Putting together the pieces of the puzzle: Traces of New Zealand in international school geography textbooks

How does a fairly remote space (the islands of New Zealand) contribute to the development of geographical literacy in the geography textbooks of post‐socialist (Romania), Western (Germany) and post‐colonial (Mexico) countries? A four‐step analysis of three textbooks of international selection revealed different regionalisation cultures combined with traditional and recently implemented educational paradigms of geography education and led to a similar result. Despite the many ways in which New Zealand's geographical distinctiveness could be used to enhance geographical literacy, there are few operationalisations of educational targets that might contribute to sustainable long‐term learning. Further, these results also offer a possible explanation for the absence of the ‘southern lands’ on students' cognitive maps of the world.     

Adaptive Transitions: The Long‐Term Perspective on Humans in Changing Coastal Settings

Adaptation is a key concept in long‐term human adjustments to climate change. Despite the centrality of human decisions and actions in adaptation, much of the climate change literature is thin on humanities and social science which are the primary approaches for understanding human activity. This situation is particularly pronounced in Louisiana's discussions about its disappearing coast line where research has concentrated in understanding biophysical processes and solutions prioritize short‐term adaptations. This paper reviews the relationship of adaptation and long‐term transitions in the global change discussion and traces how disjointed adaptations in coastal Louisiana have contributed to a perilous environmental situation there. It proposes a shift from discrete adaptations to efforts that incorporate interrelated biophysical and human adaptations that can sustain long‐term transitions.     

Climate‐induced migration: Exploring local perspectives in Kiribati

A number of studies have indicated that the long term habitability of Kiribati, a low‐lying country in the central tropical Pacific Ocean, is tenuous given the impacts of climate change, particularly sea level rise. In an effort to plan for the resultant challenges ahead, a number of national policies and programs have surfaced to reduce the impact of localized changes on people's livelihoods. This study explores how local community members (n = 60) have taken it upon themselves to respond to the impacts of climate change by utilizing a number of different strategies. The results highlight that: first, respondents consider climate change to be the most concerning issue for sustaining their livelihoods; second, respondents have built physical defences, relocated temporarily or permanently, and sought government assistance to adapt to localized climate‐related impacts; and third, the majority of respondents indicated that they would migrate as a long term strategy to respond to the future impacts of climate change.     

Geographical categories: an ontological investigation

This paper reports the results of a series of experiments designed to establish how non-expert subjects conceptualize geospatial phenomena. Subjects were asked to give examples of geographical categories in response to a series of differently phrased elicitations. The results yield an ontology of geographical categories-a catalogue of the prime geospatial concepts and categories shared in common by human subjects independently of their exposure to scientific geography. When combined with nouns such as feature and object, the adjective geographic elicited almost exclusively elements of the physical environment of geographical scale or size, such as mountain, lake, and river. The phrase things that could be portrayed on a map, on the other hand, produced many geographical scale artefacts (roads, cities, etc.) and fiat objects (states, countries, etc.), as well as some physical feature types. These data reveal considerable mismatch as between the meanings assigned to the terms 'geography' and 'geographic' by scientific geographers and by ordinary subjects, so that scientific geographers are not in fact studying geographical phenomena as such phenomena are conceptualized by na ve subjects. The data suggest, rather, a special role in determining the subject-matter of scientific geography for the concept of what can be portrayed on a map. This work has implications for work on usability and interoperability in geographical information science, and it throws light also on subtle and hitherto unexplored ways in which ontological terms such as 'object', 'entity', and 'feature' interact with geographical concepts.     

Central‐Auckland rainfall, 1853–2020: Sites histories and implications for developing a long‐term rainfall record

Previous work related to central‐Auckland site Albert Park showed that sparse site histories for inner‐city weather stations can be usefully supplemented by mining searchable online historical archives (Papers Past, DigitalNZ), at least as far back as 1909. Assessment of potential is extended here back to 1853, within the context of developing a long‐term rainfall record for Auckland. Although late 19th century sources are thinner and of poorer quality, much useful information could be gleaned about the locations and exposures of early sites. Hypothesised implications for the rainfall record suggest that all early site data need to be adjusted upwards.     

