Interplace

Hello Interactors,

Beauty may be in eye of the beholder, but it’s also in the brain. We all seem to be drawn to balance, order, and predictable patterns which rulers, T-squares, protractors, and compasses have readily provided. It’s the stuff maps are made of. They’ve brought progress and good fortune to many over the centuries, but have they also lead to our decay?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

HIGH FASHION

I can’t deny it. I’m a sucker for grids. I’m drawn to music, art, and designs that are balanced, orderly, and intelligible. Give me a ruler, a protractor, a compass, and a pencil and I’d happily make art and designs all day. Growing up I’d handcraft lettering on cards using my Dad’s plastic flowchart stencils. What can I say, I’m a product of modernity. A neat and tidy aesthete.

But that attraction was called into question last week as I was watching The Hobbit. The movie’s protagonist, Bilbo Baggins, lives in an organically shaped earthen home carved into the side of hill. There’s not a Cartesian grid or plane anywhere to be found. Every wall is curved as if bored into the hillside by a giant gopher. I was so smitten that I murmured out loud to my family, “I could definitely live in that house.” Has my planar proclivity passed me by, or has the curving complexity of nature caught my eye?

Neuroscience has uncovered evidence that we humans, perhaps other animals as well, tend ‘like’ and/or ‘want’ aesthetic order and balance. Evidence of elements in oddities ordered by humans abounds in centuries of found paintings, carvings, jewelry, and even cities.

But firm empirical conclusions of this gray-matter matter remain elusive. Although, neuroscientists do agree on one thing: there is no single ‘beauty center’ in our brain. When hooked up to brain imaging machines, scientists observe “activity in the frontal pole, left dorsolateral cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, temporal pole, motor cortex, parietal cortex, ventral stratum, and occipital cortex, among others.” And there is ongoing work trying to tease out the order in which these activities unfold betwixt the vast network of synapsis in a brain containing as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. A task seemingly more complex than the identification of the regions themselves.

If aesthetically pleasing ordered intelligibility is indeed a universal mammalian trait, getting to that cognitive state is complex – understanding it even more so. Some scientists believe another reason concrete evidence is elusive is because the visual stimuli used across studies varies considerably.

Designing and administering cognitive research requires rationalizing inputs across studies to achieve more predictable outcomes. This ‘streamlining’ of the scientific method is not only applied to studies, but to the design and manufacturing of products, and the planning, mapping, and administration of our neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states.

Political scientist and legal anthropologist James C. Scott once alluded to the similarities between designing observational studies and the design of our modern urban environments writing,

“The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.”

Scott’s 1998 book, Seeing Like a State, is critical of what he calls High Modernism which is an over-reliance on Cartesian principles, the scientific method, and unfaltering faith in technology. While he admits these advances improved – and continue to improve – the human condition, he believes blind adherence to these aesthetic, bureaucratic, and technocratic principles may have also put us on a path toward what we now see as potential human extinction.

The list of ‘High Modernists’ in art, science, design, and politics is long, but Scott created a “Hall of Fame” of geo-political modernists like former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Cold War strategist Robert McNamara known for his ‘scientific management’ style, New York commissioner-cum-urban planner and power broker Robert Moses, founding head of Soviet Russia and dictator of the proletariat Vladimir Lenin, the Shah-of-Iran who sought to modernize and nationalize his entire country and industry, and the influential architect and urban designer Le Corbusier who advocated for standardized inhumane design and erasure of historical and cultural tradition – especially in the aftermath of war.

Scott’s full list includes people of not any one political persuasion. He reveals how both conservatives and progressives are capable of “sweeping, rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition.” He notes they all use “unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs.” And he observes the public really has no recourse, nor often the desire, to resist it. He says,

“The ideology of high modernism provides, as it were, the desire; the modern state provides the means of acting on that desire; and the incapacitated civil society provides the leveled terrain on which to build (dis)utopias.”

That ‘desire’, as it were, I suspect is partially driven by the aesthetics found in the uniformity, balance, and order of ‘High Modernists.’ Parsimony, the reductive removal of redundancy, is what persuades people to purchase overpriced but simplified products like Prada. It’s what spurred Tom Wolfe to observe in his book From Bauhaus to Our House that elite modernists want to fill cities with “row after row of Mies van der Rohe.” The German architect was known for his stark rectilinear buildings made of what he called ‘skin and bone.’

In addition to fashion and architecture, modernist desire was (and still is) embodied in many elements of society and popular culture from literature, to industry, to transportation. Much of this progress occurred during the Industrial Age of the 19th century. I can imagine the exhilaration of high speed movement through space over time on a bike, car, or train surely began with fright but ended in delight. Even desirable.

As Scott points out, the state provided the means for this desire to manifest. He invites us to,

“imagine that what these designers of society had in mind was roughly what designers of locomotives had in mind with ‘streamlining.’ Rather than arresting social change, they hoped to design a shape to social life that would minimize the friction of progress. The difficulty with this resolution is that state social engineering was inherently authoritarian.”

FROM CRAWLING TO SPRAWLING

It was locomotives that brought many colonizers to my home town, Norwalk, Iowa in the late 1800s. But the first was Samuel Snyder in 1852. He built a log cabin near an area called Pyra. He was likely on the land of the Báxoje (Bah-Kho-Je) people, or as neighboring tribes called them ayuhwa “sleepy ones” otherwise known as Iowa. Pyra was a few miles south of the state capital, Des Moines (Hartford of the West) that was incorporated just one year earlier.

By 1856, four years later, Pyra had a post office and a new resident, George Swan, who made his presence known by “putting up a pretentious edifice, to be used as a hotel.” Swan was a politician and newspaper publisher who moved from Norwalk, Ohio but was born in Norwalk, Connecticut. He became postmaster in part to change the name of the town from Pyra to Norwalk.

The renaming of Indigenous place names to Western names is another common act of the ‘High Modernist’, as is laying out a town in your vision. Which was the next thing Swan did.

The county and the township had already been gridded and platted as part of Thomas Jefferson’s squaring of a nation, but it was Swan’s ‘authoritarian’ vision that allowed for the ‘social engineering’ of the town I grew up in. He was aided by a handful of settlers including Jesse Huff and Mary Huff. One of my best friends came from the Huff family, his uncle was our baseball coach, and his grandpa was the long time Norwalk city manager. That’s three generations of city administration aided by the modern state’s ‘means of acting on the desire’ to ‘level terrain’ so they may build their ‘utopia.’

It took until the 1950s and 60s before Norwalk become a true suburb of Des Moines – an expansion beyond what Swan could ever have imagined. Its population sputtered growing modestly between 1900 and 1950 from 287 to 435, but then grew 205% between 1950 and 1960 to 1,328. The town didn’t expand beyond Swan’s initial footprint until 1969 and it’s been sprawling ever since. It’s now hard to discern the border between Des Moines and Norwalk. When I lived there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s corn and soybean fields provided a visible gap.

