Journal of Ecology, Phytocoenologia, Ecology, and Remote Sensing of Environment as well as in a volume being published by the Consejo Superior de Investigacion Cientifica, Madrid, on Tierra del Fuego: Los Sistemas Naturales y su Ocupación Humana.
Hong-key Yoon (PhD'76), University of Auckland, New Zealand, was in Japan last year studying Japanese temple towns. He is still pressing forward on the concept of "geomentality." He writes that "my Berkeley teachers are still my mentors at heart" and that he is working on aspects of Carl Sauer's intellectual history, based in part on interviews while he was at Berkeley.
Nigel Smith (PhD'76) returns this fall to the University of Florida after a term at the World Bank. His "Colonization Lessons from the Rainforest," along with a paper by Jim Parsons, is reprinted in a recent Rainforest Reader edited by Susan Place.
Mary Adamson (MA'76), living in Pleasanton, writes that she is now Assistant to the Manager, Internal Auditing, at PG&E with wide-ranging responsibilities that include managing the Department's $4 million budget, supervising employees, negotiating contracts with vendors and consultants, drafting the department's annual Opinion Report and Strategic Plan and planning future budgets. It's a fascinating spot, providing insight into every segment of the company and its subsidiaries. Mary, happily married to Richard Harrington for some 20 years, reports recently encountering H. Gregory Smith (MA'78, PhD Oregon), now a principal engineer at MITRE Corporation. He expects shortly to be traveling to the former Soviet Union to work on an environmental initiative.
Mary-Louise Quinn (PhD'76) summarizes her several years of intensive Ducktown studies with a richly illustrated and technologically informed historical essay, "Industry and Environment in the Appalachian Copper Basin 1890-1930," in Technology and Environment, pp. 575-612, July 1993. This, her fifth and perhaps concluding paper on this little-studied but significant Tennessee example of environmental degradation and recovery, has brought her invitations to speak in coming months at annual meetings and symposia of both the Society for the History of Technology at Lowell, Mass., and the American Society for Environmental History. Her Copper Basin experience has convinced her of the advantages to the historical geographer of long association and repeated returns to a well-defined research area and topic. Her earlier work was with water resources issues.
Dan Holmes (MA'76) and wife Robin Spencer (AB'80), each have their own environmental consulting firms. They have recently adopted a newborn son, Spencer Daniel Holmes. The Holmes reside in Orinda. For many years Dan was departmental general factotum who knew where things were and if we didn't have them where to get them.
Janet Crane (PhD'77) is teaching geography at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston while pursuing a doctorate in Theology at Boston University.
John Monteverdi (PhD'78), San Francisco State University, continues to chair the Department of Geosciences (Geology, Meteorology and Oceanography) a post he has held since Fall 1990. He is editor of the American Meteorological Society journal Weather and Forecasting and is a member of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Severe Local Storms (thunderstorms that produce hail 3/4" or larger, straightline winds in excess of 50 knots and/or tornadoes). John's recent publications include: in press (with S. Johnson), A splitting storm with hook echo in central California, Wea. Forecasting; Convective and rotational parameters associated with three tornado episodes in Northern and Central California, Wea. Forecasting, 9, 285-300, 1994 (with J. Quadros); The operational usefulness of the SHARP Workstation in forecasting a mesocyclone-induced tornado event in northern California, Western Region Technical Memorandum WR-219, 22 pp., 1993.
John is still living in Rockridge and still runs a lot. His father passed away in January 1994.
Chris Exline (PhD'78) is into his 16th year as chairman at the University of Nevada, Reno. The University Board of Regents, citing the Department of Geography for outstanding accomplishment, has approved a new M.S. in Geography. The department has added two additional faculty members, one of whom is Scott Mensing (PhD'93) who joins Paul Starrs and Chris to establish a strong Berkeley foothold there. Chris continues to serve on the planning commissions of both the city of Sparks and Truckee Meadows. He is faculty athletic representative to the NCAA and campus NCAA Rules Compliance Coordinator. A full plate.
