Message from the Chair
Life has been dominated this year by the University's financial distress, which spilled over into all aspects of Departmental life. There have been endless campus-wide committee meetings on the restructuring of teaching, especially in environmental sciences; on the reorganisation of the Earth Sciences Building when Paleontology leaves later this year; on the relocation of the Earth Sciences Library; and on the seismic safety of the building. The good news is that the Department seems likely to occupy the whole of the fifth floor and a sizeable part of the fourth when these changes are complete, increasing its floor space by some 50%.
The bad news comes from the increasing budgetary stringency in the University as a whole. Jay Vance and Ted Oberlander have taken early retirement, with major consequences for teaching. Thanks to what I can only call inspired management by the Staff, and especially by Natalia, we still preserve normality in our day-to-day operations. And our faculty continues to support major campus commitments, especially in Area Studies and Development Studies.
In spite of all the odds we are holding the line, and we will continue to do so. At all levels in the Department there is great good will and enormous support. It could be seen at the Map Sale, especially at Commencement, and indeed on many other occasions. We appreciate very much the calm and good natured way in which everyone has met the year's succession of crises.
We appreciate too the continuing support of our alumni and friends, who give us the resources to help our undergraduates and graduate students to do Geography. We are grateful indeed to the McCone Foundation and our other generous benefactors for helping us look to the future rather than dwell on the present.
It is seventy years since Mr. Sauer came to Berkeley. The Department he built will survive the present problems. Indeed I think it has probably never been stronger and more dynamicas the activities in this year's Itinerant record. We look forward to the next seventy years of Berkeley Geography with high optimism.
David R. Stoddart
Help us to bring the Itinerant Geographer to you this year and next.
We are asking everyone to contribute $6.00 toward the cost of printing and mailing. Please send $6.00 (by check or by international money order, payable to the Regents of the University of California) to Editor, Itinerant Geographer, Department of Geography, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. Thanks for your support!
During 1992 Michael Watts spent six months in India initiating a longer term research project on agrarian change in Kerala. Along the way he spent some time in Hungary, Italy, Malaysia and the UK, and kept plugging away with some colleagues on a Decollectivization in Agriculture Project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Watts returned to teaching with a vengeance in the Winter of 1993 (four courses!). He gave lectures at Rutgers, Cornell, Oxford, the IGU in Washington DC, Yale and Madison during the year and has been invited to give a series of lectures at University College, London during the Spring of 1994. His book with Allan Pred Reworking Modernity (Rutgers University Press) appeared at the end of 1992, as did a number of pieces on agrarian change, food systems and cultural theory in Progress in Human Geography, Review of African Political Economy, Economic and Political Weekly and Cultural Anthropology. Watts continues to chair Development Studies and is always thinking about early retirement. He is sponsoring two of next years' Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellows (one from Oxford, one from UCLA) who will be at Berkeley working on environmental movements and forest conservation (both in India).
Lisa Wells continued her research on Holocene sedimentation in the San Francisco estuary wetlands and on long term climate history of the Pacific Basin from coral geochemistry. She has been conducting lots of field work in the bay marshes and managed a trip to Indonesia in December. Lisa and husband Jay Noller welcomed the arrival of their new son, Gabriel Esquivel, born in March.
Dick Walker suffered a publishing drought after having two books appear in the last three years; he admits to loafing along . . . except that he is at work on a new book on the condition of the Bay Area in the late 20th century, tentatively titled "Dancing on the brink", to be published by Verso Press. It's not likely to be finished this year, however, since the arrival of Zia Sharmila Walker in November 92. DW stayed at home on paternity leave Spring 93 and is on sabbatical in Fall 93 to take care of the little one while his wife, Chic Dabby, continues as Director of the Psychological Services Center in Berkeley.
David Stoddart's year was dominated by the University's financial difficulties and all the issues which arose from them. But in the Fall he again taught the course on "Geomorphology and ecology of tropical islands" which took undergraduates for seven weeks to the Gump Biological Research Station on Moorea, French Polynesia. In rather sharp contrast he was in Vladivostok at the end of January negotiating future co-operation between the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Russian Academy of Sciences. The city had just been opened to foreigners after having been closed for sixty years; it was not however the best time of year to be there. In June he took over as President of the 70,000-member Pacific Division of the AAAS at its annual meeting in Missoula, Montana. Late last year he attended a reception at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., in honor of F. Raymond Fosberg on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Atoll Research Bulletin. And he learned some practical geomorphology too, when during prolonged rains in January a subterranean river burst up through the floor of his house and flushed belongings into the street.
David Hooson's book on Geography and National Identity (Blackwells) is, at long last, finally in press, and scheduled for publication next October. Another one, on that mysterious vanished super-power and its fragmented future, is still being re-cast but he plans to have it essentially finished by next Spring. Hooson attended the I.G.U. in Washington and a symposium in Fredericksburg VA where he gave a paper on "Rediscovering the Old Soviet Union." David's summer includes a trip down the Danube, to Istanbul as part of a Cal Alumni trip. His fellow passengers will be Jonathan and Hilda Sauer.
Michael Johns received a 1993-94 Junior Faculty Research grant which he will use for travel and research for a book on Mexico. Michael will teach a revamped Geography 120 under a new title "The Economy and Culture of the Western City" in the Fall. He and Michael Watts will team teach a Freshman Seminar, "Economy, Culture and the Individual" in the Fall.
In November, Hilgard O'R. Sternberg travelled to Montpellier to participate in two different doctoral examinations on theses on Amazonia, one on flood plain forests, the other on development alternatives for Careiro, the island where Sternberg did his own 1956 thesis A Água e o Homem na Várzea do Careiro , with which he competed for the Chair of Geography of Brazil at the then University of Brazil, now Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Following the examinations, Sternberg spent some time in the Camargue, a region whose geomorphology had been studied by his Professor Richard J. Russell. This fall he is scheduled for yet another PhD examination, this time at the University of Paris dealing with the neotectonics of the Peruvian Amazon.
Hilgard's paper at a symposium on Environment and Development in Brazil at Tokyo has been published in the Proceedings (in Japanese). A volume, The Fragile Tropics of Latin America, will include his paper on "Water and wetlands of the Brazilian Amazon: an uncertain future," as well as one by Nori Yagasaki (PhD'82), now at Yokohama University.
In February 1993, Sternberg presented a seminar at U.C. Santa Barbara, in which he reported on the state of his research on charcoal in the rainforests of Amazonia. A parallel project, using stable isotopes, has been undertaken in collaboration with son Leonel, a professor at the University of Miami.
In late May and June of last year, Bob Reed , was in the Philippines, continuing long-term research on the urban transformation of Baguio and the growth and regional impacts of the Iglesia ni Christo religious sect. Late July and August saw him chairing an international gathering (Environmental Science and Adaptive Strategies: Research Planning Conference at Padjadjaran University) in Bandung, Indonesia supported by a grant from the Henry B. Luce Foundation. He initiated a study of Dalat (Vietnam's foremost highland city) in August, and another visit in early 1993 to Hanoi and several provincial cities of Northern Vietnam to select sites for a meeting on regional development in Vietnam scheduled for August 1993. Bob received a grant from UC's Pacific Rim Research Program which will be used to fund a workshop on "Highland Development Research Issues in Vietnam" in Hanoi, Dalat, and Thai Ngyyen (Vietnam) next January.
Papers were presented at the above mentioned international seminar in Indonesia, (on the environmental transformation and urban expansion in the Southeast Asian uplands), and at the AAG Atlanta meeting (on the modern role of hill stations in Vietnam and the Philippines). He was also elected chair of the Asian Geographers Speciality Group.
Bob filled in as Acting Chair for the Group in Asian Studies during the Fall.
A photographic exhibit of Bob's photos on "Urban Vietnam: Perspectives on Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, 1992-1993," were on display in Wurster Hall on the Berkeley campus, April–June 1993.
Beatriz Manz, who joined our faculty just two years agoshe is half-time in Geography, the other half in Ethnic Studieshas been named director of Berkeley's Center for Latin American Studies. She came out running in a recent profile in the Daily Cal: "I am very confident, very energized, and very enthusiastic. There is no other place I would like more to be..." The Center, which offers interdisciplinary masters and doctoral degrees, has its offices on Bowditch Street, which she vows to make a "comforting and lively" locale. Beatriz, whose past studies have been largely concentrated on Guatemala, is off this summer to Brazil on fieldwork and, later, to her native Chile.
With Bob Reed completing his third year as chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, two of the Berkeley area studies centers are under geographers. At earlier times David Hooson headed up Slavic Studies and Jim Parsons the Latin American program.
Jay Vance focuses on the sequential impact of various transportation forms that ultimately created the urban realms we have today in a piece in Our Changing Cities edited by John Fraser Hart (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). The paper originated in a lecture series at the University of Minnesota.
Jim Parsons was an invited participant at an international symposium on food and wine sponsored by the Oldways Foundation at Expo92, Sevilla, in September. He had continued on to Spain from the CLAG meetings in Santo Domingo where he also had given a paper. En route home he gave the banquet address at the AAG West Lakes Division meeting at the University of Missouri, hosted by Kit Salter (PhD'70).
In December Jim was in Alta Bates hospital for balloon angioplasty in response to a flare-up related to earlier open heart by-pass surgery but he was soon back on his feet to complete a contribution to a forthcoming volume 'rereading' cultural geography and another on the Amazon Basin for the Encyclopedia Britannica .
Emeritus lecturer Dan Luten has been inducted into the Big 'C' society. It seems that rugby has become a major sport at Cal and former members of the rugby team have been granted their Big 'C' letters. Dan played in 1933 while a graduate student (chemistry!) and later announced games at Memorial stadium. Long involved in environmental matters, Dan is listed on the national board of advisors of a new Washington organization, Carrying Capacity Network, which seems to be focused on just about everything that matters to environmentalistsenvironmental protection, population stabilization, immigration, ecological economics, resource conservation, growth control and cultural carrying capacity.
Barney Nietschmann continued work as environmental advisor to the Nicaraguan government and to the Miskito environmental NGO organization, "Mikupia," and on research for a management plan for the largest coastal protected area in Latin America, Miskito Coast Protected Area, "Miskito Kupia" (Miskito Heart). He served as co-project director on scuba training and helping to organize Miskito divers to confront "resource pirates" who exploit young, untrained divers to stay too long and too deep to bring lobstersthe Red Gold of the Caribbeanfor export to the US. Many of the 3500 divers have been paralyzed for life, some have been killed by the brutal forced diving conditions.
The National Geographic Society's Board of Trustees has nominated Nietschmann to the Society's Committee for Research and Exploration which decides on applications for funding of scientific research projects. On March 31, he was invited by NGSalong with former NGS grantees Jane Goodall, George Schaller, Melvyn C. Goldstein, Paul C. Sereno, etc.to commemorate award of the 5000th NGS research grant to Rosalind Alp (for pioneering study of chimpanzees in Sierra Leone).
Barney continues to teach Geography 4, cultural geography with an emphasis on cultural biological diversity as well as a seminar on "Field Research Methods and Theories" and "Ocean Geography". During the year he gave papers at the International Geographical Congress and at the AAG, as well as a series of four talks at the University of Wisconsin on Central America. He continues his field research in the Eastern Caribbean: Dominica and St. Lucia, on indigenous seafaring, Carib people, and coastal-problems. He is working on a book with grad student Rich Griggs about the world's 5000 "Nations". Barney begins a two -year project, funded by the University of California Pacific Rim Program, on "Central America's Pacific Coast: Biodiversity, Natural Disasters and Environmental Degradation."
"The World According to Nietschmann," Audubon (circulation 500,000) Nov-Dec. 1992, p. 73 puts up for public view our own Barney's innovative thinking about the difference between bureaucrat, expansionist, centralized political systems known as 'states' and the much larger number of 'nations' on earth defined by common ancestry, history, society, ideology, language, homeland, and often, religion....e.g. Cree, Pawnee, Cherokee, as well as Serbs, Croats, Basques, Welsh, and of course his own Miskito Nationmaybe 5,000 such groups in all. There's a photo, too, of BQN with his Miskito friends and his sternness pose "environmentalist, geographer, raconteur, with his own ideas about states and nations." Stories on Barney also appeared in an Op-Ed of the Wall Street Journal , September 4, 1992 and in an article, "Miskito Coast," which appeared in American Way [American Airlines magazine], May 15, 1993.
Nietschmann family activities: Angelina continues taking classes; Carlos began Berkeley High School, plays rugby, crew, and football; Kabu, 11, is a sixth grader at Malcolm X, will transfer to Martin Luther King, plays soccer with the Mavericks and is on the Berkeley YMCA Swim Team; and Tangni, 3-1/2, began swimming at 8 months of age and now is in swim classes at the Berkeley Y.
In fall Cherie Semans (PhD'87), departmental cartographer and Lecturer, took over Geography 4Introductory Cultural Geography. She will teach the course again during summer session along with a new course, Geography 186Map Reading, Analysis and Interpretation. This class will be a broader survey of maps and mapping than her spring cartography class. Much of the emphasis will be on looking at maps in a more critical manner as described in her recent article, "Paper Worlds: Maps vs. Reality," which was published by the San Francisco Exploratorium in conjunction with its 1992-93 Finding Your Way exhibit. Cherie continues to coordinate UC's social science outreach into the Richmond Unified School District in addition to spending time teaching geography, specifically "everything you wanted to know about wetlands," in her son's third grade class.
Hilgard Sternberg and Jim Parsons, emeritus professors, were among featured lecturers at an Environmental Day for talented eighth and ninth graders from throughout California in December. The 'happening' was sponsored by Johns Hopkins University and the College of Natural Resources.
Although with plenty of mileage still left on their tires, two of our senior faculty have been snared by the lures of 'early retirement,' teaching their last regular classes in the fall semester 1992.
Jay Vance (PhD Clark 1952), one of the country's most distinguished urban geographers, joined the Berkeley faculty in 1958 to initiate work in his specialty. In his 35 years here he has written standard texts on the Western City, on the geography of wholesaling, and the historical geography of transportation and has been a major contributor to the periodical literature. His courses on urban morphology, transportation, Canada, and the U.S. have been part of the department's basic fare. His urban field course, popularly known as 'Lunch 1A," was renowned both for its gustatory delights and for the instructor's remarkable sense of and sensitivity to the history of urban form. He boosted Boston and Oakland at every opportunity, while never forgetting the role of the French 'Bastides' in the history of cities. Jay supervised some 24 PhD dissertations and was for many years graduate adviser. His students are spread across the country. He maintained close ties with City and Regional planners, working especially with Peter Hall, distinguished British geographer who for a time was carried on this department's roster and who himself has taken the same early retirement option (for several years he had been half time at Berkeley and half time in Britain).
Jay's wife Jean, herself a geographer, died less than a year ago. Daughter Tiffany lives in Seattle. This spring Jay was in Australia and New Zealand, in part to familiarize himself with the 'down under' rail system and to travel the 'long straight' between Adelaide and Perth. Later he headed north to the family retreat in the Queen Charlotte islands, accompanied by his canine friend Jacques, to finish off his latest project, an historical geography of North American railroads.
Ted Oberlander (PhD Syracuse 1963), the other casualty (he likewise retired as of January 1, 1993), came to the department in 1963 as a replacement for the inimitable Swiss geomorphologist-cartographer John Kesseli. Ted has specialized in desert landforms, his work taking him first to Iran (his dissertation at Syracuse, 1962, was on the Zagros Gorges) and more recently to North Africa and South America's Atacama as well as his old stomping grounds, the Mojave. For the past year he has been partly incapacitated by the loss of muscular control of his left arm, carried in a sling following a delicate operation for a neck tumor, the removal of which required the severing of crucial nerves. In August 1992 he married Barbara Bigelow Willsey (AB'53) , having been widowed two years earlier by the death of his first wife, Lucille McClish, one-time departmental secretary.
Ted's carefully prepared and artistically illustrated lectures on land forms, map reading, cartography, the Middle East, and arid lands were legendary in the department. His widely employed text on physical geography, written jointly with Robert A. Muller of Louisiana State University, has gone through several editions. A new and revised version is in the final stages of preparation.
Roger Byrne
"Holocene Changes in the Distribution and Abundance of Oaks in California." USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PSW-126. U.S. Forest Service Symposium on Oak Woodlands and Hardwood Rangeland Management Proceedings, 1991 (with Scott Mensing and Eric Edlund).
"An Automated Charcoal Scanner for Paleoecological Studies." (with Sally Horn and Roger Horn). Palynology 16:7-12, 1992
"El Impacto Potencial de un Calentamiento Global Sobre los Ecosistemas Terrestres de México." (with Leticia Menchaca). Ciencias 43, núm especial, 145-150, 1992
David Hooson
"The I.G.U. Commission on the History of Geographical Thought," Geojournal, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 216-217, 1992
Michael Johns
"The Anatomies of Ruling Class Culture: The Buenos Aires Elite, 1880-1920," Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 74-101, 1993.
"The Urbanization of Peripheral Capitalism: Buenos Aires, 1880-1920," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 352-374, 1992.
