potatoes and baby formula

I wanted to share a couple of nutrition-related stories that one of my professors told in a class on developing world geography and social theory (the class is actually intended for undergraduates, but I'm just sitting in because I like the professor)

One concerned the introduction of a new breed of potato in the mountains of Peru. The potato, as everyone knows, originated in Peru. In markets in Peru you can find literally hundreds of varieties of potatoes. But those native Peruvian potatoes do not look much like the potatoes most Americans are familiar with. They are a lot smaller. So some well-intentioned scientists and activists with the World Bank and UN Food Program came into Peru and introduced a new strain of potato that had been developed for them. This new potato was bigger. It had a higher starch content. Therefore, it would feed more poor Peruvians and help stamp out hunger.
The seeds for this new potato was called "improved seeds".
But my professor argues that there are many different ways to define "improved" and while these potatoes may have been improved in starch content, there are several other factors in which quite the opposite was true.
The native Peruvian potatotes had been growing in the Andes for a long time. They were well adapted there. But the new potatoes were vulnerable to certain pests and diseases which the local potatoes had long overcome through adaptation and natural selection. So the Peruvians had to start using fertilizers and pesticides to keep these new potatoes healthy. This cost money. The pesticides had to be imported from Western nations, and paid for in foreign exchange. They also had negative environmental impacts.

My professor also explains how the new potatoes had negative impacts upon the cultural scene. Traditionally, Peruvian women were the farmers of the society. They knew many things about cultivating potatoes. This is called "indigenous technical knowledge". But the new potatoes were advocated by outsides - by Western scientists and economists, and by Peruvian technocrats, government agents, and scientists trained in Western-style universities in Lima. As a result, these women lost their role in society. They were replaced, marginalized, cast aside.

The other example he gave concerns baby formula and is particularly insiduous. I think it's pretty much common knowledge that human breast milk is the best thing for babies. But baby formula manufacturers would like to have people believe otherwise. They want to replace an essential source of nourishment - one which is natural and free - with a manufactured substitute that is supposedly more "convenient". (the hidden, more culturally-charged subtext is that "modern", "civilized", "respectable" women do not breast feed in public because it is "obscene"). My professor describes how Nestle went to India and Sri Lanka in the 90s to open up new markets for their baby formula. They sent agents into maternity wards at hospitals DRESSES AS NURSES and handed out a week's supply of their baby formula free to all new mothers, along with the advice that it was the modern, healthier thing to do. Now, if you go for one week without breastfeeding after giving birth, your breasts dry up and you are no longer able to produce milk. So as soon as the free samples ran out, these mothers were forced to go out and buy expensive baby formula. Now, baby formula may not be as good as real breast milk, but the scientists at Nestle have at least come close. Their product is by no means BAD for the baby. In northern, temperate climates, that is. But this was India and Sri Lanka, where climates are hot and tropical. Where electricity is sporadic or, in many parts, non-existent. And therefore, where refridgeration, or sterilization of baby bottles, is not an option. Baby formula must be refridgerated. And baby bottles must be sterilized. Without those conditions, this baby formula was incredibly unsafe and ended up causing bushels of babies to become incredibly sick, and their mothers could no longer produce human breast milk for them.

The defenders of the formula say it is necessary since 2% of all women are unable to produce milk. But traditional societies already have mechanisms in place to deal with such risks. They have wet-nurses, and in any given village, there will always be some woman who is willing to nurse another woman's baby should she not be able.

post-multiculturalism

Came across an interesting book today: "Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism"

It seems to back up my thinking that cultures are fluid and that we would all be better off if instead of conjuring up so many artificial boundaries around culture, we simply gave into their fluidity.


Here are some of the comments on this book from amazon.com:

76461.3147@compuserve.com (Paris, France) says:
He takes a bold stand against standard, garden-variety "multiculturalism", suggesting that the struggle for a more equal society cannot be waged through "identity politics" alone: a common ground must be found (or forged) among all ethnic and racial groups, based on common citizenship and a common aspiration for justice, not just a tolerance for each group's particularities.

