It is difficult to strike an upbeat note with the passing of Jim Parsons. We shall miss him terribly. The Itinerent Geographer was Jim's project for half a century, and this one is replete with items from his treasure chest of a desk drawer. Jim would undoubtedly think we have become too big, too fancy, and too slow to press. But keeping tabs on Berkeley Geography is a large undertaking these days, thanks in large part to him. (We shifted to biennial publication because of the volume of material and expense of mailing). As we lumber on into the next century, we will need everyone's help in keeping us notified of the personal and collective legacy of Berkeley Geography; keep sending us updates as you can, and any items pertaining to Parsons, as he always did for Mr. Sauer.
Berkeley Geography is doing well, you may be assured. We have managed to grow in a time of austerity at the University of California, adding two new faculty members and soon a third to fill the Oberlander-Wells slot in Geomorphology. We welcome Lynn Ingram and Gillian Hart to our midst: both have tremendous energy and superb credentials, and their influence is being felt already. We have also added four faculty affiliates from other colleges on campus, three of them Geographers by training and one a Geographer by affection. The excellent offices of Profs. Fortmann, Groth, Radke, and Kondolf broadens our base of expertise and gives us a larger "footprint" on campus. Joint appointments of Professors Harley Shaiken and Jean Lave are currently in the pipeline, as well.
The period of austerity appears to be behind us. Budgets have waxed a bit, and we are in a position to consider new projects. There is a major GIS initiative brewing at Berkeley, in which we will play an important part (in case anyone thought we were blind to the need for more GIS support for students and faculty). We are working on winning further faculty positions in East Asia and Gender and Geography, obvious gaps in our offerings. We already play a leading role in International Studies, holding directorships of three campus institutes or centers through Professors Watts, Manz and Reed, and co-managing the Development Studies Major. Environmental Studies has been completely reorganized at Berkeley and a new Atmospheric Sciences center and program established, and we're active in both.
We will have a completely refurbished building by Fall 1998, just in time for the Department's Centennial celebration. It's amazing to think that the century clock has wound all the way around. I am particularly pleased, speaking of our own history, that we will finally be able to honor Clarence Glacken with a new seminar room. We have even revived his courses and spirit of reflection on the nature of human and environmental history. We'll also have more room to stretch our wings as we take over the entire fifth floor and half the first floor of the renovated McCone Hall.
And speaking of revivals: I hope to see you all at the Berkeley Party at the upcoming AAG meetings in Fort Worth!
Richard Walker
James Parsons, 1916-1997
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In Memory of James Jerome Parsons
1915-1997
Jim Parsons died at home in Berkeley this morning, February 19, of a brain tumor. He was 81. He is survived by his wife Betty of 54 years, a son David of Florence, Montana, a daughter Sally Stewart of Boise, Idaho, and three grandchildren, Parker Parsons and Alec and Sara Stewart. His son John preceded him in death.
Tomorrow will be the first day at Berkeley without Jim Parsons. He was Berkeley. He was Geography at Berkeley. He informed us, he encouraged us, he wrote letters on our behalf for grants and jobs, and he read what we wrote and told us to keep going, to write more, to go to the field more, and to stop by his office to chat, to see the latest books. His love for geography inspired us.
His Itinerant Geographer informed and entertained us and made us part of the Berkeley Geography family. His typed letters with the xxxxxx's were "keepers" (Bob West kept the 50 letters he received from Jim). He sent us clippings and articles with penciled notes signed JJP. And for those of us who went to a Parsons lecture we will always remember along with his vast knowledge that the lecture notes were on the back of an envelope or a grocery store receipt.
Jim and Betty made Geography at Berkeley a home, not just a department. At their Woodmont Avenue home in the Berkeley Hills they hosted generations of students, faculty and visitors. Jim was always in the department and received every visitor, every student who wanted to know something about somewhere, every faculty member who came in with that "you-can't-believe-what-just-happened" look. Invitations to go with Jim to lunch, on a field trip, or to a Cal basketball game were frequent outcomes of dropping by his office in the department. Many a student left Jim's office amazed and delighted that he was enthusiastic about what they were interested in and that he had loaned them just the right books to read more about it.
Besides supporting Berkeley Geography and Berkeley geographers, Jim and Betty supported Cal sports all of them. Football and basketball for surethey were longtime season ticket holders, but also they were there with "Go Bear" cheers for track, baseball, waterpolo. Jim and Dave Larson (PhD'94), wrote a wonderful Rumpelstiltskin piece on the Bears' rocky 1995 football season in the December 1995 California Monthly.
Born on November 15, 1915 in Cortland, New York, James Jerome Parsons was 13 years old when his family moved to Monrovia, California in 1928. He went to Pasadena Junior College where he was editor of the newspaper. He came to UC Berkeley in 1934 and majored in Economics, graduating in 1937. He had met Carl Sauer ("Mr. Sauer") and was impressed and interested in the cultural historical work that was developing in Berkeley's Geography Department. Jim and his good friend Joe Phillips went to the Sauer's Thanksgiving Day "Open House", where Jim got a chance to talk to Mr. Sauer. After graduation, Jim went to Ukiah, northern California, to work for the Redwood Journal , 1937-1938. Back at Berkeley, Mr. Sauer ran into Joe Phillips on campus one day and asked him, "Whatever happened to that fellow Parsons?" Joe replied, "He's working at a newspaper." "What a mistake," Mr. Sauer remarked, "he should be in Geography." Joe Phillips wrote a letter to Jim to tell him what Mr. Sauer had said and Jim wrote to Mr. Sauer that he was on his way back to Berkeley. Mr. Sauer never answered the letter but Jim came anyway and began graduate studies in Geography in the Fall of 1938.
Jim met Betty Rupp in a Geography class at Berkeley. Originally from Chicago, Betty's family had moved to Oakland when she was 8 years old. At the University of California she majored and graduated in Education. Jim was drafted into the Army in October 1941 and sent to Field Artillery School in Lawton, Oklahoma. Jim and Betty were married October 30, 1942 in Oklahoma City. Soon after Jim was sent to work on airphoto interpretation in Admiral Halsey's headquarters in New Caledonia. Jim was back in California on leave in August, 1945 when the war ended and he was discharged from the service.
Back in graduate school in the Fall of 1945, Jim quickly finished his course requirements, taught a Spring 1946 course, and left with Betty for Colombia in May of that year to do the research for his dissertation which he finished in 1948. In the Spring of 1948 Jim began teaching as an Assistant Professor. On how they came to Berkeley Betty said, "When Jim came back after the war, Mr. Sauer put him to work and we just stayed."
And stayed they did. Jim and Betty educated and fed several generations of geographers. Parsons' students were something special, even at Berkeley. They'd been to the field, the real field, out there places. They'd been to the archives, to the homes of regular people, they spoke the languages, and they wrote about those people and those places with a clarity and honesty rare in academia. They were Parsons' students afterall and he set a standard that nobody wanted to fall short of. He chaired 38 PhD's and they are some of geography's best.
Jim's wide range of books and articles are a lasting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of people and places, his beloved Antioquia, Colombia, to the presence of the past on the landscape, and to the geographer's sense of place (Jim once said he'd never forgotten a place he'd been to). Jim informed us about hops, coffee, the Miskito pine savanna, California, Colombia, green turtles, gold mining, bananas, fog drip, starlings, acorns and hogs, cork oak forests, ridged fields, African grasses in the New World, airline pilots, cattle, Canary Islanders, hillside letters, and more, much more. He gave us a greater appreciation of the nature and diversity of geography. His books and articles stand on our book shelves and remind us what a remarkable person we had the privilege to know and love. His geographer's life was something, something great, something good.
He published reviews of 76 books, 1946-1996. Jim's reviews were great reviews; for many of the authors they were the best review. Jim had a system. He'd read a book and if he liked it he would write a review and send it in, sometimes unasked for by a book review editor, but happily received and published. If he read a book and didn't like it, he didn't write a review. That way, he said, good books get noticed.
Jim was twice chairman of the Geography Department, a total of 11 years. He served several times as Chairman of the Center of Latin American Studies. He was President of the Pacific Coast Geographers in 1954-55, and President of the Association of American Geographers, 1974-1975.
He received many awards and honors, among which include a Guggenheim (1959-60), a gold medal from the government of Antioquia, Colombia (1977), AAG Honors (1983), the Berkeley Citation (1986), another gold medal from the government of Antioquia in 1987the Pedro Justo Berrío Medal, an Honorary Professor award from the University of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia, the "Trabajador de la Cultura" medal from the Instituto de Integración Cultural, Medellín, Colombia, 1989, and the Distinguished Mentor Award from the National Council for Geographic Education in 1991.
Jim retired in May, 1986. Many people came to that retirement party held at the Men's Faculty Club on the UC campus. But of course, Jim really didn't retire. He still came to work everyday, he still talked to young people interested in geography and places and people, he still came to the Tea Talks, and he and Betty still went on field trips and they still cheered for Cal teams.
This is just a snapshot of JJP amid the immediate sadness and grief from the passing of a great geographer and a good friend. At the same time I remember that Jim was always smiling. Jim smiled more than anyone I ever knew. And as we remember our times with him, in the office, at the Berkeley Hills house, at the Cal gems, in the field, we have to smile too. Those were some times.
At noon today a Berkeley geography student went to the main campus flagpole to lower the flag in Jim's memory. He was stopped and questioned by the Campus Police. At that moment Vice Chancellor Carol Christ walked out of California Hall and asked what was going on. The student, Francis Smith, said, "I was trying to lower the flag in Professor Parsons' memory, he died this morning." Vice Chancellor Christ told the Police, "Let him go. It is a campus tradition to lower the flag when a professor dies. For Professor Parsons the flag will be lowered to halfmast tomorrow."
A Jim Parsons memorial will be held later this year.
Bernard Nietschmann, February 19, 1997
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Gifts in memory of Jim Parsons may be contributed to two funds: one for undergraduates and one for graduates. For undergraduates: "The James J. Parsons Alumni Scholarship for Field Research in Geography," Alumni House, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-7520. For graduates: "The James J. Parsons Graduate Fellowship in Geography," c/o Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4740. |
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Lynn Ingram, appointed Assistant Professor July 1995, is a Stanford PhD in Geology. She will help fill the void left by Lisa Wells's departure. Lynn comes to us from the Lawrence Livermore Lab Center for Accelerator Mass Spectronomy (1992-1994) where she was a Department of Energy Global Change Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow with interests in paleoclimatic reconstruction of estuarine, marine and continental environments, integrating sedimentary, geochemical and paleontological data. Lynn has worked with marine sediments in the Pacific Basin, estuarine deposits in San Francisco Bay, mid-Cretaceous to early Paleocene marine sediments from the Italian Apennines and the Northern Pacific Basin. She has worked on high resolution radiocarbon dating of charcoal-shell pairs from the West Berkeley and Emeryville shellmounds from San Francisco Bay and from the Daisy Cave shellmound from San Miguel Island in the Santa Barbara channel to reconstruct paleo-upwelling along the California coast. |
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Associate Professor Gillian Hart transferred from City and Regional Planning to Geography in January 1996. Gill is a Cornell University PhD in Agricultural Economics. Prior to coming to Berkeley she was with Boston University and MIT. Gill has interests in international development. She works on agrarian development in Asia and Africa, focussing on issues such as the relationship between household production and gender, and on agriculture-industry linkages and the diversification of rural regions. Gill has recently focused on debates over agrarian reform in South Africa. |
The Department warmly welcomes five new Faculty affiliates. They join the Department as 0% joint appointments which allow them to participate in department advising, teaching and decisions.
Louise Fortmann, Professor of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, has research interests in property, poverty, gender, community natural resource management, U.S. and southern Africa.
Paul Groth (PhD'83), Associate Professor in Architecture, pursues research interests on cultural landscape studies, architectural history, and the United States.
Matt Kondolf, Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture, holds a Geography PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Matt is an expert in stream restoration, fisheries management, and environmental policy regarding freshwater resources.
John D. Radke, Geography PhD from the University of British Columbia, is an Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture. John is a GIS specialist interested in spatial systems for regional environmental planning, metrics for landscape characterization, and spatial interaction models.