"Economic Development and Industrialization in Argentina," Economic Geography , 68, 2 (April), pp. 188-204, 1992.
Beatriz Manz
"Representation, Organization, and Human Rights Among Guatemalan Refugees in Mexico1980-1992," Joel Simon, co-author, Harvard Human Rights Journal , Vol. 5, Spring, 95-135, 1992
Barney Nietschmann
"The Co-Existence of Cultural and Biological Diversity," International Security: The Environmental Dimension . EPIIC, Tufts University, Boston, 1992.
"The Interdependence of Biological and Cultural Diversity." Center for World Indigenous Studies, Occasional Paper #21, 1992.
"The Development of Autonomy in the Miskito Nation," Fourth World Bulletin, 2(2):1, 6-7, 15, 1993.
James J. Parsons
"Geography," in Latin America and Caribbean Studies: a Critical Guide, Paula Covington, ed., SALAM (Seminar in Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials), pp. 267-275. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992.
"Before Greenwich: the Canary Islands, El Hierro, and the Dilemma of the Prime Meridian," in S. T. Wong, ed., Person, Place, and Thing: Essays in Honor of Philip L. Wagner , pp. 267-275, 1992.
"Southern Blooms: Latin America and the World of Flowers," Queens Quarterly (Kingston, Ont.), 99(3):542-561, 1992.
Las regiones tropicales americànas: Visión geográfica de James J. Parsons, Bogota: Fondo FEN Colombia. 427 pp, 1992.
Allan Pred
"Pure and Simple Lines, Future Lines of Vision: The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930," Nordisk Samhällsgeografisk Tidskrift, 15, 3-61, 1992.
(with others) "Books of the Decade: an eclectic listing," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, December 1992, 721-30.
Robert R. Reed
"From Suprabarangay to Colonial Cities: Reflections on the Hispanic Foundation of Manila," in Nezar AlSayyad (ed.), Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Experience , London: Avebury, pp. 45-81, 1992.
David Stoddart
"F. Raymond Fosberg and the Atoll Research Bulletin, 1951-1991," Atoll Research Bulletin , 355, 1-24, 1992.
"Environmental variability and environmental extremes as factors in the island ecosystem" [with R.P.D. Walsh], Atoll Research Bulletin, 356, 1-71, 1992.
"Substrate specificity and episodic catastrophe: constraints on the insular plant geography of Suwarrow Atoll, northern Cook Islands," Atoll Research Bulletin, 362, 1-19, 1992.
James E. Vance, Jr.
"The Growth of Canada, the Mercantile Model, and the Corridor of Exploitation," in S.T. Wong, ed., Person, Place, and Thing, pp. 145-175, 1992.
Richard Walker
A review of Social Bases of the Micro-electronic Revolution in Science and Society, Summer 1992 56(2):220-224.
Michael Watts
"Life Under Contract," in Peter Little and Michael Watts (eds.), Peasants Under Contract , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
"The Devil's Excrement: Oil, Money and the Spectacle of Black Gold," in Nigel Thrift et al. (eds.), Money, Power and Space, Oxford, Blackwell, 1993.
"Hunger, Famine and the Space of Vulnerability," GeoJournal [reprinted in Economic and Political Weekly ], 30/2, pp. 1-9, 1993.
"Development I: Power, Knowledge and Practice," Progress in Human Geography, 17/2, pp. 257-272, 1993.
"The Space of Vulnerability: A Realist Theory of Famine and Hunger," (with Dr. Hans-Georg Bohle) Progress in Human Geography, 17/1, pp. 43-67, 1993. [Reprinted in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie ]
"Peasants and Flexible Accumulation in the Third World: Producing Under Contract," Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 27, July 25, pp. 90-97, 1992. (with Allan Pred)
Lisa Wells
"Holocene Landscape Change on the Santa Delta, Peru: Impact on Archaeological Site Distribution," in The Holocene, 2(3):193-204, 1992.
From the dust jacket of Pred and Watts, Reworking Modernity: Capitalism and Symbolic Discontent , Rutgers, 252 pp., $45/$17 [with case studies from Sweden, California, and West Africa illustrating geographical, cultural, and historically distinct responses to capitalism]: "A brave, provocative reconnaissance to map the cultural ecology of late capitalism.....Only a very high order of geographic, linguistic, historical, and cultural skills (not to mention playfulness) stands a chance against such a bewildering fortress. It's too soon to expect a citadel to fall, but Pred and Watts have definitely scaled the outer walls."James C. Scott, Yale University.
From an extended review of Storper and Walker, The Capitalist Imperative in Economic Geography "A book all human geographers should read.....far too important to squander on geography alone....advances the intellectual project and the cause of our discipline like few other books in geography before (as the authors) celebrate and marvel at the ability of capitalism to reconstruct itself.....using geography."Marie S. Gertier, Toronto.
Antipode, A Radical Journal of Geography , established 25 years ago under Dick Peet (PhD'67), enters its second quarter century with a new look and new editorsBerkeley's Dick Walker and Linda McDowell, Cambridge University. The new editors propose to conserve the journal's legacy as "the Left alternative and leading voice of critical and independent thought in geography....innovative and rebellious." The journal, now in the Blackwell stable, will continue to publish articles about "ancient social evils while taking on new or revived concerns such as post-fordism, postmodernism, gay liberation, Eurocentrism, feminism...and rethinking socialism." So yes, there is a "Berkeley School," perhaps more than one.
The McCone Foundation of Pebble Beach has pledged $7 million to renovate the 33 year -old Earth Sciences Building, geography's home, and to endow fellowships for graduate students. The foundation was established by the late John McCone, a 1922 Berkeley alumnus who directed the CIA under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and was chair of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1958 to 1960. He died in 1991. In recognition of the foundation's pledge, the UC Board of Regents has approved renaming the building McCone Hall. $5 million of the pledge will be used to expand and modernize the Department of Geology and Geophysics, the Department of Geography and the Seismographic Stations. The remaining $2 million will fund graduate student fellowships in the two departments. The renovation, however, is estimated to cost $10 million and a seismic upgrade will cost an additional $5 million.
The estate of Ella-Marie Loeb, wife of Edwin Loeb, former lecturer in the department, has left $112,600 to be used to support "research by worthy students in the field of anthropology or geography," and to be known as the Edwin M. & Ella-Marie Loeb Memorial Scholarship Fund.
The Kenneth and Florence Oberholtzer Fellowship is in the process of being finalized. This fellowship, a result of a $150,000 endowment from Kenneth Oberholtzer, will support graduate students in Geography studying "conservation, protection and wise use of the earth and its resources." Mr. Oberholtzer, who is the uncle of Richard Walker, was a long-time school administrator and Superintendent of the Denver Public Schools who retired 25 years ago to Danville, CA. He has a life-long interest in conservation dating from his days at the University of Illinois' Agricultural School.
The H. Homer Aschmann Lecture Fund has been created with a $25,000 gift from Mrs. Louise Aschmann. It will be used to support visiting lecturers in the wide-ranging interests of the late Professor Aschmann, U.C. Riverside, who completed his PhD at Berkeley in 1954.
Total enrollment in 1992-93 geography courses: 2,218. Courses with enrollments exceeding 100Fall: G. 1 (Byrne)115; G. 4 (Semans)141. G. 156 (Johns)108. Spring: G. 130 (Watts)196; G. 150 (Greenberg)146.
Summer Session 1993 lecturers: Shirley Hoffmann (Global Environments), Cherie Semans (Intro to Cultural Geography, and Map Reading, Analysis and Interpretation), Rich Griggs (Cultural Geography of Indigenous Peoples), Bob Rice (Natural Resources and Population), Jorge Lizárraga (The Caribbean Region), and Ying Yang (Geography of China)
Faculty leaves 1993-94: Granger, Walker, Fall; Wells, Fall and Spring; Byrne, Reed, Spring. In addition Manz is teaching in Chicano Studies in the fall.
A two-week strike by teaching assistants (Graduate Student Instructors, GSI, in the current terminology) marked the waning days of the fall term. An April election apparently brought the union status sought for by the AGSE (Association of Graduate Student Employees) but for "tutors and readers" only, not for teaching assistants. In the spring semester it was fee increases, demands for realigning Ethnic Studies, possible closure of the Department of Art, and for saving the threatened graduate programs in Dramatic Art and the Library School, that set off short-lived campus demonstrations. A restructuring of Board of Regents into a more democratically representative body has also been the subject of lively discussion.
The Open House April 24 brought a record number of former students and friends to the department. It was a cooperative venture, skillfully coordinated by Margarete Monaghan (AB'85), to which students, staff, and faculty all contributed. Included were lectures, demonstrations, round-the-clock activities for young people, the department's fabulous vocalists and band, the celebrated Sauer Singers and more--even free hot dogs courtesy of Barney Nietschmann, Jr.
Two weeks later, Margarete organized the annual Spring Map Sale. This event, jointly sponsored by Geography and the Main Library Map Room, brought in more than $3,000 as well as hordes of 'closet geographers' (maps are 'in').
Geography's 1993 Commencement, organized by Doty Valrey, was set for the second year in the North Gate oak grove; which must rate as one of the finest in the country. A record 77 BA degrees and 15 PhDs were awarded in Geography, along with 8 MA s (compare with the handful in geology and geophysics). Among graduating seniors, Lamont Allen was recipient of the departmental citation and Phi Beta Kappa, who was brought up in Germany in a U.S. military family. Lorien Ferris was awarded the first Lucille McClish Oberlander Award in Physical Geography. Andrew Cohen, on the Board of Directors of EBMUD, was the keynote speaker, with undergraduate and graduate remarks made by Elaine Miller and George Henderson, respectively.
The biggest hit of the graduation, the Sauer Singers, simply get better and better. Under the direction of Dick Walker, the Sauer Singers are Brad Beck, Kim Charnofsky (MA'89), Christopher Hoadley, Victoria Randlett, Robin Sturgeon (AB'92), and Charles Hadenfeldt (on drums!).
Don Bain continues as Director of the Geography Computing Facility. He taught his usual "Introduction to the Use of Computers in Geography" class in the Fall semester, ably assisted by Lisa Hamilton, and collaborated with Cherie Semans (PhD'87) on the computer portions of the Spring semester cartography course. He continues to write for MacWeek magazine most recently an article on professional cartography on the Mac and reviews of the Macintosh GIS program MapInfo, and map projection programs Geocart and Azimuth. He used Azimuth to create the logo for the Association of American Geographer's 1994 meeting in San Francisco. This summer Don is collaborating with Jim Proctor (PhD'92), now at U.C. Santa Barbara, on a pilot project to put geographic teaching images (slides) on computer disks (Kodak Photo-CD).
Deborah Berman-Santana to State University of New York, Albany
Alex Clapp to University of Toronto
Piper Gaubatz (PhD'89) to University of Massachusetts
Thomas Howard to Armstrong College, Savannah, GA
Scott Mensing to University of Nevada, Reno
Katharyne Mitchell to University of Washington, Seattle
Richard Schroeder to Rutgers University
Lisa Wells and Jay Noller, a son, Gabriel
Dick Walker and Chic Dabby, a daughter, Zia
Frankie and Karl Malamud-Roam, a son, Daniel
Eric Edlund and Anne Iverson were married in October
Victoria Randlett and Ron Mann in September
Neusa Hidalgo Monroy and Scott McWilliams in December
Carmen Concepción, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow. PhD (City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley). [Continuing in 1993-94]
Brian Hudson, School of Planning and Landscape Architecture, Queensland University of Technology, Australia (April 1993)
Bo Malmberg, PhD (Geography), Uppsala University, Sweden.
Leticia Menchaca, PhD (Plant Ecology) University College of North Wales, Bangor. Research Scientist National University of Mexico (UNAM). Visiting Scholar UC/UNAM Faculty Exchange Program. [Continuing in 1993-94]
Stephanie Pincetl, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow. PhD (Urban Planning), UCLA.. [Continuing in 1993-94]
Andrew Kirby [Spring 1994], Geography, University of Arizona
Sallie Marston [Spring 1994], Geography, University of Arizona
S. Ravi Rajan, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow. PhD (Geography) Wolfson College, Oxford
Haripriya Rangan, Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow. PhD (Architecture and Urban Planning), UCLA
Tony Smith, Philosophy, Iowa State University
Noritaka Yagasaki, (PhD'82) [Spring and Summer 1994] Geography, Yokohama Univ.
Visiting scholar (1991) Yelena Kostuikhina, St. Petersburg, was back again in California this year for research in the Tahoe-Baykal comparative study.
Maggie Rössler, visitor in 1991, now prominent in the Unesco Heritage program in Paris, is travelling the world selecting sites for preservation.
Visiting lecturers during the year have included Alan Taylor (Penn State), Kay Anderson (University College, New South Wales), Gilberto Cabrera (University of Havana), and Paul Starrs (Nevada). Susan Christopherson (PhD'83), Cornell and Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, visited the department in October and gave a 'tea talk.'
* * * * *
And, one more for the record, the all-important secretaries, now administrative assistants, without which none of the rest of us would ever have made it.
Gladys Wickson ca. 1925-29
Harriet Giles Welles 1929-1939
Virginia Foulds 1939-1941
Geoff Christiansen 1941-?
Marjorie McMillan McPhillamy 1945-49
Lila Rose Arnold 1949-1951
Wester Lowdermilk Hess 1952-1957
Elinore McGee Barrett 1957-1960
Lucille McClish Oberlander 1960-1963
Joyce Frost Endsley 1963-1966
Sharon Hamilton 1966-1968/70
Martha Moon 1968-1970
Peggy Lincoln 1970-1982
Natalia Vonnegut 1982-present (1976-82 served as either Undergraduate or Graduate Assistant)
****
The Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (APCG) meets in Berkeley September 15-18 this year (1993). Features will include a bay cruise, and a special plenary session on Latin America featuring, among others, Henry Bruman (PhD'40), Dan Stanislawski (PhD'44), Marie Price (AB'84, PhD Syracuse), George Lovell (Queens University) and Dan Arreola (Arizona State University). University Map Librarian Phil Hoehn is developing a display of historic maps, and there will be a reception catered by Barney Nietschmann Jr., both in the foyer of the Doe Library. The Sauer singers too should be on tap. Where do you hold such a conference in the midst of the school year? The Shattuck Hotel and the downtown Berkeley Conference Center one block away on Bancroft Way. There will be an annual banquet (Les Rowntree, San Jose State, will give the presidential address on "100 Years of Changes in the Berkeley Hills"), a welcoming cocktail party hosted by the APCG Women's Network and the Society of Women Geographers, workshops for undergrad and grad students, and other special sessions, are planned.
A large turn-out is anticipated, given both our geographic centrality and the fact that we have not in memory previously taken on such a meeting. For old grads it should be the perfect opportunity for 'homecoming.'
Chairman David Stoddart and Paul Starrs (PhD'89), University of Nevada, are the organizers.
Details are to be found in the APCG Newsletter received by all members (calendar year membership $15 regular; $18 joint; $8 non-voting student and retired, through Nancy Wilkerson, Sec. Treas., Geography Department, San Francisco State University, San Francisco 94132).
The $65 registration fee (with optional $20 for Wednesday 5-9 p.m. Bay Cruise and $25 for Friday Annual Banquet) due August 1 with checks, to APCG, addressed to David Stoddart Geography, UC Berkeley 94720. Presenters of papers should submit abstracts at the same time following format of national AAG meetings (250 words on 3-1/2" floppy disk with paper copy).
In addition to the pre-meeting (Wednesday) 4-hour Bay Cruise (conditional on sufficient registrants), field trips are planned to the wine country (Bill Crowley, Wed.), to Mt. Diablo (Sharon Johnson, Thurs. or Fri.), and to the Delta (Dave Larson, Sat.).
Shattuck Hotel APCG rates, $68 single, $78 double, plus $15 for third person, includes continental breakfast and overnight parking. Add 12% sales tax. Reservations should be made by August 16 directly with the hotel, 2086 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 (Ph 510-845-7300).
(Note: This is not a 'football weekend.' Cal plays at Temple in Philadelphia September 18.)
The fall APCG meeting at Berkeley will serve as a warm-up of sorts for the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel six months later (March 29 –April 2 1994), also to be hosted by the Berkeley department with the assistance of other northern California and Nevada institutions. David Stoddart again heads the local arrangements committee with Paul Starrs in charge of field trips, close to 40 planned. Allan Pred is Program Chair. Abstracts of papers must be received in the AAG Central Office by September 20, 1993. Details in AAG mailings.
Registration fees: AAG members $100; Student and Retired members $50; Nonmember students $75; Other Eligible Participants $150; One-day Registrants $50. For more information contact AAG, 1710 16th Street NW, Washington DC 20009 (Ph 202-234-1450; FAX 202-234-2744).
Convention room rates at the San Francisco Marriott (415-896-1600) are $125 single/double.
