Forestry as imperial careering: New Zealand as the end and edge of empire in the 1920s–1940s

Forestry is interestingly situated within British imperial networks of the 19th and early 20th centuries whereby India was arguably the main node. Drawing on Lambert and Lester's concept of ‘imperial careering’ as a way of exploring imperial networks, this paper further extends its application to foresters as a group of middle‐level technical experts as well as carrying it into the 20th century when the British Empire was by some measures at its zenith. The forestry careers of Owen Jones and Hugh Corbin, principally in Australia and New Zealand, are used to illustrate the discussion which concludes with some more general observations about imperial careerists.     

Reviewing the Guayana project: Lifetime migration to and from Bolivar state,Venezuela, 1950–2001

By the mid‐twentieth century the population and economic resources in many developing economies had become concentrated in the capital city. Planned industrial cities became an important mechanism to encourage more balanced urban systems as well as development in peripheralized regions. Venezuela boasts one of the most impressive planned industrial cities, Ciudad Guayana, constructed in 1959 in the resource rich but inaccessible Bolivar state in the southeast. This paper summarizes the lifetime migration to and from Bolivar state for the years 1950, 1971 and 2001. Whereas the majority of lifetime migrants originated from the neighbouring northeast region in 1950 and 1971, by 2001 more migrants arrived from the capital region. For lifetime outmigrants, the destination states became more diverse and less focused on the capital region. Gender ratios of lifetime migrants to and from Bolivar became more equitable as women became more prominent in migration flows. The level of urban primacy in Venezuela declined substantially after 1971 as the country became more internally integrated, although this more equitable distribution of the country's population may not have been solely a result of the creation of the growth pole, but a result of wider economic development.     

Making the Subterranean Visible: Security,Tunnels, and the United States–Mexico Border

The number of unauthorized tunnels discovered through the U.S.–Mexico border has risen dramatically since the mid‐1990s. These tunnels are problematic for the state because the subterranean border is both less visible and more difficult to monitor and control than is the surface border. In this era of heighten security, the debate on secure borders has intensified. As a result, the need to demonstrate security success at both the national and the agency level has risen. Efforts to make tunnel discoveries (and security) visible are made within border‐security agencies and within national discourse and legislation. These efforts spatially fix tunnels to the border in ways that obscure fuller a understanding of drug trafficking in general. This paper employs archival research, content analysis, and informal interviews with security‐enforcement agents to consider the material presence of tunnels within border landscapes.     

NIMBY Then and Now: Land-Use Conflict in Worcester,Massachusetts, 1876–1900

Although its existence is readily apparent in the published literature of a number of fields, pre-1950 exclusionary land-use conflict is largely ignored in studies assessing such conflict today. An inventory of land-use conflicts mentioned in a Worcester, Massachusetts, daily newspaper in the years 1876–1900 found a high incidence of efforts to exclude various undesired land uses. The results put in question many of the characterizations and explanations advanced of contemporary NIMBY activity.     

The Asymmetric Border: The United States’ Place in the World and the Refugee Panic of 2018

The year 2018 saw a moral panic in the United States in the media and among many citizens over the treatment of refugees/asylees at the U.S. southern border, particularly the separation and detention of children apart from their parents. This happened in the context of a period in U.S. political history in which “immigration,” without much discernment about different types of immigration, was central to political discourse. In fact, in terms of numbers, there was no immigration crisis at the border. Undocumented migration from Mexico across the southern border of the United States has been in decline for many years, and the irregular movement of people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras is currently small by historical standards. The only crisis, to which the U.S. panic was a response, has been a human rights crisis. Families and children seeking asylum from horrendous civil‐rights conditions in their countries of origin were criminalized and denied their right to asylum hearings. The panic points both to the extreme politicization of immigration in the United States, particularly since Donald Trump's entry into national politics in 2015, and to popular confusion over categorizing different types of immigrants. But it also raises questions about the nature of the U.S. southern border in relation to the United States’ place in the world. Rather than thinking about the United States as simply the rich destination country of unfortunate people coming from poor origin countries, the refugee panic of 2018 brings into the focus the fact that the United States itself is complicit in the conditions in those countries that produce so many refugees in the first place.     