Stan Herwitz (MA'79, PhD Canberra), Clark University, writes on "The Assumption of Watertight Bedrock Underlying an Experimental Watershed" in Physical Geography, Sept–Oct. 1993.
Jerry Fish (PhD'80), Winthrop University (South Carolina), spent six weeks in the Philippines this summer. His wife Lita is a native of a village in Nueva Vizcaya province, northern Luzon.
Helena Ribeiro Sobral (MA'81) has been elected Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Sao Paulo Catholic University, Brazil. It is a four -year term with responsibility for five departments.
Nancy Lewis (PhD'81) is Associate Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Hawaii–Manoa.
Susanna Hecht (PhD'82), UCLA, has been working in the Bolivian Amazon, looking at the effects of colonization and commercial agriculture on patterns of deforestation, as well as studying Debt for Nature swaps in Latin America, and international environmental politics. She also has a project on shifting cultivation for the World Resources Institute. Susanna is much in demand on the lecture circuit, including stops at Harvard and Yale this Fall. Her recent articles have appeared in Bioscience, The Ecologist, Economic Botany, World Development, Journal of Peasant Studies, and New Left Review. Susanna has been awarded one of four field research grants under the University of Pittsburgh's Current Latin American Issues program on environment and social policy to work on 'Soil management technology of the Kayapo IndiansIndigenous technology and land use alternatives.' She has been dodging fate lately, as her house in Topanga was badly damaged in the Northridge Quake and nearly incinerated by last year's Malibu fire. She also has a house on California's Lost Coast, where she's serving on the Mattiole River Restoration Council when she's not riding horses or gardening.
Michael Storper, Professor in the newly-created School of Public Policy and Social Research at UCLA, published a co-authored book in French in 1993 on regions in France, Italy and the USA. The book will be published next year in English by Harvard University Press under the title Worlds of Production: the Economic Identities of Regions and Nations. In 1992, he co-edited a book with Allen Scott entitled Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development (Routledge, London). Recently he was a Fulbright scholar at the Institute of Geography, University of Copenhagen, where he was named to a three-year term on their advisory board. He has also been advising NordREFO, the Nordic countries regional development studies consortium, on a multi-year comparative study of regional industrial development there. In 1993, he was a visiting scholar at the French national research council (CNRS) and in 1994, a visiting professor of economics at the University of Lille. He gave two invited lectures to the OECD's Division of Science, Technology and Industry on the topic of the regionalization of technological learning, and its implications for contemporary economic policy, as well as lectures and conference papers in Greece, Morocco, France, Mexico and the USA. Recent articles have appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Regional Studies, Research Policy, and Economic Geography, as well as a number of foreign journals and edited books. He continues to work on the relationship between regionalization and globalization of the economy, especially in relation to questions of technology.
Victor Savage (PhD'82), University of Singapore, reviews the literature on human geography of Southeast Asia in the forthcoming 40th anniversary issue of the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. Other contributors: Karl Zimmerer (PhD'88) and Kent Mathewson on Latin America and Michael Watts on post-colonial Africa.
Nori Yagasaki (PhD'82), Yokohama National University, has seen an expanded and revised version of his doctoral dissertation on Japanese in California agriculture published in Japanese. Nori is spending a six month research leave in Berkeley, further extending his California studies. Last summer he was in western Kansas looking at the development of irrigation farming and the cattle feeding industry. He and his wife Nobuko became parents of a second child at the end of the year.
Mark Bassin (PhD'83), University of Wisconsin, is leaving the Madison department at the end of the coming year to take up an appointment at University College, London, where he joins David Harris (PhD'63), head of that institution's Institute of Archeology. Mark was on the Berkeley campus following the AAG meetings in San Francisco for an invited address before the Slavic and East European Center on "Geographical Space and National Identity in Pre -Revolutionary Russia."
Susan Christopherson (PhD'83), Cornell University, writes of "Market Rules and Territorial Outcome" in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, June 1993.