Continuing budget cuts reduced the Geography Computing Facility's staff from one (Susan Pomeroy (MA'87), then Lisa Hamilton) to none, leaving Don Bain to manage the department's 45 computers alone. The Computer Facility internship program, begun in Spring 1992 with ten interns, continued in 92-93. Fall semester interns Eric Havel (Environmental Science 93), Marilyn Bolak (AB'92), Jane Sterzinger (AB'92), and Robin Sturgeon (AB'92), were succeeded in the Spring semester by Eric Havel (for a third semester), Rosan Primeau, John Velcamp (AB'93), and John Rigdon . The interns made an immense contribution to running the Facility and assisting computer users.
Utilizing various creative sources of funding (including alumni contributions and the sale of older equipment) the department's stock of computer equipment continued to evolve. A milestone was passed in late May when the last of the original Macintosh Plus computers was retired. Some of these were among the first Macs ever made donated to the university for the Tolman Laboratory, then upgraded and transferred to Geography. Several of these stalwart machines have been in 24-hour a day operation for over a decade, and are now being sold to other departments. They enabled the Facility to support "friendly" software, PostScript graphics, and networking years before these became common on other computer platforms.
In January Davis geographer Debbie Elliott-Fisk, as Director of the university's Natural Reserve System, selected the Geography Computing Facility to create geographic information systems for the four Berkeley campus-affiliated reserves. Grad student Heather Carlisle was hired to begin the project with the Hastings Natural History Reserve in Carmel Valley using the Macintosh-based program GeoNavigator.
Computer connectivity assumed increasing importance in 92-93, as most of the department's faculty and staff acquired computers both at home and work (and sometimes in-between, with Powerbooks and other portables becoming commonplace). Use of high speed network connections for e-mail, library catalogs, file server workgroups, news -servers, weather satellite images, and software became a routine part of academic life.
George Giefer, for 34 years Librarian at the Water Resources Center Archives on the Berkeley campus, has retired. He has been replaced by Linda Vida-Sunnen, formerly with libraries at PG&E and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Water Resources archive is a Statewide arm of the university, conveniently housed (for geography) on the Berkeley campus.
The regional oral history program at Bancroft Library has prepared a 304-page memoir documenting the life of Luna Leopold, emeritus professor of geology and landscape architecture, and formerly chief hydrologist of the USGS Water Resources Division. A long time friend of the department, Luna has often described himself as a 'geographer.'
With all the Earthquake Emergency Planning on the campus one might think the 5th floor seismologists must know something that we don't know. But the truth is that the much publicized quake that had been predicted for the Parkfield area of the San Andreas fault failed to materialize this winter within the frame of dates promised.
Why, it is asked, is the University spending so much money on new and retrofitted buildings (library, life sciences, business school, computer sciences, health services) when it is so financially strapped? The answer is that the building programs are funded separately by bond issues approved by California voters and the legislature, or by earmarked gifts of private donors.
Three-dot journal: The traditional "Thursday teas," euphemism for the weekly departmental seminars, have been switched forward to Wednesdays at 4, hopefully to induce better attendance . . . Grad Student Barbara Walker coordinated the 'Tea Talk' Speakers with financial assistance from Graduate Dean Joseph Cerny . . . Geography upper division lecture courses, at least for Fall 1993, are all scheduled for Tuesday-Thursday, only Geography 1 (introductory physical) being slated for MWF . . . the coming Summer Session is offering an unprecedented seven different geography courses . . . UC, under increasing budgetary constraints, has put plans for a 10th campus in the San Joaquin Valley on indefinite hold . . . Berkeley's city government lost several key figures during the spring including the city manager . . . The geography program at UC Davis is being 'disestablished,' as a consequence of budgetary constraints and internal conflict.
The rains came (nearly 27 inches [0.68 meters] for the East Bay through the end of May for the 1992-93 season). For the first time in memory the southern part of the state received as much precipitation as the north. The snow pack in the Sierra peaked at in excess of 160 inches [4.1 meters].
A reorganization of the College of Natural Resources consolidates existing disciplines and replaces or renames programs. The Conservation and Resource Studies major will continue within a consolidated new behemoth Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. In addition, an Environmental Science major will focus on understanding biotic and abiotic factors behind environmental problems. Geography remains in the College of Letters and Science.
With a Cal football season that could be easily forgotten, it was basketball's year. First came the dismissal of the coach "Students must be treated as human beings. . . You cannot use language that is abusive, degrading or demeaning. You can't have that" (Chancellor Tien). Then followed a late season surge that led the Bears to the NCAA tournament and wins over LSU and last year's champion Duke before succumbing to Kansas. Major factors: a freshman from Alameda named Jason Kidd and a sophomore from Fremont named Lamond Murray.
Did you say ethnic restaurants? A recent listing for Berkeley included 24 Chinese, 17 Mexican, 16 Japanese, 12 Italian, 10 East Indian, 4 African, 13 Southeast Asian (Burmese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian).
The City of Berkeley's parking meters yielded $3.8 million in revenue in 1992, including fees on tickets not paid in time, a $1.3 million increase over the previous year!
An often forgotten side of Carl Sauer, so long the dominant figure in geography both at Berkeley and nationally, is underscored in a special issue of A gricultural History on U.S. agricultural research. An article entitled "Soil Morphology Studies in the U.S. Soil Survey Program" by Anne and William Effland, historian and soil scientist respectively, in the Spring 1992 issue of that journal (v. 66, no. 2, 189ff) credits the Berkeley geographer with initiating the study of the relation to soils of underlying geology and landforms. It further describes him as the major influence in the creation in 1935 of a division of Climatic and Physiographic Research within the newly established Soil Conservation Service. Sauer's report to the Science Advisory Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, had identified the need for bringing pedology into an integrative science of 'surface and soil.' He recommended that climatologists be brought together with soil scientists and geologists because of the fundamental role of weathering processes. As a result a Division of Climatic and Physiographic Studies, with C. Warren Thornthwaite as chief, was established to institute the recommendations. Thornthwaite had completed a PhD in geography at Berkeley under Sauer in 1930. Sauer had urged establishment of a number of field research projects in different parts of the country. He organized the first himself to study the erosional development of stream channels at Polacca Wash. on the Navajo-Hopi reservation in Arizona. This, and other projects (SW Louisiana, the karst of western Kentucky, the Muskingum watershed of eastern Ohio), were staffed by geologists and geographers, not soil scientists.
Administrative budget cuts soon terminated these projects but the groundwork had been set. The authors trace this line of research in the Soil Survey program from its inception to the present. A full page photo of Sauer ca. 1939 accompanies the article. The caption describes him as "originator of the climatic and physiographic research in the Soil Conservation Service."
The mystique, if that's what it is, of Sauerian Berkeley cultural geography has been getting worked over of late. Christine Rodrigue (Chico State) makes the rather startling claim in the Professional Geographer (November 1992) that cultural geographers (and anthropologists?) have been all wrong in relating animal domestication so readily to ritual motives; a Wisconsin librarian, David Henige, does the hatchet job on what he terms 'the high counters' in the matter of pre-Columbian population estimates for the Americas (Latin American Population History Bulletin 1992); John Chappell dismisses Sauer's rejection of environmental determinism as 'misguided' (at APCG in Bellingham); and a volume by one D. Brooks Green, Historical Geography: a Methodological Approach , entirely omits Sauer, Andrew Clark and Don Meinig (though Wilbur Z. does make it). How soon they forget! And then there is the dissent of some of the more contentious 'new cultural geographers.' But on that see Marie Price and Martin Lewis in the March 1993 Annals, a rousing affirmation of the older tradition of empirical questioning that sometimes tends to be lost or misrepresented in the modernist shuffle of 'conceptual positioning.'
For all the controversy, cultural geography survives, perhaps in its liveliest form as 'cultural ecology.' The Cultural Ecology Newsletter of the AAG specialty group (Kent Mathewson, editor) Spring 1993, listed no fewer than 16 sessions on the program of the annual meetings in Atlanta as 'of interest to members.' Berkeley PhDs and grad students were present on most of them.
Bill Speth's paper on "Carl Sauer's Uses of Geography's Past" at the APCG Bellingham meetings pointed to how Sauer consistently drew on the works of major figures in geography's past (especially German) to justify a distinctive culture historical geography that conflicted with 'received' American geographies. The paper has been submitted to the Professional Geographer.
Peter Haggett's 1992 Carl Sauer Memorial Lecture at Berkeley has been published in revised form as "Sauer's 'Origins and Dispersals': its implication for the geography of disease" in Transactions, Institute of British Geographers 17:387-398 (1992). It includes a refreshing review of Sauer's wide-ranging contributions to geographical scholarship, emphasizing his courage to speculate as among his most abiding legacies. There is a photo of the Berkeley geographer and the well-known map of New World agricultural systems from 'Agricultural Origins.'
An extended essay by historian Kenneth Maxwell, "Adios Columbus" in the New York Review of Books (January 28, 1993) on some 14 major volumes inspired by the 1492-1992 quincentenary gives favorable attention to recent reprints of Carl Sauer's The Early Spanish Main (U.C. Press 306 pp., $40.00; $16 paper) and Bill Denevan's revised The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Wisconsin, rev., 353 pp., $45.00; $14.95 paper).
Nancy Blumenstock, wife of David Blumenstock (PhD'43) sent us the following (year unknown, probably 1936-37):
"Sauer is becoming unbearable these days, what with his new-found conviction that only God and the plow can save the soil."
–Robert W. Richardson
Sauer slowly bowed his head
To hide a salty tear.
Then in a measured voice he said
So all around could hear:
"There's nothing that will aid us now
To save our precious soil;
Except to trust in God and Plow
And ever onward toil."
David I. Blumenstock
Apparently it's tough all over, and getting tougher. LSU's geography program is trying to increase grant and contract support from current levels of about $750,000 per annum to in excess of $1,250,000 and a concurrent doubling of endowments from $400,000 to $800,000. This in the face of the state of Louisiana's insolvency. They bewail the fact that over 50 percent of their total funding is still from state funds while the comparable figure for the Penn State geography department, for example, is only 18 percent. 18 percent! Are they kidding? So far as the editors know the Berkeley figure is closer to 85 percent.
And LSU is not alone. From the Geography Alumni Newsletter of the University of Illinois (everyone is into 'newsletters') we learn that that department has not only a cash endowment of $100,000 but a 'deferred gift endowment' of over $800,000, "a kind of insurance program with which to protect the department," making it fully competitive in attracting quality graduate students.
The AAG Council (elected) currently includes Betsy Burns (PhD'74), Arizona State, secretary-treasurer, and Don Vermeer (PhD'64), representative of the Mid-Atlantic Division. Bill Denevan (PhD'63) is associate Book Review editor of the Annals. And now, here comes Betsy again as one of two nominees for vice-president of the APCG 1993-94!
The APCG has had 57 presidents since its establishment at UCLA in 1935. Of these eight have been from UCLA and four each from Berkeley, Oregon, and Washington according to a listing in the past APCG Yearbook. From the Berkeley faculty: Leighly, Parsons, Kesseli, Luten. Berkeley PhDs on the presidential list include Meigs, Dicken, Price, Aschmann, Stanislawski, Wagner, Court, and Urquhart.
An invitation to Berkeley geographers in the last Itinerant to contribute books and reprints on rural Latin America to the new Jose Maria Aguedas Library in Santiago, Chile, being organized by geographer Rafael Baraona carried an error in the address, which should be 3004 Av. Ricardo Lyon, Santiago.
Blair Boyd's Landscape magazine vol. 31, no. 3 is dedicated to the late Jean Vance, Jay's wife and herself a geographer, who served on the editorial board of the magazine for 17 years. She is described as "a model for cultural geography, with her wide knowledge and understanding. . . . reticent to seek the limelight, she deeply influenced a large circle of friends and students who knew and loved her. Never one to intrude, her invariable opening on the telephone was is this a good time to talk? We wish we could hear that question from her again." A Jean Vance Memorial Fund to support the hiring of graduate students to assist faculty teaching has been set up at the geography department at San Francisco State University where Jean was chairperson at the time of her death.
Some historical data, from a 1980 letter from the late Don Brand (PhD'33): "I have amused myself studying the printed programmes of the first six doctorates conferred at Berkeley in Geography. Two had minors in Geology (Leighly and Dicken); the other four in Anthropology. The Geography Department members of the orals committees were three: Sauer (all six candidates); Oskar Schmieder (3); and Leighly three (Dicken, Meigs, Brand). From other departments: 3 Geologists, N.E.A. Hinds (Leighly, Thornthwaite), Louderback (Leighly, Dicken), Taliaferro (Dicken); 3 Anthropologists, Lowie (Leighly, Thornthwaite, Kniffen, Brand), Kroeber (Kniffen, Dicken, Brand), Olson (Meigs); 3 historians, Bolton (Thornthwaite, Brand), Chapman (Meigs), Priestly (Kniffen, Brand); 2 economists, Daggett (Thornthwaite), Knight (Dicken); one soil scientist, Hendry (Kniffen, Meigs). I was quite complimented one time in Mexico City at a luncheon at the University Club when Bolton claimed me as one of his "boys" along with George Hammond and several other historians from Berkeley who were present."
'New' vs "Traditional'?From Blackwell's (London) "Geography 1993" listing of new offerings: of some 60 titles, mostly by U.K. authors or transplants, no more than five appear to be grounded in specific places, areas or localities (South Pacific, Russia, China, UK, Japan). The rest unfailingly tackle the overarching, often philosophical issues generally or on a global scale. E.g. discourses on the 'reworking' of 'late' capitalism, the faces of modernity and post-modernity, the dialetics of political economy and development, industrial organization, spaces of consumption, power relations, gender, class, and environmental impacts.
In striking contrast each of our 15 Berkeley doctoral dissertations this year relate to geographically specific situationsChina (2), Israel, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Tanzania, Gambia, Chile, Venezuela, Vancouver, the Middle West, the Pacific Northwest, California (3)who, what, when, where, why!
The Berkeley department has its own centenarian. Ed Thomas (MA'39), born in San Bernardino in 1893, celebrated his 100th birthday at a party at the Berkeley Women's City Club March 29, attended by more than 140 well-wishers.
Ed Thomas was an undergraduate major in geography and captain of the Cal swimming team (Class of 1915). After graduation he spent one year as a graduate student assistant to Professor Ruliff Holway at $100 per month. He dropped out for financial reasons (and to marry a young lady who had been enrolled in one of his sections), and was soon swept up by World War I and onto the battlefields of France where he earned the Croix de Guerre. On his return he went into the automobile business in Berkeley. He re-enrolled in the university in 1936, signing up in Leighly's meteorology and other classes and seminars. His MA thesis on "Landslides in the Berkeley Hills" was filed in 1939 (the other completed in that year was Jim Parsons' on the California hop industry).
The Thomas and Sauer families had become close friends, and during World War II Ed was recalled to teach in the campus cadet program. He eventually returned to the automobile business, retiring in 1958. Later he was employed part-time in real estate. A few years ago he and his wife Helen moved to a Portland, Oregon, rest home to be near his daughter. Helen died shortly thereafter.
Ed wrote a brief memoir of his memories of the geography department and his relations with Berkeley geographers for the 1987 Itinerant Geographer . He counted his time in the department as among the happiest of his life.
High Fives for Ed Thomas!
Were he alive today Nick Mirov, Russian -born forest ecologist who taught in the department in the 60's and 70's, would also be celebrating his centennial year.
A gala reception and concert of chamber music honored Henry Bruman (PhD'40) emeritus at UCLA, on his 80th birthday in March. It was jointly sponsored by the University Library and the School of Arts, both of which have received generous financial and other support from Henry. The Bruman Library and Map Room is an important feature of the Los Angeles campus. The Henry J. Bruman Summer Music Festival involves free twice-weekly sessions of classical music. In a Los Angeles Times feature, July 5, 1992, including a fine portrait of benefactor Henry is quoted as explaining how his means have been a matter of fortunate investments made before the real estate boom in southern California. Bruman joined the UCLA faculty in 1945 and retired in 1980. He has spent much time in recent years in his native Germany.
Les Hewes (PhD'40), emeritus at the University of Nebraska, recently received the Doc Elliott Award presented annually by the Alumni Association of that school to a retired faculty member "who has gone beyond traditional expectations and made a difference in the lives of students and alumni." Les has been at the university since 1945 and was chairman of geography for 22 years. He has directed a record 34 PhD dissertations and an additional 27 MA theses. Under him Nebraska became the pre-eminent place to study the Great Plains. At 87 he seems to just be getting under way. During the past year he has travelled in Turkey (where the landscapes of Cappadocia were especially impressive), Cuba, and Peru and Bolivia." Next on the schedule a cruise along the Norwegian coast "as far as Norway goes."
"Andrew Hill Clark 1911-1975" by David Ward (acting chancellor at Wisconsin-Madison) and Michael Solot is one of eight essays comprising volume 14 of Geographers Biobibliographic Studies, Geoffrey Martin, editor. Andy (PhD'44), often described as the dean of American historical geographers, spent most of his professional career on the Madison campus. He was president of the AAG in 1961 -62. The original English version of a paper by Clark on "The Contributions of Ralph Hill Brown to American Historical Geography," invited for a special issue on the U.S. by the editor of Die Erde (Berlin), appears in the current Historical Geography (23:1–2), formerly the Historical Geography Newsletter out of CSU Northridge and now edited and published in new format at Louisiana State University. It is proceeded by a foreward by Michael Conzen, "Clark on Brown: a Study of Influences."