THE TORONTO STAR FRESH AIR FUND: TRANSCENDENTAL RESCUE IN A MODERN CITY, 1900–1915

ABSTRACT. The Toronto Star newspaper began rescuing poor children from the city's hottest, smokiest, and smelliest neighborhoods in 1901. The Fresh Air Fund, like park and playground planning, assumed that proximity to nature modified both health and behavior. Evoking transcendentalism—the idea that providential nature could move humanity into higher forms of existence—the Star sent children to the countryside near Toronto, albeit temporarily, assured of producing tangible health benefits. It also expected “nature” to convert the antibourgeois immorality of poor children into something more tolerable.     

Visualizing,interpreting and comparing detrital zircon age and Hf isotope data in basin analysis – a graphical approach

The development of fast and reliable instrumental methods for U‐Pb dating and Lu‐Hf isotope analysis of zircon has caused detrital zircon to become a popular provenance indicator for clastic sediments and an important tool in basin analysis. In parallel with the increasing ease of access to data, advanced methods of data interpretation have been developed. The downside of some techniques for visualization and comparison of detrital zircon distribution patterns is that the results are difficult to relate to what the zircon grains really record: The age and nature of geological processes in a protosource terrane. Some simple methods of data presentation and inter‐sample comparison that preserve a direct and intuitively understandable relationship between the data and the age of zircon‐forming processes in the protosource are proposed here: Comparison of confidence intervals around empirical, cumulative distribution curves combined with the use of a plot of upper vs. lower quartile values of cumulative zircon U‐Pb age or Lu‐Hf model age distributions. This approach allows a robust and transparent separation to be made between samples whose detrital zircon distributions are indistinguishable from each other, and those that are more or less similar. Furthermore, it allows simple comparison between detrital zircon distributions and the geological age record of potential protosource terranes, or the detrital zircon distributions of possible sedimentary precursors.     

Home-Work Links,Labor Markets,and the Construction of Place in Lawrence,Massachusetts, 1929–1939

This paper addresses the issue of how to combine, on one hand, the everyday links that are established and maintained between home and work, and on the other, the demand-driven social regulation of labor markets. It is argued that by taking an approach acknowledging the complexity of networks and the “constellations of relations” involved in forming local labor markets, we can better understand the meshing of divisions of labor at home and at work, in concert with the demands of local employers. In this respect, the roles of households, ethnic communities, and employers are taken to be critical and interdependent in forming local labor markets and, ultimately, constructing places. Census and archival data are used from Lawrence, Massachusetts to examine these issues through the situation of woolen mill workers of the 1920s and 1930s.     

Decentralization of the Nation's Main Street: New Coastal‐Proximity‐Based Portrayals of Population Distribution in the United States, 1950–2000

Almost half a century has passed since Jean Gottmann coined the term “Megalopolis” in reference to the almost continuously urbanized stretch of land spanning the East Coast of the United States from southern New Hampshire to northern Virginia. Because a disproportionate concentration of population resided in this Megalopolis, the northeastern core enjoyed an economic and cultural supremacy, and he termed the Megalopolis “The Main Street of the Nation.” By the later 1960s and 1970s, however, population migration patterns began to reflect the influence exerted by the emergence of a second national core centered on the large metropolitan areas along the Pacific Coast, especially those of the Los Angeles and Bay Area conurbations in California. Although of different character, this burgeoning concentration of population, economic activity, and cultural influence may reflect the development of a West Coast Megalopolis that could soon rival the original Megalopolis of the Northeastern Corridor. Today, the U.S. population distribution is largely a bicoastal one. This article documents the emergence of this bicoastal population distribution. Using historical census data and GIS technology, we present a number of novel ways to graphically portray and examine this population redistribution phenomenon. The United States is not unique in witnessing an increasing share of its inhabitants clustering in coastal zones. Current critical policy concerns about the worldwide vulnerability of coastal populations have focused the need for better coastal population estimates and better mapping methods for portraying population redistribution trends.     