Paul Groth (PhD'83), formerly split between Landscape Architecture and Architecture on the Berkeley campus, now moves full-time into Architecture.
Mike Heiman (PhD'83), tenured as associate professor and chair of Environmental Studies and Geography at Dickinson College, Carlisle PA will be on sabbatical for the 1994-95 academic year. Chair of the Socialist Geography Specialty Group 1992-93 and treasurer 1993-94, he received one of a handful of grants through the EPA's Environmental Justice Grant Program whereby he travels all over EPA Region 3 giving workshops on accessing the Community Right-to-Know (toxic release inventory) database in CD-ROM format. These workshops are specifically targeted for low-income communities and/or communities of color heavily impacted by toxic emissions. So far he has been all over PA, West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland. The research on the institutional basis for environmental discrimination continues. He has published several book chapters and journal articles on the politics and geography of hazardous waste management and 'environmental racism," and has had several TV and radio interviews on these and related issues. A truly 'activist geography'!
Brian Godfrey (PhD'84), Vassar College, lectured on an AGS sponsored cruise around Cape Horn, from Buenos Aires to Santiago during the winter break. Brian had lived in Santiago, during a junior year abroad at Pomona College, leaving three days before the military overthrow of Allende in 1973. Director of Latin American Studies at Vassar, he continues working on a book project on Rainforest Cities of the Brazilian Amazon which he hopes to complete during a fall 1994-95 leave. His Brazil: Geography of a Tropical Giant will appear shortly in the American Geographical Society's Around-the-World Program series. Brian writes of "Regional Depiction in Contemporary Film," in the October 1993 issue of the Geographical Review.
Abdi Samatar (PhD'85), University of Minnesota, has been carrying out field work in Botswana and Somalia for another book to follow up on his excellent, The State and Rural Transformation in Northern Somalia (Wisconsin, 1989). This second book, tentatively entitled Class, State and Capitalist Development in Africa, challenges the philosophical underpinnings of the weak state versus strong civil society thesis. It centers the analysis on class unity, state formation, in regional and international context as the fundamental building blocks of successful capitalist states. He produced two book chapters in 1994: "The Differential Impacts of Structural Adjustment on African Agriculture: Banana and Rice Production in Somalia," and "Empty Bowl: Agrarian Economy at Crossroads." "Empty Bowl" examines the way the crisis of accumulation contributed to the collapse of the Somali state and fracturing of civil order.
Abdi has grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and Fulbright. He was quite visible on radio and TV a couple of years ago while consulting for the State Department and the United Nations on the Somali disaster.
Sally Horn (PhD'86), University of Tennessee, has had recent papers on the paramo lakes and fire history of Costa Rica in National Geographic Research and Exploration 9(1):86-103, 1993 and Quaternary Research 40(1):107-116, 1993. Sally recently served on two AAG elected committees, Honors and Nominations. Lately she has been extending her studies on vegetation and climatic change beyond Costa Rica to the near-by Appalachians and the high peaks of the Dominican Republic. She is chair of the AAG Biogeography Specialty Group.
Judy Carney (PhD'86), UCLA, has received tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor. A recent article on "Converting the Wetlands: The Intersection of Gender and Agrarian Change in The Gambia," appears in the October 1993 issue of Economic Geography.
Jamie Grodsky (MA'86) is chief counsel and senior staff officer on the House Natural Resources Committee chaired by Rep. George Miller of California. One recent assignment: an evaluation of how the American West is changing.
Jody Solow (MA'87, PhD Cambridge) is one of seven co-authors of The Hawaiian Spinner Dolphin, UC Press, 1994, 435 pp., $40.
Barbara Brower (PhD'87), after teaching this summer in the Texas-at-Oxford program, moves from the University of Texas–Austin to Portland State University. Barbara, with two children and a husband, moves to the longed for position in the Far West this fall. Recently she has been named editor of the bi-annual Himalayan Research Bulletin, a large-format journal of the Nepal Studies Association, which will follow her to Portland.