The department also welcomes Adjunct Assistant Professor Pat Williams. Pat received his PhD in Quaternary Geology from Colombia University. His current research interests include the geological and cultural records of active tectonic processes and climate, with a focus on the Bay Area.
The department deeply regrets the departure of Lisa Wells, Assistant Professor, who in January 1996 left Berkeley to take up a position at Vanderbilt University, where her husband is also joining the faculty as a geologist. Lisa came to Berkeley seven years ago. She directed the work of 6 graduate students including one completed PhD, Mei-Ling Hsu, now on the faculty of Taiwan National University. Lisa will continue advising several of the others until they finish their degrees this fall. Vanderbilt's geology department is apparently thrilled to be hiring a "geographer," Lisa being comfortably on the edge of either discipline.
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News Flash The Department has begun a search for a physical geography faculty member to replace Lisa Wells. Applications closed on December 15th. |
The combined renovation and seismic projects move forward with a start date of late spring 1997, although the Fifth Floor will not be renovated until Spring/Summer 1998. The department will be entirely displaced for about six monthswish us luck!
The seminar room (575) has been renamed the Clarence Glacken Seminar Room. This space will undergo dramatic renovation, more than doubling in size. The Departmental "Tea Talks" will be held there in the future.
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Gifts to a lecture fund in the name of Clarence Glacken may be sent in c/o the Department of Geography, 501 McCone Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4740. |
| Barney Nietschmann was one of three faculty members to receive the Social Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award for sustained excellence in large undergraduate lecture classes. With it came a nice little check and his picture in the Berkeleyan. |  |
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Don Bain, Director of the Geography Computer Facility, was one of 11 individuals to receive the 1996 Chancellor's Outstanding Staff Awards at a May 8 ceremony. He also received the L&S Distinguished Service Award for 1995-96, along with a handsome check presented at this year's Commencement ceremony. |
In just two years Berkeley Geography will celebrate its Centennial. Gary Dunbar, emeritus at UCLA, explains in his 1981 essay on Geography at the University of California: "The first separate Department of Geography in a major university in the United States was created in the University of California in 1898 when the distinguished but aged scientist George Davidson was named Professor of Geography. The Department was created with the special purpose of serving the newly organized College of Commerce. Davidson's fifty-year career with the U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey had ended in 1895. He had served as a member of the Board of Regents of the University 1877-1884 and had been an Honorary Professor of Geodesy and Astronomy since 1870. It is not clear why a Department of Geography was created in 1898 but the precedent of European commercial schools was cited, and it is possible that the model of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where teaching of geography was initiated in 1893, was in the minds of those who established Berkeley's College of Commerce."
Davidson sought to find out what academic geography consisted of at the end of the 19th century and to organize his department accordingly. He studied the structure of geography at Oxford and Cambridge and corresponded with Ferdinand von Richthofen of the University of Berlin who had worked in California with the Whitney Survey of the 1860s. Surveying the literature of geography, writes Dunbar, Davidson found little agreement on procedures and few organizing principles.
The original prospectus of the College of Commerce encouraged students to spend one or more years in some foreign country in order to become familiar with its commercial and industrial conditions. A Travelling Fellowship in Geography, established in 1900 with the aid of Hearst money, sent at least one graduate to the Philippines.
A second appointment in the Department of Geography came in 1901 when Lincoln Hutchinson was made instructor in Commercial Geography. Afterward came the appointment of Ruliff Holway as Assistant Professor of Physical Geography in 1904. The first graduate degree, an M.A., was granted in 1908.
Michael Johns received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in July. Michael's book The City of Mexico in the Age of Diaz is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press. His article "The Making of an Urban Elite: The Case of Rosario, Argentina, 1880-1920," appeared in the Journal of Urban History, (Vol. 20(2):155-178, 1994).
Michael serves as Departmental Undergraduate Advisor as well as Advisor for both the Latin American Studies and Development Studies programs. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Historical Geography.
Barney Nietschmann, back on campus in 1995-96 after a year in Costa Rica doing research on coastal environments, has developed a new lower division class on "The Ocean World" with a first time enrollment of 200 students. That he received the 1996 Distinguished Teaching Award in Social Sciences suggests the level of student enthusiasm for his lectures. Seventeen members of the Geography 266 seminar worked with several NGOs to research and map the worlds dangerous beaches, indigenous divers and decompression sickness, the status of Caribbean coral reefs, and the present-day distribution and status of the West Indian manatee.
This summer Barney and grad student David Smethurst led a manatee research program under the University Research Expedition program, studying manatee in the Tortuguero area of Costa Rica. Barney was recently in southern Belize with grad student Charles Tambiah and other students to work with Mayan communities to inventory and map their lands for a Maya Homeland Atlas as part of a land rights initiative led by the Toledo Maya Cultural Council and the Toledo Alcaldes Association, assisted by the Indian Law Research Center. Geography in Action!
Nietschmann papers:
"Conservación, Autodeterminación y El Area Protegida, Costa Miskita, Nicaragua," in La Lucha Por La Tierra en La Ultima Frontera de Centroamérica , Mac Chapin, editor, pp. 1-54. Mesoamerica Año 16, Número 29, Antigua, Guatemala: CIRMA, 1995. (A ringing condemnation of the failure to include local Miskito people in the planning and implementation of the Miskito Coast Protected Area funded by US AID through the Caribbean Conservation Commission.)
"Protecting Indigenous Coral Reefs and Sea Territories, Miskito Coast, RAAN, Nicaragua," in Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas, Stan Stevens, editor, Washington, D.C.: Island Press, in press.
"Authentic, State, and Virtual Geography in Film," Wide Angle 11(3):4-12, October 1993.
"The Fourth World: Nation vs. States" in Recording the World: Geographic Perspectives on the 21st Century, G. Demko & W. Wood, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994.
Dick Walker continues on the rack between Chairing the department and fathering a four-year old. He did, nonetheless, manage to eke out several articles from a larger project on San Francisco and California, including a series on California's political-economic crisis of the 1990s, immigration to the state, the history of San Francisco's economic geography, both internal and in relation to the globe, the urban landscape of the Bay Area, and the battle to save the city from redevelopment. Walker remains editor of Antipode and advisor to a healthy number of graduate students (we won't even talk about the joys of committee service on campus). When all's said and done, however, he appears to thrive on being Chair and keeping the ship of state in good running order.
Allan Pred's publications this past year included "Out of Bounds and Undisciplined: Social Inquiry and the Current Moment of Danger," Social Research, Winter, 1995, 1,065-1,091, and "Interfusions: Consumption, Identity and the Practices and Power Relations of Everyday Life," Environment and Planning A, 28, 1996, 11-24. During his summer and December visits to Sweden he made several conference and guest lecture appearances. He is currently working on his next book, provisionally titled Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: Racisms, Racialized Spaces and the Popular Geographical Imagination in Sweden.
As president of the Pacific Division of the AAAS, Orman Granger gave the Banquet address at that organization's annual meetings in June 1996 at San Jose State, not surprisingly on the impact of changing climate. In addition to his time on the Graduate Council he has been named to the Executive Committee of the Center for Latin American Studies. Orman also serves as Departmental Graduate Advisor.
During the spring of 1996, Lynn Ingram started a new upper division course in Geological Oceanography. The course covers the morphology and geography of ocean basins, their history (plate tectonics, sea level changes, and the climatic record contained in oceanic sediments), submarine volcanisms and resources, and human influences on the coastal zone. She presented papers at: 7th Conference for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, La Jolla; Pacific Climate Workshop, Monterey, CA; and the Geological Society of America Annual meeting.
This year, four manuscripts resulting from oceanographic cruises made during the summer and fall of 1992 (with the International Ocean Drilling Program) were published in the Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program (Volumes 145 and 146). These papers represent the one cruise (Leg 145) of the North Pacific Transect, from Japan to Vancouver Island. The second cruise involved coring along the eastern Pacific margin. Lynn continues her paleoclimate work on sediment cores taken in the Santa Barbara Channel.
Other papers published this year include "A 20,000-year record of ocean circulation and climate change from the Santa Barbara Basin" in Nature 377, 510-514; "High-resolution dating of deep-sea clays using Sr isotopes in fossil fish teeth" in Earth and Planetary Science Letters 134, 545-555, and "Coral ages and island subsidence, Hilo Drill Hole" in Journal of Geophysical Research 101, 11,599-11,605.
Lynn also published several papers in the area of her ongoing work on reconstructing salinity and freshwater inflow to San Francisco Bay over the past several thousand years using isotopic tracers (strontium, oxygen, and carbon): "Isotopic records of Paleosalinity in San Francisco Bay Estuary" in San Francisco Bay: The Urbanized Estuary, 2nd Edition (T. Hollibaugh, Ed.), Amer. Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division; "A 2,000-yr record of San Joaquin and Sacramento river inflow to San Francisco Bay, California" in Geology 24, 331-334; "Stable isotope record of Late Holocene Paleosalinity and Paleodischarge in San Francisco Bay, California" in Earth and Planetary Science Letters 141, 237-247; and "Stable isotope and salinity systematics in estuarine waters and carbonates: San Francisco Bay" in Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 60, 455-467.
This year Lynn was made a faculty associate for the Archaeological Research Facility and a faculty curator for the Museum of Paleontology. She is also working with a new postdoctoral fellow in the department, Jo Lin, on paleoclimate records from lake sediments in the Great Basin, and assessing the origin of sediments entering San Francisco Bay using isotopic tracers. Another project begun this year involves the use of trace elements and isotopes to differentiate juvenile salmon races in the San Francisco-San Joaquin Delta.
Lynn received grants from the Inst. of Geophysics & Planetary Physics (LLNL) in support of a project on "Trace Metal Concentrations in Otoliths: Salmon Differentiation in San Francisco Bay Delta"; a DOE-WESTGEC grant to support "A High Resolution Analysis of Salinity Change and Wetland Development in the San Francisco Bay Estuary: 1000 PB to the Present"; an Esper Larsen Research grant for "Developing and Testing a New Dating Method for Deep-Sea Clays"; and support from USGS/NEHRP for "Slip-Rate Determination for the Pittsburg -Kirby Hill Blind Thrust Fault."
Michael Watts continued in his second year as Director of the Institute of International Studies. He has been overseeing activities associated with grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation on a variety of research concerns: political Islam, multilateralism, labor in the global economy, and African dissertation training among others. He organized workshops on global environmental regulation, the global food system, and comparing reentries into the world economy (Vietnam, S. Africa and Nicaragua). He delivered lectures in Havana, Glasgow, Copenhagen and Stanford in the last year. Watts has two new edited collections: Liberation Ecologies: Environment and Development in the Late Twentieth Century (with Dick Peet), Routledge, London, 1996, and Geographies of Global Change (with Ron Johnston and Peter Taylor), Blackwell. A sampling of recent publications includes: "Muslim Modernism? Islamism, Civil Society and Citizenship in a Nigeria City," Public Culture , Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 251-290, 1996; "Is Robin Hood Politics Possible? Populism, capitalism and the
political economy of autonomy," Review of International Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 1, 122-131, 1996; "Development III: The global agro-food system and the late twentieth century agrarian question," Progress in Human Geography , Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 230-245, 1996; "Working Class Heroes," Transition (with Iain Boal), #68, pp. 90 -115, 1995; "'A New Deal for the Emotions': Development Discourse and History," in Jonathan Crush (ed.), The Power of Development, London, Routledge, 1995. Earlier (1994) there were papers in the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Peasant Studies and The Ecologist .
Son Ethan grows beautiful and strong, and wife, Mary Beth Pudup (PhD'87) was recently awarded tenure at UC Santa Cruz. He's even getting some sleep.
During the past year, Gillian Hart made three trips to South Africa where she is engaged in research on industrial decentralization and the land question. This research will form the focus of her forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Remaking the Landscape of Apartheid: Local Dynamics, Global Connections .
