Tending their Goaties at the Edge of Anthropocene

Thank goodness geography is not an exact science!

“11 questions to shape geographical sciences research in the next decade”

As a new epoch dawns, prompting humanity to search for the largest cave, situated well above the sea level, but with running water and enough soil to cultivate fast growing, edible weeds, as far away from the nearest volcanoes, and with near-zero seismic history … to protect their backsides [it won’t happen that way, of course] …

Life in a Rockshelter

Daily life at Hinds Cave as depicted by artist Peggy Maceo. In the foreground two women sit on woven mats and prepare food while a baby sleeps to one side and two young girls intently watch (and learn). The woman on the left pulverizes parched nuts while the seated woman uses a parching basket to keep nuts and several red-hot coals in motion. At the rear of the cave, an elder sits wrapped in a rabbit-fur robe while her adult daughter weaves a new mat. Two young boys kick up dust as the older brother aims a stick at his younger sibling. The men must be out hunting [that’s what they’ll tell the kids, any way—Moderator.] Image courtesy of College of Liberal Arts, The University of Texas in Austin. Click image to enlarge.

The National Research Council has released a new report which poses eleven questions that they believe would shape the research in geographical sciences in the next decade. To their credit they have briefly touched on “a time when populations are moving and natural resources are being depleted,” honing their questions with the “aim to provide a more complete understanding of where and how landscapes are changing” so that the society could manage and adapt to the transformation that are occurring on the Earth’s surface.

The following expert is from the National Academy of Sciences latest public release:

11 questions for the next decade of geographical sciences identified

The committee that wrote the report solicited input from the geographical science community to identify research priorities and the approaches, skills, data, and infrastructure necessary to advance research. The strategic directions span from overarching issues of environmental change and sustainability to specific areas in the field that are transforming. They are grouped by topic area, but are not ranked in any order of importance.

How to understand and respond to environmental change:

• How are we changing the physical environment of Earth’s surface?
• How can we best preserve biological diversity and protect endangered ecosystems?
• How are climate and other environmental changes affecting the vulnerabilities of coupled human-environment systems?

How to promote sustainability:

• Where and how will 10 billion people live?
• How will we sustainably feed everyone in the coming decade and beyond?
• How does where we live affect our health?

How to recognize and cope with the rapid spatial reorganization of economy and society:

• How is the movement of people, goods, and ideas changing the world?
• How is economic globalization affecting inequality?
• How are geopolitical shifts influencing peace and stability?

How to leverage technological change for the benefit of society and environment:

• How might we better observe, analyze, and visualize a changing world?
• What are the societal implications of citizen mapping and mapping citizens?

Related Links:

• A New Era of Intense Volcanic Unrest May Have Begun
• Global Travel Warning!

Alcohol Sales and Violence: Spatial Link

If you ever thought there were link between alcohol sales and violence in the neighborhood, you would have been right, of course. But the worst kind of violence is drug related: Fire-Earth

Indiana University: Public Release

More alcohol sales sites mean more neighborhood violence: Indiana University study

More alcohol sales sites in a neighborhood equates to more violence, and the highest assault rates are associated with carry-out sites selling alcohol for off-premise consumption, according to new research released Feb. 21 by two Indiana University professors.

Using crime statistics and alcohol outlet licensing data from Cincinnati, Ohio, to examine the spatial relationship between alcohol outlet density and assault density, Department of Criminal Justice professor William Alex Pridemore and Department of Geography professor Tony Grubesic found that off-premise outlets appeared to be responsible for about one in four simple assaults and one in three aggravated assaults.

The findings were released today at a press briefing entitled “Using Geographic Information Systems and Spatial Analysis to Better Understand Patterns and Causes of Violence” and presented as part of the Feb. 18-22 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, Calif.

“A higher density of alcohol sales outlets in an area means closer proximity and easier availability to an intoxicating substance for residents,” Pridemore said. “Perhaps just as importantly, alcohol outlets provide a greater number of potentially deviant places. Convenience stores licensed to sell alcohol may be especially troublesome in this regard, as they often serve not only as sources of alcohol but also as local gathering places with little formal social control.”

Using different suites of spatial regression models, the researchers found that adding one off-premise alcohol sales site per square mile would create 2.3 more simple assaults and 0.6 more aggravated assaults per square mile. Increases in violence associated with restaurants and bars were smaller but still statistically significant, with 1.15 more simple assaults created when adding one restaurant per square mile, and 1.35 more simple assaults per square mile by adding one bar.

“We could expect a reduction of about one-quarter in simple assaults and nearly one-third in aggravated assaults in our sample of Cincinnati block groups were alcohol outlets removed entirely,” Grubesic noted. “These represent substantial reductions and clearly reveal the impact of alcohol outlet density on assault density in our sample.”

The study examined 302 geographic block groups that encompassed all of Cincinnati, with each block group containing about 1,000 residents. Block groups are subdivisions of census tracks and represent the smallest unit available for socioeconomic analysis using data from the Census Bureau.