A review of volume 13 of the same Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies in the Geographical Journal (London) by M.J. Wise notes especially "the delightful portrait" (of Joe Spencer, PhD'36) that "succeeds in persuading his personality to stand out on the written page."
Maurice Perret (MA'42, PhD Neuchatel), retired at Univ. of Wisconsin–Steven's Point, has published Portage County: of Place and Time , a kind of geographical-historical encyclopedia of his adopted homeland, "located half way between the equator and the north pole, half way between the zero Greenwich meridian and the international date line." He describes it as based on the more than 300 people who took his field course at UW-SP between 1968 and 1983; their names and titles of their reports are listed as an appendix.
At the 57th annual meetings of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers last September in Bellingham Ed Price (PhD'50), retired at the University of Oregon, was singled out for special attention with several special sessions in his honor. Ed, an active member of the association and its president 1962-63, was later a Guggenheim fellow. The sessions were organized by Al Urquhart (PhD'62). He and wife Margaret celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last summer. Among other Berkeley names on the APCG program: Patton, Court, Ellefson, Rowntree, Wilvert and grad students Berman-Santana, Hetland, and Howard.
John Thompson (MA'51) has retired at the University of Illinois where he has been on the faculty since 1964. John, who was born in Peru and is Stanford's only geography PhD, went to Urbana to head up its Center for Latin American Studies. From 1966 to 1975 he was chairman of the department of geography there. He has been substantially involved in legal cases related to levee collapse and flooding in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta area on which he wrote his dissertation. He is reported to be completing a book on land drainage in the Middle West.
Wilbur Zelinsky (PhD'53), emeritus at Penn State, was awarded the 1993 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Award at the Atlanta AAG meetings for the best book by a geographer on the U.S. accessible to the general reading public for his Cultural Geography of the United States (Prentice Hall, revised 1992). National Public Radio featured Wilbur on 'cemeteries' before its 8 o'clock Sunday morning news during the convention. And Wilbur won't quit. During the year he has contributed chapters to two books: Creativity and Tradition in Folklore (Utah State) on names and naming, and Historical Geography: a Methodological Approach (University Press of America), as well as the entry on 'Landscape' in The Encyclopedia of American Social History. And Landscape 31(3), 1992, carries a richly illustrated Zelinsky piece on U.S. roadside signs and signage.
A volume of essays honoring Phil Wagner (PhD'53), Person, Place and Thing: Interpretive and Empirical Essays in Cultural Geography , has been published by LSU Geoscience Publications, Baton Rouge. It is edited by Phil's Simon Fraser colleague Shue Tuck Wong. Among the contributors: Yi-Fu Tuan, Marvin Mikesell, Jay Vance, Clyde Patton, Jim Parsons, Carl Johannessen and the late Homer Aschmann. The introductory 'appreciation' by Wong describes Phil as "one of the brightest stars among Berkeley geographers....an enduring torch-bearer. Wherever he goes the Sauerian influence and the presence of Berkeley is felt....a spokesman and ambassador of the Berkeley school....eclectic and extremely broad....(a person whose) work and personality have played a significant role in the growth and development of cultural geography in North America."
Phil taught at the University of Chicago, UC Davis, and Simon Fraser before retiring at the last in 1987. More recently he has lectured at the University of Texas and Louisiana State University. His chapter on pilgrimages appears in Sacred Spaces, Sacred Places edited by Alan Morinis and Robert Stoddart, Stanford University Press, 1993. A book-length manuscript, Geltung, is currently under review.
Fred Simoons (PhD'54), UC Davis retired, is hanging on with Liz in Spokane for at least another year, this delaying plans to move to Austin, TX to be close to the library resources of the University. There's enough to work on at hand for his Foods of India project and except for the last year's snowy winter they like it where they are.
Jess Walker (MA'54), Louisiana State, writes of "Anthropogenic landforms in the coast zone," Bulletin of Geomorphology (1992) and "Sea Level change: Environmental and Socio-economic impacts" in GeoJournal 26 (1992), 511-520. Jess also has contributions on Mississippi River "Mudlumps" and on "Levees" in the IGU-sponsored Geographical Snapshots of North America , Donald Janelle, ed., Guilford Press, 1992.
The Charles S. Alexander Fellowship for Women at the University of Illinois, supports a female PhD student at dissertation completion stage. Chuck (PhD'55) passed away in 1987.
Here he comes. Its Yi-Fu Tuan (PhD'57), University of Wisconsin-Madison, with his 11th or 12th book, maybe even the 13th. The Island Press, Covelo, CA has just released Yi-Fu's Passing Strange and Wonderful: Aesthetics, Nature and Culture (288 pp., $25) a kind of soliloquy on the nature and content of aesthetic experience. Even political institutions, he suggests, may be thought of as aesthetic or "aestheric-moral" creations. This is particularly true in America, he believes, because of its democratic ideals and the fact that it was conceived by the early leaders as "a moral, artful feat of rational statecraft." He writes of the Constitution and of American democracy as resting on two principles well recognized in the history of artone "the unity that encompasses diversity," the other "that a theme can grow, acquiring branches and subthemes, and yet retain its original character." A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer, referring to Yi-Fu's attention to the sensuous details of life, enriched by comparisons and differences in attitude, taste, and belief among various cultures and eras, observes that his writing has a concreteness and brightness of detail too rare in writings on aesthetics." But we knew that. And to think that it all evolved from Pediments of Southeastern Arizona (1959), the Climate of New Mexico (1959), the Coastal Landforms of Panama (1961) and such!
"Understanding the earth as our homeunderstanding the meaning of the verb to dwellis an immense challenge to the human spirit." So writes Yi-Fu in his foreword to Anne Buttimer, Geography and the Human Spirit (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 1993.
Carl Johannessen (PhD'59), University of Oregon, is having a hard time getting India out of his system. He was back there again in January looking for New World domesticates (maize, annonas, sunflowers) as well as architectural designs suggestive of linkages with Peruvian rock sculpturing. Accompanying him was son Bruce and wife.
William Doolittle's "Agriculture in North America on the Eve of Contact" in the outstanding quincentennial issue of the Annals (September 1992) is dedicated to his friend and neighbor Campbell Pennington (PhD'59), currently living the quiet life in San Marcos TX. He is looking through field notes on the Mountain Pima from some 20 years ago and may yet take them on for one more volume on NW Mexican Indian cultures.
Clint Edwards (PhD'62), Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is editor of an expanded edition of George Nunn, The Geographic Conceptions of Columbus , first published in 1924 in the American Geographic Society Research Series. A 40-page chapter by Clint examines in retrospect the four theses proposed by Nunn regarding the navigator's knowledge.
Bill Denevan (PhD'63), University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been one of the geographers most quoted in the public press in relation to the Columbus quincentennial. In particular his paper on "The Pristine Myth: Landscapes of the Americas in 1492" in the special Butzer-edited issue of the Annals AAG 82:3 (1992) demonstrating that the New World was a much used and altered land prior to the arrival of Europeans has been widely noted, e.g., in Newsweek, Time, the NY Times. The reissue of his Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (University of Wisconsin Press) was reviewed, along with Sauer's Early Spanish Main, in an extended essay on the literature of the quincentennial ("Adios Columbus," by Kenneth Maxwell) in the New York Review of Books. Bill's "Stone vs. Metal Axes: the Ambiguity of Shifting Cultivation in Prehistoric Amazonia" appears in the Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 1991-92.
Lee Talbot (PhD'63), whose environmental consulting activities span the globe, has been twice recently to China (on biodiversity matters) and to Zambia (a national environmental action plan), while also visiting every major continent (except South America) consulting with key scientists and managers on development of new principles for the conservation of living resources (a follow up of a project he organized in the 70s which resulted in a monograph New Principles for Conservation of Wild Living Resources ). Much of his work continues to be supported by the World Bank through his McLean VA offices of Lee Talbot Associates International. But there has been room, for work and play in Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, not to mention the sports car racing that keeps him revved up. An English version of the co-authored Crisis and Opportunity: Environment and Development in Africa has been published by Earthscan, London. The original French edition was awarded the Prix Pierre Chauleur from the Academie des Sciences d'Outre-Mer for outstanding contribution to international development.
Lee also has chapters in two recent World Bank reports ( Biological Diversity and Forests; Perspectives on Natural Resources Management ); a jointly authored piece in World Archeology is forthcoming.
Don Vermeer (PhD'64), George Washington University served as head of the Host & Travel Grant program for the IGU meetings in Washington which accommodated lodging and travel needs of more than 100 Third World geographers.
Bob Frenkel (PhD'67), Oregon State University, checks in with papers on the reclamation of the Salmon River (Oregon) salt marshes in the Northwest Environmental Journal and Restoration and Management Notes . Bob's son Steven is a recent PhD in geography at Syracuse University. Another chip off the old block! (Others George Carter, Jr., Michael Doran, Bob Richardson).
Alan Patera (MA'67), after many years as Geographer in the Census Bureau's Center for International Research ("well paid but on the wrong coast") has moved to Lake Grove OR (south of Portland) where he has bought into a press and is producing the quarterly journal Western Places , a chronicle of forgotten western settlements. From the sample he has sent with a fine cover photo of New Almaden CA and features on it and other ghost towns in Nevada, Idaho and Oregon, it looks like a quality publication of the sort that should be in every western library. Alan's interest in post office history and out-of-the-way places shines through, a 'geographer' who has found a way to live out his dream. $25 per year, $10 per issue from P.O. Box 2093, Lake Grove OR 97035. Next, a special issue on Walla Wallathen Bartlett Springs CA, more on the Boise Basin, etc., etc. It's the only periodical with a map for its index, and why not, its Geography!
Agroforestry in the Pacific Islands: Systems for Sustainability edited by Bill Clarke (PhD'68) and Randy Thaman (MA'68) is due out momentarily from the United Nations University. It includes chapters by both Bill and Randy (the former emeritus at the University of Fiji, Suva, the latter still on the faculty there) as well as Bryce Decker (PhD'70), University of Hawaii (on the Marquesas). Clarke, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, has recently prepared reports on Vanuatu (New Hebrides) environmental issues and on the sustainability of agriculture on the four Pacific Island LDCs (Vanuatu, W. Samoa, Kiribati and Tavalu).
Martyn Bowden (PhD'67), Clark University, held a visiting appointment at the University of Maine, Orono, last year where he used that institution's outstanding cartographic collection to produce a lecture on "The Invention of New England." (Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1993).
Roy Shlemon (PhD'67), independent environmental consultant based at Newport Beach, was to participate in the IV Colombian Geologic Congress in Medellin in July 1993. Roy is well known in Colombia for his work on landslides in the Antioquia highlands and on gold dredging in the Bajo Cauca and along the Rio Nechi. Of late he has become a farmer (6 acres of Hass avocadoes near Bonsall, San Diego County).
Bret Wallach (PhD'68) was in India again over Christmas. He has been promoted to full professor at the University of Oklahoma. This spring he lectured at both Minnesota and Kansas.
In the January Geographical Review an appreciative commentary on Bret's At Odds with Progress: Americans and Conservation (Arizona 1992) identifies him as "an enchantingly fine writer with an exceptionally sensitive mind" (Cotton Mather), calling particular attention to the author's subtle eloquence in the prefatory comments in which he identifies himself as a 'Berkeley geographer.'
A review of Richard Peet's (PhD'68) Global Capitalism: Theories of Societal Development by Terry McGee in Economic Geography, April 1992, 210-212 considers the theoretical debates surrounding persistent Third World poverty in the face of recent supposedly beneficial changes such as the 'green revolution' and expanding industrialization. The study of development, he holds, has lost its concern with poverty and with it the vision of radical theories explaining unequal development. It is suggested that the lack of field work and long experience in real Third World situations, plus the failure to adequately recognize the widespread greed and inefficiency among the 'elite of developing countries', makes such research too often suspect.
As ever Peet remains in the thick of it. "Some Critical Questions for Dick Peet on 'Antiessentialism'" followed by Dick's response in Antipode April 1992, 113-130. The issue seems to be related to the 'determinism' of Marxist geography. Environment, space, and place, he insists, are obvious entry points for social analysis, 'our' goal now being "to outline crisis relations between world society and global-regional environments."
In a review of James Duncan's The City as Text, (Annals AAG March 1993, pp. 184-187), seen by at least one reviewer as foreshadowing the end of 'traditional cultural geography,' Dick rather sees the "landscape as text" idea on which it is based as elitist and so in need of "unmasking." Too many princes, not enough peasants. Its all a part of the 'poststructural' thing.
The George J. Miller award, the highest honor awarded by the National Council for Geographic Education, was presented to Kit Salter (PhD'70), University of Missouri, at its Santo Domingo meeting for outstanding contributions to geographic education. Kit has been a key player in the resurgence of geographic education and instrumental in the formation of the Geographic Alliance network around the country.
Anne MacPherson (PhD'71), has written an incisive and insightful biographical sketch of Clarence James Glacken 1909-1980, our late colleague, in volume 14, pp. 27-42 of Geographers Biobibliographic Studies edited by Geoffrey J. Martin. The same volume includes essays on the late Andrew Hill Clark (PhD'44), John Muir, and Ibn Battuta among others. Anne's contribution, which includes a complete Glacken bibliography and chronology, relies heavily on unpublished materials as well as her own experience working with Clarence.
Peter Rees (PhD'71), University of Delaware, was resident organizer for the October 1992 annual meeting of the Eastern Historical Geography Association (EHGA) in rural Sussex County of southern Delaware. Martyn Bowden (PhD'67), Clark University, is reportedly arranging for the group's twenty-fifth anniversary meeting in Barbados in February 1994.
By Bill Code (PhD'71), University of Western Ontario: "Information flows and the processes of attachment and projection: The case of financial intermediaries," in Collapsing Space and Time. S.D. Brunn and T. Leinbach, eds. This chapter by Bill serves as the cornerstone of an article in the Annals, March 1993 by Milforn B. Green on institutional stock ownership.
Paul S. Anderson (MA'72, PhD Australian National University), Illinois State University, was recently in Brazil where he was a Fulbright Professor at the Universidade Estadual Paulista, Rio Claro Campus. He taught a graduate course on using microcomputers in cartography education.
New directions for geography! The New York Times (November 6, 1992) reports that the Colgate-Palmolive Co., New York-based consumer products giant, has given William S. Shanahan , 52, the chief executive officer, the additional title of 'president.' That would be Bill Shanahan, grad student in the late sixties at Berkeley and friend of Bob Reed (PhD'72). They came to the department from Dartmouth, where both had played basketball. But Bill, after a year here, went on to a 'higher' calling.
Kurt Rademacher (MA'73) continues as Director of Field Trips for the Nature Conservancy's San Francisco office, specializing with small group, custom-designed itineraries at prices that include substantial contributions to the Conservancy's program. Kurt recently conducted a tour across Patagonia, comparing and contrasting the topography, climate, flora and fauna to those of California. Other recent highlights include a Chumash Indian tour of Santa Cruz Island, the winter congregation of bald eagles in the Klamath Basin, the Grenadine Islands, and a cruise in southeast Alaska co-led with Roger Luckenbach (former grad student). Since last report, Kurt and Nancy have a new son, Erik and their daughter Molly is now eight.
Rowan Rowntree (PhD'73), still with the urban forestry section of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, is the announced speaker at a California Native Plant Society meeting September 22, 1993, at the University Botanical Garden, 7:30 p.m.; the topic, "The Urban Forestry Movement in California."
Vincent Berdoulay (PhD'74), Université de Pau, is prominent in the IGU Commision on the History of Geographical Thought.
Betsy Burns (PhD'74), Arizona State, applies the approach to commuting analysis of James Vance's classic study of the Natick MA labor-shed and employment field to her home town of Tempe AZ in the 1992 Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers , vol. 54, pp. 77-96. She reviews extensively the methodology of "the noted urban and transportation geographer," her former mentor, and critically applies it, using GIS systems analysis and commuting survey data from the Maricopa County Regional Travel Reduction Program. Support for her work, interestingly, came from the UC Berkeley Transportation Center.
James Fortier (MA'74; PhD cand.) is in his ninth year as appraiser and deputy assessor at the Mojave desert community of Victorville. He writes that the assessment roll for the city has been increasing by some 20 percent annually, with projects designed and approved for yet another 40,000 new residents in the area. "But now we may be entering the bust phase of the cycle" he writes. "Land values have plummeted." The daily tedium has been broken by vacations in several Latin American countries and in Europe. "I often reminisce about my time in the Geography department and feel grateful for the experience."
Dennis Dingemans (PhD'75), UC Davis, and wife Robin Datel (PhD Geography Minnesota), who have edited the Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers for the past three years, have passed the wand along to Dan Turbeville, Eastern Washington University, Cheney. The retiring editors' roll in upgrading the Yearbook was recognized with appreciation at the 1992 annual meetings in Bellingham.
Jory Hecht, 13, oldest son of Barry Hecht (PhD cand.), whose Balanced Hydrologics consulting firm on Solano Avenue is a veritable hive of 'geographic activity,' represented the state of California in the finals of the National Geographic-supported Geography Bee in Washington D.C. Who says that 'geography' is not a genetically fixed trait?