An exchange program between Berkeley and University of Durban-Westville that she helped to initiate in 1992 now encompasses a far broader set of exchanges between the UC system and tertiary institutions in KwaZulu-Natal. As part of this broader initiative, Gillian is helping to organize a research group around questions of land and the socio-spatial reorganization of work. She has also been engaged in a variety of ways with South African government departments, trade unions, and a variety of non-governmental organizations at the national, provincial, and local levels.
In addition to delivering papers in South Africa, Gillian attended conferences in the Netherlands, the AAG, several Institute for International Studies workshops at Berkeley (including one on "Re-entering the Global Economy: Nicaragua, South Africa, Vietnam," which she co-organized), and was invited to give seminars in several places including Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford.
Over the past year, Gillian has published articles in Journal of Peasant Studies, Transformation , South African Labour Bulletin, and three edited book collections. She was invited to join the editorial boards of Feminist Economics , Oxford Development Studies and Journal of Peasant Studies.
Louise Fortmann gave this year's keynote address to an FAO/ECE/ILO Forestry Seminar on Ecosystem Management, organized a conference "Voices from the Commons" for over 500 people from 52 countries including villagers who spoke for themselves instead of being talked about, developed two new ESPM courses, and continues her research on community well being and forestry in California. She also learned what off-sides means in under 10 soccer.
Beatriz Manz continued with a research project on labor in the agricultural export sectors in Chile and New Zealand, which will be completed in 1997. Beatriz conducted research in the Guatemalan rain forest, where refugees have recently returned to the Ixcan area re-establishing communities. A book is in progress.
She attended several international conferences, and kept busy as Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies. She also serves on several the Inter-American Foundation Doctoral Fellowship Committee, the Advisory Committee for the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group.
Beatriz has recently published, "Fostering Trust in a Climate of Fear," in Mistrusting Refugees, E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen (eds.), University of California Press, 1995; "Indians, Land, and Poverty in Guatemala," in The Color of Hunger, David L. Shields (ed.), London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995; "Exodus, Resistance and Readjustments in the Aftermath of Massacres," and "Forward" in Massacres in the Jungle, by Ricardo Falla, Boulder: Westview Press, 1994; "Reflections on an antropologia comprometida: conversations with Ricardo Falla," in Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Culture , Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (eds.), University of California Press, 1995.
Paul Groth (PhD'83) reports a banner year for prizes. At the Chicago AAG meetings his book Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. (University of California Press, 1994) received the John
Brinckerhoff Jackson book prize. Later that spring, the Vernacular Architecture Forum awarded the book its Abbott Lowell Cummings Award, for the most significant contribution in that year to the study of vernacular architecture in North America. In the fall, the American Studies Association gave the book the runner-up position for the ASA's book prize. Since then, Groth has published a chapter on Skid Rows in Streets Of The World: Critical Perspectives On Public Space (UC Press), and three chapters on West Oakland's workers' housing and employment locations, in a book due out this summer from the Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State. The West Oakland work involved several Ph.D. students from Architecture and Planning, all paid by CALTRANS as part of the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project. The data gathered have begun to suggest a category of small housenot worker's cottage, not polite middle class housewhich Paul calls the "almost polite house." Away from home, Paul spent June of this year exploring small towns and Native American reservations in the Western states from Kansas through Arizona and Nevada.
Robert Reed continued as Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia studies, a capacity he has served in for the last seven years. But the coming year WILL BE THE LAST. Additionally he served as acting Chair of the Group in Asian Studies, which has grown to more than twice the undergraduates in Geography and about the same number of graduate students. He gave a paper at an international conference on "Vietnam Legacies: Twenty Years Later" at UC Davis in April. This August Bob was in the Philippines for the International Conference on the Centennial of the 1896 Philippine Revolution with a paper on the "Environmental History of Benguet."
Recent publications: The Challenges of Highland Development in Vietnam , A. Terry Rambo, Robert R. Reed, Le Trong Cuc, and Michael R. DiGregorio (eds.), Honolulu: Program on Environment, East-West Center, 1995, and with an article on "From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital: Reflections on the Colonial Origins, Urban Transformation, and Environmental Impact of Dalat"; "Preface" (with David L. Szanton) in Working Papers No. 2 (Agrarian Thermidor. Rural Dynamics and the Agrarian Question in Vinh Phu Province, Vietnam ), No. 3 (Recent Urbanization and Environmental Change in Viet Tri City, Vietnam ), No. 4 (Environment and Industrial Renovation in Vietnam ) and No. 5 (Gourou's Symbiotic Villages Revisited ), Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1995; and "Recent Urbanization and Environmental Change in Viet Tri City, Vietnam. Preliminary Research Observations" (with M. DiGregorio. P. Tuong Vi, P. Sullivan, D. Szanton, et al.). Working Paper No. 3 (Recent Urbanization and Environmental Change in Viet Tri City, Vietnam ), Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1995.
During Summer 1995 David Hooson attended the centennial celebrations at the London School of Economics, then gave a talk on Clarence Glacken at the I.G.U. symposium on "Nature and Culture in Geographic Thought" in Dublin. In August, he gave an invited lecture at the 150th birthday celebrations of the Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg. Spring 1996 saw David on "sabbatical-in-residence," with a new seminar on "Emerging Peoples and Regions of the former Soviet Union" (the book is still in progress on this theme). This August David is attending the I.G.C. in The Hague, Netherlands, with a paper on "The necessity for re-integrating geography." Wife Margaret Mackenzie is now a full professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
John Radke was appointed a Special Consultant on University Geographic Information Systems Education to the Commercial Remote Sensing Workforce 2005 initiative of the Commercial Remote Sensing Program Office (CRSPO), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He was on the Executive Committee of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) and is now a Member Delegate. John produced the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Brochure, which explains the organization, membership requirements, its objectives and the role it is playing in shaping GIS research in the US.
He received three grants this past year: Intergraph Corporation Software grant (UNIX based CAD) & ( PC and MAC based CAD) unlimited SITE license; City of Berkeley grant to construct "A Strategy to Enhance Geographic Information Systems within the City of Berkeley"; and East Bay Regional Parks District grant to "Construct a Desktop GIS of the East Bay Hills Fire Study." This was expected to be available on CD-ROM in June 1996.
Publications: "Modeling Urban/Wildland Interface Fire Hazards within a Geographic Information System," in Geographic Information Sciences, 1995, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-14; "Detecting Potential Erosion Threats to the Coastal Zone: St. John, USVI," International Journal of Marine Geodesy; "Boundary Generation for Disaggregate Point Data With Possible Applications to Ecological Classification," (forthcoming - September) GEOMATICA; "Spatial Decompositions and Detecting the Bounding Hull of a Set of Points,"(forthcoming) The Canadian Geographer. Professional Report: (with a graduate student Bruce Appleyard) for the Information Systems Group of the City of Berkeley: "A Report on Spatial Information Infrastructure in the City of Berkeley."
John presented papers at the 15th Annual ESRI User Conference, Palm Springs, CA; Beijing Urban GIS Workshop, Institute of Remote Sensing and GIS, Peking University and CPGIS, Beijing, China; Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Technology, Universitas Trisakti, Jakarta, Indonesia; Association of American Geographers 92nd Annual Meeting, Charlotte, North Carolina, April 10, 1996; CPGIS Informatics 96, West Palm Beach, Florida.
Jim Parsons' scholarly career (Berkeley all the way) is reviewed in one of the glass exhibit panels opposite the 5th floor elevator. The exhibit, which was compiled by Margarete Monaghan and Cherie Semans , is titled "Cal's Eclectic Geographer," and features his Colombian studies.
At the time of Jim's 80th birthday, to recall happier moments, a department gathering was hosted by David Hooson and Margaret Mackenzie at their Inverness retreat, in which a letter of congratulation from Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien was presented.
In July 1995, there had been another kind of celebration, the so-called Parsonsfest, a kind of Rocky Mountain rendezvous organized by former student Jack Wright, PhD'90, and an old Montana hand in charge. For a week, in a 14-passenger van, a group including Jim and Betty, Jack, Paul Starrs, Tom Eley, Ted Oberlander and Dave Larson roamed the back roads of western Montana, from Glacier Park to Butte and Bannack, with time out for an unforgettable day of whitewater rafting on Clark's Fork of the Columbia and for good Montana food, including a Bar-B-Q at Dave and Suzi Parsons' horse-and-pony farm, south of Missoula in the Bitterroot Valley.
This is the way we like to remember Jim.
A major publication event among our faculty has been the appearance of Jay Vance's The Northern American Railroad: Its Origin, Evolution and Geography (348 pp., $39.95, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). A labor of love many years in the making, it is a handsome and extensively illustrated volume of many maps with a striking color jacket of an early steam train heading across a western landscape. The book is dedicated to Jay's late wife Jean "because she appreciated the pleasure it gave me to write it and to present it to her as a gift on the day before her untimely death." The maps, which include end papers detailing in differential colors all of the major North American railroad routes in 1894 (front) and 1994 (back), are by Adrienne Morgan, many of the illustrations from the National Archives. With tens of thousands of attractive color brochures having been sent out by the publisher to members of railroad clubs and subscribers to railroad fan magazines, the book seems destined to chalk up hefty sales figures. A consistent theme is the differentiation of the North American rail system from that of Britain, seeking to promote rather than simply responding to development.
The acknowledgments include special thanks to the assistance of Charles Hadenfeldt of the front office and to Vic Ryerson (MA'71), one of Jay's students now with the legal branch of the California Public Utilities Commission. Although the U.S. rail system is the focus of the book there is an 80 page postscript on the historical geography of Canadian rail development.
Jay spent the summer at his Queen Charlotte Islands refuge at Masset, B.C.
Hilgard O'R. Sternberg devoted summer 1995 largely to the continuation of his research on hydrological and biogeographical phenomena first observed by him on the Carajás massif (Pará, Brazil) in 1991 and followed up in 1994. The study area is located on the isolated and virtually pristine South Range that emerges from the forested Amazon lowlands, cresting at about 900m a.s.l. Access was gained by helicopter, which shuttled Sternberg and field companions daily to the site. An inflatable raft, loaned by an unit of the Brazilian Army with headquarters in Belém, was loaded onto the chopper and used in the investigation of karst-like lakes on the narrow, rolling summit.
Following his Amazon-related work in Brazil, Sternberg conducted some research in Argentina and Uruguay, in connection with the Hidrovia, a project which has the support of the Inter-American Development Bank and aims to improve navigation of the 3,500 km-long natural waterway from Cáceres (in Mato Grosso) to Nueva Palmira, Uruguay. In a paper presented at the 48th International Congress of Americanists (Stockholm 1994), Sternberg had pointed to Hidrovia's potential for a calamitous modification of natural ecosystems, notably in the unique, species-rich, Pantanal.
In March-April 1996, the Sternbergs returned to Brasil on a short trip, limited to Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Ouro Preto.
Publications: "Waters and wetlands of the Brazilian Amazon: an uncertain future," in Nishizawa, T. and Uitto, J. I. (eds.) The Fragile Tropics of Latin America, Tokyo, United Nations University, pp. 113-179, 1995; and "Proposals for a South American Waterway," in Mörner, M. and Rosendahl, M (eds.) Threatened Peoples and Environments in the Americas . Stockholm, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Stockholm, pp. 99-125, 1995.
Ted Oberlander was on the road again last spring when he and wife Barbara were in Turkey and Greece for several weeks. A revised version of his Physical Geography text, a sixth edition (with Robert Muller) is in press with Longmans.
Even in retirement Dan Luten's propensity for dealing with numbers (in any form) continues to be appreciated. A Christmas letter notes that he is treasurer of the local League of Women Voters Foundation (Marion of course does most of the work), treasurer of his community preparedness group "Grizzly 1100 Neighbors," and "class agent" for his Dartmouth College class of 1929 responsible for collecting perhaps $50,000 from the surviving (60-75?) members of the original 638. It might be noted that he has himself contributed generously to the AAG and to the department's Sauer Lecture Fund as well as numerous other unidentified causes (with an occasional extra boost from his Shell Foundation ties).
