All lectures are presented fully online via Zoom every Friday at 3:30 PM. The link to join the meeting is https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/99623736476
except when otherwise indicated. Brown bag sessions start at noon on
the days there are speakers. Alumni, friends and the public are always
invited to attend.
Spring 2010 Lectures
January 29 - Biodiversity dynamics during the Late Quaternary
David Nogues-Bravo
Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate; University of Copenhagen, Denmark
During the last 50,000 years 65% of the megafauna genera have gone
extinct, but there are significant differences in the extinction rates
among continents. Other species did not go extinct but suffered changes
in their population structure and sizes. The causes behind Late
Quaternay biodiversity dynamics are still an unresolved puzzle (Koch and
Barnosky 2006). Since the end of the XIX century, researchers still
debate the relative importance of climate/environmental change and human
impacts in Late Quaternary Extinctions, LQE, without reaching a
consensus. Unfortunately, the debate about LQE has generally suffered
from the search for a silver bulletto explain the extinctions, although
there some combined hypotheses. Whatever the causes of the global LQE,
testing hypotheses about LQE requiresdeveloping stringent models at
large scales and comparing the predictions of these models against the
fossil record and derived aDNA data. Here I offer a review on some novel
research venues that would offer novel and deeper insights in Late
Quaternary biodiversity dynamics and in current biodiversity patterns.
February
2 - Communities, climate change and development: can the international
climate regime deliver mitigation and adaptation that benefit the poor?
Diana Liverman
Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University and Institute for Environment and Society, University of Arizona
Climate change poses considerable risks to vulnerable people and places.
International organisations, national governments, and local and non
state actors are mobilizing and negotiating to respond to climate
change, both in terms of reducing emissions and adapting to
environmental changes that are already occurring. This lecture asks how
the response to climate change might reach the poor, especially through
emission reduction programmes such as carbon offsets, forest protection
and the mainstreaming of adaptation into development policy and
identifies some of the gaps in scholarship that are needed to make
informed decisions.. There are tremendous challenges for the new US
administration to internationalize its response to climate change and
for the international community to craft an agreement in Copenhagen this
year that is just and effective.
Brown bag talk: "Geographic Perspectives related to the Americas Climate
Choices Committee"
11:00 am, 350 Science Hall
This brown bag will be an informal discussion related to the role of
geographic research/input into the Americas Climate Choices Committee.
Dr. Liverman is on the committee, and will be advising the Obama
administration on related issues. This should be an interesting
opportunity to learn more about this, and discuss issues with Dr.
Liverman in an informal setting.
See for more information:
www.americasclimatechoices.org
February 5 - Territorial Resources and Trajectories of Innovation in Provence, France
Sylvie Daviet
Universite de Provence
During the last decade, new researches in Europe have focused on the
role of "territorial resources" as a vector of local and sustainable
development (Camagni, Maillat, Matteaccioli, 2004; Gumuchian, Pecqueur,
2007). These "territorial resources" have been exploited by an
innovative 'milieu' that plays a key role in coordinating this process.
Whether they are natural or cultural, they are often embedded in the
physical heritage of a place and are ingrained in its history. Their
revival generally occurs over a long term period, comprising of
different steps that lead us to question the role of history in
territorial development and in innovation. By studying the competitive
cluster of perfumes, aromas, flavors and fragrances in Provence
(France), with companies such as L'Occitane en Provence, we will explore
these new trajectories of innovation. Then we will examine a model that
analyses under what conditions a resource can be 'revealed' and
transformed in a Local Productive System.
February 12 - Well adapted but still extinct: lessons in human ecodynamics from the Viking settlement of the North Atlantic
Andy Dugmore
University of Edinburgh, Geography
In Greenland we have the apparent paradox of more than four centuries of
Norse sustainable practice and successful adaptation to climate change
coupled with ultimate failure. In Iceland and the Faroe Islands the
Norse settlement endured, but in the case of Iceland long-term
settlement success was associated with extensive landscape degradation.
We propose that the choices made in Norse Greenland to develop their
farming system with a rising level of connection and intensification of
marine resource utilization could have created an elegant solution to
global changes that increased the short-term effectiveness of adaptation
and minimized landscape impacts, but at a cost of reduced resilience in
the face of unexpected variation. In effect, their concentration on
marine mammals for subsistence and a highly integrated communal approach
to both subsistence and economic activity (the harvesting and
processing of prestige goods, particularly ivory) was effective in the
short term, could be refined to cope with a degree of change but
ultimately proved to lack resilience; results that contrast with
developments in Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
February 19 - The World was Never Flat: Early Global Encounters and the Messiness of Empire
Mona Domosh
Dartmouth University
Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World is Flat was meant partly as a
wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate
boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that
globalization has brought about a level economic "playing field" in
which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric the title
certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future
economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of
globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and
decidedly un-flat processes and practices. In this paper I help
deconstruct this view by literally fleshing out the everyday ways
through which United States expanded economically in its early
(1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia,
Scotland, and the United States, I provide an historical look at
encounters between North American business men and women and their
foreign customers, students and workers. Focusing on the diverse
practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global
efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the
uneven, contested and messy ways that economic expansion works. By
analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the
United States was just becoming apparent I am able to highlight the
sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion
in the early 20th century.