Despite these well-intentioned ‘High Modernists’ sprawling attempts around the world at carefully planned and engineered social utopias, scholarly literature reveals what Scott suspects. Research across economists, geographers, and planners suggests this general consensus:

“urban sprawl as a multidimensional phenomenon [is] typified by an unplanned and uneven pattern of urban development that is driven by a multitude of processes and which leads to the inefficient utilisation of land resources. Urban sprawl is observed globally, though its characteristics and impacts vary.”

The words ‘uneven’ and ‘multitude of processes’ and ‘inefficient utilization’ resulting in ‘varying impacts’ don’t fit the exacting premise promised by enlightened ‘High Modernists.’ This study I’m quoting was done in reaction to the fact that despite the populations of European cities declining, their footprints have continued to sprawl since the 1970s. They say, “There is no sign that this trend is slowing down and, as a result, the demand for land around cities is becoming a critical issue in many areas.” This is the essence of urban sprawl.

The ordinal origins of sprawl are synonymous with their historic modernist and economic origins – the Central Business District. The shape and pattern of the impending sprawl in the United States and Europe is like a spider spinning it’s web from the center out. Causes are often oversimplified by a focus on the economic trade-off between housing prices and commuting costs. Importantly, this economic function is a result of the modern state’s role in ‘providing the means of acting on the desire’ of select individuals to live ‘elsewhere.’

There are other factors that determine the shape, resolution, and scale of sprawl. A 2006 study determined that

“sprawl in the USA between 1976 and 1992 was positively related to groundwater availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralised employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth and the low impact of public service financing on local taxpayers.”

Other studies include another big factor in the United States, ethnicity: that same 2006 study found “that increases in the percentage of ethnic minority populations within cities and rising city centre crime rates both led to a growth in urban sprawl.” Curiously, a similar study focused on Europe “confirmed the positive impact of higher crime rates on sprawl, but observed the opposite effect for the impact of ethnic minority populations.”

I HAVE A CITY IN MIND

Sprawl isn’t just happening in the U.S. and Europe, but in developing countries as well. Since opening up in 1979, China has seen unprecedented sprawl in conjunction with their rise in socioeconomic development. Urbanization increased “17.92% in 1978 to 59.60% in 2018, and scholars predict it will reach 70% in 2035 and 75% in 2050.”

As is the case in the United States and Europe, “the expansion of urban land mainly sacrifices rural land, especially cropland, which produces negative effects such as ecological degradation, water and land loss, and soil pollution.” This study concludes that “urban land expansion has garnered much attention, and studies have focused on land transition monitoring, effects analysis, and mechanism identification. However, discussions on suburban development and its subsequent effects remain insufficient.”

These researchers draw attention to three commonly used dimensions in studying sprawl:

* Administrative - Administrative boundaries such as towns close to a city.

* Spatial - Location, Density, and Spatial Activity adjacent and within commuting distance of the city.

* Social - Attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.

A primary thrust of ‘High Modernism’ are found in those first two dimensions. ‘High Modernists’ seek to ease the ‘administrative’ costs through the reduction of ‘spatial’ complexity. There’s actually nothing modern about that, really. Unless you consider the 5th century BC Greek polymath Hippodamus ‘modern’. He is considered the ‘father of European urban planning’ beginning with his grid plan of the Greek port city Piraeus that remains today. But being a mathematician, he no doubt was seeking spatial parsimony for city administrators.

The economist Herbert Simon (who studied decision making in large organizations) describes the ‘administrative man’ this way:

“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty – that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.”

Simon elucidates how the first two dimensions of the effects of ‘High Modernist’ urban sprawl, – ‘administrative boundaries’ and remote measures of ‘spatiality’ – are ‘gross simplifications’ of the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world.’ This ‘real world’ may be better evidenced in the third dimension of measures, ‘social attributes such as classes, races, and ethnicities of residents that distinguish cities and suburbs.’

But even these attributes can remain removed the real world if viewed from a map or table of data. We need only look at Redlining as an example of how ‘social’ dimensions can be used to negate, subjugate, frustrate, dictate, alienate, arbitrate, automate, and attempt to eliminate certain classes, races, and ethnicities through actuated, calculated tax rates, interest rates, and loan rates through a slate of mandates from magistrates of the city-state, state-state, and nation-state.

The French Philosopher, Michel de Certeau, observes in his book The Practice of Everyday Life how Walking in the City, despite its gridded plans, results in people defiantly deploying practical and tactical shortcuts despite attempts by centuries of ‘High Modernism’ to control them. He writes that ‘the City’,

“provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.”

But he also wonders if this concept of the city is decaying. He reflects on the strength, resiliency, and tenacity of humanity despite the potential erosion of ‘High Modernism’ and asks,

“Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well?”

He invites us to not turn our “bewilderment” of ‘High Modernism’ in ‘catastrophes’” of its undoing but instead,

“analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay…”

As much as I like the ordered, gridded aesthetic, I’ve come to better appreciate the beauty in our ‘microbe-like’ natural world. Modernity may be defined by the analytical geometry of Descartes, but I can’t help but wonder if the work of another 17th century mathematician may come to shape our future.

His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German mathematician who invented, perhaps along with Isaac Newton, calculus. Leibniz is also credited with discovering self-similarity which forms the bases for Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals. Mandelbrot’s geometry, his ‘Art of Roughness’, describes the mathematics behind branching systems found in fern leaves, cauliflower, trees, and coastlines as well as our circulatory system, nervous system, bronchial system, and maybe even Bilbo Baggin’s hobbit home in the hill.

If it wasn’t for the fractal-like nature of the gray-matter of our brain, it wouldn’t be able fold upon itself to fit within the small cavity of our cranium. Even its network of neurons, and the synaptic patterns they form as we fawn over beauty, follow the mathematical laws of Leibniz and Mandelbrot. Our world may not need be ordained by Cartesian order because it’s already organized. We just need to understand it and follow its lead.

As neuroscientists continue to map the brain in search of what draws us to order and balance in objects as well as cities, perhaps they could consider the conjecture of British physicist and distinguished professor of the Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West when he writes:

“…because the geometry of white and gray matter in our brains, which forms the neural circuitry responsible for all of our cognitive functions, is itself a fractal-like hierarchical network, this suggests that the hidden fractal nature of social networks is actually a representation of the physical structure of our brains. This speculation can be taken one step further by invoking the idea that the structure and organization of cities are determined by the structure and dynamics of social networks…

…In a nutshell: cities are a representation of how people interact with one another and this is encoded in our neural networks and therefore in the structure and organization of our brains.”

Hello Interactors,

Last Sunday I ‘rabbit-holed’ on the origins of Easter. That led me to Passover, and then Ramadan. The origin stories all involve the movement of people, or their ephemeral equivalents, through space over time. And they all share a ‘common interest’ in one of the most ancient cities on the map — Jerusalem. Is there a map for that?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

MAPPED OUT

Spring has sprung, Easter Pass(ed)over, and Ramadan lingers on. Last week Christians celebrated the rising of their messiah from a tomb, Jewish people celebrated the exodus of their people from slavery, and Muslims continued to gather, contemplate, and fast. It’s rare these three holidays occur at once. The Islamic calendar of 354 lunar days cycles with the moon through the 365 solar days of the Christian calendar allowing the these three religious holidays to coexist every three decades.