Our faculty continue to attract public attention. The Berkeleyan, campus weekly, has carried features on the work of Hilgard Sternberg ("Is it too late for the Amazon?") and Roger Byrne ("The independent domestication of plants around 10,000 years ago in widely separated world areas was an indirect response to climatic change"). Richard Walker's incendiary article on "California Rages Against the Dying of the Light" (New Left Review Jan-Feb 1995) is quoted briefly in the Alumni Association's California Monthly (June 1995) as evidence that, however well they keep their political views out of the classroom, some members of the Berkeley faculty "can still sock it to the powers that be." In the same alumni mag (December 1995) Jim Parsons, with Dave Larson (PhD'94), recounts the fate of the Bears' 1995 gridiron debacles.
A note for Sauer bibliophilesA Spanish translation of Carl Sauer's Early Spanish Main has long been rumored but never confirmed (there is no copy in the UC Library system). Here is the citation: C.O. Sauer, Descubrimiento y dominación española en el Caribe (transl. Stela Mastrangelo). 455 pp. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1984.
And there is now, too, a Spanish translation of Clarence Glacken's Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967)Huellas en la playa de Rodas: naturaleza y cultura en el pensamiento occidental desde la Antiguedad hasta finales del Siglo SVIII , 700+ pp., Barcelona: Serbal, 1996. In a 15 page introduction Horacio Capel of the Universidad de Barcelona describes it as "majesteriala work of immense erudition, the product of patient investigation through two decades and a prolonged preoccupation with environmental problems and the relations between society and nature." Glacken (1909-1989) joined our faculty in 1952 and retired in 1976.
A 1992 survey recently released by the National Research Council (NRC) showed Berkeley with both the largest number and the highest percentage of top-ranked doctoral programs of any university in the country. Overall 41 PhD fields were evaluated by 8,000 faculty peers. All but one of Berkeley's 36 graduate programs were rated in the top in terms of 'faculty competence and achievement.'
Geography tied for sixth, down three rungs from earlier rankings. The top ten:
1 Penn State
2 Wisconsin
3 Minnesota
4 UCSB (!)
5 Ohio State (!)
6 Berkeley
6 Syracuse
8 UCLA
9 Clark
10 Washington
Our NRC rating in Geography fell from #3 to #6, which was very disappointing. We believe it reflects less on us than on changes in the discipline and oddities in the rating system. Two departments that leapt over us have specialized in Geographical Information Systems and computer
methods, and have received huge amounts of grant money to do so. Important measures of excellence were left out of the NRC study, particularly job placements and the writing of books. Our only shortcoming was low productivity among some faculty, which brought down the department average.
On September 20, 1995 Robin Donkin, Jesus College, University of Cambridge spoke at the Alumni House on "A Servant of Two Masters," reviewing his life work at the margins of history and geography. Donkin, a Reader in Historical Geography at Cambridge and a member of the British Academy, has written on such diverse subjects as Cistercian monasteries, agricultural terracing, the culture history of pearls and pearl-fishing, the Muscovy duck, the Guinea fowl, and the history of spices and aromatics. He was introduced by David Stoddart. Robin remained in the department for three days, his first visit in more than 30 years.
The 16th of the Sauer lectures series, on April 4, 1996, featured Yi-Fu Tuan, Vilas Professor of Geography at the University of Wisconsin and himself an alumnus of the Berkeley department (PhD 1957). His subject was "Escapism: Another Look at Nature and Culture." In his characteristically low-keyed style he kept a near capacity Alumni House audience entranced with his philosophical reflections on the human condition and its interactions with Nature. Yi-Fu was introduced by David Hooson, chair of the Sauer Lecture Committee.
Both lectures were followed by receptions and a dinner honoring the speakers at the Parsons.
The fund supporting the Sauer Lecture series, administered through the Dean of the Graduate Division, is scraping the bottom of the barrel. Continuation of the lectures, which have done much to draw the attention of the campus to Geography and the achievements of Geographers, will depend on the results of a new round of fund-raising which it is hoped will secure the program's continuance.
Contributions can be sent via the Department Chair.
In summer 1995, Cherie Semans and Don Bain moved their offices into 515 (the former section classroom). Besides providing much more space, the collaboration has been beneficial since many of Cherie and Don's activities overlap.
An increasing amount of Cherie Semans' work is on computer these days, although her technical pens are still required on occasion. Cherie has also received a Committee on Teaching grant to do further work on the Geo-Images project. She will be adding units on aerial and ground-level California, Alaska and Moorea to her existing Hong Kong collection.
During the last two years, Cherie has had several opportunities to travel, from Cook's Bay in Moorea to Cook Inlet in Alaska. In between these two venues, she has been working with California county fairs and festivals (Gilroy Garlic Festival, Indio Date Festival, etc.) as a cartographic consultant. She has also been chosen to re-do the school district boundaries in the West Contra Costa Unified School District. The elementary and secondary school boundaries (formerly Richmond Unified) were formulated 30 years ago, so updating them based on new demographics was long overdue. Other projects she has collaborated on include working with organic farmers to map their property for field management and reconstruction of a container ship collision off of Busan Harbor which she worked on with Don Bain.
Though a Cal alum from the start, Cherie's work has also caught the eye of Stanford University. In 1995 she was approached by Stanford Athletics to do a map of Stanford Stadium, similar to the one she had done for UC
Athletics. It should be published for the 1996 season.
In her copious spare time, Cherie continues her many years of geography outreach work by preparing and teaching map projects for both her sons' elementary classes, often on a weekly basis. She will be advising the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose on mapping exhibits and workshops.
Don Bain received his 10 Year service pin from UC Berkeley in August.
It's time for a hand to Natalia Vonnegut, rounding out 20 years of distinguished service in our departmental office, as either undergraduate or graduate assistant, then as Administrative Assistant and promoted to Management Services Officer in 1995, indisputably a new record. Try to imagine where we might be without her!
Charlie Hadenfeldt and Neil Maxwell of the Sponsored Projects Office worked together to be the first on the UC Campus to electronically transmit a proposal on the Net to NSF. He also travelled to Montana this summer to the wedding of his daughter, Samantha.
Luda Requadt travelled to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival three times this past year to see the entire repertoire. She will be doing the entire opera season in San Francisco, and will be taking a skiing vacation over Christmas in the Sierra.
The Department saw two staff departures in Fall 1996. Margarete Monaghan, after five years in Geography, resigned in October to move to Madison, Wisconsin. Charlie Hadenfeltdt, after 13 years with the Department, transferred to the Sponsored Projects Office with a promotion.
Fundraising has become a regular part of Berkeley life in the wake of state cutbacks. 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 warmly 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, following the McCone Hall renovation: furnishings for the new cartography lab, Glacken Seminar room and media classroom. 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@berkeley.edu).
We appreciate your generosity over the years!
In the Geography Computing Facility's main laboratory Power Macintosh is now the rule, with 24 megabytes RAM and 17-inch 24-bit color monitors standard. Ever larger file sizes have made diskettes obsolescent, at least for those doing graphics, so all workstations have been equipped with 100 megabyte Zip drives. Software advances are now more often evolutionary than revolutionary, with FreeHand 7 and KPT Bryce 2 the most notable advances. But an exception is Microsoft, whose Word 6 for Macintosh was a disaster, forcing users to stick with discontinued version 5.1a.
The fall semester computer class and the spring semester cartography course continue to equip undergraduate students with essential computer skills. The curriculum has gradually evolved: html programming (for the World Wide Web) has replaced desktop publishing in the computer course, and a new unit on "maps for the web" was added to cartography.
The troubles at Apple computer have naturally been of concern in this Macintosh-oriented facility (as on the Berkeley campus in general, where Macs greatly outnumber PC's). The Macintosh is still a more sophisticated and mature platform than Wintel, and in the Facility's areas of emphasis (publication graphics and multi-media) it continues to dominate the industry. Significantly, most of the leading programs for Windows 95 are precisely those Macintosh applications used and taught in the Facility for the past decade.
The biggest change in the Geography Computing Facility has been the new importance of the World Wide Web. Former professor Lisa Wells made the most effective instructional use of the web, placing her notes on the server the same day she gave each lecture. The departmental web site, now administered by Natalia Vonnegut, provides necessary information about the department, its program, and its people. New students increasingly report that most of their questions were answered by the department's web pages (http://WWW-Geography.Berkeley.EDU/BerkGeog.html). Many students have personal pages, and two of them, Gan Golan (Gone Beyond ) and Matt Jalbert (Exuberance) have won special recognition.
Also on the web, The Geo-Images Project continues to grow. Four new chapters have been added: Snow as a Resource, and Afghanistan in 1976-78 by Douglas Powell, Images Illustrating Principles of Geomorphology by Lisa Wells, and A Geographer on the Kiwai Coast of New Guinea by Tom Eley. To access Geo-Images use any browser to go to http://WWW-GeoImages.Berkeley.EDU/GeoImages.html .
Don Bain was immediately struck by the geographic potential of Apple's QuickTime Virtual Reality panorama technology when it first appeared in late summer 1995. These computer images allow the viewer to look up, down and all the way around 360°, controlled by the mouse. Don acquired the necessary hardware and software and has ever since been obsessed with creating panoramas everywhere he travels.
The QTVR panorama collection on Geo-Images now numbers over 100, and includes images from South Pacific islands, remote missions in the desert of Baja California, the lights of Las Vegas, winter scenes in Owens Valley, waterfalls in Yosemite, stormy weather on the Big Sur coast, the temporarily reborn Tulare lake, familiar Berkeley campus sights, redwood groves, magnificent scenery in British Columbia, the Alaska Highway, dredge tailings along the Klondike River, and even the midnight sun in the Canadian Arctic. To access these images you will need NetScape 3 (or later) and the QuickTime plug-in from Apple (available free for both Macintosh and Windows). The QTVR panoramas are listed under Geo-Images (see above).
New department T-shirts were available proclaiming "Berkeley Geography" under a star -shaped polar map projection of the world. Proceeds go to the Association of Undergraduate Geographers (AUG) which supports the annual fall potluck, 'beer on the balcony' and similar functions.
Marjorie McPhillamey, departmental secretary in the later Sauer years, and a long-time resident of Washington D.C. where her husband Bob is a retired attorney, reminisces in a recent letter on those pre-computer days:
"Dr. Sauer suggested a system of dictation that certainly saved time over transcribing my poor shorthand. I rolled the typewriter by his desk and typed the letter as he dictated. His style was contemplativeno rapid fire memosand I could keep up with him fairly well. He did not care that the letter be in the best secretarial school format, and would make corrections and additions to the original before signing it. Once I did not recognize a word he used and thought it was something else. When he proofread the letter he said, 'That's not the word I used, but I like yours better.' Considering my inadequacies and his expectations we had a very nice relationship. He was a very special person in my life, as he was in many others."
Marjorie has devoted much of her life for the past 30 years to the Welcome to Washington International Club, a volunteer group of some 900 women with a wide range of programs to welcome and extend friendship to women from foreign countries. She has been on the Board of Directors since 1971 and was for six years its executive secretary. There is no central office and, she says, she has ended up as a result with a "houseful of files." Her address is 4100 W Street NW, #401, Washington D.C. 20007.
Another former departmental mainstay from days of yore, Wester (Lowdermilk) Hess, (1952-57), who was lured years ago to the Washington area by her husband, physicist Bill Hess, returned to Berkeley this summer on Bill's retirement with NASA, taking up residence in the Lowdermilk family abode on the northside, only a couple of blocks from the campus. (1620 LeRoy Avenue, Berkeley 94709)
Robert Argenbright (PhD'90), University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Susan Craddock (PhD'94), University of Arizona
George Henderson (PhD'92), University of Arizona
Tad Mutersbaugh (PhD'94), University of Iowa
Lydia Savage (AB'90), University of Southern Maine
Krisnawati Suryanata (PhD'95), University of Colorado at Denver
Geography courses with enrollments exceeding 100: 150AC* (F'94, Walker); 159AC (S'95, Manz); 110 (F'95, Walker); 30 (S'96, Nietschmann); 130 (S'96, Watts); 159AC (S'96, Shaiken).