February 26 - Creating Natural Earth
Tom Patterson
US National Park Service
Natural Earth is an integrated collection of raster and vector data for
making small-scale maps. Its intended users are practicing mapmakers,
which makes it unique among geospatial datasets. I will discuss the
various versions of Natural Earth—from land cover, to vector base maps,
to cross-blended hypsometric tints—emphasizing the design and technical
challenges of creating a world map dataset.
The idea of "cartographic realism" guided the development of Natural
Earth, a design approach that is an outgrowth of my National Park
Service mapping. When appropriate, and in moderation, I add natural
environment effects to park maps, effects that people are familiar with
and find pleasing—modulated terrain shadows, warm illumination, organic
textures, and natural colors. The goal is to make a map that will
attract and hold the reader’s attention as long as possible, to
encourage visual exploration. Natural Earth applies these effects to
small-scale maps, trying to translate the physical world’s beautiful
chaos into comprehensible spatial information. Hal Shelton (USGS) and
Tibor Toth (National Geographic), pioneers of cartographic realistic
mapmaking during the late-manual era, influenced the development of
Natural Earth.
March 5 - Seeing In/Through Suburbia: Surveillance, Privacy, and Community in Post World War II Buildings and Landscapes
Anna Andrzejewski
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Art History
This talk examines a middle-class housing development built during the
late 1940s and early 1950s—Crawford Heights in Madison, Wisconsin.
Crawford Heights serves as a lens through which one can examine the
critical role of domestic architecture and landscape design in everyday
suburban life. Evidence in the built environment and statements of
current and former homeowners show that the layout of Crawford Heights
and the design of its dwellings increased opportunities for surveillance
between residents, helping them balance competing desires for privacy
and community. The paper builds on previous studies of postwar suburbia
by revealing how occupants negotiated these competing desires through
living in their houses and neighborhood in ways that countered
prescriptive domestic discourse of the postwar period.
March 12 - Climate change, novel climates, and predicting species responses: Advancing theory and informing management
Sam Veloz
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Center for Climate Research; Climate, People, and the Environment Program
Understanding and predicting the impacts of future climate change is one
of the most pressing issues facing ecologists and decision makers.
However, making predictions about the impacts of climate change and
communicating these impacts to decision makers and the public is
problematic partly because of novel climates, i.e. future climates that
have no contemporary analogs. Novel climates force modelers trying to
predict ecological responses to climate change to incorporate conditions
outside of the range of their calibration data while novel climates
also compel decision makers to base decisions on conditions outside of
their current frame of reference. I use the predicted distribution of
cheatgrass, Bromus tectorum, in the Lake Tahoe Basin in the Sierra
Nevada Mountains to demonstrate how novel climates can affect
predictions of future species distributions. I show that the
interpretation of model predictions is sensitive to whether novel
climates are explicitly accounted for in distribution modeling. I will
then go over some recent work looking at alternative ways to analyze and
communicate climate change in Wisconsin over the next century. I show
that future climate in Wisconsin will be different from contemporary
Wisconsin climate but that climate analogs from contemporary North
America can help guide management by giving an explicit spatial
reference to the biological, economic and social conditions that
currently exist under future Wisconsin climate conditions.
April 23 - The Natures of the Beast: On The New Uses of the Honey Bee.
Jake Kosek
University of California Berkeley, Geography
This paper focuses on the rise of the honeybee as a tool and metaphor in
the war on terror. At present, the largest source of funding for apiary
research comes not from the USDA but from the Pentagon and the US
military as part of efforts to remake entomology in an age of empire.
This funding is being used in two central areas: first, to train a new
generation of bees to make them sensitive to specific chemical
traces—everything from plastic explosives, to the tritium used in
nuclear weapons development, to land mine detection; second, in an
explicit attempt to redesign modern battlefield techniques, the Pentagon
has returned to the form and metaphor of the swarm to combat the
unpredictability of the enemy in the Global War on Terror. In its
investigations of the new uses of the honey bee, this paper explores how
the long and intimate relationships between bees and humans is being
remade to better address and serve current fears and battlefield
strategies in the "war on terror."
April 30 - Global suburbanism: The challenge of 21st century urbanization
Roger Keil
York University
Urbanization is at the core of the growth and crisis of the global
economy today. Yet, the crucial aspect of 21st century urban development
is suburbanization which is defined as the combination of an increase
in non-central city population and economic activity, as well as urban
spatial expansion. It includes all manner of peripheral growth: from the
wealthy gated communities of Southern California, to the high
rise-dominated suburbs of Europe and Canada, the exploding outskirts of
Indian and Chinese cities, and the slums and squatter settlements in
Africa and Latin America. Suburbanism is broadly defined as the growing
prevalence of qualitatively distinct ‘suburban ways of life’.
Surprisingly, the universal character of suburbanism is, to date,
unrecognized. Studying suburbs today will have to include analyzing
recent forms of urbanization and emerging forms of urbanism across the
world but one also needs to take into view the dilemmas of aging
suburbanity. This presentation argues that the 21st century shapes up to
be the century of the suburb and explores some of the prevalent
governance, infrastructure and land use challenges of global
suburbanism.