The histories of these religious traditions are all rooted in the interactions of people and place. Ramadan celebrates the night the Quran was passed down from above, Easter stems from the Germanic goddess Ēostre who rises to coax the sun to return, and Passover is from the Hebrew word pasha meaning “he passed over” commemorating the angel of death passing over them.

People pass over terrain every day around the world. As Ēostre rises the sun warms the earth and people begin agitating, moving, traversing, and colliding like molecules being heated by the sun’s radiation. As the earth rotates waves of interactions between people and place rise and fall with the sun, rolling across the earth’s surface in perpetual motion.

And yet our maps sit still. They are static moments of effervescent daily life frozen in time. Google Street View offers snapshots of people living their lives; unforgiving they strive, pixels blurring their eyes. But our world is anything but static. And yet our lives depend on fixed representations of us and all that surrounds.

Take electoral district maps as an example. Every ten years, when the U.S. census is taken, the federal and state governments are required to reapportion the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and State Legislatures to match the current population. Accordingly, they’re also required to map numerically equal districts in the spirit of neutrality in a process called redistricting. Here’s an interactive redistricting map from FiveThirtyEight.

It is seemingly impossible to be impartial in the remapping of these districts. Various subgroups of the general population are advantaged while others lose out. The system tends to bias regions with economic vitality because they typically attract the most people. Those people most advantaged economically are also those who are most mobile. Those less mobile tend to be more economically disadvantaged and are usually low-income, minorities, less educated, and skilled laborers in declining industries and geographies.

The rich get richer, the poorer get poorer. Those who are mobile, move; and those stuck, are out of luck. One piece of research from 2019 by two political geographers reveals that “that districts with the fastest rate of growth have a higher level of affluence.” This means the ‘winners’ will gain house seats while the ‘losers’ lose seats. Their research looks at the 89 U.S. House seats that have shifted due to redistricting since 1960. Their results shows that,

“Rewarding population growth means rewarding certain interests that produced it, the converse is true for punishing population loss. This is an underappreciated point among the many who think that a population basis for apportionment is problem-free and self-evidently superior to any other scheme.”

WIGGLE ROOM

There are many rules applied to generating electoral district maps by the states, but according to the Loyola Law School the most common is Contiguity. There are 45 states that stipulate districts must be contiguous. In other words, a district can’t have an island floating inside another district. Borders must be adjacent.

The next most common rule is adherence to Political Boundaries “to the extent practicable”. Thirty-four of the states have this as part of their state constitution or statute. This means a district map has to attempt to align its boundaries to county, city, or town lines.

Compactness is another rule or guideline. They say, “scholars have proposed more than 30 measures of compactness” and that, “32 states require their legislative districts to be reasonably compact; 17 states require congressional districts to be compact.” Idaho appears to have the most specific definition of ‘compactness’ stating officials, “should avoid drawing districts that are oddly shaped.” I honestly have yet to see an electoral district map that is not oddly shaped. It turns out ‘compactness’ is a matter of opinion. Just look at Texas!

Communities of interest also commonly show up in districting rules. There are 15 states that consider keeping “communities of interest” whole when drawing state legislative districts; 11 states do the same for congressional districts.” Those with a ‘common interest’ are people who share the same interest in a given piece of legislation. Just last May Kansas reinstated their guidelines and criteria stating:

“There should be recognition of similarities of interest. Social, cultural, racial, ethnic, and economic interests common to the population of the area…should be considered.”

Given these popular rules, it’s not hard to see how poor people and ethnic and racial minorities are literally excluded from representation. It’s also easy to see how redistricting amplifies political partisanship. The U.S. Constitution says little about how to limit these powers. And while the Supreme Court have stated excessive partisanship is unconstitutional, they’ve also “explicitly blessed lines drawn to protect incumbents, and even those drawn for a little bit of partisan advantage” Moreover, they’ve said they will not consider claims of extreme partisanship claiming there is no legal way to determine how much is ‘too much’.

But I’m not certain there is a fair way to map representation using static maps that assume constituents somehow live, work, pray, or school within an electoral district. Perhaps it’s possible in some rural areas, but I go through three congressional districts and four state legislative districts just to get to the airport. To be ‘contiguous’ and ‘compact’ the district lines go down the middle of Lake Washington. Do the people I see on the other side of the lake really have different ‘community interests’ than mine?

It was Thomas Jefferson who pushed to violently displace or exterminate Indigenous people, possess their land, and then grid it up to be sold (or given for free to homesteaders), farmed, and then taxed. After all, he was a farmer with an agrarian vision of colonial settlements across the country featuring schools, churches, and a government seat within ‘political boundaries’. You can read just how easy it was for settlers to grid their own property in a piece I wrote last year called, Make Your Own Survey in Under a Day.

While these people mobilized across the country, farmers and settlers were not that mobile relative to today. Early settlements were naturally ‘compact’. ‘Common interests’ were instilled through fear. Settlers banded together despite their ethnic or religious differences because they fretted over when and where the original occupants of the land they were farming may return hostile and violent demanding their stolen land be returned. And ‘contiguity’ would have been easily achieved given the rectilinear plots they platted.

Territorial and electoral mapping became more complicated the more complex American societies became. Trains, streetcars, and bicycles made it easier for people to travel longer distances to live and work. The ‘common interests’ became more diffuse with each advance in transportation and wave of immigration. I can see how a politician might wish to squiggle the square on a map to wriggle toward voters to tap.

Wriggle as they may, their constituents wiggled more. Now we have evidence that mobility and affluence are linked to partisan political maps that advantage the advantaged at the expense of ‘others’. We also know that lower income people are often priced out of affluent areas to suburbs, exurbs, and even rural areas. They are forced to live in areas often very different than where they work. Are their ‘common interests’ really relevant to their legislative representation?

For example, if poorer people must rely on public transportation to get to and from work or school, are local, state, and congressional politicians in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas really going to listen to their complaints about equitable transportation? Will they get fair ‘legislative representation?’

And increasingly, for some, the pandemic has made it possible to live and work in wildly different places. What does ‘compactness’ or ‘communities of interest’ or ‘contiguity’ look like on a map under these dynamic conditions? Mapping for the purpose of political representation, taxation, and even urban and transportation planning assume built environments are as permanent as the physical earth in which they arrange themselves. Even a decennial census admits to a certain pace of life that is inconsistent with the increase in mobility, technology, and, unfortunately, climate change and economic inequality.

MAPPING SPACE AND TIME

There are some who have been calling for a shift from this stiff short shrift. From as early as the mid 1990s, a leading voice in this choir of change is Michael Batty. He is an urban planner, geographer, spatial data scientist, and professor at the Bartlett School of Planning at University College London. In 2002 he wrote an editorial in the Journal of Environment and Planning titled Thinking About Cities as Spatial Events.