Lower division course offerings have been increased, replacing the half-century old triad of Geography 1, 4 and 7, e.g. 10 (World Regions/Hooson), 20 (Global Restructuring--Pred), 50AC* (California and the Pacific Rim--Walker), 40 (Global Change--Ingram, Granger). [*American Cultures course]
New upper division courses: 145 (Geological Oceanography--Ingram), 149 (Coral Reefs and Islands--Stoddart), 161 (South Africa--Hart), 177 (Conservation Geography--Nietschmann).
New graduate seminars: 203 (Nature and Culture: Social Theory, Social Practice and the Environment--Walker), 214 (Development Theories and Practices--Hart), 215 (Seminar in Comparative and International Development--Hart), 241 (Geochemical Approaches to Modern and Past Environments and Climates--Ingram), 290 (Physical Geography Research Seminar--Ingram).
Innovative new classes have become more the rule than the exception. A new course on the 'Southern Border,' taught by Beatriz Manz (Geography) and Harley Shaiken (Education) even included a three-day field trip to Tijuana, visiting maquiladoras, shantytowns, and Border Patrol offices.
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) is being taught by John Radke, a geographer (UBC) in Landscape Architecture and Faculty Affiliate in Geography, and is cross-listed as Geography 188X. And that is not all. According to the journal GIS World the Berkeley Research Program in Engineering Planning and GIS is "the Best University Geographic Information Systems site," based on a survey by users. Robert Twiss of Landscape Architecture said "that the most likely basis for this wide interest is a feature developed by his group called GRASS-Links, which he believes to be the world's first on-line service of this type providing access to the San Francisco Bay/Delta geo-database on environmental and land use." See for yourself at www.regis.berkeley.edu/
Fall 1994: PhD Candidate Gray Brechin (Urban Field Study)
Spring 1995: Tim Krantz (PhD'94) (Global Environments; Biogeography); Bill Alevizon (The Ocean World); Krisna Suryanata (PhD'94) (World Agricultural Systems); Ben Crow (Economic Geography of the Non-Industrial World); Peter Rosset (Political Ecology of the Third World); Iain Boal (The Nature of Science and Technology)
Fall 1995: Bill Alevizon (the Moorea course); Gray Brechin (Urban Field Study)
Spring 1996: Eric Edlund (PhD'96) (Topographic Map Analysis and Field Methods for Physical Geography); Iain Boal (Nature and Culture)
Through an on-going joint arrangement with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Douglas Johnson (Clark University) was Visiting Professor during Spring 1995. Elizabeth Vasile (PhD'96), under a similar sponsorship taught the Middle East course and a upper division seminar on Migration in the Modern World during Spring 1996.
Geography 180 Field Trips, Spring, 1996
Eric Edlund (PhD'96) made his debut this spring as a Visiting Lecturer teaching Geography 180, "Field Methods for Physical Geography." The class emphasized field-based research, surveying and mapping techniques. Field work was undertaken in such challenging environments as salt marshes (deep mud) and the slopes of Mt. Diablo (deep poison oak). The semester featured two extended field trips.
Field Trip One: Death Valley
This was a memorable five-day trip in late Marcha little too early for wildflowers, but excellent weather! On day two, students admired the view across the valley floor from windswept Aguerreberry Point in the Telescope Range (photo 1). The next day, the team used map,
compass, and hand levels in an attempt to occupy the lowest point in the United States (-282 feet below sea level). The sight of 11 students wandering across the salt pan (photo 2) brought to
mind the words of Edward Abbey: "Ah to be a buzzard now that spring is here." Fortunately, all eleven survived for subsequent explorations of Zabriskie Point, Salt Creek (home of Cyprinodon salinus, the surprising desert pupfish), Titus Canyon, and the Stovepipe Wells sand dunes (by moonlight no less). Some of the steep alluvial fans along the east side of the valley feature varying shades of rock varnish, indicating the relative age of different parts of the fan (photo 3).
Helpful hint for desert travelers after a hot day in the field: campers may use the showers and the pool at the Stovepipe Inn for $2.00 per dayunlimited access!
For some students, the highlight of the trip was the Racetrack, a high-elevation playa flanked by spurs of folded Cambrian dolomite. Here, boulders of various sizes have apparently been pushed hundreds of feet across the lakebed by wind (photos 4, 5). This year's students offered
hypotheses for the specific meteorologic mechanisms required to transport boulders; next year's class will use the department's total station surveying equipment to establish baseline positions on each of the itinerant rocks.
In an inspired conclusion to the desert adventure, the group set up their last night's camp on the shoulder of Hunter Mountain, elevation 7,000 feet, with a spectacular view of the Sierra Nevada; one inch of snow fell during the evening, and the nighttime low temperature dipped below 30°F. Everyone was smiling the next day, which may have induced the instructor to press his luck in scheduling field trip number two....
Field Trip Two: Little Yosemite Valley
The group took a chance on the weather in planning an early May backpacking trip to Little Yosemite Valley, ostensibly to examine evidence of late Pleistocene glaciation as mapped by Francois Matthes, but in fact as an opportunity to practice backcountry gourmet cooking. Two nights were spent at the LYV campsite, conveniently located next to a well-preserved recessional moraine. Hiking up the Merced River toward Echo Valley, students observed that glaciated valleys may indeed be V-shaped. The loop hike around Moraine Dome featured snowpack above 7,500 feet, but luck and the weather held for the entire weekend, and 100% of the students straggled onto the Ahwahnee patio for afternoon refreshments and a Sunday paper. What were you expectinguncivilized wilderness?
Eric will reprise both field trips in Spring, 1997make your reservations early! Many thanks to Doug Powell for providing reading material on various aspects of Death Valley and the California Desert. Further details on these field trips may be found on the department's web page.
Cherie Semans received a Fall 1995 Committee on Teaching grant for travel to Moorea to work with the "Biology and Geomorphology of Tropical Islands" classa 13 unit interdisciplinary class offered as Geo. 142, E.S.P.M. 112, I.D.S. 158 and I.B. 158. She worked with the 15 "Moorea" students in Berkeley before they left for their 2 month stint in Moorea, French Polynesia, and then traveled down there with her two sons (Matt, 12, and 6 year old Robert) for a week in tropical paradise. Work consisted of approximately a half day of consulting on individual student projects, and a half day of touring and snorkeling. By the time students had returned to Berkeley in late November, Cherie had completed a digitized map of Moorea for their use. Don Bain added contours to the map, which remains a resource for anyone interested in the island. Cherie and Don, who also travelled to Moorea in the fall, gave a joint tea talk, "Moorea: Geographical Research Possibilities in a Tropical Setting" in February 1996. Cherie plans on returning to Moorea this fall with the 1996 "Moorea" students.
Summer 1996 provided Cherie with several teaching opportunities. She taught 186, Map Reading, Analysis and Interpretation class, during the first six-week session, and then launched two new courses. Geography 179C is a three-week course on various aspects of travel. Graduate student Kate Davis gave a guest lecture on American women explorers and travelers during one meeting, and travel as represented on the internet was explored as were several other topics. Geo. 182 is a new field course focusing on rural California. Some of the places visited include Vichon winery, an alpaca ranch in Napa, a goat farm and cheese factory in Sonoma county, an abalone aquaculture farm on Tomales Bay, Angel Island, the Sonoma County fair, an exotic bird farm in Santa Rosa, an organic fruit farm in Brentwood, the Chinese community of Locke in the Delta and several places in the Monterey/Big Sur area.
Summer 1995: Courses were taught byLisa Husmann (China and Central Asia); Lisa Husmann and Karl Roam (The Geography of Health and Disease); Cherie Semans (World Peoples and Cultural Environment, and Map Reading, Analysis and Interpretation); and Krisna Suryanata (Natural Resources and Population)
Summer 1996 saw a doubling of course offerings including four 1-unit courses offered during the three week sessions: Courses were taught by Susanne Freidberg (Natural Resources and Population), Lisa Husmann (China and Central Asia; Health and the Environment), Doug Powell (Global Environmental Change; California), Victoria Randlett (The American West), Amy Ross and Elizabeth Oglesby (Revolution and Counterrevolution in Latin America), Susan Pomeroy (a two module course on The Geography of Cyberspace), and Cherie Semans (Travel; Rural Field Study; and Map Reading, Analysis and Interpretation).
The 1995 Commencement saw 51 AB degrees, 5 Minors awarded plus 10 MAs and 10 PhDs. The Departmental Citation went to Matthew Jalbert, the Lucille McClish (Oberlander) Award in Physical Geography to Jacob Schweitzer, and the David Hynding Award in Cartography to Rini Keagy. Professor Harley Shaiken (School of Education) was Commencement Speaker, stepping in a short notice to replace Mike Davis who had to back out because of illness.
Music was provided by the Southern Oscillation Group (Brad Beck, Barbara Hadenfeldt, Victoria Randlett, Robin Sturgeon, Dick Walker and Charles Hadenfeldt).
The May 1996 commencement ceremonies were held under rain-threatening skies, and in fact the location to hold them wasn't decided until an hour before it began. 37 AB degrees were granted, 10 additional students received a Minor in Geography. There were five MAs and seven PhDs who participated in the ceremony. Tenara Blood gave the undergraduate remarks and Susanne Freidberg the graduate address. Mike Davis , author of City of Quartz, was the Commencement Speaker. Kathleen Mikulis received the Departmental Citation, Francis Smith was awarded the Lucille McClish (Oberlander) Award in Physical Geography, and Jennifer Freeman received the Daniel Hynding Award in Cartography.
The Coral Riffs (Victoria Randlett, Kim Charnofsky, Robin Sturgeon, Brad Beck, Charles Hadenfeldt) performed, and a reception followed (held indoors for the first time in memory!). All was orchestrated masterfully by Luda Requadt .
Visitors,1995-96
William Alevizon
Niels Fold (Institute of Geography, University of Copenhagen)
Michael Landzelius (Göteborgs University)
Cindy Li (PhD Oklahoma)
Jo Lin (PhD Columbia University)
Andrew Jameton (University of Nebraska)
Ravi Rajan (Ciriacy Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow)
Krisna Suryanata (PhD UC Berkeley)
Carol Zabin (Ciriacy Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow)
Visiting Scholars, 1996-97
Georges Anglade (University of Quebec)
William Denevan (University of Wisconsin)
Niels Fold (University of Copenhagen)
Magnus Jirström (Lund University)
Jo Lin (Postdoctoral Fellow)
Alan Taylor (Pennsylvania State University)
Huei-Min Tsai (Fulbright Fellow, National Taiwan University)
Bruce Willems-Braun (University of British Columbia)
Carol Zabin (Ciriacy Wantrup Fellow)
Former Ciriacy Wantrup Scholar Priya Rangan presented a paper entitled "Putting the Wise Use Movement in Its Place," (with Brigitta Bode, Ph.D. candidate, ESPM Berkeley) at the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, June 5-8, Berkeley. She is currently revising an article on "Property vs. Control: Understanding the Role of the State in Natural Resource Management" which seems, by all accounts likely to emerge in Development and Change . Priya has an essay in Liberation Ecologies: Environment and Development in the Late Twentieth Century, Michael Watts and Richard Peet (eds.), Routledge, London, 1996.
Among the wide ranging speakers at the traditional Wednesday Geography 4 o'clock "teas" were geographers David Harvey (Johns Hopkins), Marvin Waterstone (Arizona), and John Cloud (UC Santa Barbara); anthropologist Arturo Escobar (Massachusetts, now at UCB), Andrew Jameton (Nebraska), Norman Miller (LLNL), Ben Crow (UCSC), Ivan Evans (UCSD), Daniel Singer (Paris), Richard Ford (Stanford), Charles Rutheiser (Georgia State), Michael Kearney (UCR). There were several Berkeley graduate students as well as campus visitors from environmental sciences, education, and engineering.
A bombshell was dropped on the Berkeley campus in early July when Chang Lin Tien, Chancellor for the past six years, announced that he is stepping down not later than June 1997. His term in office has been especially marked by his strong support of affirmative action (in the face of Regents actions) and by highly successful fund raising from alumni, including those from his native China and Taiwan.
