ACE in the Hood

Tonight I attended the 2008 Annual Meeting of Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE) - an environmental justice community organization based in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. The work that ACE does, and has done, for Roxbury and other neighborhoods in the greater Boston area is serious and impressive, but these events are always like carnivals. We elected four new members of the Board (congrats to T.J. in particular) and enjoyed some particularly funny skits lampooning the MBTA experience of students (thanks to REEP) and the T Riders Union. As always, the food was great and the company warm.

GIS Day 2008

For GIS Day 2008 I drove up to the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire to man a booth advertising our Department. This is the 10th year that UNH has hosted GIS Day activities (and my second year attending). The staff honored Mike Routhier with a glass clock for his decade of organizational success. Interestingly, I met Mike's father who had volunteered to drive the van that shuttled attendees from Morse Hall to the guest parking lot. Very pleasant gentleman and very proud of his son.

As usual it was a good turnout, although a slightly younger crowd. I recall speaking to more high school groups last year. This year I spoke to mostly middle school groups. I took posters by three of my students to show off (thanks to Jim, Jen and Bill Sr.), although I found myself explaining what an "undergrad" is more often than the GIS projects I showcased. One student was very interested in the quality of food on campus.

I also met up with two of our alums, both of whom made a point of stopping by to say hi. One works for GeoVantage - Dan Shinnick - and the other for Pictometry - Matt Deal. Very friendly people. They pushed their products, I pushed my students (for internships). It all works out very well.

Latinos in Scotland

I am writing this post a little late after our trip, but better late than never.

Just before the start of the school year, my wife and I made a 10-day trip to Scotland. She was presenting at an invitation-only conference in Glasgow (I wasn't invited but came along anyway).

We decided to document our trip in "realtime" (or close to it) by maintaining a 'geo-blog' of our travels for friends and family back home. This was an interesting - and time consuming - experiment. Scotland is a 21st century country (technically it is part of the UK, but the relationship is complicated), but it is also a still a rural country. Finding a stable Internet connection was almost always a challenge.


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An interesting thing about the state of online maps and directions. We discovered - the hard way - that Google Maps consistently underestimates travel times in Scotland. By contrast, Multimap (a British product) provides much more accurate estimates of travel time. Google has a national bias (surprise, surprise), or at least it doesn't take into account the unique quality of British roads or hapless American tourists trying to drive on the left side of the road. The difference was significant and we nearly missed a crucial connection on a car ferry. Luckily, the Scottish people are very forgiving.

Edinburgh is suitably beautiful and romantically Gothic - thick walled castles on craggy peaks dripping with damp and history. The newer buildings (those less than 300 years old) are still black and sooty from the city's coal-fired past.

We were warned that Glasgow would be a gritty contrast (and a waste of time), but I found it to be easily as engaging as Edinburgh. I spent 3 full days walking that city. Where Edinburgh is a beautifully preserved museum, Glasgow is a living, breathing, frenetic metropolis. Many of the buildings are products of the city's wealthy heyday - the mid to late 19th century. High Victorian architecture and a strong Gothic revival - flying buttresses, extraordinary gargoyles and grotesques, incredibly carved, multi-hued stone. And inside and all around this 19th century architecture flows the modern day Scotland - well dressed people occupied with modern pursuits. Lots of good 'ethnic' restaurants too.

Modern day Scotland is a bundle of contrasts. Our visit to Eilean Donan, one of the most beautiful and charismatic castles, provided a jarring example. While the local guide (dressed in full kiltish reglia) explained the fairytale-like saga of clan battles and rediscovered histories, the reality is that much of the surrounding lands are now owned by Saudi families (why, I don't know).

The Highlands were breathtaking. Treeless and green. The Highlands are a region of long, unbroken views, low skies, and steep-sided giants. "Moody" is a cliche description I've often heard, but now I understand. It's not just the constant damp and cloudiness, it's also the consistently unpredictable light. Clouds and mist move and shift with eerie speed.

Must go back.

Geography in Nebraska

I spent this last week at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska (Go Big Red!) scoring Advanced Placement Human Geography exams. I personally scored 400 exams. I was accompanied by another 200+ high school teachers and college professors, and together, we scored 40,000 exams from high schools across the country and around the world. This was my first year scoring high school AP exams, but the AP Human Geography exam has been around for 8 years now, and the number of students taking the exam has been doubling every two years!

Until I had signed up to be an AP reader, I was not even aware that high schools taught AP Geography in the US. It turns out that there are hundreds of high schools around the country that offer formal Geography courses either as electives, or in some cases, required courses! High school students who achieve a minimum score on the AP Human Geography exam can get college credit (and thereby have one less course to take).

