The nomadic landscape: People in a changing Arctic environment

Geografisk Tidsskrift—Danish Journal of Geography 109(2):181–189, 2009

The paper will explore the sense of place in the Thule district, Northern Greenland, including the emotional topography by which people live. The analytical framework is the notion of a nomadic landscape, drawing from the essay on nomadology by Deleuze & Guattari (2004). The nomadic landscape is constituted by a network of spatial centres—or points of reference—from each of which an infinite spatial realm takes its beginning. The ambition is to demonstrate how, in a nomadic landscape, movement is integral to memory, sociability and experience; this is vital to the understanding of present day responses to the reduced mobility owing to changing weather and ice conditions in the Thule district.     

Review symposium: our common future: the world commission on environment and development

In 1983 the General Assembly of the United Nations called for the setting up of a World Commission on Environment and Development. The Commission's ambitious tasks were described by its Chairman, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Prime Minister of Norway, as: (1) to propose long‐term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable developments by the year 2000 and beyond; (2) to recommend ways concern for the environment could be translated into greater cooperation among developing countries and between countries at different stages of economic and social development; (3) to consider ways and means by which the international community could deal more effectively with environmental concerns; and (4) to help define shared perceptions of long‐term environmental issues and the appropriate efforts needed to deal successfully with problems of protecting and enhancing the environment. The Commission's Report, Our common future,was published in 1987.     

Characterizing the changing environment of cropland in the Songnen Plain,Northeast China,from 1990 to 2015

Journal of Geographical Sciences - Quantitative characterization of environmental characteristics of cropland (ECC) plays an important role in maintaining sustainable development of agricultural...     

Griffith Taylor Lecture,Geographical Society of New South Wales, 2004: Australia and the ‘State of Nature/Native’

This account sets itself against the binarism of physical versus cultural determinism that drives population–environment debate over people's place on the Australian continent. In reading back into colonial times, it evokes ‘our’ unresolved sense of relation to nature on a continent that has pressed awkward buttons since the time the botanist on Cook's Endeavour, Joseph Banks, first mused over the apparent contradiction on the east coast of human presence and uncultivated land. Australia's ‘state of nature’, including its inhabitants, elicited tensions in Anglo-Celtic peoples’ ambiguous relation with nature that have never gone away or been resolved. Indeed, I argue, against the background of what was considered in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought to be a distinctly human separation from, and capacity to rise above, nature, that the Australian state of nature/native precipitated a crisis in prevailing ideas of ‘the human’. As consternation grew into the nineteenth century about the very capacity of Aboriginal people for improvement, and particularly for cultivation, I argue they challenged the basis upon which the unity of humankind had been assumed in Enlightenment thought. They could not be comprehended, according to the prevailing conception of racial difference, as a mere variety of the human. The radical idea of innate human difference may thus be understood as arising out of this incomprehension, as an attempt to account for the ontologically inexplicable difference of the Australian Aborigine. This lecture's excursion into the origins of ‘race’ is by way of highlighting the uncertainty of the divide between the human and non-human worlds. Imagining an entangled world of living things may help to craft fresh lines of debate about modes of environmental belonging and becoming on this continent that overcome the stale binaries and blind spots of Australia's population–environment debate.     

Political Geography: Territory,State, and Society

Kevin R. Cox. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. xiv and 382 pp., maps, diags., photos., and index. $36.95 paper (ISBN 0‐631‐22679‐6) Reviewed by Douglas Reardon, Department of History, Geography, and Global Studies, Coppin State College, Baltimore, MD     

Everyday Ecologies: Cities,Nature, and leaching Urban Ecology

Abstract

Conventional geographical approaches to the city tend to place the study of urban form and urban space squarely within the political-economic and cultural branches of geography. Geographic pedagogy has tended to assume, therefore, that nature is absent from the city or exists only as a backdrop or stage on which urban economic and cultural activities take place. In contrast, there has been a recent groundswell of interest—originating in places as diverse as environmental activism, environmental history, landscape architecture, and environmental education—in reinterpreting the city as a space intimately connected with nature. This article examines the possibilities for integrating this rethinking of the relationship between city and nature into undergraduate education. Specifically, it outlines the rationale, objectives, and design of a course on urban ecology and examines the benefits and challenges of doing urban ecology as part of geographic education.     

A fishery in a changing lake environment: The naked carpGymnocypris przewalskii (Kessler) (Cyprinidae: schizothoracinae) in Qinghai Hu,China

Quinghai Hu is a large, high-altitude, saline lake in north-western China, and supports a fishery based on an endemic species of naked carp (snow trout). The fish take seven years to attain maturity and a marketable weight of 300 g, and have a lifespan of 14–21 years under the present fishery regime. They seasonally migrate from the lake to spawn over the gravel beds of inflowing rivers, but these areas have been reduced by weirs and irrigation diversions and recruitment may have declined. The population may have been affected also by a 1.85-m fall in the lake level over the past 30 years, and by associated changes in salinity. The fishery was opened to large-scale exploitation in 1958. Yields declined sharply (max. 28,523 tonnes, 1960) as the larger, older fish were removed, and then more slowly (min. 2523 tonnes, 1983). Since 1987 the fish factory has been limited to an annual quota of 1200 tonnes, taken by a fleet of four pair trawlers. Another 800 tonnes are taken by licensed fishermen, mainly using gill nets, and perhaps 1000 tonnes are taken illegally. The estimated total catch in 1992 was 3000 tonnes. New trawlers introduced in 1989–90 substantially increased the factory's catch per unit effort, and in 1990 the quota was virtually filled in one month in a zone within 20 km of the factory. Although this could suggest that the stocks will be conserved if the quota is retained, at least half of the catch in 1989–92 consisted of immature individuals. Trawling operations recently were suspended following a further decline in the catch after 1992. While the new trawlers are capable of a major increase in effort, neither the changing environment, the fish stocks or the present markets favour intensified pressure. Gillnets may provide better control over the minimum size limit and may cause less damage than trawling. Other options to improve the viability and profitability of the fishery include improvements in handling, processing and marketing. Failure to develop the fishery may encourage attempts to introduce exotic fish, at some risk to survival of the local species.     

Reconceptualising local community: environment, identity and threat

Summary Economic 'development' driven by global economic forces produces specific expressions of 'community' in places where large new economic projects are to be located. This paper draws on contemporary geopolitical literature to theorise community identity as partly formulated in response to external 'threats'. A comparative study of community mobilisation in response to proposals to locate coastal superquarries on the Isle of Harris, Outer Hebrides, Scotland, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, suggests the applicability of this theoretical framework for extending geographical analysis of community identity and the politics of place.