Lawrence A. Schenbeck says:
Hollinger's vision of a future America in which ethno-racial identity becomes more of a voluntary affiliation made by individuals, less of an involuntary designation--enforced from without and within--visited on every member of a group. Hollinger argues that the spread of a "postethnic" sensibility would benefit nearly everyone. It would mean a real end to use of physical markers called "race" to identify, and hold back, members of certain communities.

but Miles P. Grier has this criticism:
Hollinger suggests that we should be able to choose racial identities by our affiliations, not by our genetics. Again, his accounting of history (other than intellectual history) is incomplete. The cosmopolitan familiarity with all peoples he proposes seems a wonderful example until we realize he has not accounted for the ways in which class position allows for such a sampling. Whether through travel, education, exposure to public art, or the purchase of entertainment commodities, a cosmopolitan famiiliarity with the world's goods comes at a price. So, the rich get richer... and the rich person with cosmo aspirations gets more cosmo, too. Because of the various privileges granted to white families in terms of financial credit, home loans, and other subtle and unsubtle handouts, whites are in a better position to take advantage, as a collective, of cosmopolitanism. Thus, cosmopolitanism does not upset racial hierarchy.

"Jose Mtnez Ruiz" (Murcia SPAIN) has this humorous take:
This book is hispanocentric postmodern ethnic metropolitan pre-racist Asiatic multipentagonocentric Euro-postmodernist and Afro-American postethnic rurulian native urbanistic social post-minority sludge.

rocks in the middle of the ocean

I love tiny little islands off in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of miles from anything.
There are some great ones on earth.

Atlantic:
Ascension (UK)
St Helena (UK)
Tristan de Cunha (UK)

Pacific:
Easter Island (Chile)
Pitcairn Island (UK)
Galapogas (Ecuador)
Clipperton, off the coast of Mexico (France)

And now I've just learned of a new one. Well, not islands per se, but "rocks":
St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks (Brazil)
In between Brazil and Africa, these rocks are simply part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge that just happen to stick up above the water. If the ocean were drained they would look little different than the rest of the ridge....just a few feet taller.

They are tiny...blink and you might miss them! Together (there are four of them in an area 250 x 350 meters) they only constitute 10,000 square meters (that's about the footprint of a building on campus), but they've got a lighthouse and a small hutch for visiting scientists and military personnel.

Pictures and info here: http://www.worldwildlife.org/wildworld/profiles/terrestrial/nt/nt1318_full.html

The shoreline (if it can be called that) is extremely rocky. You need to board with a lifeboat and be very careful clambering up the rocks. Believe it or not the rocks have their own endemic species - grass, moss, spiders, and even birds. How do those birds get there? (Charles Darwin must have asked the same question when he visited the rocks en route to Galapagos)

What to us constitutes "land" is so dependent on what the water level just happens to be.
Everyone knows by now that the oceans are rising and that a change of just a few feet will have enormous impacts upon vast amounts of land on earth - inundating them with water. It is less often we consider the opposite process (and for good reason, because it would depend on the ice caps to stop melting and start re-freezing) yet it's an intriguing concept. If water levels decreased just a few feet, think of all the land that would would be added! In lowlying coastal areas where the gradient is very low, the added land could be substantial. Island's perimeters would expand, some (like The Maldives) by a great deal. The St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks, which are now four separate rocks, might combine to become just one rock (or better yet, an actual "island").

I'd be curious to know how long it would take this "new land" to become habitable, first by vegetation, and then by animals.

There's a tiny little island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. You see if every time you drive across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It is privately owned and uninhabited. In the 1980s, a developer wanted to chop off the top of the island and build a hotel and casino. This was a bureacratic nightmare as the islands marks the converging point of three counties - Marin, Contra Costa, and San Francisco - all of which would have had to approve the crazy project.