Donald Berg (PhD'76) has received a permanent appointment in the Department of Geography and History at South Dakota State University, Brookings. Don taught the first course (a seminar in environmental hazards and land use) to be offered in a new Master's degree program at a remote venue (from the Brookings campus). He will be developing several new courses over the next two years, including the Geography of the American Indians. His research and course offerings in the Geography of the Illegal Drug Trade continue. He and wife Ellen plan to attend the '93 NCGE meeting in Halifax, Nova Scotia this summer.
Nigel Smith (PhD'76), University of Florida, has been recruited by Rainforest Alliance to take a group of CEOs and financial players from the East Coast up the Rio Negro of the Brazilian Amazon in June. He himself has plans for a integrative historical-ecologic study of people and place along the interface of terra firme and varzea in the Santarem area, apparently a response to the unexpected discovery of stunning 8,000 year old pottery in the terra preta of that region. Nigel, who was born of British parentage in Venezuela, became a U.S. citizen last summer. In December Cornell University Press published Tropical Forests and Their Crops (Cornell, 568 pp.) jointly authored by him and World Bank colleagues. And he still gets around with his research and consulting work, with six trips to Brazil, two to Colombia and one to Spain last year!
Mary-Louise Quinn (PhD'76) writes of "Industry and Environment in the Appalachian Copper Basin, 1890-1910" in Technology and Culture, July 1993, her fifth and last paper on this Tennessee mining district.
Valerie Herr (PhD'77) is president of In Dulce Jubilo, a Berkeley-based non-profit foundation with its primary purpose the provision of funds for special projects and programs that make learning an exciting and life-enriching experience for young people. In 1992 it awarded $13,500 in minigrants to public school teachers for classroom projects, all financed through volunteer contributions. It hopes to be able to raise the ante in the future, "adding at the quality end." Valerie and husband Dick (retired two years ago from the UC Department of History) have built a 'Cambridge Cottage' in Girton, England. Intended for summer occupance, it is to be rented out the rest of the year.
A recent visitor to the department was Pamela Merrill (PhD'77) now Mrs. Roger Pink of Canberra, Australia. Pamela was for many years an employee of the Australian National Park Service, including four years in the giant Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. It was there that she met her husband, also a Park Service employee and more recently with the A.C.T. Park Service in Canberra. They were touring the U.S. and Canadian West by car. Pamela's 26-year old son John (by an earlier marriage) lives in Geneva.
Roger Miller (PhD'79), University of Minnesota, has been shuttling back and forth between Minnesota and the University of Stockholm for the past decade, focussing his study on turn-of-the-century rural-to-urban migration to the Swedish capital. More recently he has been involved in an historical atlas project for downtown St. Paul, MN, using fire insurance maps and GIS software in an innovative way to capture land-use change. Roger continues to teach urban geography, social theory, and the history of planning, as well as in the area of cinematic representation of the city while simultaneously engaged in the dissolution of his marriage (he and his second wife have a 5-year old son). "One would like to believe," he notes, "that the metal becomes stronger with tempering, but there are times when I have doubts."
Susanna Hecht (PhD'82), UCLA, Architecture and Urban Planning, has co -authored with Alexander Cockburn, critiques of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio ("a blind alley") in New Statesman and Society, the Nation and The Ecologist. Their Fate of the Forest continues to occupy a prominent place in the bookstores.
Michael Storper (PhD'82), Architecture and Urban Planning, UCLA, writes of "The limits of globalism. Technology districts and international trade" in Economic Geography 60(1):60-93, 1992. The research, carried out while a fellow of the German Marshall Fund, part of a book in progress, looks at the global economy as a series of specialized districts (as e.g. in the U.S., France, Italy) and the increasing technological advantage and flexibility of 'specialized exporters.'
The October 1992 issue of the same journal carries a bristling exchange between Storper and Virginia Lawson regarding the nature of 'acceptable discourse' on development, growing out of the latter's critical review of Storper's earlier book-length study of Industrialization, Economic Development, and the Regional Question in the Third World. Michael's "Prospects for Alternative Fuel Vehicle Use and Production in Southern California," appeared as Working Paper 2, Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, 177 pp. 1991. As of May 1993 the UC library MELVYL computer 'look-up mode' has 22 entries under Storper's name, heavily concentrated on industrial organization and economic development. And now comes a collection on Pathways to Industrial and Regional Development , 437 pp., $59.95, Routledge, 1992, jointly edited by Storper and Allan J. Scott.
Papers by Ron Dorn (MA'82; PhD UCLA) on the use of desert varnish in dating the enigmatic Nazca lines on the Peruvian desert have recently drawn the attention of archeologists, as recounted in Nature, 2 July 1992, 358:19.
Mark Bassin (PhD'83) was promoted to Associate Professor and tenure at the University of Wisconsin last fall. He has been teaching this spring at the University of Chicago and has a Resident Fellowship from the Institute for Research in the Humanities which he may take up next spring. His 1992 Annals article on geographical determinism in Russian intellectual history elicits rarefied compliments and criticism in the ensuing March 1993 issue, with an appropriate response by Mark.
Tom Bassett (PhD'84), University of Illinois, is group leader for the Ivory Coast section of a comprehensive study of environmental change in Africa being coordinated by his institution. A team of 25 social and physical scientists, financed by a $750,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, will conduct field studies in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, and Mozambique as well as the Ivory Coast. Tom is focusing his concerns on the presumed damaging effects of cotton cultivation on the fragile tropical soils of the Ivory Coast, an old stamping ground.
A Fulbright scholar in Africa during the spring semester 1992, he has recently co-edited an anthology, Land in African Agrarian Systems published by the University of Wisconsin Press in which he contributed a chapter on Ivory Coast pastoralism. He also has co-authored a paper in the Journal of African History and a chapter in Désequilibres Demographie, Désequilibre Alimentaires (Paris 1991). He is acting director of the African Studies Center at Illinois. The chapter in the AAG-sponsored volume, Geography's Inner Worlds (Rutgers 1992), on 'Places and Regions' features the 1988 piece by Tom on peasant-herder conflicts in the Ivory Coast as an exemplar of the 'political economy' approach "permeated by an intimate familiarity with the area." Tom was in London during the Spring conducting historical research at the Public Records Office.
Kristin Nelson (PhD'84), who gave up a prized tenure-track position in this department for other worlds, is enrolled in the psychology program at Stanford.
Brian Godfrey (PhD'84), Vassar College, takes off in the Geographical Review, October 1992, with an article on the gold-mining frontier of the Brazilian Amazon and a review of a recent study of Amazon conservation, while his earlier Review contribution on "Amazon Boom Towns" provides the point of departure for another article in the same issue on "Squatters and Urban Growth in Amazonia."
Brian was in Berkeley during the 1992 summer on an NEH Summer Seminar, when he participated in "Images of Amazonia" program with Candace Slater in Portuguese. Carolyn Cartier (PhD'91) has recently joined Godfrey on the Vassar Geography faculty.
Sandra Marburg (PhD'84) has been teaching CNR 10, the introductory course in the Conservation and Resources program on the Berkeley campus.
Abdi Samatar (PhD'85 Interdisciplinary, with Michael Watts), is currently visiting Minnesota (Geography Department) but has spent much of his time travelling the country speaking on Somalia and granting interviews to all manner of TV and radio programs. He spent part of the Spring in Ethiopia and Somalia and will be on a Fulbright in Botswana during 1993-94. He had important articles appear in the Journal of African Studies and Economic Geography during the year.
Judy Carney (PhD'86), UCLA, is publishing and teaching up a storm at UCLA. Judy has initiated a new research project in Mexico on the impact of NAFTA on the agricultural sector and made a preliminary trip to Cuba where she is thinking about conducting new fieldwork. Judy was nominated for a teaching prize at UCLA and has a variety of new articles recently out including a piece on technology transfer in Agricultural History, a chapter in a book edited by Michael Watts on Contract Farming and pieces on Gambia in Development and Change and Economic Geography .
Sally Horn (PhD'86), University of Tennessee, has been awarded the Junior Faculty Research and Achievement Award of that university for her work on vegetation and climatic change, fire frequency, agriculture and other human and natural disturbances in Costa Rican forests and paramo. In her work she has used pollen, charcoal and fossil evidence. Recent Horn publications include "Holocene Fires in Costa Rica" and "Pollen Viability in the Chusquea" in Biotropica (1992) and "An automated charcoal scanner for paleoecological studies" in Palynology 16 (1992), 7-12. The last is jointly authored with Roger Byrne and Sally's husband, Roger, who is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Tennessee.
Sally has been elected to the 1994 AAG Nominating Committee, one of three members. Earlier she was on the elected Honors Committee.
Briggs Nisbet (MA'86), staff analyst for the American Farmland Trust, San Francisco, contributes a chapter on agricultural land conservation in California's Threatened Environment (Island Press, 1993). The volume is sponsored by the Planning and Conservation League, an activist environmental organization in Sacramento.
Barbara Brower (PhD'87), University of Texas, and husband Jan Olson have a new daughter, Rosemary, born in late January in Austin. Notwithstanding Barbara will be an instructor in a summer program in England at Brasenose College, Oxford, July 11-August 23, 1993 on "Mankind and Nature: The English Sense of Place" with numerous field trips (Rosemary is to go along). Ian Manners is the other geographer participating in the program.
Martin Lewis (PhD'87), for the past three years on the faculty at George Washington University, moves to Duke University this fall where he will be professor of "the practice of Environmental Geography," an independent status (Duke at present has no geography program). His wife, Kären Wigen (PhD'90) has a faculty appointment in the Department of History at Duke and Martin has been commuting between Washington and Durham. So what is perhaps the South's leading university is at last making room for geography, and (conspicuously) Berkeley cultural geography, if only through the back door. Stay tuned.
Martin's recent work has attracted wide attention among scholars. On the heels of his well regarded dissertation on culture and agriculture among tribal people in northern Luzon published by the UC Press (1992) comes his second book-length effort, Green Delusions: an Eco-critique of Radical Environmentalism (Duke University Press, 1992, $24.95) that has been reviewed by The New York Times ("a lively cascade of ideas") and several environmental journals and excerpted, with front cover notice, in Harper's (November 1992). In it he challenges the uncompromising stance of certain radical environmentalists, optimistically proposing that modern technology and capitalism may yet lead to a way out of our current dilemma.
In another direction he has authored, with Marie Price (AB'84, PhD Syracuse) a rousing methodologic statement and critique, "Reinventing Cultural Geography," the lead article in the March 1993 Annals. It is a vigorous response to recent 'misinterpretations' and even dismissal of the work of what has come to be known as 'the Berkeley School.' The fireworks may be only beginning with responses from James Duncan, Dennis Cosgrove, and others whose ox was gored, scheduled for the September issue.
Matthew Milukas (PhD'87), Lahmeyer International, writes that he will be with LI's Jakarta office through July 1993. He and wife Pat will vacation in Hong Kong and the U.S. before returning to LI's headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.
Bob Voeks (PhD'87), Cal State Fullerton, is on a three year leave to do research in Brunei where he is working on two projects: looking at non-equilibrium theory of tropical species diversity maintenance and at Penan and Iban ethnobotany in Brunei and Sarawak. Bob writes of "African Medicine and Magic in the Americas," Geographical Review January 1993, pp. 66-78, mapping 16 distinct magico-medical systems from the Carolinas to southern Brazil. As in his earlier work special attention is given to plant pharmacopoeias. Other publications due out soon: Homage to Pierre Verger: Civilizations and Cultures of the Gulf of Benin: Africa and the Diaspora and a piece on extractive resources in Tropical Rainforest Research: Current Issues . He has a contract with the University of Texas Press to produce a monograph Candomblé Medicine: African Ethnobotany in Brazil .
Bob writes of Brunei: "it is a curious little nation, struggling to find its identity after declaring its full independence in 1984. Its status as the wealthiest country on Earth is evidenced, if nothing else, by the number of Mercedes and Rolls Royces on the roads.....As an Islamic nation, Brunei has passed a series of laws in recent years to keep in step with the teaching of the Koranincluding outlawing alcoholic beverages. Receiving 4,000 mm of annual rainfall, Brunei must be the wettest 'dry' country in the world."
Tom Eley (PhD'88) reportedly has left the University of Alaska-Kotzebue to become Subsistence Takings Coordinator for Native Affairs (Yukon, Kanuti and Arctic Reserves) with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Fairbanks. So he's still about as far north as you can get, just a little further east.
Karl Zimmerer (PhD'88) has been advanced to associate professor and tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after three years on that faculty. The acceleration is reflective of his more than a dozen scholarly papers based both on his South American fieldwork and a notable teaching record. His most recent paper on contrasts in crop diversity in commercial and subsistence agriculture appears in the Journal of Historical Geography 19(1), 15-32, 1993.
Gail Fondahl (PhD'89), late of Middlebury, taught at Dartmouth this past year.
Piper Gaubatz (PhD'89), visiting assistant professor at LSU where husband Stan Stevens is on the staff, has accepted an appointment at the University of Massachusetts. Her book, Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformations on the Chinese Frontiers , is due out momentarily from Stanford University Press. Piper has also received a year-long grant from the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China to carry out research in Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen and Guangzhou in 1993-94. She will start the research in Beijing this summer.
The University of California Press meanwhile has published Stan Stevens's (PhD'89) Claiming the High Ground: Sherpas, Subsistence, and Environmental Change in the Highest Himalaya , 537 pp., $55, 1993.
Paul Starrs (PhD'89), University of Nevada, will be a S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Landscape Architecture on the Berkeley campus during 1993-94 academic year. His dissertation on the cultural geography of Western ranching is due out shortly from The Johns Hopkins University Press. Paul and wife Lynn (on the faculty in Range Management here) have been on the precipice during the spring term, Reno or Berkeley, but for the time being they continue to operate in both worlds. Paul's "Looking for Columbus," a review article on Sauer, Samuel Elliot Morrison and Kirkpatrick Sale and the meaning of the quincentennial, is the lead piece in the Geographical Review October 1992 82(4):367-374. He has had other essays recently in volumes published by the National Rural Studies Committee (Corvallis), The Society of American Foresters, and the International Congress of the Americas (Lima). His "Yosemite and Tahoe to Mono Lake" appears in California Landscapes pp. 221-267, an IGU guidebook published in conjunction with the Washington D.C. congress last August.
Paul is co-chair with David Stoddart of the 1993 APCG meeting to be held in Berkeley, and is directing all fieldtrips for the 1994 AAG meeting in San Francisco.
And, adding to an already delightfully busy schedule, he begins his 1993 summer keynoting the western-US wide conference on "Wild Pigs: Ecology and Behavior" in San Luis Obispo.
Widd Schmidt, former grad student, is editing a "place and location" special issue of Wide Angle, a trade journal of the TV & motion picture industry (in which his wife is involved). Among contributors lined up: Barney Nietschmann, Paul Groth, Paul Starrs.
Lucy Jarosz (PhD'90), University of Washington, initiated a new project on agricultural change in Washington State and continues to publish on Madagascar (a piece on population growth and its relation to ecological change), including some fascinating material on vampirism.
After four months in Guatemala, where his wife fulfilled a teaching Fulbright scholarship and Bob Rice (PhD'90) continued studying the changes in Central America's coffee sector, he is back in the Bay Area teaching geography courses at SFSU and UCB. Staying home and spending time with one-year-old daughter Anika, Bob is currently working on a consulting contract with the Smithsonian Institution's Migratory Bird Center. The Center is interested in recent and ongoing changes in coffee production that may be impacting migratory bird habitats in Mexico, Central America and Colombia. In August, Bob will be in Chiapas, Mexico, conducting field work with a colleague from Stanford to access land degradation associated with a variety of new cropping systems that have emerged in the area in recent years.
The dissertation of Kären Wigen (PhD'90), Duke University (History) on the historical geography of a rural district behind Nagoya (Japan), is due shortly from the University of California Press.
Jack Wright (PhD'90) is finding nothing but green pasture in the desert at his New Mexico State post at Las Cruces. His dissertation, pared down and revised, is due out from the University of Texas Press this fall under the title Searching Country: Conservation, Land and Life in the Rocky Mountain West (the emphasis is on Colorado and Utah land trusts). In addition there are papers in the works for the likes of the Operational Geographer (Canada), Journal of American Planning Association , the PG, Geographical Review, Journal of Cultural Geography and Journal of Wildlife Management . And a book is underway on the biogeography of elk in the West (Jack is a member of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation) and perhaps something on coastal conservation in Jamaica.
The discussion on the origin of California grasslands, fueled in part by the piece by Mark Blumler (PhD'92) in Fremontia (July 1992), continues unabated in later issues of that journal and in letters to the California Native Plant Society's Newsletter Bay Leaf (October 1992).
George Henderson (PhD'93) continues his postdoctorate at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.
1992-93 recipients of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award: Eric Edlund and Rick Schroeder.
