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I found this image while browsing for something to represent the idea of environmental regulations from the point of view of what the regs are meant to protect. It is from a short video in which the Canadian NGO West Coast Environmental Law  makes a strong case for citizen participation in the details of environmental protection.  Environmental Planning Tom Daniels Since I was hired to teach environmental geography in 1997, I have taught Environmental Regulations about once every alternate year. It had an even wonkier title when I first arrived, but the simple title to which I changed it reflects the applied (as opposed to theoretical) approach I take in the course. More than anything else I teach, this course provides students with skills and knowledge that have direct workforce application. It is the course that draws most directly on my non-academic work in geography -- a single year between graduate programs in which I worked for what was then the world's largest civil and env

Journalist Carrie Kahn reports on legal measures that Nicaragua's increasingly authoritarian president has recently implemented to restrict dissent . In the guise of fighting terrorism, new laws appear to make free expression and free assembly even more difficult. Ortega signals a willingness to continue ignoring human-rights organizations, the international community, the Catholic Church and to embolden a violent minority of Nicaraguans to commit atrocities in support of his regime. For more details of how such a beautiful country arrived at such a terrible impasse so quickly, please see my #SOSnicaragua (May) and Nicaragua's Kent State (July) posts, as well as journalist Jon Lee Anderson's Fake News  article, appearing in the current issue of the New Yorker . He describes Ortega's application of lessons learned from autocrates abroad. Parallel Just as Ortega is intensifying his attacks on dissidence by branding protestors as terrorists, parallel strategies are emerg

Just yesterday,  I learned about a special service of the BBC, known as BBC Great Lakes. It was established in 1994  by BBC journalists seeking to help reunite families in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. It continues to broadcast in the Kinyarwanda and Kirundi languages. Its online presence includes the newsy  BBC Gahuza page,  as well as social media channels. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was from PRI's The World that I learned about this news service, in a piece entitled Memories of growing up in Bujumbura , in which producer Robert Misigaro reflects on the importance of a youth center in his home city, the capital of Burundi and shares music from that city. Lagniappe The Great Lakes region of Africa is not merely a BBC construction; the term is sometimes used narrowly to refer to the are bordering Lakes Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. Map source: ACCORD More broadly, it refers to the 12 member countries of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region , which w

Tea gardens of Cha Gorreana -- Photo: Kaizr I teach several courses each year on coffee, but some while ago I offered a one-credit honors colloquium on tea -- more specifically on tea and climate change . I intended to do this just once, but we learned that it was a popular topic, so I have continued to offer it each semester. It has been a great way for me to keep meeting new honors students, whose curiosity and willingness to take intellectual risks is always invigorating. The Azores are part of Macronesia It has also been a way for me to keep learning about tea, which remains a distant third behind coffee and chocolate in terms of my direct experience. Part of that learning came from the honors program itself, whose key staff person was an accomplished tea collector and hobbyist who would visit our class a couple of times each semester. She is still a consummate tea maven, but has recently moved on to another university. As a sort of parting gift, she shared the article The Tea Cap

Hearing this interview on my local NPR station today reminded me of The One Who Got Away ... the academic version. When I was at University of Arizona during the early days of climate-change, Dr. Diana Liverman was a guest speaker a few times. I also met her -- and more importantly her graduate students -- at conferences. I almost transferred to Penn State, where she was on the faculty, even though PhD students do not really do that. It did not work out, and she ended up coming to Arizona, too late for me to have a decent advisor, though I eventually wiggled my way through . Hearing her cogent discussion on the radio took me way back, but I have no regrets -- I love what I do now and work with her would have kept me in the R-1 orbit . Like many geographers, she is deeply worried but not yet resigned -- we could not continue to teach if we did not retain at least some hope. And like many geographers, her work is deeply interdisciplinary. The interview draws on a recent report -- Trajec

Over the weekend, New York Times journalist Kirk Semple and photojournalist Daniele Volpe provide a comprehensive update on the dire condition of Nicaragua. For those of us who love Nicaragua -- meaning anybody who has visited -- the title is heart-breaking, because it summarizes a dire condition that we could not have imagined six months ago: ‘There’s No Law’: Political Crisis Sends Nicaraguans Fleeing . (See my July 27 Nicaragua's Kent State  post for a bit more about recent developments.) Semple details the losses in the tourism industry that have resulted from the government's lawless response to protests since April. Photographer Volpe captures one of my very favorite places in this photo -- the usually bustling main square of Granada, now idle. The NYT article hints at a question I have had since the very beginning. The second political life of the FSLN has relied on a strange combination of revolutionary rhetoric and nostalgia on the one hand (left) and alliance with ru

Sometimes a large city can give a person a feeling of profound anonymity. I felt it the first time I flew over São Paulo -- among the millions there, I envisioned myself as nameless. But what if the city itself had no name? That is exactly what the new urban place at 30°01'48"N 31°46'48"E is: a nameless city. I will be interesting to compare this July 2018 screenshot with the imagery of Egypt's new capital as it continues to be built out. Even now it is a bit difficult to see what is emerging in the Saharan sands some 30 miles to the east of Cairo (and not to be confused with New Cairo City, about halfway between the two). Journalist Jane Arraf told the story of Egypt's new capital , as officials decide that relief from congestion and pollution in centuries-old Cairo cannot be provided otherwise. Wikipedia simply calls the emerging city Proposed new capital of Egypt in its description of the details of its establishment. Unlike the original Cairo -- whose or