PoMo; Collapse

Over break I saw my friend Adam for the first time since High School. I was trying to explain what on earth it is geographers do. His response: "oh, so they've gone Pomo, huh?"
I immediately put two and two together. He got it. He was referring, of course, to PostModernism, the "postmodern turn", yada yada yada. Funny, though, I'd never heard the abbreviation "PoMo" before. But now that I know it I like it. I think it's appropriate. It doesn't have a particularly flattering ring to it...PoMo.

Indeed, according to the folks at urbandictionary.com, PoMo has a distinctly pejorative connotation to it.

Which begs the question: when is postmodernism pejorative and when is it not?
As buzzwords go, it gets thrown around an awful lot.
Are there actually people out there who self-identify as postmodernists? (Or "Pomos"?)
Who are they? Artists, architects, philosophers, academics, social critics?
By the way...what a great title that is..."social critic"....your job is to sit around and criticize society.

For a while, I went along with it. I was like "well, I'm not a modernist...I'm not a technocrat...I don't believe society is progressing towards an ever-better future based on scientific and social achievement, so I must be postmodernist, right?"

Now I'm not so sure. I read David Harvey's "The Condition of Postmodernity" over break.
Like anything, it means different things to different people. And even after reading that whole book I'm not sure I could sit down and tell you what it is. But I no longer think it's enough to simply label this the "postmodern age". To some, postmodernism seems to imply an "anything goes" attitude. We can borrow bits and pieces from everything that's come before, without regard for order or chronology. Well that's all well and good but there are more important things to be doing than simply cobbling things together out of other things. More troubling, pomo seems to go hand in hand with neoliberalism, and neoliberalism (at least around this department) is almost ALWAYS used in the pejorative.

According to a fascinating piece I read for my sustainability science class, we are on the verge of a major "pulse" in human history on par with the invention of domesticated agriculture (circa 8000 BC) and the agricultural/industrial revolution. Holling (2004) is the creater of the adaptive cycle model. It comes in a figure 8. There's the stage of growth/accumulation, followed by a peak and thencollapse, then creative destruction and reorganization. Its beauty is that it works on any scale (spatial and temporal). And it applies to any complex system, whether ecological/biological, or social/economic. We've been in the growth phase since the end of the second world war, but we are on the brink of collapse. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because collapse provides the opportunity for creative destruction, the operative word being "creative". When systems become to rigid and brittle (as ours has) it ceases to be resilient and loses its adaptive capacity. All systems NEED destruction and reorganization. Ecosystems should collapse. Forests should burn down. For them to do so is 100% natural. Destruction begets creation. To assume that we can have continued growth, continued accumulation...that is the paramount of UNsustainability.

The storm is gathering. Globalization. Terrorism. The Internet. Global Warming. Eco-Catastrophes. Big shit is going down in this complex system of ours...harbingers that it is on the verge of collapse. And I for one welcome that collapse. Shake things up a bit. Or a lot.
Things are going to change. We could start with the exhaustion of the world's oil supplies. That would force things to change in a hurry. Unfortunately, that day may not come until after I die. It's too bad. I really wish I could see it.

Not to sound like an alarmist or pessimist or anything. Far from it, collapse is a chance for positive reorganization. This is a good thing. Some will falter in the process, but the system as a whole (i.e. the earth and humans and other species) will have the chance to become more resilient, more sustainable. No, really.

cities in forests; airplanes; geography of sound

In landcover classification (using remote sensing imagery), "urban" is a wholly separate category than the various classifications of vegetation-covered land.

But what about urban areas with dense vegetation and tree cover. Many suburbs have a tendency to plant a lot of trees, in some cases resulting in more tree cover after development than before! This is the case in Marin County where I grew up. The areas that have been most heavily developed used to be grassy hills and valleys with sparse tree cover, but since development they are now lush green gardens full of trees that were not there before.

It's not just suburbs that can have heavy tree cover. Some very urban areas have heavy tree cover. Cities in tropical climates can have incredibly dense foliage. So much so that if you looked at an aerial photograph it would appear mostly green, only punctuated by the grey of urban development.

To what degree could we say that these are "cities in a forest" versus "forests in a city"?