Alternative and Virtual Rurality: Agriculture and The Countryside as Embodied in American Imagination

Affection for agrarian livelihoods and rural and small‐town environments has long been held by residents in many of the world's “more developed” countries. Although the rural proportion of the U.S. population has shrunk to a minority over the last century, fondness for rurality continues to manifest itself in a number of ways. Attachment to the rural ideal or rural idyll can be considered as attachment to the idea of a type of place, rather than specific place attachment. Based on literature, field observation, computer searches, and data from the U.S. Census of Agriculture, connections to idea(l)s of rurality apparent in popular culture are identified and illustrated. These include rural and agricultural tourism, small‐scale farming and large‐lot rural subdivisions, urban agriculture, farmers’ markets and community‐supported agriculture, creation of housing developments around farm activities, and rural‐named housing and business developments. Idealized relationships with rurality call upon health and well‐being, connecting to nature, aesthetics, privacy, and respect and nostalgia for rural livelihoods.     

Time out and Worlds Apart: Tradition and Modernity Meet in the Time‐Space of the Gravesweeping Festivals of Hong Kong

This paper focuses on Hong Kong's Gravesweeping Festivals, Qingming and Chongyang. The practices carried out in urban cemeteries at these Festivals are over two thousand years old, and represent “time out” from modern “clock time”. They are examined in the context of Giddens' (1985) reworking of Hägerstrand's time‐space geography, and of Douglas' (1966) discussion of pollution. It is suggested that the cemeteries are regarded as dangerous places because they represent liminal spaces. Giddens' dimension of span enables a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, the long‐established cultural significance of the grave, and, on the other, the recentness of the urban cemetery. The dimension of form(redefined from Giddens' original concept), applied to some details of cemetery landscapes, reveals the “worlds apart” of the non‐material worlds of the spirits and of fengshui. By considering the Festivals in the light of Giddens' dimension, character, it emerges that the Gravesweeping Festivals are, as they have been for centuries, firmly embedded in Hong Kong's social system, where routines of ancestor veneration continue to renew and strengthen the family bonds that are at the heart of Confucian values. Furthermore, their continued observation may well represent practices that are of deep ontological significance to the predominantly immigrant community of Hong Kong.     

Tourist Carrying Capacity Measures: Crowding Syndrome in the Caribbean

International tourism is increasing at an unprecedented rate. Understanding the variety of national and local impacts of this increase is of importance to a growing number of governments. Butler's resort cycle model (1974, 1980, 1991) provides for several long‐term possibilities as to the relationship between crowding and growth. McElroy, de Albuquerque, and Dioguardi (1993) focus on one of those possibilities. Specifically, using their penetration ratio, they predict that as tourist crowding continues for a group of Caribbean islands, the appeal of these islands decreases in the eyes of potential tourists and that, as time increases, the growth rate of the affected islands, actually decreases. Our article indicates that such a simple, straight‐line relationship between increased crowding and a decrease in the rate of change may not be inevitable; indeed, diseconomies of scale may be avoided. The use of a curvilinear regression function reveals how both positive and negative scale economies existed in the Caribbean during the years 1992 through 1996.     

Environment and sustainable development

The World Commission on Environment and Development was created as a consequence of a United Nations' General Assembly resolution in 1983. The Secretary-General appointed the Chairman Gro Harlem Brundtland (Norway) and Vice-Chairman Mansour Khalid (Sudan), who were directed to appoint the other members of the Commission. The Commission's Secretary-General was a member of ex officio. Twelve of the twenty members came from developing countries. Four members were from Africa, five from Asia, four from Latin America, and eight from Europe and North America.     

The Value of Autoethnography for Field Research in Transcultural Settings*

Mary Louise Pratt uses the term autoethnography to refer to those instances in which members of colonized groups strive to represent themselves to their colonizers in ways that engage with colonizers' terms while also remaining faithful to their own self‐understandings. This paper extends Pratt's conceptualization of autoethnography and describes how it may be used to inform field research in transcultural settings in the formerly colonized world. Drawing from research in a village in northern Pakistan, we argue that approaching fieldwork with an “autoethnographic sensibility” can yield important epistemological, methodological, and political insights into our research practices. The paper concludes by suggesting that these insights extend beyond a postcolonial, or even cross‐cultural, research context, to inform more general debates in human geography about how to achieve a critical and reflexive research practice.     

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT IN CHESHIRE*

ABSTRACT. The purchase and subsequent demolition of Cheshire, Ohio‐located in the shadow of the General James M. Gavin Power Plant‐has attracted national attention. According to a New York Times report, “the deal … is believed to be the first by a company to dissolve an entire town.” In this article we consider historical precedents for the case, explore the thirty‐year history of community‐plant relations in Cheshire, and recount the series of incidents that ultimately led to the town's sale. We discuss the impact that the town's sale has had on the local community and the larger implications of American Electric Power's actions.     