Alex Clapp, spent much of the year finishing his dissertation "The Forest at the End of the World: The Transition from Old-Growth to Plantation Forestry in Chile," which he plans to file by July. This fall he begins an assistant professorship at the University of Toronto in the Department of Geography and the Institute for Environmental Studies. Alex recently spent a month in South Africa doing fieldwork on a comparative study of the relationship between plantation forestry and natural forest conservation in Chile, South Africa and New Zealand, intended to offer lessors for the struggle over the remaining old -growth forests of the Pacific Northeast.
His AAG paper "Creating Competitive Advantage: Forestry Policy as Industrial Policy in Chile" won the Latin American Specialty Group's award for the best graduate student paper at Atlanta.
Susan Craddock (PhD cand.) has received a Social Science Research Council grant on health status of homeless women in San Francisco.
Rich Griggs (PhD cand.) who has been traipsing all over Europe for materials for his dissertation on the political geography of unrepresented, minority cultural groups, is the author of Occasional Paper 18, Center for World Indigenous Studies (Kenmore WA) "The Meaning of Nation and State in the Fourth World." In the same series (#19) is a report by Jovana Brown, wife of Bill Brown (PhD'70), Evergreen College, Olympia, on "The State and Indian Nations' Water Resource Planning."
Rich made headlines in Danish and Swedish newspapers this winter with his statements suggesting that Skåneland (southern Sweden) and Bornholm were part of the occupied Fourth World, the historical product of invasion and artificially-set boundaries. Griggs is constructing a new world map of "nation states," convinced that among regional cultures the consciousness about their own identity is increasing and must eventually be faced by the centralized political powers. "Despite the fact that geography has been an academic field for 100 years it hasn't produced a single map of the people in Europe" he claims. But when Griggs is finished the first map of the world's people will be a fact. The map and article, "Europe's 120 Nations" will be published early next year by the National Geographic Society's journal, Research and Exploration .
Shirley Hoffmann filed her dissertation (Indian agriculture in the upper Orinoco, Venezuela) in late May and will teach the introductory physical geography course during the summer session.
Tom Howard, his dissertation completed on early Sierra passes, takes up a teaching job at Armstrong State College in Savannah, Georgia, in September. Coincidentally but conveniently, his fieldwork and text-writing for the forthcoming Michelin green guide to California draws to a close this summer, as the volume goes to press.
Lisa Husmann, having not only finished her second M.A. (in East Asian Languages) and passing her Oral's, has been accepted into a one-year intensive RN nursing program at UCSF's Nursing School. Lisa will return to complete her PhD dissertation at the program's conclusion.
Jeannine Koshear (PhD cand.) spent the year in Washington, DC on a AAAS/AID fellowship. It will continue for a second year.
Marcia Levenson (PhD cand.) was in Nome, Alaska, and Eastern Siberia all year for field work.
Frank Murphy, living at and managing the UCB Richard Gump South Pacific Biological Station in Moorea, French Polynesia, is very much enjoying both the work and the chance to live in a fascinating and beautiful place. He just finished his master's thesis on the "Geomorphology and Evolution of the Motu of Moorea" and is beginning a new research project on the "Holocene Evolution of Cook and Opunohu Bays" on Moorea.
Anyone who is interested in doing research in Moorea or the South Pacific region should know that the field station is by all means open to use by geographers.
Jeff Schaffer (PhD cand.) in May gave a talk on "The Geomorphic Evolution of Yosemite Valley," at the joint Cordilleran-Rocky Mountain Section of the GSA's annual meeting in Reno NV. In early June he lectured at the Yosemite National Park visitors' center on the geomorphic evolution of Yosemite Valley, the subject of his dissertation, in which he takes exception to conventional interpretations. Following his illustrated talk skeptics were invited into the field to examine the evidence.
As one of the 189 authors contributing to The Jepson Manual: Higher Plants of California , he appears to be the only non-botanist. Interestingly, as a geographer he did not write the "Geographic Subdivisions of California" chapter, but rather the "California's Geological History and Changing Landscapes" chapter.
Rick Schroeder's (PhD cand.) version of his dissertation, "Shady Practice: Gender and the Political Ecology of Resource Stabilization in Gambian Garden/Orchards," will appear in the July/October special issue of Economic Geography devoted to the environment and development. In the Fall of 1993, he will begin a tenure-track position in the Geography Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
PhD Qualifying Exam passed: Michelle Cochrane , Eric Edlund, Neusa HidalgoMonroy, Mei-Ling Hsu, Lisa Husmann, Tim Krantz , Martine Kraus, Chuck Schmitz.
Tim Krantz, Guide to Rare and Unusual Wildflowers of the Big Bear Valley Preserve .
Scott Mensing, "The Impact of European Settlement on Blue Oaks (Quercus Douglasii)," Madroño 39:36-46, 1992.
Katharyne Mitchell, "Work Authority in Industry: the Happy Demise of the Ideal Type," in Comparative Studies of Society and History, 1992.
Rick Schroeder (with Michael Watts), "Struggling over Strategies: Fighting for Food, Adjusting to Food Commercialization among Mandinka Peasants," Rural Society and Development 5:45-71, 1991.
Brent Millikan, "Tropical deforestation, land degradation, and society: lessons from Rondonia (Brazil)," Latin American Perspectives, 19(1):45-72, Winter 1992, 29 pp.
Douglas AllenBSc Honors '87 (Physical Geography) Univ. of Leeds
Michael DavidowBA'87 (Geography) The Johns Hopkins University; JD'90 (Law) Univ. of Michigan
James FreemanBA'89 (Development Studies) University of California, Berkeley
Emmanuel GabetBA'89 (Physical Anthropology) University of California, Berkeley
Julie GuthmanBA'79 (Sociology) University of California, Santa Cruz; MBA'88 (Business Administration) University of California, Berkeley
Jinn-Yih HsuBA'88 (Civil Engineering) National Taiwan University; MS'90 (Building and Planning) National Taiwan University
Sun Min LeeBA'92 (Social Geography of Economic Development) University of California, Santa Cruz
Kathleen McAfeeBA'67 (Biology) Vassar College
Elizabeth MorganBA'87 (Womens Studies/English) California State University, Sacramento
Amy RossBA'85 (History) Brown University; MA (Latin American Studies) University of California, Berkeley
Scott StarrattBA'81 (Geology-Chemistry/Biology) Whitman College; MA'89 (Paleontology) University of California, Berkeley
Jim StocktonBA'83 (Physics) Williams College
Michael DavidowRegents Fellowship
Susanne FriedbergProvost's Research Award and a Summer FLAS (Bambara)
Emmanuel GabetRegents Fellowship
Florence GardnerNSF
Jennifer JonesGraduate Opportunity Program Fellowship, Mentored Research Award and a Summer FLAS (Spanish)
Tim KrantzCarl O. Sauer Memorial Fellowship
Sun Min LeeGraduate Opportunity Fellowship
Kathleen McAfeeNSF- 3 year, MIGIS
James McCarthyRegents-Intern Fellowship
Luz Maria MenaGraduate Opportunity Program Fellowship
Mark O'MalleySummer FLAS (Czech) and FLAS 1994-94 (Czech)
Victoria RandlettWitter Grant-in-Aid
Charles SchmitzSSRC/IIE Fulbright (Yemen)
Krisnawati SuryanataAffirmative Action Dissertation Year Fellowship
Carolyn TristSociety of Woman Geographers Fellowship
Liz VasileEtta Ogden Holway Scholarship
Barbara WalkerInternational Predissertation Fellowship (SSRC)
Peter WalkerInternational Predissertation Fellowship (SSRC)
FLAS = Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship
Doctorates:
Deborah Berman-Santana, "Kicking Off the Bootstraps: Environment, Development and Community Power in Puerto Rico," 1993. (Chair: Richard Walker)
Mark Blumler, "Seed Weight and Environment in Mediterranean-Type Grasslands in California and Israel." 1992. (Chair: Roger Byrne)
Joanna Ellison, "Mangrove Response to Rising -Sea Level, Bermuda," 1992. (Chair: David Stoddart)
George Henderson, "Regions and Realism: Social Space, Regional Transformation, and the Novel in California, 1882-1924," 1992. (Chair: Richard Walker)
Joshua Semyon Sylvan Muldavin, "China's Decade for Rural Reforms: The Impact of Agrarian Change on Sustainable Development," 1992. (Chair: Richard Walker)
Roderick Paul Neumann, "The Social Origins of Natural Resource Conflict in Arusha National Park, Tanzania," 1992. (Chair: Michael Watts)
Brian Page, "Agro-Industrialization and Rural Transformation: The Restructuring of Midwestern Meat Production," 1993. (Chair: Richard Walker)
James Proctor, "The Owl, the Forest, and the Trees: Eco-Ideological Conflict in the Pacific Northwest," 1993. (Chair: Michael Watts)
Ying Yang, "The Image and Reality of Chinese Landscape: With a Special Reference to Tourism," 1993. (Chair: David Hooson)
Other dissertations filed too late for a May degree or are very near to filing: Shirley Hoffmann, Thomas Howard, Alex Clapp, Scott Mensing, Katharyne Mitchell, and Rick Schroeder.
Master's:
Florence Catherine Gardner, "Environmental Justice Organizing and Economic Change in the Southern United States: An Inquiry into the Limits of Theory." 1993. (Chair: Richard Walker)
Michelle Goman, "Paleoecological Evidence for Prehistoric Agriculture and Tropical Forest Clearance in the Sierra de Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico." 1992. (Chair: Roger Byrne)
Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga, "Binational Agroindustry in Northwest Mexico: A Geography of the Mexico-US Fresh Produce Trade," 1993. (Chair: Richard Walker)
Frances Malamud, "The Case for Independent Origins of Agriculture in China," 1993. (Chair: Roger Byrne)
Francis Joseph Murphy, "The Geomorphology and Evolution of the Motu of Moorea, French Polynesia." 1992. (Chair: David Stoddart)
Mark O'Malley, "Divided But Not Conquered: Political Economy, Ideology, and Urban Development in Berlin, 1948-1990." 1992. (Chair: Richard Walker)
Karl Roam, Plan Iby examination
Sharon Brooks (AB'92) is a graduate student in geography at Penn State.
Sheila Leilehua Conover (AB'91) is a three time Olympian1984, 1988 and 1992 in the sport of kayak, and has a career record of 26 national titles and 2 Pan Am Gold medals (1987). Sheila is currently a PE teacher and substitutes 8th grade geography and cultural studies at a private school in Newport Beach, CA. She writes that she has paddled on every continent except Africa, and has been to every country in Europe except Romania. She spends most of her time in Dusseldorf, Germany and her future travel goals include Africa for one year as well as Mauritius.
Elizabeth Lobb-Saltzman (AB'91), after living in Brooklyn, NY, started her first year of graduate study at the University of Washington, where she was TA for Lucy Jarosz (PhD'90). She is the daughter of Gary Lobb (PhD'70), CSU Northridge.
Mathew Tomas (AB'84), senior planner for Contra Costa County doing long-range land use and policy planning, was recently married to Diane K. Obi (AB'84 Poli Sci). Matt is interested and involved in housing and economic development of California Indian Tribal lands and is a member of the Upper Lake Board of Pomo Indians.
June Wong (AB'84) and Steve Bonham (AB'84) have a new son, Douglas, born March 14,1993.
Martha (Molly Shaw) Deich (AB'82) is a high school biology, earth science, and general science teacher, married to an astronomer and the mother of two boys. They are currently living in Dwingeloo, Holland, where husband Will is a radio astronomer at the observatory there. They encourage all visitors.
Gillian van Muyden (AB'82) completed her second year of Law School at Pepperdine University, focussing on land use and environmental law. She plans to spend next fall at Pepperdine's London campus. Prior to that Gillian was a city planner for the cities of Torrance and Thousand Oaks, CA. In 1990 she received a MA in Public Administration from CSU Northridge. She writes: "the best part of attending law school at Pepperdine is driving through Malibu Canyon with its steeply dipped bedding planes and watching the Topanga formation's slow, daily erosion, sometimes in chunks, down intermittent Malibu Creek and into the sea."
Jake Bendix (AB'80) has completed his PhD at Georgia and is teaching at that institution. He has recently published in the Professional Geographer and in Zeitschrift für Geomorphologie June 1992.
Steven M. Ramirez (AB'73) and wife have owned a McDonald's franchise since 1988 in Galt, CA. Previously he was an executive with the Southern California Gas Company, 1981 - 87. He also served in various capacities: as consultant to the Chairman of the California Economic Development Corporation from 1985-87, Director of the California Office of Industrial Development, Advisor to the Chairman of the California Energy Commission, a member of President Reagan's Transition Team at the State Department in late 1980, and one of two Americans invited as an observer by the PRI on Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid's Transition Team in 1982. They spend their free time working on charitable causes in Mexico and seeking investment opportunities created by the pending North American Free Trade Agreement.
Mike Pasqualetti (AB'65) has been promoted to full professor at Arizona State University. Mike took his MA in geography at LSU and his PhD at UC Riverside. He was recently honored by the AAG Energy and Resources Energy Group for his work in nuclear plant location studies.
John Underhill (AB'50) retired after a career in photography and cancer research, Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
David Moore (AB'41), a landscape painter, studied in Geography under Carl Sauer and John Kesseli. He writes that in "Mr. Sauer's classes I remember his saying often when describing a culture: 'The picture is such and such,' or 'the picture has changed in recent years.' That word 'picture' stayed in my mind." After four years of service in World War II he studied art in San Francisco and later in New York. Mr. Kesseli's landscape morphology and Mr. Sauer's 'pictures' were a powerful influence on David. For the last two years he has been exhibiting paintings at the John Natsoulis Gallery in Davis, CA.
Fred Bowerman Kniffen (1900-1993)
Fred Kniffen (PhD'30), long-time member of the Louisiana State University faculty and the oldest living holder of a Berkeley geography doctorate, passed away in Baton Rouge May 19 at the age of 93.
One of the leading figures in 20th century American cultural geography, his students are spread widely across the country. His early morning presence in the LSU department had been legendary and he remained an active scholar and counselor of younger geographers until slowed by cancer in the weeks before his death.
Born January 18, 1900, in Britton, MI, he graduated from the near-by University of Michigan in 1922 in geology along with his friend John Leighly (PhD'27). There he had also had contact with a young professor of geography named Carl Sauer and, after some time in Alaska, he followed Sauer and his assistant Leighly to Berkeley, and geography to which they had come in the fall of 1923.
Although Fred's dissertation, the second in the Berkeley department, was on the Natural History of the Colorado Delta, his interest early focused on Indian cultures and on cultural landscapes, particularly folk housing and elements of material culture. He had studied with anthropologists Kroeber and Lowie and ethnographies of the Achomawi, Walapai, and Pomo were among his earlier published works. Later he devoted himself increasingly to the cultural geography of the South and especially Louisiana, with a steady stream of widely quoted papers on house types, covered bridges, agricultural fairs, outdoor ovens and similar elements of material culture, often as keys to diffusion.
Kniffen went to LSU in 1929 and retired in 1970. There he was named Boyd Professor and LSU Foundation Distinguished Professor. He worked closely throughout his career with Richard J. Russell and in later times Bob West and Jesse Walker, all former Berkeleyans, together forming what was sometimes seen as an 'outpost' of the California department. His Culture Worlds, with R.J. Russell (MacMillan 1951, 1961, 1969) was long one of the major introductory texts in geography. Fred was an elected councilor of the AAG 1960-61 and Honorary President of the Association 1966-67. In 1982 he was honored by the Louisiana Folklore Society. A 2-day "Kniffen Symposium" at Baton Rouge in 1990, with some 24 papers by students and friends, featured the announcement of a new Fred Kniffen Professorship in Geography –Anthropology. Volume 29 (1990) of Geoscience and Man is a selection of his writings under the title "Cultural Diffusions and Landscapes" edited by H.J. Walker.
He is survived by his wife Virginia, who suffered a broken hip shortly before his death, as well as three sons and a daughter. At his request, there was no funeral service but the flag was flown at half-mast on the LSU campus.
Harold Homer Aschmann (1920–1993)
Homer Aschmann (PhD'54), recently retired after a distinguished career on the faculty of the University of California, Riverside, passed away September 25 at Fontana after a brief illness. He was 72.
Born in San Francisco in 1920, Homer graduated from UCLA in geography in 1940 and received an M.A. from that institution two years later. He was a prisoner of war in Germany during the latter stages of World War II. His PhD dissertation on "The ecology, demography, and fate of the Indians of the Central Desert of Baja California," based on unusually trying field and extensive archival research, was completed under Carl Sauer in 1954 and published as volume 42 of Ibero-Americana . Before completing his dissertation Homer had taught for short periods at San Diego State, Nebraska, and Los Angeles State, where he teamed up with Ed Price (PhD'50). He went to the new Riverside campus in 1954 to establish the geography program there. Carl Sauer, before his retirement as chairman, sought to bring Homer to Berkeley. He was thwarted by the Riverside Chancellor who insisted that Homer was crucial to their program. A move from one of the new campuses to Berkeley or UCLA at that time required the authorization of the heads of both schools.