In it he writes,

“It is possible to conceive of cities as being clusters of `spatial events', events that take place in time and space, where the event is characterized by its duration, intensity, volatility, and location. There may be interactions in time and space between events, leading to clusters and other aggregations, but the dominant way in which these descriptions are characterized is clearly temporal.”

He defines duration as being as short as ‘trip making’ — measured in minutes or hours, to ‘living at a residential location’ — measured in months or years. Intensity could the intensity in which an event impacts people or place. It may be correlated with the ‘compactness’ of people involved in ‘common interests’ relative to those around them. Volatility is the variation in intensity and may be correlated with duration. A white collar worker with a predictable routine (or working from home) would measure as less volatile than a gig worker taking part-time jobs across a given region, country, or the world. Location, then, is the traditional measure and mapping of the terrestrial as well as population scale, size, and density.

In his 2018 book, Inventing Future Cities, Batty dedicates a chapter to The Pulse of the City. Here he talks of a,

“’liquid city’: a place where physical desires, face-to-face contacts, and digital deliberations provide a new nexus of innovation. Flows, networks, and connections, rather than inert structures, dominate this physicality as infrastructure comes to represent this new liquidity built on layer upon layer of flux and flow.”

He isn’t the only voice challenging traditional static notions of place, Doreen Massey was another. She was a British social scientist and geographer and Professor of Geography at the Open University in the UK. She began her career in the field of economic geography where she focused on social and economic inequities that create stark divisions between regions and social classes. This led her to reconceptualize the sense of space.

In a 2013 interview, she talked about how space is often the afterthought when considering ‘time and space’ in the social sciences. Time is given much attention as ‘the dimension of change and dynamism’ and space is relegated to inert earth ‘out there’ that we ‘cross-over’, ‘devoid of temporality.’ She points to a well held historical position in academia that if the field of history is about time, then geography must be relegated to space. Throughout her career, she worked to change that.

Her research and writing aimed,

“to bring space alive, to dynamize it and to make it relevant, to emphasize how important space is in the lives in which we live, and in the organization of the societies in which we live.”

She offers this scenario as an example: When we are ‘crossing-over’ ‘inert land’ ‘out there’ in a car or train and glance out the window, we acknowledge we are moving through space and the physical geography is indeed part of it. But our eyes and brains also capture snapshots of people walking across a street, ordering food from a street vendor, or strolling in a park. These moments, like those on Google Street View – these interactions of people and place – are also part of the space.

She surmises that,

“Space concerns our relations with each other and in fact social space, I would say, is a product of our relations with each other, our connections with each other.”

Mapping these concepts and phenomena is as complicated as explaining it, but dynamic mapping continues to make strides in mapping complex spatial processes.

One of the most visceral examples is this 2014 video of 30,000 airplanes flying in Europe’s airspace over the course of a single day.

And there are tools that help analyze air traffic flow data like this.

Companies like INRIX have been studying traffic flow data on the ground for decades. Their software allows for traffic flow analysis and visualizations using real-time data from vehicles.

When I take the bus I use an app called OneBusAway that shows in near real-time the location of a bus on route from origin to destination.

There are also companies like StreetLight Data who buy anonymized and aggregated location data from mobile phone providers that probabilistically determine traffic flows generated from cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

These are examples of dynamic cartography that approach articulations of Batty’s ‘liguid city.’ They are baby steps toward representing the dynamism Massey sought to better understand our relations and connections with each other. But they lack the richness census data provides and we’re a long way from trusting governments to track us 24/7 365 days a year as part of their routine census collection. Many people already view the census as a personal violation of privacy.

At the same time, our methods are stuck in the past. When Jesus was believed to be rising from his tomb, the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or Muslims fasting as the Quran was handed down it was all happening in cities they believed to be as permanent as the religions they birthed. In the case of Jerusalem, it was. That certainty came under question during the dawning of the Enlightenment and the spread of colonialism. The Industrial Age accelerated the pace of change and innovation in technology and urban design. Society’s pace quickened and cities, and connections to them, acted as civic accelerators.

In 1914 Scottish cartographer and geographer John Bartholomew created an Atlas of Economic Geography for King George V. It included a map that showed how long it would take to get to various places around the globe. It would have taken King George several weeks to traverse the boundaries of his British Empire. You can now do it in a day.

There is a disconnect between the open-ended superexponential growth of ‘political boundaries’ that accelerate our pace of life and the process of determining who governs them. Representative governments are determined by methods of mapping from a bygone era. What does this say about our future?

I’m with Michael Batty when he says,

“I think there is much we need to say about cities as we come to terms with a world that is intricately connected and where information underpins our every act.”

Hello Interactors,

I ran into a friend last week who shared a bit of neighborly news. A border dispute is brewing in our neighborhood and you can bet maps are soon to be weaponized. It’s nothing new in border disputes around the world, but do maps really lead to a shared understanding of people and their interaction with place? It may be time cartography gets radical.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

COMMUNITIES DEMANDING IMPUNITIES

I step quietly as I near the end of the private lane. Ahead there’s a beige colored fence, barely six feet high, blocking the pathway. It’s attached adjacently to a fence bordering the owner’s yard. As I gently approach the fence I see a dingy string innocently dangling from a small hole in the upper right corner near the fence post. A slight tug on the string and I hear a metal latch release on the other side. It’s not a fence after all, but a secret gate.

I push it open and slither through sheepishly looking around to see if I’d been caught. I’m careful to lift the cold black metal latch to silence it as I gently close the gate behind me. I scurry past the driveway glancing at the house. My pace quickens down the remainder of the private lane before me. I self-consciously scurry by neighboring homes and scamper up a steep hill before triumphantly stepping onto the territory of public domain: a city street.

This secret passage along a private drive is known to longtime locals in the neighborhood like me. The gate sits on private property connecting two private lanes that connect two public parks at each end. Adventurous out-of-towners looking to walk or bike from one park to the other usually see the gate masquerading as a fence and turn around. But for as long as these roads have existed, locals have hastily snuck through the graciously placed gate.

But the fate of this gate is a question as of late. Do they have the right to block a pedestrian route that connects public parks even though it’s on private land? Or do they have the duty to honor the traditions of a community that has relied on this path for decades if not centuries? To answer these questions, governments, corporations, and individuals turn to legally binding property maps. Instead of arming themselves with their own maps in a race to the court, perhaps they should join arms around one map seeking mutual support.

The word map is a shortened version of the 14th century middle English word, mapemounde. That’s a compound word combining latin’s mappa, “napkin or cloth”, and mundi “of the world” and was used to describe a map of the world that was most likely drawn on an ancient cloth or papyrus.

This etymology resembles cartography from latin’s carta "leaf of paper or a writing tablet" and graphia "to scrape or scratch" (on clay tablets with a stylus)”.