From the Daily Californian, May 14, 1996: "The salary gap has driven some Berkeley professors to consider leaving the UC system. 'There has been such a crisis in education in California in the last four years.' said geography professor Michael Watts. 'The entire state system has been hit with massive state budget cuts. Myself and many of my colleagues are beginning to look at other sorts of institutions.'"
But things are now looking up. The Governor has signed off on a plan that will allocate significant funds for increases in faculty salaries.
There is a fine new library, with numerous current periodicals and newspapers, right next door to our McCone, in the Journalism School building at North Gate. And it's open to the public.
The Memorial Glade, between our building and Doe Library, where the T-Buildings long stood, has been grassed over, providing a magnificent view of Doe Library. So has Memorial Stadium, after 20 years of Astroturf.
A hang-out of 30 years standing for geographers, the Cafe Espresso (The "Depresso") presided over by the jovial Lino Pellegrini across the street on Hearst just below Euclid, closed its doors on June 26, 1995. Lino, who came to the U.S. from Italy in 1965, blamed a doubling of the rent as the final straw. Some will remember it as Barney Nietschmann's "other office," others for its minestrone, lasagna, or cappuccinos. The Dynasty , Berkeley's oldest Chinese restaurant, also closed on Euclid.
The Office of the President announced in March that it is moving, but that it will remain in Oakland. It is leaving the current state-wide offices near Lake Merritt when its lease expires in May 1998 and moving to a new building the University hopes to construct in downtown Oakland on Franklin Street between 11th and 12th streets.
The Daily Californian has returned to its five -days a week publishing schedule after two years of stumbling along the edge of financial disaster.
The ASUC Book Store has been taken over by the University in the wake of continuing financial mis-management.
With the purchase of the Grizzly Peak Electrical Substation from PG&E the campus anticipates as much as $2.67 million savings on an annual $10.7 million electric bill. The purchase price of the substation was $3.1 million!
San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson became UCs 17th president October 1, 1995 following action by the Board of Regents.
The 92nd annual meeting of the AAG in March 1996 at Charlotte, NC, found five Berkeley faculty on the program (Pred, Walker , Reed, Byrne, Hart) and ten graduate students and perhaps 35 PhD alums. Jay Vance, Emeritus, was awarded the 1996 Edward Ullman Award for Meritorious Contributions to the Field of Transportation Geography by the Specialty Group in Transportation. Sally Horn (PhD'84), University of Tennessee, was a member of the Program Committee. Grad students James McCarthy , Bill Boyd and Scott Prudham organized a special session on Rural Restructuring in the Post-War U.S. Others were organized by Allan Pred, Josh Muldavin, Barbara Brower, Tom Howard and Susanne Freidberg. Next up, Fort Worth, TX, April 1-5, 1997.
The APCG meetings at Sacramento State in June 1996 included papers by Jim Parsons and Cherie Semans (PhD'87) as well as alums Tom Eley (PhD'88), Alaska, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Dennis Dingemans (PhD'75), UC Davis, Elizabeth Burns (PhD'74), Arizona State University, Bill Bowen (PhD'72), CSU Northridge, and grad students Jeffrey Schaffer, Jennifer Jones, and Sharon Johnson. Sharon's presentation on "Land Use Change in the Hardwood Rangelands of the Sierra Foothills" was named the outstanding student paper. The next APCG meetingsSpokane in September 1997.
The Association's Newsletter, now in new format and called Pacifica, featured Dingeman's sensitive research essay on Rio Linda, "Sacramento's Redneck Suburb," in its Spring 1996 issue. The piece was reprinted, with illustrations, in the Sacramento Bee.
Item missed in the last IG with its delayed release: At the 1995 Annual Meeting of the AAG-- Marvin Mikesell (PhD'59), University of Chicago, was awarded Honors "For clarity of insight into the work of geographers, influential research in cultural and cultural-political geography, excellence in teaching and long and exemplary service to the discipline."
The IGU Commission on the History of Geographic Thought in Dublin July 1995, found David Hooson together with Mark Bassin (PhD'83), University College London, Hong-Key Yoon (PhD'76), Auckland, and, Vincent Berdoulay (PhD'74), University of Pau. A photo from Gary Dunbar proves it.
Europe has called this summer. Mark Blumler (PhD'92), SUNY Binghamton, and Carl Johannessen (PhD'59), Emeritus at Oregon, were headed for an Economic Botany conference in London; Jack Wright (PhD'90), New Mexico State, organized a panel on resource management for the IGU sessions in Holland, which David Hooson also attended. Alex Clapp (PhD'93), University of Toronto, was scheduled to be there too after early summer field work in British Columbia.
Re-Reading Cultural Geography, edited by Kenneth Foote (Texas) (University of Texas Press, 494 pp., $24.95 paper, 1994) is a landmark sequel and successor to Wagner and Mikesell , Reading in Cultural Geography. It is a long-awaited assessment and inventory of major developments in cultural geography. Included is a gargantuan bibliography. There are extensive references and reflections on the place of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School. A foreward by Phil and afterword by Marvin provide an effective framework for the body of the text. There are commentaries by Doughty, Parsons and Salter, as well as the reproduction of an early Nietschmann piece on ecology and culture on the Miskito Coast.
Geography at UC Davis lives on, but as a "Program in Geography" rather than as a department. The protracted litigation associated with divisive internal conflict among the geography faculty has come to a final resolution. Some of the geographers have become affiliated with other departments, others remain as 'at-large' faculty directly under the College of L&S.
Paul Starrs (PhD'89), University of Nevada-Reno, is the new editor of the Geographical Review, the fifth since the journal was established more than 80 years ago! Paul has named Martin Lewi s (PhD'87), Duke University, as his Associate Editor. What with Dick Peet (PhD'68), Clark University, as co-editor of Economic Geography, our own chairman Dick Walker as co-editor of Antipode, Barbara Brower (PhD'87), Portland State, with her Himalayan Research Bulletin , and Gail Fondahl (PhD'89) as managing editor for Polar Geography and Geology, we are clearly doing our share on the editorial side.
The Genius of C. Warren Thornthwaite, Climatologist–Geographer is the title of a biography by John H. Mather and Marie Sanderson of one of this department's first and most renowned graduates (University of Oklahoma Press, 240 pp., $29.95, 1996). Thornthwaite (1899-1963) received his PhD in 1930 with a dissertation on the Urban Geography of Louisville KY that belied his later interest and work in weather and climate. A college friend of John Leighly at Central Michigan Normal School, Warren was teaching at the University of Oklahoma when he published his first papers on climatic classification in the Geographical Review . In 1935, he became chief of the Climatic and Physiographic Research Division of the new U.S. Soil Conservation Service (1935-1942). Later he established the Thornthwaite Laboratory of Climatology, located in rural New Jersey and affiliated first with Johns Hopkins University and later with Drexel Institute of Philadelphia. It became a mecca for climatologists from all parts of the world.
His most important scientific contributions were his "rational" classification of world climates in 1948 and his concept of evaportranspiration and its use in the climatic water budget.
The Thornthwaite obituary by John Leighly ( Annals, AAG December 1964) and interviews with Arnold Court (PhD'56) and David Miller (PhD'53) provide the authors with background information that will be of special interest to Berkeley geographers.
Latest word on the long promised collection of essays on Carl Sauer, Legacy of Intellect, edited by Martin Kenzer, is that the Amsterdam publisher (Kluwer) has pulled out. On the initiative of Kent Mathewson it now appears that the project may be picked up by the Louisiana State University Press. When will it be out? Quien sabe.
H.G. Gierloff-Emden, emeritus at the University of Munich, a visiting professor in the Berkeley department 1961-62, is the author of the exhaustive "The First Discovery Voyage of Columbus: Nautical and Oceanographic Significance" (in German) in the Münchener Geographische Abhandlungen, Band B-19, 260 pp., 1994. With more than 100 maps, charts, and tables he probes the scientific background of the voyage, the meteorology, astronomy, oceanography, cartography, and the status of the art of navigation of the time. His time at Berkeley with Carl Sauer is acknowledged as a stimulus to his prolonged engagement with the Columbus theme and he cites extensively from the commentaries of Clint Edwards (PhD'62) in the AGS reprint of the G.E. Nunn (1924) volume on "The Geographical Conceptions of Columbus."
'Agricultural Origins and Dispersals,' that distinctively Berkeley theme pioneered half a century ago by Sauer, continues alive and well. Nature (London), in its 4 July 1996 issue (vol. 382), carries a three-column review of The Origin and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia , edited by David Harris (PhD'63), University College (UCL Press, 1996, 954 pp.). There are 27 individual contributors, with a summary chapter by Harris, who continues as director of the Institute of Archaeology.
The last Itinerant Geographer proudly listed some 35 books by Berkeley PhDs published since 1991. Others to add to that list:
Mark Bassin, The Dream of a Siberian Mississippi: Imperial Vision and Geographical Fantasy, Cambridge, 1996.
Déborah Berman Santana, Kicking Off the Bootstraps: Environment, Development, and Community Power in Puerto Rico , University of Arizona Press, 1996.
Barbara Brower, The Sherpa of Kumbu, Oxford -New Delhi, 1991.
Kenneth Erickson, Lumber Ghosts, Boulder, Pruett Publishing, 1994; 2nd printing 1995.
Piper Gaubatz, Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformations on the Chinese Frontiers, Stanford, 1996.
Brian Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: the Urban Transformation of Brazilian Amazonia , Columbia University Press (forthcoming).
Katharyne Mitchell, Diaspora and the Politics of Space, University of California Press, in press.
Richard Peet and Michael Watts (co-editors), Liberation Ecologies: Environment and Development in the Late Twentieth Century , Routledge, 1996.
Mary Beth Pudup (editor), Appalachia in the Making: the Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century, University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Edward Price, Dividing the Land: Early American Beginnings of Our Private Property Mosaic, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
C.L. Salter (co-editor), Geography for Life , National Geographic Society
Daniel Sicular, Scavengers, Recyclers, and Solutions for Solid Waste Management , UC Berkeley, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992.
Fred Simoons, Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances in the Old World (revised and expanded), University of Wisconsin Press, 1994.
Nigel Smith, Amazonia: Resiliency and Dynamism of the Land and Its People, United Nations University Press, Tokyo, 1995. (with E.A.S. Serrão, P.T. Alvim, I.C. Falesi)
Nigel Smith, Floods of Fortune: Ecology and Economy Along the Amazon , Columbia University Press, 1996. (with M. Goulding, D. Mahar)
Nigel Smith, Enchanted Amazon Rain Forest: Stories from a Vanishing World , University Press of Florida, 1996.
Stan Stevens, Claiming the High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence and Environmental Change in the Highest Himalaya, UC Press, 1993.
Stan Stevens (ed.), Conservation Through Cultural Survival: Indigenous and Protected Areas, Washington, D.C., Island Press, in press.
Michael Storper, Boundaries, Compartments and Markets: Paradoxes of Industrial Relations in Growth Pole Regions of France, Italy and the USA. UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, 1993.
Michael Storper, Worlds of Production, privated published in France, 1997. (with R. Salais)
Yi-Fu Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth, University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Tom Veblen (co-ed.), The Ecology and Biogeography of Nothofagus Forests , Yale University Press, 1996.
Philip Wagner, Showing Off: the Geltung Hypothesis , University of Texas Press, 1996.
Bret Wallach, Losing Asia: Modernization and the Culture of Development, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Wilbur Zelinsky, Exploring the Beloved Country , University of Iowa Press, 1994.
Karl Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes, University of California Press, 1996.
Karl Zimmerer, (co-editor), Biogeographical Landscapes and Conservation in Developing Countries, University of Wisconsin Press.
Are there others we have missed?
New UC Press Book Series
Berkeley Studies in Critical Human Geography. (editorial group: Walker, Watts, Pred, Pudup, Hart and Saxenian) already has several books in press and more under contract.
Alvena Suhl Storm (MA'28), 93, an early graduate student in this department and for many years on the faculty at San Diego State University until her retirement in 1966, has been awarded an honorary doctorate by that institution. Ten years ago a wing of the then new Social Sciences Building at San Diego was named 'Storm Hall' in her honor.