Sometimes I feel that man has simply settled in the middle of nature. We have paved our streets, built our houses, and put up streetlamps right down in the middle of a forest, but the forest is still there. We are just temporary inhabitants in the lifespan of the forest.

Are neighborhoods that lie directly under airport approach flight paths significantly lower in property value?

is there any evidence to show that living directly under the flight path of airplanes as they approach airport runways is significantly cheaper than living elsewhere? (because of the noise, etc)

How far does airplane noise travel?

when an airplane flies over the landscape, how far away can people hear it?

what is the radius of the airplane's noise reach?

to what degree is the radius of the airplane's noise reach proportial to the airplane's height above the ground? (in other words, how much noisier does an airplane seem to someone on the ground when the airplane is in the vicinity of an airport and thus low in altitude, versus when it is at normal cruising altitude)

I like to stand outside at night, when traffic has died down, and just listen to all the sounds out there. There are always sounds, be it the wind, crickets and other insects or animals, sounds of distant cars or other human sounds. But I wonder where on earth there is a lack of all earthly sound. Where on earth is so deadly still that there is no wind, no life, no sound at all? Certainly not in the forests, but maybe in the deserts.

I'd like to see some studies of the geography of everyday sound. Maps showing decibels of sound through space.

the yuppification of environmentalism

"Yuppification" is a fun word. And unfortuantely, it is all too relavent.
I think the environmental movement is in risk of being yuppified, and that is not a good thing. People are coming to identify yuppies and environmenalists as one in the same. This is not good, because yuppies are an exclusive social group, and because environmentalism is something that should appeal to everyone.

Yuppies are appropriating things like organic food and farmers markets. These are things that should be available to anyone. But once they get identified with yuppies, they become stigmatized to a large section of society that sees itself in opposition to yuppies, who they see as "liberals".

Things considered "yuppie" are considered upmarket, exclusive, expensive. And all too often, this is exactly what is happening to organic food. "Organic" is becoming a luxury label and is being priced as such. But there is no reason why organic foods should cost more than other foods. The label "organic" is yet another victim of the commodification of everything.

undermining the system; territorial control; power and space

Some geographers go to work for the CIA.
Now I'm against pretty much everything the CIA stands for. If there ever was an example of unjust power being extended in space through exploitation and force, it's the CIA.
But what if I went to work for the CIA and subverted it from within?

I'm sure not all analysts at the CIA are bad people (or at least, don't realize that they're aiding an unjust cause). But I wonder if any of them are actively working against the geopolitical-economic interests of the power elite? Wasn't it, afterall, the CIA that actually advised Bush NOT to go to war in Iraq (before being told to shut up)?

Oh well, now that I've written this and it's forever attached to my name in cyberspace, fat chance of ME ever getting through screening to work for the CIA.

Maybe I could become a cop, and use my position of power and authority to protect the meek and punish the truly evil. In other words, not go after the petty criminals (or merely marginalized) that bare the brunt of copwork focuses on - drug users, prostitutes, loiterers, teenagers, the homeless - and chase after the REAL badguys - corproate crooks and politicians. Michael Moore proposed something like that to the producer of COPS in Bowling for Columbine. The problem - corporate crooks just aren't as entertaining.

our society has perfected the art of extending power through space. we have a hierarchical law enforcement system, from the national (US Marshals, FBI, Homeland Security), to the state (highway patrol), county (sherrifs), and local (cops). It is the local law enforcement that most of us come into contact with the most, and it is the local that is the most pervasive in space. There are few populated places in America where the arm of the law does not extend (although certain groups have certainly taken advantage of the remoteness of certain woods, or the laxity of law enforcement in certain placs, to pursue their own brand of law and justice). But even our national forests and national parks are patrolled by rangers with guns. There isn't really anywhere you can go and be fully beyond the power of the state.

I was struck during my travels in China by the spatial reach of state power. Every little village had a local police station. And you can better believe that in China, those local police were enforcing policy as handed down directly from Beijing. Ironically it is in the most remote places, such as the Muslim ethnic minority-dominated Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region that state control is at its firmest. Not only are there (Han Chinese) soldiers and police officers at every corner, but there are plainclothes police too. No movement goes unwatched.