Security,Development, and Fear In Guatemala: Enduring Ties and Lasting Consequences

This paper investigates the long‐term ties between security, development, and fear in Guatemala. I argue that as the development apparatus in Guatemala has long been structured around violence and security concerns, development encounters in the contemporary era continue to be shaped by fear. The confluence of multiple mechanisms of fear, including the legacies of violence, surveillance, and coercion, structure development encounters in profound ways. Drawing on semistructured interviews with development practitioners, I examine their perceptions of fear's impact on development encounters at the local level to highlight the problematic culture of fear rhetoric, which serves to obscure practices through which lived experiences of fear are reproduced. Emphases on social cohesion, solidarity, and behaviors which “better contribute” to development work to mask the racialized elements of these discourses and ultimately serve to silence and delegitimize indigenous demands for structural change and justice in the country     

Griffith Taylor and the SE Australian highlands: issues of data sources and testability in interpretations of long‐term drainage history and landscape evolution

Much of the current research on long‐term landscape evolution and drainage history in SE Australia is built in one way or another on the early work of Griffith Taylor. The controversy prompted by several attempts to incorporate Taylor's work in recent plate tectonics interpretations of the long‐term evolution of SE Australia highlights differences of opinion as to the appropriate methodologies for such investigations. These questions, including the issues of data sources in reconstructions of long‐term landscape history, testability of such reconstructions, and the relationship between the landscape history so reconstructed and larger‐scale, regional landscape histories, appear not to have been addressed in recent literature on geomorphological methodology. This literature notes the demise of critical rationalism and appears to espouse a strongly relativist viewpoint, which relies on the shared understanding among the discipline's practitioners as to what are appropriate data sources and tests for hypotheses of long‐term landscape evolution. This offers little hope for resolution of the current disputes about the evolution of the drainage systems of SE Australia, but puts the onus squarely on us, the practitioners, to develop shared understandings of the appropriate data sources and tests for our hypotheses and grand schemes of the type so favoured by Griffith Taylor.     

SQUINTING BACK AT STRABO*

ABSTRACT. Strabo of Amasia (ca. 64 B.c.‐ca. A.D. 23) wrote the first comprehensive geography of the world known to the Greeks and Romans. Interest in Strabo and his Geography, which survives nearly intact in seventeen books, has fluctuated over the centuries among both classicists and historians of geography. After some historical background on Strabo and his reception, this essay considers the contribution of two significant recent English‐language treatments, as well as Strabo's Geography itself, and suggests ways in which the Strabonic model may have renewed relevance to the geographer's task of interpreting the oikoumene in the contemporary world.     

Exploring Chile: Identities and Their Relation with the Environment through the Film Football Stories

Cinema can be considered a useful tool for understanding different geographic concepts, showing physical and human factors and the interactions between them. Andres Wood's film Football Stories explores the Chilean territory allowing the observation of the differences between the north and south of the country. Geographic components such as landscapes, architectures, the impact of anthropogenic activities, social inequalities, ways of life, and city and countryside differences are analyzed, as well as the importance of location, the spatial environment, and cinematic narration. The study of geography through films could contribute to understanding of our world and to spatial knowledge.     

Impact of storms on mixed carbonate and siliciclastic shelves: insights from combined diffusive and fluid-flow transport stratigraphic forward model

A quantitative stratigraphic model of mixed carbonate/siliciclastic continental shelves is presented to investigate the relationships between depositional processes and stratigraphic responses at long‐term, large spatial scales. A diffusion model is combined with a fluid‐flow approach to simulate both long‐term factors, i.e. the processes controlling large‐scale architecture, and short‐term processes, i.e. sediment redistribution by storms. Any net sediment accumulation is the result of the succession of a storm and a fair‐weather period. Sediments are mobilized by waves and advected by low‐frequency currents during storm events. Sediments are then reworked and redistributed downslope by diffusive processes during fair‐weather period. The results are successful in capturing several major characteristics of both modern and ancient depositional systems (geometry, differential preservation, net accumulation rates). The study highlights the importance of waves and unidirectional currents. Depositional geometry and shelf morphology depend on the balance between available sediment supply (generated in situ or detrital) and the transport energy, which is related to the style of sediment transport (diffusive or advective), and to the magnitude and frequency of storms.     