Geography is not a required course in Massachusetts high schools, nor is it commonly offered. That could be changed. Imagine how much easier it would be to recruit Geography majors if students were already aware of Geography as a discipline before they got to college.

Trust Me, I'm a Scientist

An article in the Boston Globe describes a study done by physicists at Northeastern University in which they surreptitiously tracked the movements of 100,000 cell phone users in some undisclosed "industrial nation" in order to look for patterns in peoples' day-to-day movements (see "Study Secretly Tracks Cell Phone Users Outside US" Globe 6/4/2008). The results of their analysis were published in Nature, a highly prestigious science journal. It is disturbing that neither the Northeastern researchers nor the editors at Nature seems to have thought through the ethical questions of this kind of study. The authors admit that they did not consult with an ethics panel.

Most, if not all, institutions of higher learning, as well as many private institutions, maintain some kind of Institutional Review Board (IRB). The purpose of an IRB is to ensure that any research done by the members of an institution (e.g., faculty, students, researchers) is conducted responsibly and ethically, so as not to cause injury, harm, or undue risk (physical, mental, economic, legal, etc.) to humans and even animals. Under federal law, institutions receiving federal funds must in fact maintain an IRB to review research on human subjects - whether medical or behavioral.

These requirements for ethical review are rooted in past abuses. The most notorious include the experimentations done on humans by Nazi physicians during World War II. In the U.S., biomedical researchers are still haunted by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which Public Health Service researchers withheld medication from patients with syphilis in order to observe the effects of the disease when left untreated. The latter study did not end until it was revealed in 1972. Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of unethical research that have resulted in physical, psychological and even social harm.

Having served on Salem State's IRB, I know that most of the day-to-day work of an IRB is simply determining whether or not a proposed form of research even warrants scrutiny; most do not. However, the point is that it is the responsibility - the prerogative - of the IRB to make that determination. The IRB is an institutional safeguard to catch problems before they develop. Any research involving the collection of sensitive information from or about living persons should pass before the IRB just to make sure.

A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission pointed out that the kind of 'nonconsensual' tracking done by the Northeastern researchers is in fact illegal in the US. It is illegal in other countries as well. The Nature News article notes that another researcher working on very similar research was not able to do what the Northeastern researchers had done specifically because it was illegal in Germany, where he was based. However, the Northeastern study discloses neither the country in which the study was conducted, nor the cell phone company that supplied the data.

Cesar Hidalgo, a Northeastern physics researcher and coauthor of the study, said, "In the wrong hands the data could be misused ... But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns.... We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better."

Without transparent processes or institutional safeguards, however, such assurances must be suspect.

Food, the Environment and Justice

This year's theme for Earth Days at Salem State College was "Food, the Environment and Justice." It was a timely theme. Debates over the impacts of ethanol fuel production on food availability and habitat around the world, the threat of hunger from sky rocketing food prices, anxiety over genetically modified organisms, increasing concern over globalized food distribution networks with minimal accountability and maximum distance, have made food a prominent concern within environmental and political and energy and economic debates, to name only a few domains.

The Earth Day celebration is nearly four decades old now, and it has served as an opportunity to celebrate the importance of a healthy Earth. At SSC, Earth Day has also served as a unique opportunity to bring the academic community together around a common cause. On Monday, April 14, 2008, over 100 students displayed 80 posters on an incredible array of topics. Equally impressive, we had 32 faculty from 10 different disciplines acting as poster judges, as well as over 30 members on the non-campus community. For the second year in a row, Earth Days at SSC also featured a juried art exhibit - hence the killer tomato.

The next day Professor Jamie Wilson and I hosted a viewing of the documentary King Corn on Central Campus. Student attendance wasn't as good as we would have liked, BUT we had unexpected visitors. Becky Ellis, the aunt of Ian Cheney (co-producer and co-star of King Corn), came to the viewing with a friend. She lives in Marblehead. Very pleasant woman. We had a great discussion after the film. She suggested that we contact Ian because he lives in Boston. Excellent idea.

Touring Our Backyard

For the fourth year in a row, students from Renaissance College at the University of New Brunswick and students from the Department of Geography at Salem State College came together for a common experience. This year it was Salem's turn to host a visit for our Canadian colleagues. And this year, our group was taken on an Environmental Justice tour of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Roseann Bongiovanni, Chelsea City Councilor and Associate Executive Director of The Chelsea Collaborative, acted as our guide and host.

Chelsea is less than 15 miles from Salem, but it might as well be on the other side of the country. Chelsea is a small city - only 1.8 square miles - but this small city shoulders a heavy burden for the region.