Given modern cartography’s reliance on coordinates, the word cartography easily could have emerged from the word cartesian. That word is derived from the latin word cartesius which is the Latin spelling of descartes – the last name of the French mathematician, René Descartes. Descartes merged the fields of geometry and algebra to form coordinate geometry. It was a discovery that, as Joel L. Morrison writes in the History of Cartography, formed the

”foundation of analytic geometry and provided geometric interpretations for many other branches of mathematics, such as linear algebra, complex analysis, differential geometry, multivariate calculus, and group theory, and, of course, for cartography.”

This two dimensional rectangular coordinate system made it easy for 17th century land barons and imperial governments to more easily and accurately calculate distance and area on a curved earth and communicate them on a flat piece of paper. The increased expediency, accuracy, durability, and portability of paper allowed Cartesian maps to accelerate territorial expansionism and colonization around the world.

But rectangular mapping of property, Cadastral Mapping, dates back to the Romans in the first century A.D. Cartography historian, O. A. W. Dilke writes,

“One of the main advantages of a detailed map of Rome was to improve the efficiency of the city's administration...”

Even as Descartes was inventing analytical geometry in the 1600s, European colonizers in the Americas were using rectilinear maps in attempts to negotiate land rights with Indigenous people. For example, between 1666 and 1668 a land deed clerk filed a copy of a map detailing a coastal area in what is now as Massachusetts near Buzzards Bay. The original map was drawn by a Harvard educated Indigenous man named John Sassamon who was also a member of the Massachusett tribe.

Sassamon was respected by colonizers because he represented the ideal of an assimilated native but he was also held in high regard by local tribes…including the Wampanoag for which this map served as a legal document. He was an asset to both populations and served as an interpreter in a wide range of negotiations between tribes and colonizers.

This map was used by the Plymouth colonists to negotiate terms over Wampanoag land with their leader Metacom (or as he was also known as, King Phillip). It shows a rectangle featuring a river on the left side of the map labeled, “This is a river”, a line drawn at the top and the bottom labeled, “This line is a path”, and on the right side is a vertical line that encloses the rectangle. Surrounding the area are names of tribes and a body of text at the bottom describing the terms of the deal.

Herein lies a controversy, the intention of the map, and the fate of the mapped land. The text can be read one of two ways:

“Wee are now willing should be sold” or “Wee are not willing should be sold”.

The full statement in the records reads:

“This may informe the honor Court that I Phillip arne willing to sell the Land within this draught…I haue set downe all the principal! names of the land wee are not willing should be sold. ffrom Pacanaukett the 24th of the 12th month 1668

PHILLIP [his mark]”

Nine years later, in January of 1675, Sassamon warned the governor of the Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslow, that Metacom (King Phillip) was planning an attack. The Wampanaog, and other tribes, had become frustrated and threatened by encroaching colonists. Days later Sassamon’s body was found in a pond.

At first many thought he had drowned fishing, but further evidence revealed his neck had been violently broken. A witness came forth claiming to have seen three Wampanoag men attack Sassamon. The three men were tried before the first mixed jury of Indigenous people and European settlers. They ruled guilty and all three men were hung.

This created increased tensions and mistrust between Metacom and the Puritans leading to the King Phillips War in the summer of 1675. The battle lasted three years, most of which was without Metacom. In August of 1676 he was hunted down and shot by another Indigenous man who had converted, forcibly or voluntarily, to Puritan ways. Metacom’s wife and children were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda. Metacom was cut into quarters and his limbs were hung from trees. His head was put on a post at the entrance to the Plymouth colony where it remained for two decades.

LABORERS MAPPING WITH NEIGHBORS

Violence against and dispossession of Indigenous people by colonists and industrialists usually involves a map. That’s as true today as it has been at least since the Romans. But it hasn’t stunted attempts over the years to reduce or eliminate these injustices. For example, at the end of World War I, while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and his Inquiry team were remapping Europe at the Paris Peace Conference, the League of Nations was born.

Out of this organization came the International Labor Organization (ILO) with representatives from Belgium, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was chaired by the head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers. Founding members were made of representatives from government, employers, and workers. In the interest of creating a peaceful, safe, and just world, they intended to establish fair labor practices around the world, including fair pay for women – a provision Gompers brought to the table himself. Two lines of their founding preamble stand out amidst today’s international social disorder,

“Whereas universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice…

Whereas also the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries.”

Social justice and historic income inequality are conditions that need improved among most countries today as they did in 1918. But when it came time to ratify the permanent ILO members, the U.S. Congress voted to deny Gompers a seat at the ILO table. U.S. politicians were suspect of the League of Nations and many feared these international labor rights may interfere with privatized labor in the United States. It wasn’t until 1934 that the U.S., with the urging of FDR, was allowed to take a seat at the ILO by the U.S. Congress.

Nonetheless, during the 1920s the ILO conducted several studies concerning labor conditions around the world. That including the subjugation of Indigenous Peoples as a result of widespread colonization. In 1930 ILO 29 was passed drawing much needed attention on forced labor of Indigenous and Afro-descendant people.

For the next two decades the ILO continued to conduct research and create programs throughout their conventions. In 1951 the ILO Committee of Experts on Indigenous Labour devised a 20 year blueprint that addressed land and labor rights of Indigenous populations. They brought together various UN organizations like the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, and UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. It culminated in the publishing of a 1953 report on the core social and economic conditions facing Indigenous Peoples in the Americas.

Four years later this work made its way into the passing of ILO 170 as part of the Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention of 1957. The preamble includes language that admits there exists,

“in various independent countries indigenous and other tribal and semi-tribal populations which are not yet integrated into the national community and whose social, economic or cultural situation hinders them from benefiting fully from the rights and advantages enjoyed by other elements of the population…”

This was the world’s first attempt to codify Indigenous rights into international law through a binding convention. These conventions included government made maps that were used as legally binding documents. Up to this point in history almost all legally binding maps were produced by governments. But with the spread of neoliberalism around the globe in the 1950s, mapping efforts began to be outsourced from governments to private firms and corporations. This shift was amplified by U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s Point Four Program that offered technical assistance to developing countries, especially Latin America, and was largely funded by private institutions like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations.

Neoliberal economists out of the University of Chicago, Chicago Boys, were also embedded in Latin American governments in hopes of spreading neoliberal policies that favored U.S. industries. Conservative politicians, emboldened by the Cold War, also feared these countries may turn to socialism or communism; especially given the majority of the founding members of the ILO and the League of Nations favored social programs as a means of protecting and providing social justice and stability. The U.S. stood alone in opposition to these principles and policies, but remained influential nonetheless given the U.S. military and monetary domination.

But the privatization of legal and technical documents by neoliberals, including maps, resulted in unintended consequences. If within the ILO trifecta of “government, employers, and workers” governments and employers could provide legally binding maps and documents, so could workers. This opened an opportunity for Indigenous communities, and their advocates, to provide their own maps that countered centuries-old border claims and land rights made by expansionist governments and industrialists, both of which are inextricably linked.