COMPARING INVASIVE NETWORKS: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL BIOGRAPHIES OF INVASIVE SPECIES*

ABSTRACT. Under what cultural and political conditions do certain species become successful invaders? What impact does species invasion have on human culture and politics? The work assembled in this special issue of the Geographical Review suggests complex interspecies interactions that complicate any answer to these questions. It demonstrates the need to advance a more integrative human/environment approach to species invasion than has hitherto been seen. Reviewing the concepts demonstrated in these articles and applying them to case histories of Mimosaceae (a family that includes genera such as Acacia, Prosopis, and Mimosa) invasion, two general principles become clear. The status and identification of any species as an invader, weed, or exotic are conditioned by cultural and political circumstances. Furthermore, because the human “preparation of landscape” is a prerequisite for most cases of invasion, and because species invasions impact local culture and politics in ways that often feed back into the environmental system, specific power‐laden networks of human and non‐human actors tend to create the momentum for invasion. It is therefore possible to argue a more general cultural and political account of contemporary species expansion: It is not species but sociobiological networks that are invasive.     

Return migration of 1.5 generation Korean New Zealanders: Short‐term and long‐term motives

Through in‐depth interviews and participant observation with 40 1.5 generation Korean New Zealander returnees, we explore life trajectories and identify both short‐ and long‐term reasons for return. Short‐term reasons for return include moving home when entering adulthood in order to begin a career, gaining new experiences and finding a future spouse. Longer term influences include the difficulties of living as minority‐status immigrants in the host society, transnational connections and a longing for a sense of ‘home’. Our consideration of longer term migration strategies sheds light upon the often forgotten difficulties and complexities that can underlie an individual's return.     

100 Myr record of sequences, sedimentary facies and sea level change from Ocean Drilling Program onshore coreholes, US Mid-Atlantic coastal plain

We analyzed the latest Early Cretaceous to Miocene sections (～110–7 Ma) in 11 New Jersey and Delaware onshore coreholes (Ocean Drilling Program Legs 150X and 174AX). Fifteen to seventeen Late Cretaceous and 39–40 Cenozoic sequence boundaries were identified on the basis of physical and temporal breaks. Within‐sequence changes follow predictable patterns with thin transgressive and thick regressive highstand systems tracts. The few lowstands encountered provide critical constraints on the range of sea‐level fall. We estimated paleowater depths by integrating lithofacies and biofacies analyses and determined ages using integrated biostratigraphy and strontium isotopic stratigraphy. These datasets were backstripped to provide a sea‐level estimate for the past ～100 Myr. Large river systems affected New Jersey during the Cretaceous and latest Oligocene–Miocene. Facies evolved through eight depositional phases controlled by changes in accommodation, long‐term sea level, and sediment supply: (1) the Barremian–earliest Cenomanian consisted of anastomosing riverine environments associated with warm climates, high sediment supply, and high accommodation; (2) the Cenomanian–early Turonian was dominated by marine sediments with minor deltaic influence associated with long‐term (10⁷ year) sea‐level rise; (3) the late Turonian through Coniacian was dominated by alluvial and delta plain systems associated with long‐term sea‐level fall; (4) the Santonian–Campanian consisted of marine deposition under the influence of a wave‐dominated delta associated with a long‐term sea‐level rise and increased sediment supply; (5) Maastrichtian–Eocene deposition consisted primarily of starved siliciclastic, carbonate ramp shelf environments associated with very high long‐term sea level and low sediment supply; (6) the late Eocene–Oligocene was a starved siliciclastic shelf associated with moderately high sea‐level and low sediment supply; (7) late early–middle Miocene consisted of a prograding shelf under a strong wave‐dominated deltaic influence associated with major increase in sediment supply and accommodation due to local sediment loading; and (8) over the past 10 Myr, low accommodation and eroded coastal systems were associated with low long‐term sea level and low rates of sediment supply due to bypassing.     

Sustainable Utilisation of Fisheries as Governmentality: Constraining the Potential for Ecosystems‐Based Management?

This paper examines the constitution of ‘sustainable management’ within the context of the New Zealand marine environment. Firstly this paper examines the difference between ‘sustainable ecosystems’ and ‘sustainable utilisation’. The distinction is important if we are to make sense of the different ways in which various stakeholders (fishers, fisheries companies, scientists, fisheries managers and environmental groups) use ‘sustainability’ in the management of New Zealand's marine environment. We then examine how contestation results in sustainable management becoming a governmentality. We propose that such contestation transforms stakeholders into subjects whose everyday practices and relationships are influenced by seemingly incommensurable understandings of the lexicon that surrounds sustainable management. We conclude try considering how the potential revelation of new unknowns may be needed in order for disparate stakeholders to forge a unified approach to New Zealand's marine management.