Another method of extending territorial political power is the domestic checkpoint. The domestic checkpoint is different than the border checkpoints that regulate movement between states. Domestic checkpoints regulate movement WITHIN states. In the United States, every road leading from the Mexico border has a checkpoint somewhere between 50-100 miles inland. Internal movement is less controlled in China than it once was, but still travelers are required to present their papers at strategically placed locations throughout the country

Human geographers will tell you again and again: he who has a monopoly on space has a monopoly on power.

social spaces

where can people go to meet and interact with other people?

has anyone ever done a typology of these "social spaces"?
probably, some social geographer. and now, me:

Institutional spaces:
libraries
schools

Recreational spaces:
Parks
sports venues

Commercial spaces:
Bars/taverns/pubs
Nightclubs/danceclubs
Barbershops/beauty salons
Stores (?)

What type of stores, specifically, can serve as social spaces?
Stores that appeal to people with common interests....
petstores
bookstores
clothing stores

I used to grumble about women and their tendencies to go shopping all the time. But maybe shopping for them is not so much a means to an end of buying things, but is a social experience. It can include just browsing and window shopping. But women normally go shopping with people who are already established as their friends. I don't think people go shopping so much to "meet new people". Bookstores might be an exception. Maybe this is just a cliché used in movies, but I think some guys pick up girls in bookstores. If you're looking for a certain type of person - say, one who reads - then the place in which you look (i.e. the bookstore) is a sort of natural filter, weeding out all those people who - say, don't read (and there are many).

We might also divide social spaces into public and private spaces (or that nebulous grey area in between). I think there's definitely been a trend towards more social spaces becoming privatized (or more private spaces becoming socialized? nah...)
Or how much privacy people have in these spaces.

When it comes to privacy, I think it's important to distinguish between two very different kinds of privacy (or lack thereof). In one kind, privacy is limited because of the number of people around. This is the case in most traditional public spaces which are full of people. But the lack of privacy in such spaces is innocuous compared to the newer lack of privacy pervading social spaces more and more as a result of the surveillance of private spaces (by management) as well as public spaces (by government). Both video surveillance and direct surveillance (by plain-clothes police officers) are ever increasing and indicative of Benthem and Foucault's "panopticon".

Ironically, in the former spaces, the ones bustling with people, I would posit that privacy is actually very possible. When a space is filled with people it can be easy to blend into the crowd, to get lost, to hide, and thus achieve a level of privacy that is certainly impossible if you are the only person standing in the middle of a big open space.

the problem with "the economy"

One of my biggest pet peeves is when politicians and the media talk about "the economy". The economy to them is a black box. It's just there. And they pretend like it actually matters if the everyday lives of people. But "the economy" doesn't concern itself with people. The vast majority of people could not exist for all the economy cares. The vast majority of the world's "money" is tied up in stocks and finance markets. It is intangible and invisible. Billions of dollars are changed hands every day and all through the actions of just a handful of very rich and powerful individuals. When "the economy" is on an upswing or downswing, it really does not mean anything to regular people.

The economy used to be very human-centric. "The economy" has existed forever. It predates the stock market, it predates money even. It was simply how humans lived and survived. Before the era of massive sums of money manipulated by the powerful few, the economy was localized and personal. It could be the "informal" economy and very tied to social networks - those connections that humans formed with other humans in order to achieve certain goals. Economies used to be based far more on bartering, trade, and gifting. That has all been changed by massive commodification. Not just commodification of goods and resources, but commodification of services. Tangible material goods lent themselves naturally to commodification. It is the commodification of services that I see as indicative of the present condition. We've all heard that our postindustrial society has become a service-based economy. Most Americans make money by selling services. At one point, selling services meant having a white collar job and that was supposed to be "higher" or "better" than blue collar jobs (manual labor, farming, resource extraction, dealing directly with goods). That has led to folks making $5.15 flipping burgers being classified as "white collar workers" while skilled laborers can make ten times that.