Crime statistics from January through June 2008 provided by the Cincinnati Police Department found 2,298 simple assaults and another 479 serious assaults had occurred in the study area during that time. The location of each of these criminal events was geocoded to show the precise location where they occurred. The researchers, using data from the Ohio Division of Liquor Control for Hamilton County, Ohio, then used the same geocoding techniques to spatially aggregate the city’s 683 unique alcohol sales outlets into those block groups. The arithmetic mean, or average, density of assaults was 69 per square mile, while the average density of alcohol outlets per square mile was 20.

The researchers pointed to possible implications from the research on both public policy and on future research within the field of criminology. Pridemore said ecological studies of alcohol and violence similar to this one, while appearing more and more over the past 20 years in journals of disciplines like public health, geography and epidemiology, have been rare in criminology journals.

“We believe that alcohol outlets, as a source of community-level variation in levels of interpersonal violence, deserve greater attention in the criminological literature,” he said. “The nature of our findings should encourage further investigation of the nature of the ecological association between alcohol, violence and other negative outcomes within communities.”

Grubesic said explanations for crime ecological theories like collective efficacy, social disorganization and social cohesion rely on elements like poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility, anonymity of community members and willingness to intervene on another’s behalf, are difficult to remedy through public policy. That is not the case with alcohol outlet density, he said.

“Alcohol outlet density, on the other hand, is much more amenable to policy changes,” Grubesic pointed out. “Unlike other negative neighborhood characteristics that often seem intractable, regulating the density of outlets, and to some extent their management, can be readily addressed with a mixture of policies by liquor licensing boards, the police and government agencies that regulate land use.”

Contact: Steve Chaplin
stjchap@indiana.edu
Indiana University

350 or 450ppm? Neither, Actually!

Submitted by Dione, CASF Member

What would the future be like for my daughter?

Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about science books
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love her
…
What a wonderful world this would be

Don’t know much about geography
Don’t know much trigonometry
Don’t know much about algebra
Don’t know what a slide rule is for
But I know that one and one is two

What a wonderful world this would be

[From a Herman’s Hermits song, Wonderful World, lyrics by Cooke/Alpert/Adler. Lyrics may be subject to copyright. See FEWW Fair Use Notice!]

Creating A Sustainable Future (CASF) received an emotional email from a young mother, “Kay,” who wishes to remain anonymous. Kay has a 6-year-old daughter and lives with her family in NW United States. Kay says she is not high on science, “in all probability the Herman’s Hermits famous song, ‘don’t know much about history, biology, science books, geography, trigonometry, algebra, and slide rule’ was written about me!”

She says her knowledge of climatology is even poorer than her French(!) “But I do know that I love my daughter and husband and ‘what a wonderful world this would be’ if we could rein in the greenhouse gases, and reverse the global warming.”

“I have read a number of articles about CO2 pollution in the atmosphere including a few written by the famed NASA scientist, Dr J. Hansen … but he is a government scientist …”

She wants to know the safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere and asks which of the 350, 450, or higher levels of CO2 pollution would be a “safe” level, and whether our reply could be put simply so that a “layperson” could understand the answer.

Hi, Kay – thanks for visiting our blog and email!

The CASF members believe even the lower atmospheric CO2 levels of 350ppm CO2 are unsafe! Here are the reasons why. Our findings put as simply as we could:

1. Our climate models show that when the atmospheric CO2 levels leaped over the 330ppmv “threshold” in the mid 1970s it triggered a positive feedback loop, which is now impacting the climate. [The atmospheric CO2 inventory has risen by about 17 percent since then.]
2. The “acid test,” if you’ll excuse the pun, of the accuracy of our models lies in the future, namely how much worse the environmental impacts will be in the 2008-2010 period. If the impacts of CO2 pollution worsened significantly, by a factor of 20% or more, by 2010 (we have a system for quantifying the adverse effects, see Index of Human Impact on Nature for an introduction), as we expect them to do so, then we know our models are accurate.
3. The catch? By 2010 it would be too late to do anything to slow down the runaway positive feedback system [other than say a prayer for the dead!]
4. While the preindustrial levels of 260-270ppm were [and they probably still would be ] “safe,” the longer term environmental impacts of CO2 at levels of about 290-300ppm, even if those levels were achievable [assume some miraculous means were introduced to wipe the slate clean,] in the current climatic state are uncertain!
5. Based on the above, we recommend an immediate shift to zero-emissions, the benefits of which, although by no means immediate, would far outweigh the ultimate cost of playing Russian roulette with climate change.

We hope the above helps. Feel free to visit us anytime!

Best wishes
Dione, FEWW Moderators and rest of CASF Team

Related Links:

• Greenland Ice Melt Faster Than IPCC Estimates
• Only Zero Emissions Would Avert Dangerous Warming
• Stern Report: “a great toxic dump of doublespeak in truly Orwellian fashion”
• UN Hypocrisy: Kick the CO2 Habit!
• The myth of keeping CO2 under 450ppm

• World CO2 Emissions
• Carbon Footprint of Your Dollar

dione