In the course of his career he published more than 50 articles on a wide range of cultural themes, the majority of them based on field and archival research in Latin America. At various times he did field work in Spain, Australia, Colombia, Chile and Paraguay as well as Mexico. Much of his work related to American Indian groups, especially those of the Southwest and Baja California, but also the Guajira of Colombia, where he studied under an ONR contract. Homer was also a major contributor of the literature on Mediterranean and desert climate and biogeography. Among some of his better known titles: "The Natural History of a Mine" (Chile), "Indian Pastoralists of the Guajira Peninsula," "Great Basin Climates in Relation to Human Occupance," "Man's Impact on Regions of Mediterranean Climate," and "The Evolution of a Wild Landscape and its Persistence in Southern California." A number of his papers were published in anthropological journals and symposia proceedings. His "Paraguay: A Bi-lingual Country" was his last paper, published in a volume of essays dedicated to Phil Wagner.
He was president of the Southwestern Anthropological Association (1952-53) and of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers (1966). In 1972 he received the Meritorious Contribution Award of the Association of American Geographers. He retired in 1990.
Homer is survived by his wife, Louise, and five children, Erika, Jean, Harold, Sara, and Carl. A sixth daughter tragically died in an accident while a student at UC San Diego. A grant of $25,000 in memory of Homer has been established by Louise Aschmann, to bring visiting lecturers in Homer's fields of interest to the Berkeley campus.
Edwin B. Doran Jr. (1918–1993)
Ed Doran (PhD'53), a member of the geography faculty at Texas A&M since 1960, passed away at a College Station nursing home on March 5 after an extended illness. He was 75. Born in Baton Rouge LA, Ed had taken his undergraduate and master's degrees in geology at Louisiana State where he came under the influence of two Berkeley graduates, Dick Russell and Fred Kniffen. They encouraged him, along with John Vann (PhD'59), to come to Berkeley for further graduate work in geography.
Ed's PhD dissertation, under Carl Sauer, was on the physical and cultural geography of the Cayman Islands. Although never published, it was long esteemed as the standard work on the islands, witness the dog-eared and worn copy in the West India Reference Library in Kingston, Jamaica. A sailor by avocation, Ed's publications were largely focussed either on matters relating to primitive boat types and navigation or on the cultural and physical geography of Caribbean and the South Pacific islands. He held teaching appointments at Texas, L.S.U., and South Carolina, and as a geographer with the Pacific Missile Test Range at Pt. Mugu CA, before going to Texas A&M in 1960.
In addition to some 30 papers on topics relating to watercraft and tropical island life, he authored monographs on 'Austronesian canoe origins,' the 'Tortola boat', and 'Boats and Culture History'. At A&M he was assistant dean, College of Geosciences 1965-69, and head of the geography department 1968-74, before the arrival of two other Berkeley geographers, George Carter (PhD'42) and Campbell Pennington (PhD'59) to that campus.
Ed is survived by his wife Virginia and sons, Michael of Houston TX and Thomas. The former holds a PhD in geography from the University of Oregon.
Randall S. Rossi (1949–1992)
Randy Rossi (PhD'79), an urban planner who once headed the Port of San Francisco's development department, died in San Francisco of AIDS-related causes November 24, 1992 at the age of 43.
Born in Santa Cruz, Randy studied city and regional planning at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, before entering the graduate program in geography at Berkeley. His PhD dissertation, on "Land Use and Landscape Change in the Oak Woodland-Savanna of Northern San Luis Obispo County," was completed in 1979 under Jim Parsons.
He lectured in geography at Cal Poly and was later employed by an environmental consulting concern in San Francisco before taking up his position with the Port of San Francisco (1984–1988) where he oversaw the renovation of onetime maritime Pier 7 into a landscaped fishing and picnicing area.
He lectured in the geography department on several occasions, emphasizing the opportunities for geographers in the environment field. He saw himself first and foremost as a 'cultural biogeographer' in the Berkeley tradition, with a special concern for his beloved oaks Quercus lobata. In 1984 he taught planning classes at Stanford University. Since 1989 Randy had been senior planner associated with the GCA Group, a San Francisco public affairs firm representing developers. Before that he served as planning director for the city of San Luis Obispo.
He is survived by his parents, Lucille and Angelo Rossi of Santa Cruz, a sister, Debbie, and two brothers, Joey and Chip, also of Santa Cruz.
Also Deceased:
Richard Hartshorne, in Madison WI October 29, 1992. His magnum opus, The Nature of Geography, appeared in 1939, while he was still on the faculty of the University of Minnesota. He moved to the University of Wisconsin the following year. His intellectual dueling with John Leighly is reflected in an extraordinary exchange of letters (1939-40), copies of which he presented to the Berkeley department shortly before his death.
Wallace Stegner, writer, and Cesar Chavez, farm labor organizer, towering figures who each in his own way made a difference for the contemporary culture and environment of the American West.
Department of Geography
COMMENCEMENT 1993 ADDRESSES
Professor David R. Stoddart, Chair
Daniel Coit Gilman and Today
Commencement is a great occasion in our academic yearand in our lives. It is a symbol of achievement, a new beginning, truly a turning point. For faculty, staff, graduate students and undergraduates the sun shines at last after an El Niño winter of storm, rain and cloudy skies. We are especially glad to welcome to this celebration the parents, families and friends of our graduates: parents especially will feel today that their long haul is over, though of course it never will be.
But in spite of this sense of achievement and our look toward the future, all of us must have very mixed feelings about the year that has passed and the one that we face. It has in many respects been a very difficult and occasionally even impossible year for the Department and the University. Everyone knows the financial situation. Over the last two years we have reduced our operating expenditure by something like 25%; next year we have a further mandatory cut of 13%. At last year's Commencement I said that we were coping with the situationjust. This year we tried to hold the line. Next year we will be cutting very close to the bone.
The most tangible consequence of these financial restrictions has been the loss through early retirement of two of our most senior colleagues. For over a quarter of a century James E. Vance, Jr. and Theodore M. Oberlander have anchored urban and transportation geography and geomorphology respectively. They will not be replaced. And in a different sense, of course, they are irreplaceable.
The immediate consequences for the curriculum are dire, especially in a department as small as our own. This is no way for a great university to set its academic goals and structure its educational programs: one cannot simply randomly excise a major part of the discipline in such a random manner and pretend that one continues to offer a true conspectus of Geography.
Because of funding reductions there will be fewer Graduate Student Instructors next year, and other forms of graduate student support will be severely curtailed. While technically these are decisions made in the Department, let no-one be in any doubt that they are inevitably mandated by the financial decisions of the College of Letters and Sciencethough by devolving decisions to the Department the College adroitly evades responsibility for them.
It follows that the whole nature of the educational endeavor is going to change. The quality of teaching simply cannot be maintained with crumbling resources. Personal contact between faculty and students will become more difficult as loads increase. At the end of the dayand make no mistake about itthe result of these cutbacks as they cascade down through the system will be to diminish the experience in learning of the undergraduate student. Quality is suffering and is going to suffer more, in what has always been a campus of quality. Legislators need to understand that you cannot expect more and more when you continue to give less and less: in this Department my colleagues are giving everything they have and it is unrealistic to expect that they can give more and still continue to function properly and to Berkeley standards in education and research.
There is nowand to Chancellor Tien's creditmuch talk of institutional restructuring, both within and between campuses. It is certainly the case that other departments have been even more severely affected than we have been, even to the point of closure. This has been a semester of frenetic committee activity, as the administration desperately seeks cost-cutting paths out of this morass. But it is not time for frenetic decisions. Berkeley needs to hold steady and to think quietly.
Especially it needs to remember that this is not simply a financial crisis. There is a need to rethink and restate the intellectual and academic arguments about the nature and purpose and functions of a great public university. On this there is from the administrationfrom the President downwardsa deafening silence. There is more debate in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Oakland Tribune than is heard from the University itself.
The discourse on the campus is too limited to matters of dollars and cents. We need to tell the people of California and the legislators in Sacramento what it is that we are about and why it is one of the most important activities in the State. We do it of courseas we are doing todayby sending out our graduates into the wider world to inform our fellow citizens. But this is now too slow a process.
The message may not be going out today, but it has gone out before. It is just thirty years, for example, since Clark Kerr published The Uses of the University. Perhaps there has been nothing comparable since, and his vision foundered on the discontents of the 1960s.
But it was also done by the University's second President, the geographer Daniel Coit Gilman, 120 years ago. Gilman had been Professor of Physical Geography at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale for almost a decade when he was called to Berkeley in 1872. He was here for but a brief time, before being appointed to lead the new Johns Hopkins University and in a very real sense to invent the idea of the American university.
His Inaugural Address at Berkeley on 7 November 1872, shortly after the campus had moved from Oakland to its new site in the hills, is full of nineteenth century optimism and vision. It is well to ask how we stand up today to scrutiny in the light of what Gilman foresaw when Berkeley began. Let me briefly refer to his major points.
What is to be built? It will be a University, said Gilman, not a high school, not a college, not an industrial school. It will be devoted to the promotion and diffusion of knowledge. It will be the University of California, not Oxford or Cambridge, Harvard or Yale, not indeed of Oakland or San Francisco. It must be 'adapted to this people . . . to their peculiar geographical position, to the requirements of their new society and theirundeveloped resources.' Without question Berkeley has succeeded in these aims.
What is there to build upon? It has a fine charter, which 'opens the door of superior education To all, without price.' As fees increase astronomically, students are perhaps the best commentators on this part of Gilman's vision. It has a fine site; and it has the scientific achievements of the Coast Survey, the Geological Survey, the Surveys of the 40th Parallel and similar geographical endeavors on which to base its studies.
Who are the builders? Here Gilman gets to the core. 'It is on the Faculty more than any other body that the building of a university depends. . .It is not the site, nor the apparatus, nor the halls, nor the Library, nor the Board of Regents, which draws the scholarsit is a body of living teachers, skilled in their specialties, eminent in their calling, loving to teach.' To emphasise the point I might add that it is not the President, the Chancellors, the Provosts, the Deans, or even the Chairs: it is the faculty and the students working with them. Without them, whatever the administrators pretend, the university is nothing. The Regents, Gilman went on, have a great responsibility, especially for 'careful guardianship of moneys' (and I do not think he was a man of many jokes). We must count on the help of the Pressnot fearing its criticism, desiring its support. We certainly have both in equal measure today.
And we need the help of men of wealth in this community. If there has been a ray of light during this past year it has been the way in which we have been supported from outside the university. There has been a munificent donation of seven million dollars from the McCone Foundation in support of the Earth Sciences Building (which will become McCone Hall): $5 million for structural work and $2 million to endow graduate student fellowships. Only a few days ago the Kenneth and Florence Oberholtzer Fellowship was established with a gift of $150,000 to support students in the Department of Geography working on the human use of natural resources, and we are delighted that Mr. Oberholtzer is with us this afternoon: we thank him most warmly for his generosity. Mrs. Louise Aschmann has made a substantial donation in memory of her husband Homer (PhD'54), in support of our traditional interests in Latin America. Many alumni and friend have responded rapidly and generously to an appeal for support this semester. Many letters were very touching, and testify to the great reservoir of goodwill the Department enjoys. All these gifts help to cushion the emergency in which we find ourselves.
Finally, asks Gilman: What is to be done? His answer in large part was Geography. There is need of 'civil, mining, and mechanical engineers, of expert geologists and mineralogists, of devoted naturalists and physicists, of chemists and metallurgists, of geologists, topographers, and map-makers, of agriculturalists, mechanics, manufacturers, and merchants.' Science for him is 'the mother of California . . . . She surveys your harbors, marks the path of the mountain railroad, discovers the relations of the strata of the rocks, teaches the laws of climate, maps out the Sierra, reclaims the waste lands, suggest improvements in agriculture, annihilates with the telegraph the vast area of space which separates you from London and New York. She interprets nature.'
Here was an agenda for the Department of Geography and which has been the basis of its distinction since George Davidson was appointed first professor in 1890 and since Carl Sauer came here in 1923. For Gilman and for us the truth is to be found 'in the rocks, the sea, the soil, the air, the sun, and the stars; in light and heat, and magnetic forces; in plants and animals, and in the human frame, . . . in language and literature, in laws and institutions, in doctrines and opinions, in historical progress and international relations, . . . history, oratory, poetry and art.'
And remarkably he anticipated the contribution of the University to 'the new civilization of the Pacific coast,' as a connecting link between the East and the West, serving China, Japan, Australia and the Islands of the Sea, as well as the Golden State itself.
Gilman was one of our most distinguished geographers. He speaks to us still over the decades of a noble vision nobly executed. We need that vision back, and we need it articulated anew by those who now run this University. For Gilman is speaking not only to the faculty, who after all know what he is saying. He is speaking too to the administrators and to the legislators, and indeed to the people of the State. We cannot allow these present discontents to lead to the dismantling of the achievements of the last century and a quarter. The Department of Geography and all its members is firm in this resolve. And in it we have no greater guarantee of success than the caliber and number of the students who graduate today.
*******
Daniel Coit Gilman (1831-1908) served as President of the University of California 1872-1875. His lecture was published as The building of the university: an inaugural address delivered at Oakland, Nov. 7th, 1872 (San Francisco: John H. Carmany and Co., 1872, 29 pp.). His geographical work is described by John K. Wright: "Daniel Coit Gilman, geographer and historian," Geographical Review 51 (1961), 381-399, reprinted in Human Nature in Geography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 168-187.
* * * * *
Undergraduate Commencement Speech
Class of 1993
Elaine Paula Miller
Fellow Candidates, Guests, Chairman, Administration, and Faculty
Thank you for attending our commencement exercises. Actually, when I graduated from El Cerrito High School, I didn't even know what commencement exercises were. When my friends informed me that commencement exercises mean graduation, I thought they were nuts. I viewed graduation as an anxiously anticipated end, rather than a beginning. (I also couldn't understand the exercises part of it, since graduation ceremonies usually involve lots of sitting around.) However, over the past few years, I have come to realize that whomever named graduation the 'commencement exercises' knew what he or she was talking about.
After my high school graduation, many unforeseen opportunities opened up to me. I gained the freedom to pursue any kind of goal I desired. After working for several years, I realized that attending the University constituted an opportunity, rather than an obligation. Many of us are raised to believe that we are obliged to go to college. However, I gradually discovered that my high school graduation marked the beginning of genuine decision-making, and an introduction to choice. Thus, we have all attended UC Berkeley because, on some level, we made a fundamental decision to do so. Understanding that graduation from high school really did constitute a commencement and the blossoming of opportunities has given me high hopes for the future. When I graduated from high school, I had no idea that I would actually be graduating from UC Berkeley. Thus, I'm anxious to discover the kinds of opportunities that lie ahead of me now. To me, commencement exercises, have come to signify an introduction to my destiny.
Many of us probably did not begin our academic careers at UC Berkeley intending to major in Geography. Perhaps we were unaware that the University offered Geography, or even what it was. However, somewhere along the line, we took a Geography class or heard a lecture and realized that, on a fundamental level, the study of Geography is important. Some people criticize UC Berkeley for taking what they call a reductionist view. In other words, the University has been accused of reducing problems to such an extreme that solutions cannot be ascertained. Some critics contend that the University takes a narrow, minimalist approach to study such that the conclusions seem insignificant. Yet, no one could level these claims against Geography, because it, by definition, is grounded. Geography, which is the study of physical and human processes that occur at or near the earth's surface, is inherently tied to practices occurring on the ground. And, because of this, the study of Geography is a concrete one. Our conclusions are significant. Our analyses help us understand physical processes and human experiences worldwide.
Part of what makes Geography unique is the wide range of topics Geographers study. I can think of no other major field of study that is so broad in scope, yet grounded in specifics. By studying issues on local and global levels, we can apply what we know about one place to another region. This enables Geographers to identify patterns that are repeated over the globe. This ability to recognize global patterns aids us in understanding some of the experiences of people living at a distance. The synthesis of global patterns brings people together. Recognizing experiences shared by people over the globe symbolically unites humankind and brings our world into a sharper focus.
In Geography, we concern ourselves with many processes that occur across the globe. We might pose questions like the following: How do the effects
of colonization linger in Third World countries? What happens when a capitalist power introduces its monetary system to an indigenous population? Why does deforestation alter the atmosphere as well as the landscape? How do global power relations influence local transformation? Why do deserts often form under persistent atmospheric high pressure systems? In Geography, we can apply any of these questions to numerous places around the world. Thus, regardless of whether we prefer cultural, urban-economic, regional, or the physical aspects of Geography, our studies are relevant and practical. It is the Geographers, the people who can detect the kinds of physical and human patterns being repeated over the globe, who will be called upon in the future to solve the world's problems.
When one thinks of the word, Geography, interesting images come to mind. When listening closely, we might hear it as GEO-GRAPHY, where GEO refers to the earth, and GRAPHY implies looking at something, an image. Thus, the study of Geography gives us a picture of the world. Hence, Geography, in its narrowest sense, is the study of the world. So, as our world continually shrinks due to advances in transportation, technology, and communication, who would be better than a Geographer at educating our children, interacting with other cultures, and making decisions that affect people around the world?