Now I'm not arguing against the commodification of services in its entirety. Certainly some (if not many) services are useful and it is more efficient for some to specialize in certain services. The commodification of services is nothing new, either. The butcher, the baker, the blacksmith, and the doctor have been around for eons.

But many of the services that we now pay for were once part of the informal social economy. They were not bought and sold but provided by friends and relatives. These days it seems there are people out there willing to set up a "consulting business" for every little thing, from dog-grooming to "we sell your stuff on eBay" to college admissions consulting. It used to be that people took care of these things on their own (well, not the eBay, but you know what I mean). I shouldn't blame these service providers for what they're doing. They clearly saw a niche in the market and are simply filling it. It's the people purchasing these services today. People used to do things for themselves and now they are willing to pay for just about anything.

If I say I'm anti-capitalist (I haven't fully figured out yet whether I am or not, but I'm definitely leaning in that direction) it's anathema to most people. The only alternative to capitalism most people know is communism. But I'm definitely not a communist.
Capitalism is ownership by individuals.
Communism is ownership by the state. I couldn't possibly favor communism because I'm not sure that I favor the state (more on my anti-statist thinking later)
I much prefer a third alternative - communalism - collective ownership by local groups, but not by a powerful state.

the problem with urban planning

When I decided to pursue a graduate degree in Geography instead of Urban Planning, I thought I was changing course, taking a fork in the road. I now realize that there is far more in common between these two fields than I at first realized. In fact, I think it is fair to say that urban planners are "social geographers" and "economic geographers" who put theory into practice. In other words, Geographers come up with the theory. Planners put it in practice. The problem that I have with planning is that planners are making choices that affect many people. Planners therefore have a great deal of power. And while many planners have social justice and equity as aims, many others are all too easily caught up in policies of gentrification, neoliberalism, privatization of space, and social exclusion. Planners claim to know what is best for society and then attempt to fashion appropriate spaces in which society may function according to their whims. A great deal of our space today is "planned". It did not always use to be this way, and I'm not convinced that this is best.
Planning as a profession arose in response to what many saw as the negative effects of urbanization and industrialization around the turn of the 20th century. It was born out of the progressive era, inspired by the work of people like Jacob Riis (How The Other Half Lives, an expose of the conditions of urban poverty in New York) and Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, an expose on Chicago's meatpacking industry and its noxious effects on the surrounding neighborboods). Planning was always informed with a certain sense of social justice - regulating the effects of urbanization to protect the rights of the marginalized. But unfortunately the planning profession has not always lived up to its noble intentions. Just look at all the terrible suburban development that has occurred in the last century. Most of it has happened under the aegis of planning. Some might say "well, that was poor planning" but the fact is, it was planning.

Most most of history, civilizations did not have urban planners. And for most of history, civilizations built and expanded cities that today's planners envy. What are now the "historic districts" - the hearts of the great cities of the world - were built without any planning or regulation. Venice, London, Beijing, Rome, San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Paris, Cairo, Istanbul, Calcutta. Pre-modern cities grew piecemeal in an unorganized, organic fashion. That is why they rarely conformed to any regular grid. Instead they formed a mishmash of crooked streets and alleyways. Frankly, I think this type of urbanism is wonderful. Planners are all too often guilty of condemning such districts as "slums", razing them only to replace them with "rational", "modern", geometrically-sound high-rises and plazas.

This was the norm in the United States for the first 60 years of the 20th century. Now, thankfully, most American planners advocate the preservation of historic districts and no longer advocate "correcting" crooked streets. Unfortunately, the Chinese are still doing it and with gusto. The old alleyways of Beijing are rapidly disappearing as the city prepares for the Olympics, during which it plans to show the world a modern face.

But even if planners today recognize the originality, the "quaintness", the organic nature of pre-modern un-planned cities, there is no way they could ever get built today. I think planning is necessary in order to mitigate the negative effects of large scale developments. But I think it goes too far in its regulation of individual development. Of course, the problem is that there really isn't much "individual development" these days. Everything is on a large scale. Everything is owned by the rich, by corporations.

