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In the United States, we do not elect kings. The Framers of the Constitution had been living in a monarchy, and they crafted the balance of powers among three branches of government to preclude its return. They did not foresee the advent of Sen. Mitch McConnell -- who does not share their vision -- but they did seem to understand that an additional protection was needed. Thus, in order to check the excesses of the three branches, they included protection of the Fourth Estate -- the press -- in the very First Amendment to their carefully written work. It is the only profession mentioned in the document. The patriotism of those who put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard or stylus to smartphone) is at least as important to the protection of the republic as are that of those who put on any of the uniforms of the armed services. This is true of local journalists such as those assassinated in Annapolis this summer and those threatened by a terrorist in Boston more recently. Neither man...

Photo: Geoffrey Scott Baker , resident of nearby Oella who calls Ellicott City his muse I remember this riddle from middle school days -- "If a plane crashes on the U.S.-Canada border, where would they bury the survivors?" The punchline, of course, is that you don't  bury survivors. I was reminded of this when reading Ambitious Ellicott City flood prevention plan would tear down 19 buildings in historic downtown , by Baltimore Sun  journalists Sarah Meehan and Jess Nocera. The headline is an accurate summary of what Howard County officials have proposed in response to the devastating floods of July 2016 (see my Flood Flash and and Flood Peak articles) and May 2018 ( Flooding: It's Not in the Cards ). The headline hints at some of the problems with the response of county officials. The plan is indeed ambitious, in the way that Al Capone was ambitious at banks: it contemplates obliterating the victims. The financial cost to be paid by the county would be high, but the...

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 an...

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 R...

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...