"Illusory Riches": Representations of the Tropical World, 1840–1950

This article traces the emergence of a negative strain in European and North American representations of the tropics, as earlier images of natural abundance were supplemented, and partly supplanted, by the fears and frustrations of would-be colonisers and the growing realisation of the technical difficulties of tropical "development". Taking Pierre Gourou's The Tropical World (1947) as an exemplary text that embodies attitudes accumulated over the previous century of scientific activity and colonial administration in the tropics, it is possible to see how, despite recognition of wide regional variations, the tropics as a whole were seen as constituting an impoverished and pestilential region, largely unsuited to white settlement and agriculture, and yet reliant upon outside agency for prospects of development. Without entirely ceasing to be landscapes of desire, the tropics represented a more primitive world than the northern temperate zone, a domain of largely untamed nature that served, by contrast, to demonstrate the moral and material "superiority" of northern climates, races and civilisations.     

Differential recovery from the effects of a 100-year storm: Significance of long-term hillslope–channel coupling; Howgill Fells, northwest England

A 100-year storm that occurred in 1982 caused major geomorphic changes in the main valleys of the northern Howgill Fells, northwest England. Those changes, which were documented at that time, involved extensive hillslope gully erosion, alluvial fan sedimentation, and substantial sediment input to the stream systems. The streams channels, which had hitherto been dominantly single-thread, relatively stable channels, responded in many reaches by switching to wide shallow unstable locally braided channels. Over the 20 years since the event there has been a partial recovery to channel geometries similar to the pre-flood conditions, however the degree of recovery contrasts between two neighbouring valleys, Bowderdale and Langdale. The channel of Bowderdale Beck has largely recovered. Flood sedimentation zones have largely stabilised and new single-thread channels have cut through most of the former braided reaches. In some places channel widths remain higher than the pre-flood values, and locally recovery has been modified by a lagged complex response. In Langdale, recovery is only partial with many reaches demonstrating sustained instability over the 20-year post-flood period. Furthermore, the overall spatial patterns suggest some reach-to-reach transfer of coarse sediment, shifting zones of instability downstream. The contrasts between the two valleys appear to relate to different hillslope-to-channel coupling characteristics, themselves inherited from late Pleistocene conditions. These contrasts are also evident in the longer-term (post-1949) history of channel change and stability in these two streams, indicative of the higher intrinsic instability of the Langdale system.     

Origin of glacial–fluvial landforms in the Azas Plateau volcanic field, the Tuva Republic, Russia: Role of ice–magma interaction

The basaltic Azas Plateau volcanic field is located in the Tuva Republic of the Russian Federation. The area was glaciated multiple times, and the field is characterized by the formation of subglacial volcanoes called tuyas, but subaerial volcanoes and lava fields also exist. A combined study of remote sensing and field observations in the vicinity of the tuyas in the southeastern Azas Plateau volcanic field identified landforms that are best explained by the jökulhlaup hypothesis. The landforms include elongated hills, paleochannels, and butte and basin topography. These landforms are hypothesized to have formed by both erosion and deposition caused by high-energy water streams. The triggering for the hypothesized jökulhlaups was either melting of ice by subglacial volcanism and/or destabilization of ice-dammed/subglacial reservoirs. The age estimation of the flood events is difficult, but they probably occurred during the ice ages of the Quaternary, as late as in the Middle-Late Pleistocene.     

Current Convenience,Desperate Deforestation: Ghana's AdjustmentProgram and the Forestry Sector

Since the early 1980s, most Sub-Saharan African countries have resorted to structural adjustment programs to reform their ailing economies. Adjustment, however, may provide a convenient means for governments of the adjusting economies and international capital to meet their current economic and political interests, usually by sacrificing the physical environment, with huge environmental costs for the adjusting country. This paper uses Ghana's forestry sector, which has been characterized by a dramatic increase in woodexports since adjustment, to demonstrate a direct link between adjustment and environmental destruction. Ghana's dramatic increase in wood exports, involving a rapid and extensive deforestation, results from the government's need to meet its increasing external debt service obligations, and is exacerbated by the series of massive local currency devaluation required under adjustment “to get prices right.” The systematic reduction in government revenue from devaluation to amortize the increasing debts, keeps the government and indebted wood processing firms on a treadmill of export-based extraction/deforestation.     

