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Spoiler Alert: Maryland Wins! Image: via   Nicholas Lund, Slate Readers of this space know that I have a very broad conception of what constitutes geography, even environmental geography. Everything from cigarette butts to snowboards have been included in these posts. So my inclusion of a snarky column about the selection of state birds should come as no surprise. Birds are very geographic, after all! I am taking the opportunity, however, to make some connections between  Nicholas Lund's brilliant 2013 screed on state birds and the Five Themes of Geography identified by the National Council for Geographic Education ( NCGE ). Lund offers a state-by-state listing of officially designated birds, with a suggestion for a better choice in the vast majority of cases. His reasoning is as geographic as his humor is acerbic. Those themes ( described in more detail at worldatlas ) are: 1. Location : Birds are found in specific locations, and nobody is a birder who is not also good with ...

... indivisible ... I was in South Carolina the day in 2000 that the confederate flag was removed from the top of its capitol building and placed in a less prominent position at the edge of the grounds. As we drove along I-95, we listened to the announcers on the local public-radio affiliate describe the proceedings in hushed tones resembling the coverage of a state funeral.  Any doubt as to what was really at stake were erased by a fellow motorist in a pickup truck, who sped along with banners flying from two large poles in the bed of the truck -- one of the Confederacy itself and one of the Confederacy's spinoff -- the Ku Klux Klan. I was reminded of all of this recently, when I learned that the great city of New Orleans was removing four major Confederate monuments from places of prominence. I was not surprised to learn that -- as in South Carolina and elsewhere -- supporters of the 1861 insurgency were on hand to protest. But I was pleased to learn that each removal event went ...

"You think of New Orleans, you know, like a place, longitude and latitude on a map on Earth, but in a sense, like New Orleans to me it is an address in the whole of the whole of existence. And if you match up with that address, if you're supposed to be here, then you'll feel it. You'll walk in here and you'll go, 'Whoa!'" This explanation of New Orleans as a place comes halfway through the 2007 PBS American Experience documentary  New Orleans .  He captures beautifully the connection people have to this city that both cannot be real and must  be real. This is an hour well spent, stretching from the social and racial inequalities of the 1927 flood through the active segregation of the city mid-century and ending with the horrors of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Those still-fresh wounds provide an excellent example of New Orleans as a deeply artistic community, as it looks deeply into the first Mardi Gras celebration after the flood. The film ends (spoiler ...

Is the red marker on land or in the water? Image: captured from Google Maps , May 2017 Click to pan, zoom, and compare in future The short answer is: yes . This area south of New Orleans is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico, and is a stark reminder of the fragility of coastal margins. The marker indicates the community of Terrebonne Bay , which has always been closely associated with the water, but whose very existence is now threatened by it. In just four minutes, journalist Larry Yeoman paints a compelling word picture of this community, and explains the complex causes of its vulnerability to climate change. Local food production is becoming impossible, and both the diet and the fabric of a local community is being disrupted by forces both local and global. This is, unfortunately, an example of what Dr. Mary Robinson -- former president of Ireland and now crusader for climate justice and honorary geographer -- describes as the geography of vulnerability . Lagniappe  (a Louisiana t...

It was rain forests that originally drew me into geography; I had been focused on linguistics until a friend convinced me to take a course about the disappearing Amazon. Eventually, I found myself there, particularly in the very dynamic corner of the forest known as  Rondônia  in 1996, 2000, and 2003. The Amazon remains vast -- that "corner" is the size of Arizona -- and large swaths of continue to be vulnerable to poorly-conceived  schemes of all kinds. I was interested in the underlying processes that led to deforestation -- focusing not on the saws and fires but on the political economy that drove resource use and migration to forest regions. The Rainforest Alliance was also focused on such questions at the time, and still is. Even if climate change were somehow "solved" tomorrow, we would still have significant environmental problems. But now we recognize that climate change is creating a milieu in which those problems are compounded. Of particular interest to m...

Although I was not paying attention at the time, the very first paper on climate change appeared in 1981, the year I graduated from high school. In those days, I was focused on linguistics and thought of my one geography class as an extended trivia quiz. Little did I know that learning and teaching about earth systems would soon become my life's work. That first article appeared in the August 28 issue of Science , under the title Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide , by NASA scientist James Hansen and six other atmospheric physicists used the term "global warming" six times. The bulk of the article is difficult to read, as it details the evidence for warming trends in the language of, well, science. Data from the first publication on climate change. No responsible scientist could ignore these trends. The last couple of pages, however, are relatively easy to understand, and they describe the range of possible implications of this warming. If these pages...

These are challenging times for reporters. As front-line defenders of democracy, they face unprecedented resistance from novice government workers who neither understand nor appreciate the purpose of their work. I was struck by this when I heard the frustrated response of the White House director to reporters concerned about the human cost of expected cuts  in humanitarian aid. I encourage readers to listen to the entire three-minute report, but this is the part that I found chilling. Excerpt at 1:52: MCDONOUGH: People will die. If the world does not do more, people will die. PERALTA: In a press briefing last month, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney shrugged off the crises. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MICK MULVANEY: The president said specifically, hundreds of times - you covered him - I'm going to spend less money on people overseas and more money on people back home. Mick Mulvaney's tone is that of a bully who is exasperated by the question. I can agree with him...