“Chest X-rays, 3D Image of lungs, Sagital Plane Image” by Praisaeng at freedigitalphotos.net
Valley fever (cocci dioides), a fungal disease in the Arizona, New Mexico and California, has received a great deal of media attention lately, with good reason. There have been over 20,000 cases documented, which likely is only a fraction of the total number of people infected. Tom Geoghagen of the BBC has a good piece on the disease, and the video interviews of the affected families are heartbreaking. In late June 2013 a judge in California ordered California to move inmates held in two prisons in San Joaquin in order to reduce their risk of contracting the disease, which made people living in local communities wonder if they should also move. …
Irrigation for Agriculture by xedos4 at freedigitalphotos.net
In an earlier post, I talked about how water shortages may be fueling conflict in the Middle East. In a recent article in the Guardian Lester Brown made the argument that the real threat to our future is “peak water.” Brown suggests that this topic should gain as much attention as “peak oil” because globally people have extracted water from aquifers more rapidly than it has been possible for them to replenish, which is causing a major environmental crisis. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has drawn down its water reserves rapidly: “After being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the Saudis announced in early 2008 that, with their aquifers largely depleted, they would reduce wheat planting by one-eighth each year until 2016, when production would end. By then Saudi Arabia projects it will be importing some 15m tonnes of wheat, rice, corn and barley to feed its 30 million people. It is the first country to publicly project how aquifer depletion will shrink its grain harvest.” Brown makes that point that water depletion is also a major problem in China, India and the United States. Still, it is in the Middle East that the change is happening most quickly. In Yemen, for example, some aquifers are falling six feet a year and “grain production has fallen by nearly half over the last 40 years.” While the Saudis are reducing grain production as part of a plan, Yemen is doing so simply because the water is no longer available. …
I’ve recently been thinking about the unexpected connections between the weather
Cracks in Frozen Lake by Evgeni Dinev, courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
news and Howard Norman’s book In Fond Remembrance of Me. Norman worked in Churchill, Manitoba collecting Inuit folklore during the mid-1970s but from the start everything went wrong. As soon as he arrived in northern Manitoba in 1977 he learned that a Japanese linguist and Arctic expert, Helen Tanizaki, was interviewing the same Inuit elder. While she was willing to collaborate, their informant loved Helen but could not stand Norman. The befuddled Norman also soon realized that his informant was also making up much of the folklore that he was documenting. These tales centered upon a cycle of stories in which Noah drifted into Hudson Bay, where the ice trapped the ark during the winter. In all these stories Noah encountered Inuit peoples, who would paddle their kayaks out to the ark to understand why both he and this remarkable boat was there. In every case these people would make a request –a piece of wood to burn or perhaps some animals to eat- to which Noah would always answer “No!” This denial would be incomprehensible to the Inuit. After all, Noah had many animals- why shouldn’t he share the giraffes with them? The result was always a disaster for Noah, who might witness his family deserting him so that his wife could marry a better hunter, or his animals dying in the dark of winter. In the end, Noah was usually left on the ice to be rescued by the Inuit. In the spring Noah would leave the Inuit to walk south, from where –as so often in folklore- he “was never seen again.” …
Canal by Evgeni Dinev courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
Kim Brown and I have started to work on a second edition of our Introduction to International and Global Studies textbook, which will be published in 2015. We are trying to not only make conceptual changes to the work, but also to reflect the many global events that have taken place since the first edition: in North America, fracking has changed the energy picture, in Europe, the financial crisis is changing perceptions of economic and political globalization, and around the world people are struck by the fact that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has passed 400 parts per million. Although there is a great deal of material to address in the next edition, one key issue has to be water, as drought is leading to crises and conflict in many regions, but particularly in the Middle East. …
Photo of the Panama Canal at Night by David Castillo
In an earlier post, I talked about the United States’ declining influence in the Americas. I think that nothing may symbolize this as much as Nicaragua’s vote this week to grant a Chinese company a 50 year concession to build a canal across this country. The idea of a canal across Nicaragua dates back at least to the early nineteenth century. As David McCullough described in his magnificent book, The Path Between the Seas, Nicaragua was favored because it was closer to the United States, and Lake Nicaragua seemed to make the task of building the canal easier. After the Civil War, U.S. President Grant sent five expeditions to Central America to explore a route for a canal, most of which went do Nicaragua. But since it was the French who began the project -reflecting Europe’s influence in the hemisphere- proximity to the U.S. did not shape their choice, and they began work on the Panamanian isthmus. Although the project was headed by the French hero de Lesseps, the man who had built the Suez canal, his decision to build a sea level canal likely doomed the project from the start. …
Blue Ice Cave courtey of puttsk at freedigitalphotos.net
I’ve recently been reading Michael Crummy’s Galore, which tells the story of generations of families (the Sellers and Devines) in a remote village, Paradise Deep, in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Newfoundland. The entire novel is characterized by bleak humor and beautiful language. It’s also not for those who might be scandalized by bawdy scenes. Father Phelan, for example, is a renegade priest who comes to comfort a widow haunted by her dead husband’s ghost, and stays to torture the phantom by making love to his widow. But what most struck me about the work is the extent to which it reflects cultural globalization, because Crummy was clearly inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Year’s of Solitude. This much would have been clear even without the quote from Garcia Marquez at the book’s start. The entire novel is patterned after the Colombian novelists’ classic book, including the conclusion. …
Map of Brazil courtesy of Gualberto107 at freedigitalphotos.net
In the early 1990s, when I was doing fieldwork on the history of military terror in Brazil, an academic told me about his “projetos da gaveta.” I didn’t understand this term, which he explained referred to projects that one starts but neither completes nor abandons, hence the term “projects in the drawer.” I think that most people, and certainly not only academics, have such a project. One of mine was a study of a Brazilian book about a disastrous retreat during the Paraguayan war called A Retirada da Laguna. I started this project perhaps 15 years ago, and now realize that I’m unlikely to ever finish it for publication in an academic journal, especially as I am happily working on the second edition of this textbook. But for anyone curious to learn more about this marvelous book, and the film that it inspired, I’m posting a copy of my paper below:
Image of globe courtesy of chris roll at freedigitalphotos.net
This quarter I have been teaching an “Introduction to International Studies” class. One of my goals for the year is to have a final assignment that challenges students to reflect on the course material, and to integrate what they have learned from diverse sources. I’ve chosen a response paper of about five pages in length, which they will write to address the following question: …
In the past, I’ve typically asked students to do a book review in my “Introduction to International Studies”
Image of globe courtesy of digidreamgrafix at freedigitalphotos.net
course. But as students have increasingly moved to using alternative media sources to get their information, I want to make sure that they are thinking critically about these sources. For this reason, I’ve required that my students this quarter write a review (four pages in length) of one international blog. I’ve told the class that the blog review should be a critical look at the blog, which follows the same basic format as a book review. The review asks what the writer is trying to do, and how well do they do it. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the blog? Once that question is answered, then can explore particular questions the blog raises, connections to the class, etc. But the core of this project is a critical evaluation of the blog itself, rather than a summary of its content. …
Top Ten image courtesy of Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net
Every few months I ask the University of North Carolina Press to send me the statistics for this blog. Amongst the many things that it lets me see is where the blog’s audience is (mainly the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and France), and the total size of the audience (1,347 visitors between February and April 2013). I can also see which posts visitors view the most. Here is a list of the most popular posts to date: …