Like many Geography students, I began my academic program at UC Berkeley outside the Geography department. I originally intended on majoring in civil engineering, but found that it lacked the human component that interests many of us in Geography. I discovered that Geography offers a fascinating combination of disciplines; it encompasses scientific study, like that offered by engineering, combined with the study of human activity. In fact, Geography itself is not a topic of study, but a method of analysis which takes both physical and human processes into account. When studying a place, geographers examine its physical characteristics, such as climate, vegetation, natural resources, soil chemistry, natural hazards, ecology, geology, geomorphology, and so forth. On top of this physical context, geographers consider the layers of human activity, the social, economic, cultural and political realities of the area. By studying places on physical and human levels, geographers gain a complete understanding of the area. Thus, our analyses are multi-dimensional. Our conclusions are comprehensive. Generally speaking, this holistic approach gives Geographers an understanding of the fundamental relationship between humans and the earth. Obviously, we cannot ignore the ways in which our environment limits and supports us. On the other hand, understanding the impact of humans on the environment is crucial. Geographers, those who recognize the reasons and ways humans alter the landscape, are thus qualified to make decisions in order to protect our earth.
One aspect of Geography that makes it so special is its unique devotion to the study of place. This spatial component of Geography distinguishes it from other fields of study. For example, I have completed a Bachelor's degree in English, and have learned that, like History, English is chronological and linear. In the studies of literature and History, when activities occur is central. The acquisition of knowledge in these fields depends on the organization of events in sequence. If events are taken out of their chronological order, the analysis falls apart. For instance, the destruction of the Berlin wall would be meaningless without an understanding of the events leading up to it. Similarly, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet would lose its dramatic power if, say, Romeo were to die at the beginning. Yet, Geography is not bound by plot sequences, like English, or organized chronologically as is History. In fact, we in Geography study some processes for which we have no exact date. We study events that occurred millions, if not billions, of years ago, such as the break up of Pangaea (also called the World Continent) and continental drift. Interestingly, these processes that occurred before recorded history affect our daily lives today. Thus, instead of being linear and chronological, Geography is spatial and multi-dimensional.
The differences between chronological and spatial fields of study remind me of when I first started jogging. At first, I was able to run from my house to the library and back. After a few weeks, I ran to and from Young's Market. Eventually, after months of hard work, I was able to jog as far as the North Berkeley Fire Station and back. My friends were impressed that I could run to the fire station, but one friend asked me why I didn't run for a certain amount of time, rather than to a certain destination. For example, I could jog in one direction for 30 minutes and then turn back. This sounded reasonable enough, but I never considered doing it. To me, part of the challenge and
excitement of jogging was discovering the places to which I could jog. I got a thrill out of reaching my next landmark. If I had jogged by the clock, the emphasis of the activity would have been on the time remaining to complete the workout. However, by taking the spatial approach and by setting goals in terms of place, I was engaging in a geographical process. Jogging to an actual place left me with a physical reminder of my accomplishment. This made the activity of jogging concrete and grounded, something I could own and of which I could be proud. Whenever I see the fire station, I remember the hard work and determination that enabled me to claim it as my destination. I realize today that completing a degree in Geography constitutes a similar process. Since we in Geography focus on place, the process of our work likewise becomes grounded. We in Geography all have our personal fire stations that signify to us the hard work we have put into attaining our degrees. The associations between accomplishment and place are not found in chronological, time-dependent studies, but are unique to the study of place associated with Geography.
At the very least, we in Geography have become aware of the realities behind some popular myths. First of all, the study of Geography is not the memorization of the capitals of the world. Also, we in Geography know that the United States of America is not a nation; it's a state. We know that wind chill is not a temperature, but a rate at which our bodies lose heat. And, contrary to popular belief, in Sonoma County, those holes in the ground that periodically shoot steam up into the air are not geysers; they are fumaroles. And finally, we in Geography know better than to use the term mankind; for we all belong to the human race, humankind.
To tell you the truth, I wasn't sure that I wanted to attend today's commencement exercises. I did not fully recognize the importance of the ceremony. I believed that the completion of my last final examination would signify the end of my work at UC Berkeley. I thought that finishing my school work meant that I had finished all of my work at school. However, I came to realize that even after finals, I still had to do work with respect to issues regarding school. I eventually realized that attending my graduation was important due to issues of closure and completion. Too often in our hectic UC Berkeley careers, we lack adequate time to complete our projects to our personal satisfaction. Since we hurry to class, rush through assignments, speed through exams, and skim through books, we hardly have the time to complete our tasks, let alone experience a sense of closure. So, today, we have all set aside the time to put a close on this chapter in our lives. We have all come to complete and celebrate our accomplishment. Furthermore, by establishing a place today to acknowledge our achievement, our hard work at UC Berkeley becomes grounded, like Geography itself. By coming here today, we establish the physical place that will always represent our hard work and accomplishment. Observatory Hill embodies the culmination of our academic careers at UC Berkeley. And, from now on, we will also remember this place as the site of the introduction to our destinies. This is the place of our commencement.
* * * * *
Graduate Commencement Speech
"Berkeley, As Found"
George Henderson (PhD'93)
Post hole digger. Piled higher and deeper. The idea of the PhD has surely left a strong and lasting imprint on that tortured entity we call American culture. The PhD or, more generally, graduate school, which is the broader experience I want to speak about today, has a strong effect as well on the tortured people who get the degree.
Let me begin by acknowledging that many of you are not graduate students. Quite frankly those of us who are or just were don't know who you are, though you are certainly tortured, too. Are you our parents? Then we have depleted your checking accounts. Are you our old friends? Then we work harder to make the friendship stick. Are you our lovers and mates? Then forgive us for rehearsing our theories at breakfast. Graduate school changes lives; there is much to reflect on.
There is a casual expression that those in graduate school should not have to endure. It goes, "The more you know, the less you know." Now this is a crude concoction, for at a certain point, usually to stave off the breaking point, we insist that we know more. More than what? Who can say? But if the outward signs are any indication, we must know
a great deal. The clearest of these signs are our obsessions. Some are grandiose and quite public in nature. These are the ones that lead to that crude truth: the more you know, the less you should say. But the obsessions most revealing of the inner life are the minute ones. Consider the academic's fascination for the bibliography. Other people's bibliographies. Dutiful and plain, bibliographies are more than what they seem. With a glance at the bibliography academics find out whether an author has read what they have. If so, we don't have to read the book. And when a colleague asks whether we have read such and such a book, and we actually have not, we say with mock honesty, "yes, I have . . . seen it." This is not a problem for us and it is apparently quite legal in most states. To be honest it is a necessary skill that graduate students acquire and are in fact tested on in order to graduate. This test is called the qualifying exam, for which today's ceremony is in fact an elaborate apology. But I digress.
In the course of obsessive reading or not reading, as the case may be, we realize that another author can always articulate our real obsession, that is, the ideas we think we have, better than we can. This is a problem that does require a little reading in order to solve. But we make the emotional most of it. We buy that author's every book and pine for their next publication. And it is brilliant. Brilliant. We quote that person a LOT. Their words appear in the epigraphs that we insert under chapter titles, below headings, after subheadings. We feel stellar. Pithy. A black hole from which no contradiction can escape. Then finally, and furtively, we figure out that this author may be . . . . . . wrong. Usually we reach that goal when our bibliographies are more inclusive than theirs. At this time we try to get on with things, things such as our lives.
Our lives. What remnants they are and what white noise they must make to an outsider. My parents tried to tune in to mine during their few visits to Berkeley. I think it was in vain, although I did notice a certain pattern in their general reaction to things West Coast. Once, we were on Sproul Plaza when my father spotted the hari krishnas on Telegraph Avenue. "George," he shuddered, "they're heading this way!" A few years later came the devastating fire in the Berkeley and Oakland hills. Again the timing was perfection itself. Mom and Dad had arrived only hours earlier. Rivers of smoke now eddied overhead. Eucalyptus leaves and chunks of ashen bark, held aloft, now strafed us from out of the sky. "George, I think the fire's heading this way!" To be safe, we fled at nightfall to Jenny and Dave's, a couple of friends of ours who were also putting up their friend, the ex-nun. I was unloading from the car my dearest possessions of the momentevery notebook, binder, computer disk, everything having to do with my as yet unformed dissertation. The dissertation was as yet pure unadulterated bibliography, which means that I sort of felt that there was no actual need to write it. Anyway, from out of the dark came roaring, pulsating thunder. 40, 42, . . . 44 Harley Davidsons and 44 en-larded riders. Chrome, leather, tattoos as big as lap-top computers. Tattoos to die for. "It's the Hell's Angels," whispered my mom. "And they're headed this way!" moaned my dad. "Mom. Dad. It's ok," I said, knowing not less but more than ever before, "they don't want my bibliography." Meanwhile, our friends' friend, the ex-nun, urged the Harley's on with all her might: "Go. Go. Go!" She all but waved the checkered flag as three more pairs wheeled by. No night could have been more sublime, more full of white noise, more vindicating of grad school.
Did I mention that in grad school we get analysis? It's part of the advisor-advisee package. The "Berkeley" style of graduate advising can at times be, how shall we say it, a hall of mirrors.
I'm not sure about a topic, says the patient.
What do you think would make a good topic?, responds the doctor.
Well, I was thinking about something having to do with landscape, or maybe environmental problems, perhaps development issues. And I like climatology and geomorphology, too. Do you think something like that might work?
Well, do you think it might work?
Yeah, I really do. I mean, as I think about it some more, I might have to narrow it down a little. Right now I'm a little overwhelmed with it all.
Hmm, overwhelmed, . . . . interesting.
A geography professor is the one who should have said, "If you see a fork in the road, take it." Mesmerized, we run to Doty, Charlie, and Natalia. "Just tell us what we need to do," we plead. Any they comply with consummate precision. In all fairness, I have had the best of experience with my advisors. But . . . . . there are stories.
So, we get obsessed, we get visited, we get analyzed. Something else happens, however, in the
course of those events. Somewhere along the line we cross the generation gap. Graduate school is the bridge and although you are not supposed to burn your bridges this one bursts into spontaneous combustion. We dash to the other side and when we turn around and look back through our bi-focals, what do we see? Undergrads. Undergrads who look too young to drive, to be in college, to understand what the hell we are talking about. We see incorrectly but we are doomed anyway. Let me give you one example of how early the process of damnation begins. Last fall, shortly after I filed my dissertation–I should admit at this point that I filed too late to graduate last MayI rode a train for about eight hours next to this young boy. He knew all about basketball. I knew all about dissertations. (He had a lot to say, I had very little.) We quickly found the medium: poker, black jack, and crazy eights. We exchanged addresses just before I left the train and last month I got his first letter. "Dear George," he begins. "I hope that your teaching is getting better." Now you have to understand that I didn't try to teach this kid anything. He simply had asked me what I do. I said that I teach. "Oh," he said, automatically divining my limitations. Or maybe he was mad at me for knowing more than I used to. He had asked me, "Did you know that New York City used to be a village?" "Yes," I said, "I do know that." A pause, then another, "oh."
"Landscapes," says the writer John Berger, "can be deceptive." He continues, "Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place." Think of graduate school as such a landscape. Think of it too as what Raymond Williams calls a "structure of feeling." A moment in time and place that holds you captive to the tension between what you experience and what you can articulate about it. It is possible to make too much of graduate school, and perhaps I do. It is, after all, a way-station of sorts, the departure from which today's ceremony marks. But the past remains with us. Moreover, many of us instead of really leaving grad school will move on to another one, although, as I have said, at the teaching end.
My experience tells me that a graduate institution, as a landscape and a particular structure of feeling, is a "total institution," a world of opportunities and constraints, benefits and injuries, rules and rule-breaking. It is not an ivory tower isolated from economics, vested interests, and power. It is a version of those spheres For sure, it is also much, much more. But for a few moments, at the risk of stepping outside the bounds of what feels comfortable, let us look our situation in the face, unvarnished.
Graduate school--Berkeley Geography is, as John Berger's landscape suggests, full of struggle, on a variety of fronts. As the profile of the university threatens to look more like a downsized corporation, one must fight hard against the notion that funding equals intellectual and self worth. Decisions about funding appear more mystical than ever, and resentments are hard to avoid. Graduate students university-wide and many geography students in particular have unionized and continue to fight for recognition as University workers with certain employee rights. Consequently students have been pitted against their own departments. Pointed conflict within the Geography Department, up and down the faculty-student hierarchy, has not been unusual. I think it worthwhile to pause over this one.
Neither purely negative nor entirely unavoidable, it has at times seemed to me that our days have been lived either in crisis or in the pause between crises. Every time the department gears up to hire a new faculty member we are reminded anew of the chasms that mark differences over the theory and practice of geography at Berkeley. I have no wish whatsoever to open these chasms before you, but I do want to clarify and be honest about them as an experience, as an education, as our "situation." Divisions within the department accord partly with the spectrum of politics within and beyond the universitythe left, the right, the center, and the confusing patchwork that is hurriedly being cobbled together in the 1990s. Divisions are also produced by the relative adherence to versus departure from perceived tradition. Questions and assertions abound. Which students and faculty get to be called "Berkeley" geographers? Who identifies the "Berkeley" geographers for others? Who gets left out of this "evolving tradition"? The recent call for the "reinvention" of cultural geography can't disguise that there simply is no one Berkeley cultural geography to be reinvented. Was there ever for any protracted period of time? These are honest, legitimate inquiries worth asking after if only because they enter the mind of many a new graduate student wondering what on earth goes on here.
Are these chasms good? Are they bad? For years I have sought to look past those Manichean categories,
to see something more essential at work, to see, in short, that the divisions within the department are not so much causes as they are effects. Without calling for the dissolution or irrelevance of our internal differences, for these are too real to be rhetorically disposed of, I do want them to have a context, to have meaning especially now as I graduate from the department. There is a very good, practical reason for desiring this. By the end of the graduate students' tenure in the department our relations with each other and with faculty condense into relations with a select few. When we leave and join a faculty of our own or join diverse work partners outside the academy we are thrust into broader circumstances again. We will need our multi-pound dissertations and our padded CVs. We will also need a context from which to view the inevitable chasms.
So, here is how I see Berkeley geography, and this is why I think I chose Berkeley wisely. Over the long haul and as a large generalization, the fifth floor of ESB has been given not so much to questions already formed and accepted in the discipline, it has been committed to asking and formulating questions and methods not already claimed by geography. Subjects become geography, they are not born to it. Besides leading us to the ramparts, these conditions, over time, have led to the making of an extraordinarily creative, generative intellectual landscape. It is not some abstract notion of progress from one paradigm to the next that I am talking about but an overall flexibility, a permeability to the times and to other disciplines that makes the moment during which any one grad student is here a potentially rich one. The long view is not that the heat of our battles works toward ultimate good but that the divisiveness itself comes from those underlying conditions.
Now, what is to be gained by this view? At least one possibility: a reorientation, in our intellectual relations, away from preoccupation with the ideological cast of what we do toward the actual questions we ask and the practice of what we do. Our debates will be both less self-important, more sincere, and more original. One thing is certain. Because there are no fences to sit on here, the geography department is and will remain outstanding for graduate students only to the extent that it makes free critique and imagination its first and foremost goal. I should probably add guaranteed student funding here but I am trying for a little idealism. "You can study what you want to here," I have always said when speaking of my own experience and when answering the questions of prospective students, patient parents, and wondering friends. But contrary to parlance, geography is not a naturally broad discipline. Only vigilant critique and vigilant imaginations can give it its breadth, open its borders, and ensure that it does not mean the same thing to all of its practitioners.
Various Geography Funds, 1992-1993
Robert M. Arellanes
Julian F. Arntz
Pauline Collett Basaran
Stephen Blythe
Margaret Brandes
A.C. Browne
Leslie B. Clark
Deborah L. Collins
Bryce Decker
Linda Stutler Deniz
Susan DeVos
Sandra Diamant
Emily Dicken
Tom Dodson
Philip Elwood
David A. Fong
Evelyn B. Goodman
Bradford Hall
Diane Hamlyn
Michael Heiman
Ellen B. Keable
Brandon F. Kett
Gregory Knapp
Michael Low
Mark Lubamersky
Richard MacKinnon
Anne Macpherson
Janice McNeal
Michael Medina
Gayle T. Meltesen
Imelda Merlin
Alexia Moore
A.E. Morgan
Rod Neumann
Robert Nicholson
Allan Pred
Robert and Sydney Reed
Katherine Remaley
David Robinson
Toby Ross
Peter Rummel
Victor & Margaret Ryerson (in memory of Jean Vance)
Jeffrey P. Schaffer
Thomas Schao
Paul Starrs
Jane Sterzinger
David and June Stoddart
Lee Talbot
Manning Welsh
Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis
Andrew Wortham
Noritaka Yagasaki
H. Homer Aschmann Lecture Fund, 1992-1993
Terrie Sopher (in memory of David Sopher)
Lucille McClish (Oberlander) Fund in Physical Geography, 1992-1993
David W. Clark
Robert and Sydney Reed
Hayden Robinson
Carl O. Sauer Lecture Fund, 1992-1993
Dan Stanislawski
Other Gifts
Mrs. Urbain Kinet