"Reinventing Cultural Geography," Annals AAG 83:1-17, September 1993, by Marie Price (AB'80, PhD Syracuse) and Martin Lewis (PhD'87) is a ringing refutation of the proprietary claims on 'cultural geography' of the 'new' cultural geographers who would so readily dismiss the historical landscape approach emphasized by Carl Sauer and practiced by the so-called 'Berkeley school'. There are commentaries and a rejoinder by the authors, in the December issue (83:520-22). The original paper was written while both were on the faculty at George Washington University from which Martin has moved on, first to Duke and now to Wisconsin–Madison.
In a path-breaking paper, Scott Stine (PhD'87), CSU Hayward, uses relict tree stumps rooted in present-day lakes, marshes and streams to establish records of historical drought at both northern and southern hemisphere sites far more severe than any known in recent times. His paper, "Extreme and Persistent Drought in California and Patagonia During Medieval Times," Nature 369:546-549, 16 June 1994, is proceeded in the same issue by an interpretive piece placing the new data further in context by F. Alayne Street-Perrott of the Environmental Change Unit of the School of Geography, Oxford University. Scott's report represents a major extension of his 1987 dissertation on the history of Mono Lake, CA, including buried tree-ring data from the High Sierra Lake Tenaya, and Patagonia. It supports the notion of a Medieval climate anomaly with protracted drought from before AD 852 to around AD 1350 except for a century of more normal precipitation from about AD 1112 to AD 1209. The work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
Matthew Milukas (PhD'87), with Lahmeyer International, a Frankfurt, Germany engineering firm, recently spent eight months in Lithuania. He was in the department in mid-September en route back to Frankfurt for his next assignment, quite possibly Indonesia, where he previously was basedas always on an energy development project.
During the past year Mary Beth Pudup (PhD'87), UC Santa Cruz, published an article "More than Ever, the Business of America" in Urban Geography and completed an edited book manuscript (a collection of 13 original historical essays) entitled Other Appalachias that will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 1995. She also received an "Excellence in Teaching Award" from the Academic Senate of UCSC for "providing a rigorous, thoughtful, and challenging theoretical perspective to students of Community Studies and for tirelessly assisting individual students through the Community Service Projects Committee" (the latter is a campus committee she has chaired for four years that awards grants for all manner of student initiated volunteer projects throughout the Monterey Bay region).
Karl Zimmerer (PhD'88), Wisconsin–Madison, has had recent papers on his research in Bolivia on soil erosion and land use in World Development and Economic Geography while to the Annals AAG (December 1993) he has contributed an important 'think piece' on Geography and the 'New Ecology'. Another article in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation is entitled "Spatial and Temporal Heterogeneity of the Environment of Tropical America."
Karl is on sabbatical leave for the fall quarter, finishing up a book-length manuscript, Seeds of Subsistence, based on his Andean research on native crops and cropping systems. Karl now heads the AAG Latin American Specialty Group.
Tom Eley (PhD'88), now with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service based in Fairbanks, Alaska, is subsistence coordinator for three national wildlife refuges (Arctic, Yukon Flats and Kanuti) that together comprise nearly 30 million acres, about the size of Nicaragua. He was recently sent by the Fish and Wildlife Service to China to provide guidance and counsel about conservation of biodiversity at the Fanjin Shan Nature Preserve in Guizhou Province, the karst landscape of the tourist brochures with its terraced rice paddies. It is within the historic panda range but they are no longer found there. There is interest in re-introducing them. Meanwhile golden monkeys, pangolins, a variety of turtles, and giant salamanders weighing to 100 pounds are enough.
Tom has remained active in academic geography, serving on graduate committees at the university and on the Geographic Alliance board for Alaska. He is director of its advanced summer institute for geography teachers.