Chelsea is host to over 70% of New England's heating fuel, 100% of the jet fuel for nearby Logan International Airport, a literal (uncovered) mountain of road salt for over 200 New England cities and towns, oil storage tanks holding 22 billion gallons of oil, and countless other environmental insults. Chelsea is a lower income community with a large population of immigrants and minorities. The concentration of environmental burdens and the lower socioeconomic status of its residents are not random coincidence. This is a pattern repeated throughout the country.

Roseann led our busload of 40 students and faculty throughout the city while she narrated about the social and environmental challenges that this small city and its residents have faced, today and in the past. But it hasn't been all woe and disappointment. In fact, Chelsea residents have been increasingly active in taking control of their city. The Chelsea Collaborative has organized the community to demand more responsible behavior by its corporate neighbors, and pushed for fairer treatment by those who would otherwise take advantage.

Last year, Energy Management Inc. (EMI) proposed the construction of a diesel-fired peaking power plant in Chelsea - across the street from the Burke Elementary School complex which houses four schools and more than 1,300 students. Aside from insult, the irony/hypocrisy of this proposal is that EMI has simultaneously been struggling to locate the nation's first offshore wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod and Nantucket. While the nation's wealthiest (e.g., Kennedys) have raged against the installation of renewable, clean energy, Chelsea gets an old-fashioned fossil-fueled power plant. However, Chelsea residents did not take this lying down. After months of aggressive and strategic organizing and demonstrating, EMI was forced to withdraw its proposal (see "Power Plant Withdraws, City Cheers," Boston Globe 11/18/2007).

While Chelsea remains a largely industrial and working class city, changes are afoot. Roseann arranged for our group to visit the Forbes Park project (still under construction). Blair, the project developer, conducted this leg of our tour. Forbes Park will be a 'green' loft community built atop what used to be an old lithograph factory. Complete with its own wind turbine, restored marshlands, and naturally insulated lofts (no need for air conditioning), it promises to introduce a new level of sustainable development. Of course, these lofts will be largely out of reach for most Chelsea residents - prices beginning in the $300,000 range. Students picked up on this issue fairly quickly.

When the tour was complete, we headed back to Salem to regroup and discuss what we had experienced. Students had been previously assigned to various stakeholder groups (i.e., developers, government officials, community residents, etc.) and were asked to consider Chelsea's issues from their respective positions. The discussion was interesting - students picked out the complicated, seemingly intractable issues facing the city. However, finding problems is always easier than finding solutions. It's important to remember that despite numerous obstacles, residents have battled the odds and made progress. This is one of the things that made our tour particularly powerful - not just an exposure to depressing problems in a marginalized community, but a tour of an ongoing project to make things better.

The Artwork of Science

On Tuesday, March 18, 2008, our own Dr. Stephen Young opened a unique art exhibit entitled "Earth Exposed" at the Winfisky Gallery at Salem State College. The exhibit features a wide array of aerial and satellite-based imagery of the earth, from urbanized, coastal Salem, to the so-familiar arm of the Cape, to dendritic patterns of a delta in southeast Asia.

But these are more than simply pictures from high up. These are uniquely strange perspectives of the familiar. The images range from panchromatic black and white, to wildly bright and bold pinks and purples and fuschias. These are not the hues of the landscapes we know. Rather, this is the earth through the eyes of instruments that record what human eyes could not otherwise see - invisible brightnesses and energies that reveal natural forces and processes that are no less real for having been missed before. And this is where science meets art. Within science, these images are important for the data they contain, for the information that can be gleaned. But they are beautiful too. The familiar is made exotic and alien. The organic fluidity and symmetry compel the viewer to think he is looking at some kind of organism. Maybe he is.


On December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders snapped a photo of Earth from lunar orbit and changed history. The photo, entitled "Earthrise," was described by photographer Galen Rowell as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Indeed, this one photograph of a planet has often been credited with altering the consciousness of an entire world. It was hard to believe that all of human history, and all humanity's future, rested on something so fragile and small. This iconic image offered a warning and hope of unity in tumultuous times.

Since that time, there have been significant advances in technologies that have allowed us to acquire so many more images of Earth. You might expect fascination to wane. But it hasn't. The "Earth Exposed" exhibit was well attended by students, faculty and administrators, as well as members of the community. The imagery is still fascinating and compelling.

But it's worth remembering that this kind of imagery, and this exhibit in particular, is not simply about abstracted beauty. There is a message here, and there is information with very practical and immediate relevance. The "Bye Bye Salem - Hello Salem Harbor Islands" series is a deceptively benign set of panchromatic aerial images of Salem and its harbor. But what these images show in stark black and white is the gradual disappearance of Salem beneath a rising ink black ocean. This is the message and the warning of our times, once again communicated through imagery.