I like cities that are densely packed, where everything is accessible by foot, where the streets are too narrow for SUVs. Where people live within a stone's throw of their neighbors, thus providing a natural social sphere. Where people interact with their neighbors and friends in the streets, in the marketplaces. I wish we could build these types of cities today. But even in the non-Western world this is not happening. Even countries that are supposedly opposed to "Western values" are building depersonalized, spread-out, automobile-oriented, cities. The only "new" cities today that resemble the cities of old are refugee camps and slums.

time-space compression

One of the big theories to come out of geography in the last 50 years is "time-space compression" - the idea that the time necessary to traverse a certain distance in space has declined rapidly with changes in technology - both symbolically through communications and tangibly through transportation. A personal daily geogrpahy is the scope of a person's movements through space in a typical day. Our personal daily geographies include our home, our commute to work or school, errands we run, and places we go for recreation or other purposes. Personal daily geographies may vary from day to day, or between weekdays and weekends, and may be totally different when we go on vacation. We might aggregate the personal daily geographies of every resident of a particular bounded region into a sort of average daily geography of a place. This average might be expressed in numerical form as the radius around the point of origin. I would be interested to see how these average daily geographies vary across time and space and culture. One quite obvious pattern would be that as societies suburbanize, the radius of daily geographies must expand, as longer commutes are made possible by automobiles and highways. When one's mode of transportation is pedestrian or bicycle, her personal daily geography will likely be much smaller than that of one who drives a car.

I'm interested in what the personal daily geographies were/are of people who live in small villages and do not own motor vehicles. How many kilometers does a typical Chinese peasant walk in a day in the course of his day's activities? In the course of tending his fields he may walk several km in one day.

dogs and cats

Dogs are really big these days. No, not in size. In size, dogs are in fact really small these days. Dogs are big in popularity. At least that's what it seems. I wonder if dog ownership has in fact gone up in recent years or if it's just my imagination. One thing's certain: dog ownership has definitely gone up in China. And it's all little foofoo dogs...Paris Hilton dogs. I'm sorry, but if a dog is smaller than a cat, I really don't see the point in it being a dog.

I wonder how much of the current dog craze is due to people actually wanting dogs versus wanting dogs for the (human) social interaction they precipitate. Dogs are a social lubricant (like alcohol, but moreso). Joe and Sue may be perfect strangers but if they both are walking their dogs they have a natural excuse to talk to each other.

Even if Sue doesn't have a dog herself, Joe's dog can prompt women to swoon "oh how cute". I'm not sure if it works so well the other way around.

I'm all for social lubricants. I'm just not a big dog person. I like cats. They take care of themselves. They don't need you to take them outside to pee. They're clean....they wash themselves and bury their own poop. What a smart pet! Too bad you can't take cats to the park to meet other cat-lovers.

One of the stupidest thigns about where I live right now (State College) is this law that requires all cats outdoors to be on leashes! Can you even imagine?! Cats were not meant to be leashed. Cats should be free to roam, explore, sniff out their own territories. One of the things I love about traveling is that no matter where I go in the world I will always find cats. All cats speak the same language and I can communicate with them whether they're Chinese, Thai, French, or Canadian.

the beach in January

I can be highly critical of California. Unlike many of my contemporary peers who think California is God's place on earth, I'm not entirely convinced. California has a lot of problems—traffic, overbuilding, pollution, overpopulation, overconsumption, and elitism to name a few.

But one thing I cannot criticize California for is its weather.
Having now lived in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and California, I can say that California has the best weather of the three.
And although there are places that are hotter—Arizona, Texas, Florida—I'm pretty sure that California still takes the cake weather-wise. Not all of California, mind you. The Central Valley and the southeastern deserts can bake. But the coast is near heaven with its Mediterranean climate. What I like best about the Mediterranean climate is that it is near-perfect year round. You never really have that great of a need for artificial climate control.