Henry Bruman (PhD'40), emeritus at UCLA, has endowed a Chair in Geography at that institution, where he taught from 1945 until his retirement in 1980. He has previously done similarly for the UCLA Department of Music, while also supporting chamber music programs both on that campus and at its Clark Library.
Esther Rostlund, widow of Erland Rostlund (1900-1961; PhD'51), celebrated her 91st birthday September 24, 1996, at a Healdsburg rest home.
Dan Stanislawski (PhD'44), our oldest living graduate who was 93 on April 20, 1996, remains thriving and in good spirits at his Oxford Street home, in the capable hands of his good wife Hilde.
Next down the line among our graduates is Les Hewes (PhD'40), University of Nebraska, who had his 90th birthday February 25 and anticipates attending the upcoming AAG meeting in Forth Worth TX in April 1997. Les writes that he has struck it rich in the National Archives where homestead claimants and witnesses provided inventories of improvements, important in the old homestead area of Oklahoma that he is studying. He was particularly gratified to find such statements of his father and his maternal grandfather. Les's retrospective piece on "Sonora 1931, a pictoral essay" is scheduled for the J ournal of the Southwest. It will include a collection of photos that he took while Professor Sauer's field assistant on his Guggenheim grant, "probably my best single learning experience," says Les. In September 1995 he was in Ecuador with an Elderhostel group, including both the highlands and a trip into the Amazonian rainforest.
David Miller (PhD'53), emeritus at Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sends a bibliography that includes six books and monographs some 35 book chapters and journal papers, and more than 40 reviews and notes, all on energy and water budget matters. A few years ago Dave donated some 6,300 slides to the department on such themes, all dated, catalogued and numbered. He has offered, too, a lifelong collection of reprints of works by John Leighly, his mentor. His most recent paper, from Proceedings, 63rd Western Water Conference, evaluates the research programs and results of the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory at Soda Springs, 1945-1964, where Dave did his dissertation work.
Philip L. Wagner (PhD'53), Emeritus at Simon Fraser University: Showing Off: the Geltung Hypothesis (University of Texas Press, 1996; $30.95 hardback, $12.95 paper) in which "drawing on a lifetime of inquiry, travel, and teaching (the author) asserts that the concern for Geltungpersonal standing, recognition, acceptance, esteem, and influenceshapes all of our interactions and defines the unique social character of human behavior."
Wilbur Zelinsky (PhD'53), emeritus at Penn State, pursues one of his favorite themes, "The Changing Face of Nationalism in the American Landscape" in a volume on 'pop culture' edited by George Carney, Fast Food, Stock Cars and Rock-n-Roll (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995).
Arnold Court (PhD'56), emeritus at Cal State Northridge, contributes a piece (in French) on the Segmented Wind Roses of Leon Brault (1839-1885) in the April 1995 special issue of La Meteorologie (Paris) with 27 reports from the first -ever symposium on the history of meteorology, Toulouse, 1993. Arnold's travels continue extensive, taking him, with wife Mildred, to meetings of the American Meteorological Society, the Weather Modification Association, the Association of State Climatologists, and APCG as well as visits to family members in Florida and Germany (for son David's 50th birthday). And then there is his considerable earthquake damaged library at Northridge, still to be restored.
Fred Simoons (PhD'56), emeritus at UC Davis and now living in Spokane, has a typically exhaustive article on "Dogflesh Eating by Humans in Sub-Saharan Africa" in Ecology of Food and Nutrition 34:251-292. The references include more than 450 separate items, including many in places so obscure you wouldn't believe. Fred, an Adjunct Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University, Pullman, continues his studies of the Fava bean, Pythagoras, and related themes in Old World culture history. A second edition revised and enlarged of his Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present , has been published by the University of Wisconsin Press, 550 pp., 1994. His address: 2005 E. 24th St., Spokane, WA 99203.
From MADGEONEWS, Wisconsin–Madison, Fall 1995: Yi-Fu Tuan (PhD'57) spent three days in the summer of 1995 with a colleague at Disneyland, supported by the Canadian Center for Architecture. He tells us that it is one thing to do supported research in leech-infested jungles or in a desert furnace, but quite another to get paid to go on Dumbo rides in Disneyland. What will come of it is unclear. Yi-Fu was also honored as a "1995 Notable Wisconsin Author" by the Literary Awards Committee of the Wisconsin Library Association.
The 'one big event' for Yi-Fu this year was delivery of the Carl Ortwin Sauer Lecture at UC–Berkeley, his old school. 'What a way to wrap up one's career!' He was especially touched by a bouquet of flowers sent to his room by the Dean of the Graduate School.
His interview for "Geographers on Film" was updated at the recent AAG meetings. His Topophilia was reviewed in a 'Classics in Human Geography Revisited' feature in Progress in Human Geography, September 1994.
Another first for Yi-Fu is a special issue of the National Geographical Journal of India (v. 40, pts 1-4, 1994), a collection of 26 essays dedicated to him. The title, appropriately, is The Spirit and Power of Place: Human Environment and Sacrality (464 pp.). Last year he received the Professor Appreciation Award for Excellence in Teaching of the Inter-Fraternity Council at UW.
Ward Barrett (PhD'59) recently retired from the University of Minnesota where he had been on the faculty since 1959.
Janet Kittridge (AB'61), Save-the-Bay staff member, was recipient of the California Alumni Association Excellence in Service Award last October for outstanding service to the University and the community. She has been active in the Save-the-Bay organization since 1964. For many years she chaired the Cal Alumnae Hostess committee.
Bill Denevan (PhD'63) and wife Susie have settled in at their new home at Sea Ranch on the Sonoma Coast. Bill retired at the University of Wisconsin–Madison last summer after 32 years on the faculty there. He is completing the manuscript for a book on pre-Columbian Agricultural Systems in South America. He is expected to be a frequent visitor at the Berkeley department where he carries the designation of Research Associate. Bill and Susie's permanent address: P.O. Box 853, Gualala, CA 95445.
David Harris (PhD'63), University College, London, discusses "Early Agriculture in New Guinea and the Torres Strait Divide," in Antiquity No. 265 (Annual 1995), a special issue on New Guinea.
Don Vermeer (PhD'64), has retired at George Washington University where he has been chairman and with wife Carrie is moving to San Luis Obispo. Depleted by the loss of key faculty the program at GW seemed under threat ,but from all accounts the wind has changed, in good part through Don's efforts, and Geography there is moving forward with renewed administration support. Don completed a three-year stint as Regional Councilor of the AAG, elected from Mid Atlantic Division, 1992-95, is the Associate Editor for Geography, Social Science Quarterly and on the editorial board for the Journal of Research and Exploration. Publications include: "The Still, Small Voice from Latin America in the 27th IGC, Washington, D.C.," Area, 26(3):294-95, 1994; "Here and There: Spatial Matters in Geography," in R.D. Lambert (ed.), Educational Exchange and Global Competence (Council on International Exchange, New York, 165-172, 1994 and reprinted in AAG Newsletter, 29(11), November 1994; "Sustainable Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa," Journal of Development Studies , 31(2):370-71, 1994.
Kenneth A. Erickson (PhD'65), after 28 years at the University of Colorado, Boulder, retired in May, 1996. JoAnn, his wife of forty years, and Kenneth will relocate to their home on the Oregon coast, 901 S.E. 32nd, Lincoln City, OR 97367. In some measure this decision stems from the drowning deaths of their son and grandson in July, 1994, and the desire to be near their remaining children and grandchildren, all of whom live in Oregon.
"Jerusalem, Dover Beach, and Kings Cross. Imagined Places as Metaphors of the British Class Struggle" by Martyn Bowden (PhD'67), Clark University, in Place, Power, Situation and Spectacle: A Geography of Film , edited by Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn (Rowan & Littlefield, 1994).
You think it gets cold where you live? Len Sawatzky (PhD'67), University of Manitoba, writes from Winnipeg of "a 20-day unbroken string of days on which the minimum temperature was below -30°C and the maximum below -20°C..." As the owner of a small tractor and snowblower he received numerous friendly telephone calls on such occasions, mobilizing him to clear a dozen or more neighbors' driveways, the favor typically reciprocated for with home baking, dinner invitations, etc. Even during the prolonged cold spell chickadees and nutcrackers continued to patronize his feeder, even to -40°C.
Bill Clarke (PhD'68), retired from Melbourne, after a year at Christ Church, New Zealand, was called back to his old post at Suva when the Institute of Pacific Studies found itself short-staffed. From Fiji he has sent a recent paper on "Traditional Land Use and Agriculture" that is part of a 4-volume collection on science and Pacific Island peoples.
Richard Peet (PhD'68), Clark University, considers the concentration of power among the New England elite in the 'pre-Fordist' times in "Daniel Shay's Memorial in Petersham, MA," Annals AAG, March 1996. In the Professional Geographer, February 1996 he joins in the discussion of "landscape-as-text."
Bret Wallach (PhD'68), chairman, University of Oklahoma, expected to be in Israel again this summer on the second round of a three-year Fulbright looking at water, agriculture and politics on the West Bank. He continues work on essays for a forthcoming edited volume on Kansas and another for an Encyclopedia of the Great Plains.
An information-packed 12-page chairman's Letter from Oklahoma by Bret last year suggests an unusual cohesiveness and morale that appears to be not unrelated to the impact of the April 19, 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. One of the victims was an undergraduate major in Geography, a second escaped with minor injuries. The department has long had an internship program with the State Water Resources Board whose offices were across the street from the Federal Building. The victim apparently had gone to the Federal Building either to do some copying or for coffee when the blast occurred. At least two graduate students worked on-site for long hours after the explosion and many had other friends who were victims.
The argument made by John Winslow, one -time geography grad student (PhD, Oxford), that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the perpetrator of the Piltdown Man hoax (as presented in the journal Science 83 in 1983) is confirmed in "The Case of the Missing Link" by Robert Anderson, editor of Natural History, in Pacific Discovery , Spring 1996. John is now based in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.
Tom Aley, grad student in the early 1960s and currently a consulting hydrologist-speleologist living in southern Missouri (where he owns his own cave), is co-author of a paper on "River Management at Ozark National Waterways" in Science and Ecosystem Management in the National Parks (University of Arizona Press, 1996). Jim and Betty Parsons visited Tom and his wife in their isolated Ozarks eyrie last year. Tom's report on The Caves of the White Limestone of Jamaica (1964) was an early product of the department's ONR field research program. He is author of several contract research projects on caves for the National Park Service through his Ozark Underground Laboratory, Protem, MO, in the heart of a major karst geology and spring region.
Bryce Gilmore Decker (PhD'70) retired in 1996 from the Geography Department at the University of Hawaii. Bryce was recently asked (by Mary McDonald, PhD'92) how his wife Shirley introduced him to Hawaii, how they got to Libya in the 1950s, and how he became a new Berkeley grad student in the spring of 1959. Bryce wrote that he met Shirley while a student at the University of Oregon, about 1952. She was a distant cousin of friends of the family in Creswell, Oregon, where Bryce had gone to high school and where they lived in the years after WWII. She and her sister astonished them by taking off their shoes as soon as they arrived and proceeded to walk barefoot down the farm driveway that had newly spread, coarse, crushed rock lying thick upon it. They were quite amazing princesses from romantic Hawaii.
Shirley's dad suggested that she come to Hawaii and work in the pineapple fields the next summer, 1953, which proved to be the finest summer job Bryce ever had. He drove a pineapple truck in Kunia and watched the sun rise every morning over the cloud cap of the Koolau Mountains. Agricultural work of that sort was esteemed in his family in a way that the local college kids did not appreciate, as their attitudes had been savaged by the social iniquities of the plantation system. For them it was undesirable work. All the college kids were employed together, and so he got his first lessons in local sociology right out on the plantation. All his underwear turned pink from the bright red earth they worked in.
He stayed with Shirley's family that summer and liked Hawaii so well he decided to continue his education at the University of Hawaii. Shirley and Byrce were married in Wahiawa in 1954, and he graduated in 1955. His draft board was waiting with their infamous Greetings, and a firm invitation to join the Cold War.
