Geography Students Participate in World Bank Roundtable
Dr. Fath took students in her Climate Change and Security class to D.C. to take part in a roundtable seminar with World Bank environmental and biodiversity specialists.
Service Learning with the Baltimore Orchard Project
As part of her Environmental Geography class in the spring of 2012, Dr. Natalia Fath is engaging her students in a service-learning projectdesigned to expose students to new perspectives and ideas about our cities and how to incorporate nature into our cities. In collaboration with the Baltimore Orchard Project, the class is helping to inventory and monitor the orchards and fruit trees of Baltimore, identifying the currently wasted produce of accidental or ornamental fruit and nut trees, harvesting them and giving them to volunteers and the hungry.
One of the objectives of the environmental geography class is to help students understand how modern civilizations – through their values and actions - affect their environment, and what values and actions can help prevent, mitigate, or heal environmental damage. This service-learning project occurs
in the context of one of the greatest challenges the humanity faces – how to alleviate global hunger, caused in part by destruction of earth’s natural systems and population growth pressure. This project promotes the practical as well as aesthetic value of urban trees including how trees can be local sources of food; strengthens students’ awareness of and connection to nature; and demonstratse how intentional actions can begin to mitigate the urban environment’s unintentional harm to nature.
March 7, 2012
Library of Congress Field Trip
Dr. Marcus and his students from Geography of Latin America and the Caribbean on route to the Library of Congress (Map and Geography Division) to have the privilege to hear John Hessler give a private tour in the vault and rare fifteenth century maps as well as the Waldseemuller map purchased for 10 million dollars.
February 21, 2012
Geography's Renaissance: Why It Matters
As anyone who has ever read Arnold, Byron, Melville, or Shakespeare can attest, literature is more than a dictionary. As Jared Diamond, UCLA professor of geography and Pulitzer prize-winning author has often exhorted, geography, likewise, is much more than an atlas. An underlying theme that enriches Diamond's wide-ranging work on places distant in time and space is that, given the challenges that societies have always and will continue to face, geography matters.
For many people removed from the discipline, geography is unfortunately caricaturized as yawningly concerned with capitals of such places as Kansas. Geography at Towson, however, examines such themes as the Mississippi Blues, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, high-tech but low cost aerial photography, and the geopolitics of global climate change. In addition, Towson's geographers are asking policy-relevant questions like,
- "How can work in the classroom help broaden community understanding of risk from "natural" hazards and what options are available to reduce risk?"
- "What role might the historic Silk Road Region play in America's foreign policy?"
- "Is the US winning the 'War on Terror'?"
Globalization in its kaleidoscopic cultural, political, and economic dimensions is a geographically uneven and contested process. It is a sign of an increasingly interconnected world that some anxiously claim has the potential to impose cultural, social, and political homogeneity. Yet, the shapes and sounds, smells and textures of particular places offer tantalizing glimpses into the processes, structures, spaces, and histories that in their interactions and blending add a profound and heterogeneous counterweight.
To answer one of Jared Diamond's frequently asked questions, "Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way," requires understanding that economic, social, and environmental processes take place across space and coalesce in and form particular places. Geography, however, is not just about describing the spatial configurations of economy, society, and the environment. In its attempts to explain how space helps shape economies, societies, and socio-ecological processes, as well as the reverse, geography moves beyond a passive outcome to a critical component of social and economic productions.
In its wider definition, geography provides unique practical and theoretical links between human and natural worlds. In this capacity, geography is a vital discipline for the 21st century, as many of the challenges faced by the world's societies meet at the interface of social, political, economic, and natural environments.
"Locality," "place," "landscape," "territory," and "nature-society" are among the diverse key terms that not only help characterize geography, but are words also used frequently by multidisciplinary colleagues from across the university community. Reflecting the discipline's dynamic connections to its academic cognates, the department's bi-weekly "What Matters" multidisciplinary speaker series (already in its third year) brought to the department during the fall 2011 semester:
- Don Zimmerman (Health Sciences),
- Jose Diaz-Garayua (Coppin State University)
- Marty Feldman (Finance),
- Brian Fath (Biology),
- James Manley (Economics),
- Matthew Hoddie (Political Science),
- Akim A. Reinhardt (History)
Part of the uniqueness of geography, something likely apparent to those who positively view Diamond's work and who have attended the department's speaker series, is that geography stands at the intersections of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
Geography seeks to uncover, observe, and make-sense out of our intellectual and emotional knowledge and our experiences of and in the material world, even as it seeks to unravel the mysteries of imagined pasts and possible futures. Notwithstanding his critics (I among them), Jared Diamond is a geographer who has attempted a remarkable feat. He has tried to explain what has so far shaped the modern world, and by extension, what might then shape the global future. Those who understand that geography is more than an atlas will understand that, as Herman Melville expressed over 150 years ago, "It is not down in any map; true places never are."
February 1, 2012
Fairwell to the Chair
Last August, Kent Barnes stepped down after eight years as Chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Planning. Those were a good eight years for the department. Kent worked hard to build the department. From the first, his goal was to increase the number of majors and minors. He was a success by any measure; while he was chair, the number of majors increased by over 100 students.
The number of faculty increased as well. Even as we said farewell to Ken Haddock, Marshall Stevenson, and Ralph Scott, six new faculty joined the department—Bee Thebpanya, Shou Lu, Jim Smith, Jeremy Tasch, Beth Hall and Alan Marcus. Presidents, provosts, and deans also came and went. In spite of the many changes, Kent guided the department and fostered cohesiveness among the faculty.
Semester in and semester out, Kent managed the department, creating schedules, balancing the budget, and balancing individual faculty needs against those of the department as a whole. He met with disgruntled students, disgruntled faculty and – on occasion – disgruntled administrators. In spite of the demands of his job, he almost always had a smile on his face and a pun on his lips. He made it all look easy.
These days, Kent can be found tucked in at the far corner of the new building, as far from the administrative suite as he can get. He reports enjoying more time for his research and his increased contact with students.
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