Okay, lots of houses in the Bay Area have air conditioners. And that is just stupid. They're really not necessary. In my house we survived without one. My dad opens the windows early in the morning, letting the cool air circulate through the house. Then when it warms up outside we close all the windows and close the blinds, and the house stays cool until the evening, when the sun sets and we can once again open the windows and doors. It's comfortable, not to mention energy efficient. If we need to, we can use electric fans. They use a lot less energy than air conditioners.
In the winter it never gets too terribly cold.

Case in point: last week I went to the beach. In January. It was a gorgeous day.
There were over a hundred people at the beach. Of course no one was swimming (even in the summer, it takes a brave soul to test the waters of the Pacific without a wetsuit), but people were basking in the sun's rays on the good old beach.

They say that some phenominally high percentage of the world's population lives within 100 miles of the ocean. I can believe it. While I've always considered myself more of a mountains/outdoors person than a beach person, the beach does have a certain allure, doesn't it?
Maybe this is the geographer in me speaking, but the idea of being able to stand right on the brink of a continental land mass is exhilerating. To watch the waves slowly rolling and beating upon the sand is to watch earth's natural processes in all their glory.

being an "intellectual", postmodernity, M&Ms, and other musings

They have 22 colors of M&M's now. and you can pay extra and get made-to-order M&M's in time for Valentine's Day. I like the multi-colors. Reminds me more of Smarties, the European alternative to M&M's that have come in vibrant colors for some time now.

I'm just wrapping up my first holiday home from graduate school. It feels different than when I came home for the holidays from college. Back then, everyone else from high school was home for the holidays too. Now it seems like many people have moved off in their own directions. Most people I grew up with are now out of college and have jobs. Many no longer live in Marin. I kind of regret that I'm not in touch with more people I grew up with. I've been making some efforts to get back in touch with people, but it's not easy. I'm realizing that by this time, if I'm not in regular contact with people I probably never will be again. But it takes time and effort to keep up social relationships, especially when they can be so geographically dispersed. My friends from college are now living all over the world. It provides a great excuse if I happen to find myself in the same town as them, but if not, then it can be hard to keep in touch with everyone.

I find myself drifting farther and farther away from the mainstream of American society and culture. I'm all but decided that as soon as I finish graduate school I'm going abroad (at least temporarily) permanently. At that point I will become really detached from everything and everyone here in the US. I'll keep publishing online, and maybe some people will keep up with my ramblings there, but I can't count on it.

I'm really starting to self-identify as "graduate student" and even as an "intellectual". Not that there's any sort of standardized thing as a graduate student, but I still feel that it aptly describes me right now. Especially the social science graduate student. It seems that the job of the "social scientist" is not so much to invent "new" theories, but to put the existing world into academese. We social scientists describe processes and phenomena which, quite frankly, would be obvious to anyone who took the time to think about them, and put them into formal language. when radical social scientists devise new methods of explaining social phenomena, it is not the phenomenon itself that is new, but the method of explaining it. Perhaps the processes and phenomena were there all along, but no one stopped and really thought about why they were. That's where the academic comes in. We "deconstruct" things to understand the "why" behind the "what", often as it manifests in "power relations". Because power is everything.

Does "postmodernity" mean that we have entered a new phase/era that simply comes after the era of "modernity"? Or does postmodernity reject the idea of "eras" altogether? And if so, is it saying that "there never were any such things as eras to begin with" or "there was once a linear progression of eras in time, but we have now abandoned this progression for post-modernity and we can never turn back"?

I think humans today have it in their heads that we are living in extraordinary times. They see this as the end/beginning of an era. Today's technologies seem truly revolutionary. The state of world politics and the global economy seems unprecedented. It seems so easy to assume that these are "remarkable times" we live in, the logical product of everything that has lead up to this point in time. How easily deluded we are! Today is no more extraordinary than any previous moment in time. Every past moment has seemed new and unusual and cutting edge for someone somwhere. Right? Have all people at all points in time thought of themselves as "modern"? How could they not? Or was there a time (or culture) when time did not play such a role in human subjectivity, in understanding of ones place in the universe and its grand timeline?