The language in ILO 170, while groundbreaking, was still drenched in paternalistic chauvinism and assumed assimilation of Indigenous Peoples as the binding element. One example is shown in the preamble above, “not yet integrated into the national community.” Over the course of the following 40 years Indigenous Peoples worked with the international community to revise the language. In 1989 the ILO passed ILO 169 which “takes the approach of respect for the cultures, ways of life, traditions and customary laws of Indigenous and tribal Peoples who are covered by it. It presumes that they will continue to exist as parts of national societies with their own identity, their own structures and their own traditions. The Convention presumes that these structures and ways of life have a value that needs to be protected.”

However, the word Indigenous Peoples was footnoted. In a compromise to include language of Indigenous self-determination, the ILO asked that the United Nations take up the matter on self-determination claiming it was beyond the scope of the ILO.

Indigenous people continue to advocate for their rights as “workers” through labor organizations in the ILO trio of “government, employers, and workers.” Only 23 of the 187 countries in the ILO have ratified ILO 169 and the United States and Canada are not among them. Most all are in Latin America and one of the most lethal legal weapon Indigenous people have continue to be counter-maps – maps that counter centuries of exploitive hegemonic colonialism.

FROM FALLABLE MAPS TO TANGIBLE RAPS

After decades at successful attempts at counter-mapping, it may have run its course. Governments and corporations have come to use maps to gain further legal control over Indigenous lands through abundant resources and political maneuvering. If the courtrooms of international law were a knife fight, governments and corporations show up with laser guided missiles. Labor unions in those 23 countries that ratified ILO 169 struggle for leverage, representation, and a voice – especially unions representing Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. And if they’re suffering, imagine the masses of unrepresented workers in the remaining 164 countries who have not ratified ILO 169.

Meanwhile more and more natural resources are sought in increasingly sensitive environmental areas, like the Amazon forests, where the majority of biodiversity and CO2 sucking vegetation is protected by Indigenous communities and their way of life. And as global warming increases, their living conditions will likely lead to more dispossession and even extinction.

Mapping technologies since 1989 have also become progressively democratized. They’ve empowered even more people to take to cartography to get their voices heard, claim their land, and their way of life. There has also been a steady increase in members of these Indigenous populations earning degrees in science, social science, technology, and law. They’ve also found increasing numbers of likeminded scholars, intellectuals, activists, and practitioners from the around the world to help.

Bjørn Sletto, Joe Bryan, Alfredo Wagner, and Charles Hale are four such examples. They are editors of a recent book called Radical cartographies : participatory mapmaking from Latin America published by the University of Texas Press. It “sheds light on the innovative uses of participatory mapping emerging from Latin America’s marginalized communities”. It’s a “diverse collection” of maps and mapping techniques that “reconceptualize what maps mean”. They argue what is missing, even in counter-mapping, are “representations of identity and place”.

The lead editor, Bjørn Sletto, is a native of Norway, was educated in the United States, and has lived and researched in Indigenous communities and border cities in Latin America. He writes in the introduction that

“Beyond making claims on the state, Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities appropriate participatory mapping technologies to strengthen self-determination, local governance, and resource management within their own territories…”

What he’s found over decades of experience is that,

“This fundamental rethinking of the role of maps and the different ways they can be created, analyzed, and remade is driven in large part by inhabitants of the territories themselves, rather than by Western scholars or NGOs.”

These scholars have compiled a book that gives these Ingenious people voice and representation through their own methods of cartography. They’ve been allowed to describe geographies “in their own language and on their own terms.” By “describing and depicting the natural and built environments emerging from Indigenous, Black, and other traditional groups in Latin America” they are able to “demonstrate that these radical mapping practices are as varied as the communities in which they take place”.

María Laura Nahuel is one contributor in the book. She is a resident of the Mapuce Lof (Community) Newen Mapu, Neuquén, Argentina and received her undergraduate degree in geography from the Department of Humanities at the National University of Comahue, Argentina. She writes that,

“the current political, economic, cultural, and judicial context of our work has led us to think carefully about how the state’s historic monopoly over cartography has served to subjugate the ancestral and millenary wisdom of our people, the Mapuce. In particular, new multinational resource extraction projects, which are endorsed by the Argentine government, threaten our livelihood and subject us to a constant state of tension and uncertainty. This reality has led us to develop territorial defense strategies as well as plans for achieving kvme felen, or a state of good living. Mapuce participatory cultural mapping plays a key role in this process.”

Co-editor Joe Bryan is another contributor in the book. He is the associate professor in geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he focuses on Indigenous politics in the Americas, human rights, and critical cartography. He asks in the book’s concluding commentary:

“What is a territory? The question pops up repeatedly across the chapters in this volume. After all, what are mapping projects if not attempts to define territory? The problem, as several of the authors suggest, is that mapping affords a partial understanding of territory at best. At worst, mapping runs completely counter to Black and Indigenous concepts of territory with potentially devastating results. That outcome makes the question of what a territory is all the more pressing...”

He goes on to observe that,

“We are used to thinking of territory as a closed object, a thing that can be mapped, recognized, and demarcated. The dominance of this concept is reinforced by mapping, beginning with the use of GPS units and other cartographic technologies to locate material instances of use and occupancy... Legal developments reinforce this approach, pushing titling and demarcation as a remedy to the lack of protection…”

The owner of the property on which that gate I sometimes sneak through wants to build a new home. Their plans don’t leave room for a gate nor are they particularly interested in maintaining a right of way for the public. It’s caused a kerfuffle in the neighborhood. Home owners on this private lane want their privacy while their neighbors want to maintain access between parks.

It’s a battle of territory and maps are the weapon. Individual home owners show title maps that reveal there is no public easement on the private lane. The city acknowledges there is no easement in their maps either, but are acting in the interest of the majority and asking owners to grant easements so the path may remain. It may come down to the courts to decide and you can bet maps will be involved. But as Joe Bryan says, maps afford only a partial understanding of territory.

I’m not suggesting the problems of affluent suburban property owners are of equal consequence to the existence and rights of Indigenous and Black communities or the protection of vanishing natural resources. But what they do have in common is the insufficiency of traditional Cartesian maps to adequately represent interests of governments, corporations, and individuals in battles over borders and territories. Especially when their weaponized.

A primary trigger of the King Phillip War in 1675 was the encroachment of European colonizers. This led to misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and miscommunication of territory use and rights on a Cartesian map drawn by an Indigenous member of the Massachusett tribe supposedly seeking shared understanding between cultures. Here we are in 2022 where technology and enlightened cultural sensitivity abounds, and rigid Cartesian maps are still leading to dispossession and violence of under-represented and vulnerable communities.

But like the Europeans that colonized these lands over 500 years ago, we are turning to Indigenous people for guidance on how best to map and understand territories. We are again asking them to use maps as a way to best interact with people and place through what the editors of that book call radical cartography. Perhaps it’s time we put down our weapons of maps destruction and draw a map together. It just may draw us all closer together. How radical is that?