Wayne Bernhardson's (PhD'89) Chile and Easter Island: A Travel Survival Kit has been published by Lonely Planet (1993). Wayne and Bob Raburn (PhD'88) have joined hands to do a guidebook in the Lonely Planet series on the Rocky Mountain states. Wayne, for starters, has taken responsibility for Wyoming, while Colorado falls to Bob. Bernhardson has been under contract with the Australian publishers for at least three years (Argentina, Chile, Baja California, etc.).
Paul Starrs (PhD'89), on leave for the year from the University of Nevada as a Ciriacy-Wantrup research fellow, not only played the key role, together with David Stoddart, in organizing the APCG and AAG extravaganzas. He had papers in Ubique (the AGS Newsletter) on "Cattle Free in '93'" and such off-beat outlets as the film quarterly Wide Angle (on Cormac McCarthy's novels and the films of Sergio Leone) and Spectrum , the Journal of State Governments (on regionalism) as well as a chapter in Emery Castle et al. eds., American Countrysides: Rural People and Place. His "Rodeo: You Wanna Be a Cowboy" appears in Karl Raitz, ed., Theater of Sports (Johns Hopkins). A well-timed piece on recent outmigration from California to the Great Basin (with Jack Wright) is due in the October Geographical Review . His "Looking for Columbus," it will be remembered, led off the Review for October 1992.
Stan Stevens (PhD'89), LSU, survived a year of commuting between Baton Rouge and Amherst, MA (where wife Piper Gaubatz is on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts), and has set out for 15 months in Asia. He and Piper are spending the summer together in Shanghai, and then Stan moves on for twelve months of research on land use, resource management, and economic and environmental change in a 25 village area of Nepal's eastern middle hills. This new cultural and political ecological study involves work in Sherpa, Rai, Magar, Gurung, and Hindu-hill caste communities and is being funded by a Fulbright -Hays Faculty Research Abroad grant as well as ACLS and SSRC. This is Stan's thirteenth trip to Asia, where he will have now spent a total of some 64 months.
Piper Gaubatz (PhD'89) finished her first year of teaching at UMASS, in mid-May and is continuing her field research on recent urban change, planning and development in eastern China (funded by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China). Last summer's work was in Beijingnow she is devoting eight months to fieldwork in Shanghai, Xiamen, and Guangzhou. She will return to UMASS for the Spring 1995 semester.
A spectacular wedding was that of Kim Charnofsky (MA'89) and Robin Sturgeon (AB'92) in the amphitheater of Berkeley's John Hinkle Park on June 25. It was an extraordinary musical occasion, extending for some seven hours, with musical members of both families much to the fore. Performances ranged from country and western to opera which cast Pavarotti into the shade. Performers ranged in age from about five to somewhat more senior.
Kim is in the clinical child/school psychology program at Cal State Hayward, a three year program that will prepare her to work as a school psychologist specializing in K-6 grades. She continues to teach music part-time to children, including lessons in musical geography.
Lucy Jarosz (PhD'90), who has become a pillar of the Geography Department at the University of Washington, has recent articles out in Society and Space on 'vampires and landscapes of fear' now that sounds intriguing! and in Geographical Review on 'taboos and work in Madagascar'. She has also begun an innovative program of integrating community work by students into courses, and is consulting with community colleges and other universities about doing the same.
Jack Wright (PhD'90), New Mexico State University, himself riding sky-high, is building a summer home in the Big Sky State (Montana). Not only was his Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling and Saving the West (Univ. of Texas Press 1993), a revision and extension of his PhD dissertation, winner of the AAG Jackson Prize, it was a finalist for "The Spur" of the Western Writers of America, as well as the book award of the Geographical Society of Chicago. It has stirred up no little dust, particularly in Utah and Colorado (see the review by Paul Starrs in the Annals, June 1994). A similar volume on Montana land titling history and the land trust movement is already under contract with Texas.
In addition Jack has had articles in the Geographical Review (vol. 83, no. 3, 1993) and the Journal of the American Planning Association (vol. 59, no. 4, 1993) as well as the AGS Focus (vol. 43, no. 1, 1993).