The Spatial Structure of Land Use from 1970–2000 in the Phoenix,Arizona, Metropolitan Area

This article explores the dimensions of rapid urbanization in the Phoenix Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) over the past thirty years with respect to land use change. We devote primary attention to developing an understanding of what land transformations took place, the extent to which they occurred, and where they occurred. Our findings indicate that 32 percent of the Phoenix SMSA changed between 1970 and 2000. More than half of the overall change was from agriculture to some form of urban land use, and although a large percentage of the region remains open desert the parcels of desert are increasingly fragmented. This has significant implications for urban ecology and biodiversity. The growth indicates that rather than a pattern that reflects the agglomeration effects of a polycentric metropolis, the central business district of the City of Phoenix dominates the region. This has implications with respect to employment patterns, traffic congestion, and urban air quality and climate.     

Coupling relationships: Hillslope–fluvial linkages in the Hodder catchment, NW England

Variations in the coupling of sediment transfer between different parts of a fluvial catchment, e.g., hillslope to axial stream, can hamper understanding but are an integral part of the geomorphological record. Depositional environments respond to a combination of land use, climate, storms (floods), and autogenic conditioning. The distribution of sediment in the upland landscapes of NW England is out of equilibrium with contemporary climate and geomorphological processes; more a function of peri- and paraglacial mobilisation of glacigenic deposits. Soil and vegetation development after deglaciation have interrupted any progression toward sediment exhaustion with sediment release controlled largely by extrinsic perturbation, with late Holocene anthropogenic activity, climate and extreme hydrological events the likely candidates. This paper presents a new radiocarbon-dated Holocene geomorphological succession for the River Hodder (NW England), alongside evaluating new palaeoecological and geoarchaeological data to discern the impacts of human activity. These data show a late Holocene expansion in human occupation and use of the landscape since the Iron Age (700–0 cal. B.C.), with more substantial changes in the character and intensity of upland land use in the last 1300 years. The geomorphological responses in the uplands were the onset of considerable and widespread hillslope erosion (gullying) and associated alluvial fan development. Interpretation of the regional radiocarbon chronology limits gullying to four, more extensive and aggressive phases after 500 cal. B.C. The downstream alluvial system has responded with considerable valley floor deposition and lateral channel migration that augmented sediment supply by remobilising the existing floodplain terraces and led to the aggradation of a series of inset alluvial terraces. The timing of these changes between states of aggradation and incision in alluvial reaches reflects the increased connectivity between the hillslope and alluvial systems. Aspects of both the regional climate and land use histories are conducive to increasing discharge and sediment flux, but the region wide lowering of erosion thresholds appears a key driver conditioning these sediment-rich conditions and producing a landscape that was more susceptible to erosion under lower magnitude flows.     

Growth‐faults from delta collapse – structural and sedimentological investigation of the Last Chance delta,Ferron Sandstone,Utah

Investigations of syn‐sedimentary growth faults in the Last Chance delta (Ferron Sandstone, Utah, USA) show that fault‐bounded half‐grabens arrested high amounts of sand in the mouth bar and/or distributary channel areas. Fault‐controlled morphology causes changes in routing of the delta top to delta front drainage towards the long axis of half‐grabens. Faulting was spatially and temporally non‐systematic, and polyphase, with 3D cusp/listric fault geometries instigated by linkage of variously oriented segments. Hanging wall rollover folds consisting of wedge‐shaped syn‐kinematic sand attest to rapid <1‐m slip increments on faults followed by mild erosion along crests of fault blocks and sedimentary infill of adjacent accommodation. Triangle‐zones in prodelta to delta front muds are located underneath steeper faults and interconnected rotated fault‐flats. Their geometry is that of antiformal stack duplexes, in an arrangement of low‐angle‐to‐bedding normal faults at the base, replaced by folded thrusts upwards. These faults show a brittle, frictional flow deformation mechanism ascribed to early compaction of mud. For syn‐kinematic sand, there is a change from general granular/hydroplastic flow in shear zones to later brittle failure and cataclasis, a transition instigated by precipitation of calcite cement. Extensional faulting in the Last Chance delta was likely controlled by gravity driven collapse towards the delta slope and prodelta, as is commonly observed in collapsing deltas. The trigger and driving mechanism is envisioned as localized loads from sand deposited within distributary channels/mouth bars and fault‐controlled basins along the delta top. A regional tilt and especially displacement of compacted mud below sand bodies towards less compacted muds also contributed to the faulting.