Bryce felt paranoid every day for the two years and three months he was a citizen soldier in the Army of the United States, but it was worth it all because of the interesting postings. Basic training was by Korean War vets at Fort Ord in the gritty sand beneath the live oaks in full view of Monterey Bay. When it came time for assignment, he was saved from dreary duty at a Nike antiaircraft artillery site in Columbus or Wichita or some such place where most of the draftees were sent, because he knew the difference between a pantograph and a hachure. That was enough to convince the assignment officer that he knew enough about maps to send him to the Topographic Engineers at the Presidio ofSan Francisco. That's about as good luck as a draftee could have. After a few months at the Presidio, his company was transferred to theYuma Test Station and into another glorious and interesting new environment. They did some actual useful surveying work. Some of the sprawling Station's boundary was not yet surveyed. They actually established some new section corner monuments in that unsurveyed part of the Arizona desert. Shirley and Bryce rented a little two-room place behind the offices of a cotton-ginning company in town. They were poor but happy, and drove their VW bug all over the desert as far as we could explore every weekend. They arrived in Yuma's nice winter, and left as summer began to burn.
They received word there that the unit was to be transferred to Libya,but to go along, you had to have at least a full year to go on your enlistment. Bryce wanted to go badly enough that he extended his enlistment in order to qualify. They actually travelled on a troop train and in an army troopship. There were ten thousand Americans stationed at Wheelus Air Force Base east of Tripoli. They were
an Army Engineer unit stationed on an Air Force Base. Shirley and Bryce rented an apartment in town and bought another VW there, so that they could continue their explorations.
Libya was newly independent but oil had not yet been discovered. The residuum of the desert campaigns against Rommel were still affecting daily life three million mines laid in the sand took a regular toll of life and limb. The British and Americans still maintained bases there, the Italian colonials had not yet been expelled, and they all learned Italian well enough to enjoy their food and hospitality. The Libyans were dirt poor, and mostly illiterate, although the kids by then were all in school, taught by teachers from Egypt and Tunisia, for the most part. The non-natives were all rich by comparison, and you could often see the resentment festering even then. The Italians were the landlords, had the best farms and ran flossy businesses like car dealerships. The native Jews ran small shops and furniture rentals. The Libyans had nothing but their labor to live on. Khadafy came as no surprise to Bryce.
They were actually making maps. They were topographic surveying, locating and resurveying old Italian control where they could find monuments that had not been torn out of the ground, erecting survey towers out in the desert, and doing first-order triangulation with theodolites. Base lines were surveyed with new-fangled electronic gadgetry. Bryce's own job was the best, though. A pair of them would go head out for two weeks at a time in a 3/4-ton trucks and a sheaf of airphotos and classify the terrain and cultural features. They would camp out in the desert, swap our water and canned fruit with berber herders who would brew up pots of powerful sweet tea.
There was much of interest. The Romans had organized the whole landscape to glean the most from its scant water. Wherever the topography permitted,there were ancient diversions and cisterns to collect runoff. Most of the them were full of sand, but a few of them were still in use, and others were being dug out and rehabilitated as part of aid programs. All the wadis had check dams every 50 or 100 feet that are particularly striking from the air. There were still caravans of camels using the old tracks across the desert, although the clattering big Fiat and Mercedes diesel monsters were even then displacing them. The Libyan climate is very kind to ancient masonry, and Mussolini had lavished money on excavation and restoration so the sites of Roman seaports at Sabratha and Leptis Magna were perfectly luminous places to wander around in,with their dazzling limestone and marble ruins along the dark blue Mediterranean.
The Berkeley connection was suggested by Prof. C. Langdon White of Stanford, whom Bryce had met at the University of Hawaii while he was a visiting professor in the Geography Department. He praised both UCLA and Berkeley, but added, "If you can stand the guff, Berkeley is the best".
Kit Salter (PhD'70), University of Missouri, and wife Cathy are guest co-editors of the Journal of Geography July-August 1995, with commentaries on the new Geographical Standards, new materials for the classroom, and "the geographical imperative" (how geography permeates everyday life, place discovery, and the reading of landscapes). In the previous edition of the same journal Kit, on sabbatical for the year past, writes "In Memory of Jesse Wheeler 1918 -1994," long-time colleague who Kit succeeded as chairman. He is in the process of up-dating the popular Wheeler and Kosbade World Regional Geography text.
Maria Dolors Garcia (MA'70; PhD Barcelona) has resigned as director (editor) of Documents d'Analisis after overseeing 27 issues during a 13-year span at the Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona department where she also has been chair. The collected, bright-colored numbers of this multi-lingual review, dating back to 1982, take their place among the finest representatives of geographical publishing of which we know. Although most of Documents have been either in Catalan or Castillian, all have carried clear and concise abstracts in English as well as French and German. A truly international effort, it has included reprints of papers by several Berkeley geographers.
Anne Macpherson (PhD'71), private scholar and Oakland Museum docent, continues to get around. In 1995 alone, a cruise to the Windward Islands and the Grenadines (including Saba!), the Azores and northern Portugal, an Elderhostel in Newfoundland, the Berkshire Choral Festival, and more.
Glenn George (PhD'72), whose academic career at Cal State Fullerton was cut short some years ago when he contracted multiple sclerosis, has been the recipient of a computer (Macintosh Performa 630D), printer, software and modem that 'wires' him to the outside world. The campaign, in which 34 friends came forward to help make the acquisitions possible, was spearheaded by Craig ZumBrunnen (PhD'73), University of Washington. Despite his physical disabilities Glenn's intellectual and emotional status is reported excellent. He is anxious to get on with his life, including finding new challenges and re-establishing contact with friends from the past. His address is 3154 Yorba Linda, Apt. E-12, Fullerton, CA 92631.
Lynn Rosenvall (PhD'72), University of Calgary, has contributed two essays to an Historical Atlas of Mormonism (Simon & Schuster, 1994). One analyzes the map on "Expansion Outside the Wasatch Front," the other "Abandoned Mormon Settlements."
Edmunds Bunske (PhD'73), University of Delaware, and Karl Zimmerer (PhD'88), University of Wisconsin contribute chapters to Concepts in Human Geography (Rowman & Littlefield) edited by Carville Earle, Kent Mathewson and Martin Kenzer.
Rowan Rowntree (PhD'73), Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, has been a major contributor to the Congressionally mandated Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP) that was unveiled to the public in June 1966 at Placerville. Among several other geography contributors were Paul Starrs (PhD'89) and Dave Larson (PhD'95), and PhD candidate Sharon Johnson.
Kurt Rademacher (MA'73) is a Planned Giving Officer and Director of Travel Programs for The Nature Conservancy, San Francisco office. When not leading Conservancy tours to Alaska and Baja or taking donors to Santa Cruz Island, he enjoys camping and hiking with his wife Nancy, and kids Molly (11) and Erik (4).
Peter Shields (MA'73) has been assigned for the past two years to the U.S. Embassy in Lagos, Nigeria as counselor for regional affairs. Peter has been a foreign service officer since 1977 with tours of duty in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Sudan, Ivory Coast and Washington. Prior to that he was in the U.S. Navy 1969-76 with service in the western Pacific, Vietnam, eastern Mediterranean and Central America, and Assistant Professor of Naval Science at UC Berkeley 1972 -75.
Married in 1981 in London to the former Siobhan Holt of Wiltshire, U.K., they have four children: Emily Rose 13, Naomi Laurel 11, Juliet Heather 10, and Chloe Jasmine 6.
Vincent Berdoulay (PhD'74), University of Pau, France, is now Secretary of the I.G.U. Commission on the History of Geographical Thought.
Tom Veblen (PhD'75), University of Colorado at Boulder, has two recent papers in Ecology . In the July 1994 issue on "Climatic Influence on Growth of Sub-alpine Trees in the Colorado Front Range" and in Oct. 1995 on "Sapling Growth in New Zealand Nothofagus Forests." Tom spent a month in Argentina in February 1995 conducting fieldwork for his NSF project on effects of climatic variation and human activities on fire regimes in northern Patagonia. In Colorado he is working on similar topics with support from the National Biological Service and the City of Boulder Open Space Department. The role of fire in the wildland/urban interface is a major management issue in Colorado, and was the subject of Tom's keynote address to the annual meeting of the Colorado-Wyoming Chapter of the Society of American Foresters in June 1995 and an invited symposium contribution at the Ecological Society of America's annual meeting in August 1995.
Articles have recently appeared in Journal of Ecology, Remote Sensing of Environment, Proceedings of the Australian Society of Astronomy , Physical Geography, Radiocarbon, Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, as well as edited volumes High Latitude Rain Forests and Associated Ecosystems of the West Coast of the Americas (Springer-Verlag, 1995), and Ecology of the Southern Conifers (Melbourne University Press, 1995).
Donald J. Berg (PhD'76), South Dakota State University, was promoted to Associate Professor in July 1995. He has been elected to Secretary-Treasurer for Great Plains-Rocky Mountain Division AAG, 1994 (three year term) and to the Board of Directors of the American Indian Specialty Group (2 year term). He also celebrated the birth of his first granddaughter, Natasha Marie Nygaard, April 1995.
Nigel Smith (PhD'76), University of Florida, continues collaborative research with various departments of the World Bank. For over a year he has been assisting the agriculture division with a strategy to better incorporate biodiversity concerns in agricultural development, and in the summer of 1996, he spent seven weeks reviewing experiences with agroforestry in various parts of the Brazilian Amazon for the Pilot Program to Save the Brazilian Rain Forest, which is administered by the World Bank. Nigel has three books out in recent months, all on Amazonia, as enumerated elsewhere. They have been featured or reviewed in Nature, Scientific American and Natural History . He is also co-author of World Bank Technical Paper 321 on biodiversity and agriculture.
Janet Crane (PhD'77), residing in Salem MA, has recently edited bibliographies on Martinique and on French Guiana in the World Bibliographic Series, ABC-Clio.
Byron Wood (MA'77), after some 15 years (more or less) at NASA–Sunnyvale, is still threatening to complete his dissertation! His specialty is relating remote sensing/GIS to disease control, especially as relating to wetlands. Post cards from Egypt and Guatemala suggest that he gets around.
Winifred Grant Perkins (AB'77), a manager in the Environmental Affairs Department of Florida Power and Light Company, the nation's fifth largest electric utility, continues to manage a multitude of environmental issues. Her primary focus has been on water regulations and legislation. This year she testified before Congress on the reauthorization of the Clean Water Act. Winifred has an extensive GIS system under her direction, although she does not personally get to "play" with it much. Although she lives in Palm Beach County, Florida, she frequently visits the Bay Area and often spends time at the Berkeley campus.
Matt Williams (AB'77),went on to business school at McGill and the University of Washington for an MBA. He is now part of an environmental group, Regional Alliance For Transit, which tries to apply cost/benefit analysis to proposed transportation projects in the Bay Area. Not suprisingly, the environmentally friendly approach generally also has the best cost/benefit figure. Matt was elected to board of AC Transit in 1994.
John Monteverdi (PhD'78), San Francisco State, is serving as editor of Weather and Forecasting , a journal of the American Meteorological Society. An article analyzing the cluster of tornadoes that occurred in northern and central California during December 1992 appears in the September 1994 issue.
Elizabeth Rada Carver (MA'78), a Denver attorney, has been involved with Denver health care issues. According to a report in the Rocky Mountain News, Elizabeth negotiated one of the largest hospital deals in Denver history which resulted in a health-care venture between HealthOne and Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation. It will create Denver's largest hospital system.
Richard Grassetti (AB' 78) received his MA from the University of Oregon in 1981 and has spent most of the last 14 years as a consultant specializing in environmental impact assessments. He recently found his own consulting firm in Berkeley, and teaches courses in environmental studies at CSU Hayward.
Allan James (AB'78), University of South Carolina, continues teaching and research in fluvial geomorphology, surface hydrology, and applications of geographic information processing. On-going research in northern Sierra Nevada and eastern Sacramento Valley has him spending summers in the Foothills.
Patricia Baldwin Rowbottom (AB'79) finally moved back to "God's Country," along the eastern Sierra in 1991. She's remarried to the local high school calculus teacher, substitute teaches at the high school and elementary