Hello Interactors,

This post is part three of my three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

THE GIPPER AND CAP MAKE A MAP

On the top of the geography building at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was a high security floor the CIA helped to fund…or so I heard. I never set foot in there, but I know both the CIA and the FBI routinely recruited geography students when I was there in the late 80s. They still do. The geography department was, and still is, buzzing with research in cartography, satellite imaging, and Geographic Information Science (GIS).

I remember learning how to detect a hidden nuclear missile silo camouflaged in the Russian landscape using stereoscopic glasses pointed at two LANDSAT images produced from orbiting satellites. Special imaging software was also being developed at the university to better filter and detect these patterns, and more, in remote sensing imagery.

But the kind of mapping I was most interested in was thematic mapping. I was mostly interested in computer graphics and animation, but I could also see the allure of bending cartography to serve creative means. For my senior project I converted a digital USGS topographic map of Santa Barbara into a 3D model so I could fly a camera over the terrain as a logo rose from behind the foothills. It was used as an intro animation for videos made for the newly formed National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA). This was, after all, the real focus of the geography department – and the U.S. government.

The influential chief geographer for the U.S. State Department from the 1920s through the 1940s, Samuel Whittemore Boggs, had settled on this cartographic dichotomy I was experiencing as a student. He surmised maps could be either rhetorical tools of delusion and propaganda (like fancy 3D animated video bumpers) or scientific instruments of knowledge and understanding (like Geographical Information Science). These two sides of a single coin were present 40-odd years later as I was studying geography at UCSB.

By the time I was studying cartography as an undergrad the Cold War was well embedded into the culture of all Americans, including institutions and universities. Some of my youngest memories as a kid were nuclear fallout drills at school. They weren’t all that different from tornado drills common to Iowa kids, but the films they showed us of the effects of nuclear blasts made me wish tornados were our only worry.

I also have memories of propaganda making its way into our school work as well. I remember math problems that compared missile lengthy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. – a nod to male anatomical one-upmanship.

Our culture was infused with geopolitical agendas and competitions pitting Americans against Soviets. I recall the ‘Miracle on Ice’ when the U.S. hockey team unexpectedly beat the U.S.S.R. in the 1980 Olympics. That was when the U-S-A chant was popularized. I was 15 and remember having a basketball game that day. The gym was electric with pride.

We all lived under constant fear and threat that the Soviet government could launch an intercontinental ballistic missile at any minute, so anything that felt like a victory was celebrated.

The fear was all well communicated and orchestrated using cartohypnotic techniques Boggs had warned of. This fear mongering wasn’t unique to the United States. University of Richmond professor Timothy Barney writes,

“An ominous arrow-filled 1970 map forecasts the logistics of a Greece and Turkey invasion, while another encircles Denmark and Northern Europe. The secret Warsaw Pact exercise ‘Seven Days Over the River Rhine’ from 1979 used cartography extensively to chart, complete with red mushroom clouds strewn about the continent, an all-too probable nuclear clash between Cold War powers.”

The United States has a long history and practice of thematic political cartography dating back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This inspired the formation of a thematic mapping division in the State Department. After World War II, in concert with the Department of Defense, Cold War propaganda elevated to a new level — including in cartography. It was cartohypnosis through government sponsored osmosis that created widespread prognosis of Soviet-American neurosis.

When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, he had campaigned on increased military spending to ward off what he believed to be encroaching communism and military threat from the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was his California friend, businessman, and politician Casper Weinberger, or ‘Cap’ as he was called. Weinberger shared the same fear Reagan did over evidence that cash-starved Russia was pouring much of their GDP into military spending.

To convince the American public that Reagan’s so-called ‘small government’ required ‘big spending’ on defense, he pulled a page from the 1918 State Department assembling a team of researchers, artists, illustrators, and cartographers to build his own ‘Inquiry’ into Soviet military weaponry and strategies. They produced a 100-page pamphlet called ‘Soviet Military Power’ out of the U.S. Defense Department that was intended to ‘alert’ the public to the ‘threat’ of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Armed Forces.  

The first publications were distributed in 1981 across the country and were sold in Post Offices for $6.50 or $20 today. These were printed every year from 1981 to 1991 as what some government officials refer to as ‘public diplomacy’. However, scholars use ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘propaganda’ interchangeably because it’s often hard to discern which is which.

The fact is, these publications worked. They were a perfect compliment to Reagan’s public speeches that routinely referred to his Reagan Doctrine which was “to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth.” This included funding overt and covert anti-communist resistance groups around the world – many of which illegally used acts of terror.

The Iran–Contra affair provided ample evidence of the malicious intents and actions behind Reagan’s Doctrine – funneling money from Iranian missile sales to fund militant guerilla fighters overthrowing the government in Nicaragua. Fourteen people in Reagan’s administration were indicted. Weinberger was indicted on five felony charges including accusations he lied to Congress and obstruction of investigation. Another four charges were brought against him but his cases were never tried. He was pardoned by then President George H. W. Bush, Reagan’s former Vice President.

Many of these sovereign nations the United States involved themselves in were seeking independence from reliance on foreign powers like the U.S. and the Soviet Union. However, because their forms of government often leaned toward social and communal inspired governments, Reagan assumed they’d fall under the control of the communist Soviet Union. It also meant Western corporations could lose out to state sponsored corporations.

The U.S. State Department had been attempting to spread Western economic and political propaganda around the world from at least the 1950s. President Truman’s Point Four Program (funded by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations) and the Chicago Boys (programs involving neoliberal University of Chicago economists, including Milton Friedman) were efforts to spread right-wing libertarianism around the world. That included backing a military dictatorship in Chile.

REVERSING CARTOHYPNOSIS

By the 1980s these strategies helped instill fear in Americans that the Soviet Union could one day envelope the world. Decades of claims that communism spreads like a disease – Latin America today, Anglo America tomorrow – laid the groundwork in the 1980s for the ‘Soviet Military Power’ propaganda publications to have maximum impact. The fear in many is still there to this day and is heightened by Putin’s aggression via the Kremlin. Another example of an imperialist state department aggressively meddling in the business of a sovereign nation seeking their independence from an all-powerful overlord.

Author Tom Gervasi spent years in the late 80s researching the government’s claims made in these publications. He read the CIA’s annual reports to Congress, Military Posture Statements of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sworn testimony from chiefs of the military services and Defense Department officials before the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees of Congress, as well as documents provided by NATO governments. He also consulted the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

In 1988 he republished the 1987 issue of Weinberger’s ‘Soviet Military Power’ with annotations in the margins debunking many claims made by the U.S. State and Defense Departments. He also highlighted salient examples and techniques of propaganda, including cartohypnotic maps.

One shows the land mass connecting Europe with the former Soviet Union. The Soviet territory is covered with a blue blob overlaying its boundaries. Flowing south into Europe are massive arrows encroaching on Europe. The map gives the impression the U.S.S.R. not only has the opportunity to expand by land into all of Europe but that they also have the means to do so and a plan to do it.

