Environment Society

GEOG 4742 Topics in Environment & Society: Geographies of Food and Agriculture

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:07:52 +0000

GEOG 4742 Topics in Environment & Society: Geographies of Food and Agriculture Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/08/2017 - 15:07

Audrey Richards, the great British anthropologist, once pointed out that the need to eat is the most basic and important of all human drives. We need food more frequently and more urgently than we need sex. The central place of food in our lives has made food one of the major foci of human existence. How we grow, process, distribute, and consume our food often defines us as a society. In our society, the food system has become the target of enormous critique in the last ten years, and also enormous innovation. How does what we eat define us? What does it mean to eat food made in factories and advertised on television, or to seek out "fresh," local or organic food? How do we use food to define ourselves as men and women, as Americans or punks, or Chinese, as children or adults? What does it mean to eat too much, or too little, and how does it define us as social beings? These are the key questions we'll be asking in this course. This course approaches food from two perspectives. The first is the political economy of food. We will look at food as a commodity, and study where it comes from, how it connects members of different societies and social groups as it travels along the commodity chain, and how it creates social and geopolitical inequalities. We will also study food as culture, including the symbolic meanings of different foods in various world cultures, the role of food in defining gender, national identity, and social class. We'll look at food, memory and place, the relationship between food spaces and gender/race, and the role of food in transnational culture.

See the University Catalog for specifics, recommendations, and prerequisites.

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Geography Department featured in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine

Anonymous — Thu, 27 Apr 2017 15:40:09 +0000

Geography Department featured in Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/27/2017 - 09:40

"Encompassing South American wildfires, Arctic sea-ice retreat, post-Soviet politics, climate change in Tibet and GIS, ��Ƶ Boulder geographers keep their fingers on the pulse of a changing world"

A new article titled "This is not your junior-high geography" by ��Ƶ's Clint Talbott featuring the Geography Department has been published in the Colorado Arts and Sciences magazine. The article presents an overview of the breadth of research undertaken by several faculty members and aims to redefine "Geography" by discussing the nature of our work. Check it out today!

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Human-started Wildfires Expand the Fire Niche across the United States

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 21:19:12 +0000

Human-started Wildfires Expand the Fire Niche across the United States Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/19/2017 - 15:19

Chelsea Nagy

As part of a NASA grant awarded to Dr. Jennifer Balch and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Idaho to study climate and land use drivers of invasive-grass fueled fires across the western U.S., Jennifer Balch and her team just published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) entitled “Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States”: http://www.pnas.org/content/114/11/2946.full.

Project Fire Team: Back row (L to R): Jeff Thompson, Carson Farmer, Jennifer Balch, Billy Armstrong, Greg Tucker, Adam Mahood, Oliver Wigmore, Travis Williams, Tim Dunn, Brian Johnson, Max Joseph. Front row (L to R): Trisha Shrum, Babs Buttenfield, Matt Rossi, Nate Mietkiewicz, Mariela Perignon, Leah Wasser, Sepideh Dadashi, Megan Cattau, Lise St. Denis, Chelsea Nagy, Mollie Buckland. Kneeling: Bill Travis

The costs of wildfire in the United States have risen substantially in recent decades, but the direct role of people in increasing wildfire activity has been largely overlooked. This study provides the most comprehensive assessment of the role of human-started wildfires, compared with lightning-started fires, across the United States from 1992-2012. It combined over 1.5 million government wildfire records with fuel data from the MODIS satellite, climate data from meteorological stations, and lightning strike data. Results showed that over two decades across the U.S, people started 84% of all wildfires, tripled the length of the fire season, including burning during moister conditions, dominated an area seven times greater than that affected by lightning fires, and were responsible for nearly half of all areas burned. The authors suggest that policy efforts to mitigate wildfire-related hazards would benefit from focusing on reducing the human expansion of the fire niche.This line of research focused on wildfires is one of the main themes explored by Earth Lab, a new initiative funded by the university’s Grand Challenge, directed by Dr. Balch. Earth Lab’s mission is to accelerate discovery to address major unanswered questions about the pace and pattern of global environmental change. Earth Lab aims to be a world class synthesis center, capitalizing on earth observations to answer timely questions about earth systems science, utilizing complex, heterogeneous data and novel datasets. Earth Lab has had over 20 faculty, 9 postdocs, 8 graduate students working on various science themes including fire, forest disturbance, permafrost, erosion, data harmonization, drought and risk assessment, mountain ecohydrology, societal impact of natural disasters, and data analytics. Additionally, over 15 undergraduate interns from Geography, Math, Engineering, and Geology are participating in cutting-edge research of the science and analytics teams. Earth Lab is comprised of science projects or themes, a state of the art analytics hub to facilitate research, and an education initiative to train the next generation of earth system scientists in data analytics.

The human-caused Waldo Canyon fire started 4 miles northwest of Colorado Springs, CO on June 23, 2012 and was fully contained 2 1/2 weeks later. The fire left two people dead, destroyed 346 homes and burned 18,247 acres. (uncredited photo)

On May 1, 2016, a fire began southwest of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. On May 3, it swept through the community, forcing the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta's history. The fire is believed to be human-caused.(Getty Images)

Chelsea Nagy is Program Manager / Research Scientist for Earth Lab where she has worked since October 2015. Dr. Nagy has Earth Lab managerial duties for operations and assists Jennifer Balch, project director in setting the strategic direction for Earth Lab. As a research scientist, Dr. Nagy studies the influence of humans on the spatial and seasonal patterns and drivers of fire within the U.S. For the latest updates on their research projects, education, and the analytics hub, check out the Earth Lab website: http://www.colorado.edu/earthlab.

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