Biofuels Are No Free Lunch

It appears that the promise of biofuels for curbing carbon dioxide emissions and weaning America off of its dependence on foreign oil has some complications. Many of these complications have to do with the the interdependencies of a globalized world, and they have to do with the hard lesson that solutions to one problem often create other kinds of problems, or simply shift the original problem somewhere else.

Biofuels - fuels derived from plant products such as corn, soy or palm oil - have a lot going for them on the face of it. With minimal processing, most vehicles can run on gasoline or diesel that has some proportion of vegetable-derived fuel, such as ethanol. Ethanol has been particularly important as a replacement for the fuel additive MTBE, which while increasing fuel efficiency and reducing air pollution, has the annoying habit of contaminating vast areas of surface and groundwater. MTBE was itself originally a replacement for lead in gasoline. Lead is bad. Of course, lead itself was originally added to gasoline in order to increase octane and reduce engine knocking, and interestingly, to help gasoline compete with ethanol as a viable fuel! That's another story (see "The Secret History of Lead," The Nation Mar 2000), but it brings us back to ethanol.

The initial (and ongoing) excitement around the potential for biofuels led the U.S. Congress to pass The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which, among many other things, requires a dramatic increase in the mixing of biofuels with gasoline sold in the U.S., and a tripling of domestic production of biofuels by 2012. The European Union (EU) similarly set a target of getting 10% of Europe's road fuels from plants. For both the EU and the U.S., biofuels offer a way of reducing dependence on foreign oil, reducing air pollution, and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (which contributes to global climate change).

A number of things have turned up to dampen some of the initial enthusiasm for biofuels as panacea. Recent studies by leading academics and scientific organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have found that increasing production of biofuels may actually contribute more to the release of carbon dioxide and lead to worsening environmental damage. Specifically, if one takes into account the full energy-intensive process of modern agriculture, refining of the fuel, and transport, then biofuels may be no better, and in some cases, even worse, than conventional fuels. At the same time, incentives to grow more crops for biofuel production mean that more land must be brought into production. Bringing new land into farm production often means habitat loss, and habitat loss is second only to climate change as a leading environmental concern (see "Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat," NYT Feb 8, 2008).

What's particularly interesting to me, however, is the way increased production of biofuels ramifies throughout the world. The push to produce biofuels has greatly increased the value of the crops used to produce biofuels, many of which are also food crops. This may be good for farmers, both here and abroad, because it means more income for a commodity in higher demand. However, the farmer's gain may be the consumer's loss. Higher food prices are particularly hard on poor people who must inevitably spend a greater proportion of their income on food than the more privileged. This is what is known as a 'regressive' economic impact. Increased food prices are a serious reality (see "A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill," NYT Mar 9, 2008; also see "Surging costs of groceries hit home," Boston Globe Mar 9, 2008).

The relationship between biofuel production and food is particularly striking in less developed countries. The soaring price of palm oil has hit the poor in places like India, Malaysia, and Indonesia particularly hard. Palm oil is a significant source of calories and nutrients for the less wealthy in tropical parts of the world, and it is one of the most costly. Palm oil is also one of the most sought after sources of biofuel and the most productive. An acre of palms produces 8 times as much oil as an acre of soy. Palm oil prices have increased by 70% over the last year. The increased price and the resulting diversion of palm oil from food to fuel has meant higher prices and less availability. The economic incentive of palm oil production has also encouraged growers to bring more land into production, which has meant an accelerated rate of deforestation in tropical parts of the world (see "A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," NYT Jan 19, 2008). Loss of tropical forest threatens wildlife, such as Orangutans in Borneo (watch "Palm oil demand threatening wildlife," BBC Mar 2006).

Environmental changes in tropical parts of the world are not just a threat to the non-human environment; they also threaten the livelihoods of people dependent on natural resources. Human rights and environmental advocacy groups issued reports showing that indigenous groups in Indonesia are being negatively impacted by the expansion of palm oil farms, both through loss of forest and expropriation of land (see "Biofuel demand leading to human rights abuses, report claims," The Guardian Feb 11, 2008). The EU has taken both environmental and human rights issues surrounding biofuel production quite seriously. It is seeking to encourage the use of "sustainable" biofuel production (see "EU promises sustainable plant fuel," BBC News Jan 14, 2008).

To be fair, the negative news about biofuel does not necessarily mean that it is a lost cause. In fact, there is considerable room for improvement through increased technological efficiencies as well as decisions about which plant products to use (e.g., non-food plants). Clearly, however, biofuels are not a panacea, because there is no such thing as a panacea. On a more positive note, however, the negative attention to biofuels has highlighted global interdependencies, which involve not just markets, and environmental conditions, but also social conditions and issues of justice. These are the things with which a more globalized, and globally aware, world must contend.