Gervasi comments in the margins asking us to

“Imagine opening a book and seeing the arrows going the other way, thrusting deep into the Soviet Union. The average American or West European reader would feel surprised and quite possibly indignant, finding it a complete misrepresentation of our intentions. That is how the average Soviet citizen would feel opening this book to this page. But this is powerful propaganda, immediately imprinting on our memory the vision of one possibility, without imprinting the reverse possibility, and so reinforcing allegations of Soviet intent made repeatedly, without any evidence to support them.”

And in echoes of Boggs’ suggestion that cartohypnosis can be reversed, Gervasi reminds us that

“Indeed, images like the ones below are so deeply ingrained in the American psyche that if the propagandists can ever be silenced, it will take several decades of raising clear-sighted new generations to erase all our artificial fears and suspicions of the USSR.”

Another map shows the entirety of the former U.S.S.R. in a simple outline with radiant cones stretched in every direction emanating from Moscow and other major cities. The title of the map is Ballistic Missile Early Warning, Target-Tracking, and Battle Management Radars. It suggests the U.S.S.R. had advanced radar systems ready to defend against attack.

Gervasi notes,

“This may give the impression that only the Soviets have such radars. A splendid map could be drawn of the U.S. radar system, stretching from Scotland to Hawaii, including the 12 large phased-array radars of our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the four large phased-array radars of our PAVE, PAWS system, the 75 radars of our DEW Line and North Warning System, our Perimeter Acquisition Radar Attack Characterization System, the three radars of our Navy’s Space Surveillance System, the 16 radars of our Air Force Spacetrack and other systems, and of course, our over-the-horizon backscatter radars. All of these are already fully operational, whereas the Soviet system shown here, as the text below acknowledges, will not be operational until the mid-1990s at the earliest.”

Gervasi isn’t the only one to critique claims made in these publications. Even the conservative think-tank, The National Interest, debunks the ‘Pentagon’s exaggerations’ made in the these publications. In 2016 they took aim at what became Reagan and Weinberger’s pride and joy, the Strategic Defense Initiative – or as its was commonly referred to as, Star Wars. This was a space and ground-based laser program envisioned to obliterate threatening Soviet nuclear missiles. They write that Weinberger’s,

“Soviet Military Power made ominous predictions about Soviet lasers, lasers powerful enough to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles, or disable satellites in orbit…[the publication stated] ‘in the late 1980s, (the Soviet Union) could have prototype space-based laser weapons for use against satellites.’ It went on to imply that there were working anti-satellite lasers at [a] Soviet research complex…”

In 1989 a group of Americans, including engineers and physicists, visited this research site. They concluded the Soviets could only produce a two-kilowatt laser beam. For comparison, experts claim 250 kilowatts are needed to destroy a weapon. It took until last year, 2021, for the U.S. to demonstrate a 300 kilowatt laser weapon. But means to consistently control this device keep it from being deployed.

The representative from Virginia, Jim Olin, a former electrical engineer at GE was on that tour in 1989 and said,

“It seems to me it pretty clearly is not a power laser and doesn’t represent any threat as a weapon.”

In 1942, the librarian at the American Geographical Society, John Kirtland Wright, who is an authority on the history of geography, wrote on the power of maps:

“Like bombers and submarines, maps are indispensable instruments of war. In the light of the information they provide, momentous strategic decisions are being made today: ships and planes, men and munitions, are being moved. Maps help to form public opinion and build public morale. When the war is over, they will contribute to shaping the thought and action of those responsible for the reconstruction of a shattered world. Hence it is important in these times that the nature of the information they set forth should be well understood.”

We live in a time when someone can go to their favorite search engine, type ‘map of Bering Straight’, copy and paste the image into an image editor, type in big red letters “RUSSIA” on one side of the maritime border and “USA” on the other, and voila…a map made to persuade public opinion. They can then feed it into the social media mass distribution machine and off it goes through a global network to be seen by more eyeballs than Casper Weinberger and Ronald Reagan could ever have imagined. If Boggs thought maps could be weaponized as hypnotic mind benders in the 1940s, imagine what he’d say now?

We’ve reached a point where making your own map has never been more accessible. And it’s only going to get easier. I’ve dwelled on the negative aspects of maps as propaganda, but I’m inspired by Boggs’ notion of reverse cartohypnosis. The threat of physical war has never been more real than it is today as the West continues to push an unpredictable dictator into a corner. A corner defined on territorial maps drawn in 1919 by American’s that defined boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. Maps that were made to persuade.

Putin is a man deluded by attachments to past maps that drew borders around a union of socialist republics. He has grown hateful of those who challenge that past, him, or his beliefs. His delusions are so grand that he may only be satisfied when he ‘wins’ or everyone else ‘looses’.

Like Biden and most presidents before him, he is both a victim of and an contributor to decades of cartohypnotism and through waring propaganda between two super powers seeking imperial domination.

With maps as weapons of war in an global battle for information superiority, I ask that we check our own delusions, aversions, and desires before becoming entranced by the seduction of a map. Arm our self-made mental radar and defense systems that warn us of intentions to exaggerate, placate, and sedate our vulnerability to bombs of persuasion. And should we decide to become a cartographer and make our own map one day, make sure we’re doing our best to reverse the effect of cartohypnosis.  

Hello Interactors,

This post is part two of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen to. They each can stand on their own, but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Both World Wars exemplified the hauntingly prescient title of that 1904 paper by England’s eminent geographer and burgeoning politician, Sir Malford MacKinder – The Geographical Pivot of History. And his most famous simplified world map depicting the Natural Seats of Power inspired derivatives all around the world. That was especially true at the conclusion of World War I and the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

Peace preparations by the United States began the same month they declared War on Germany in April of 1917. By November a team of researchers, writers, lawyers, and cartographers moved from the New York City Public Library to the third floor of the American Geographical Society. Surrounded by a collection of maps and books the team set work on what was called the Inquiry.

One of the primary geographers assigned to this effort was Mark Sylvester William Jefferson. He was a professor at the Michigan State Normal School at Ypsilanti and specialized in the thematic mapping of population distribution. He even invented a term for it – anthropography. The distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Southern Connecticut State University, Geoffrey L. Martin says,

“His maps were accurate, attractive, and invariably ingenious in design.”

These maps for the Paris conference were to convey reams of physiographic and demographic information regarding Europe and surrounding regions. Martin notes,

“Jefferson had the remarkable ability to simplify complexity, to inspire ingenuity of cartographic expression, and to display such manual dexterity with economy of line that his leadership, long hours, and indefatigable fascination with the enterprise insured success for the mapping effort.”

Jefferson, and his team of cartographers, joined a select group, including President Woodrow Wilson, on board the USS George Washington headed to France in December of 1918. By the middle of December the Inquiry team assembled in a hotel in Paris, including Jefferson and his twenty-five draftsmen. The team grew in size requiring them to knock down a wall at the Hôtel de Crillon, one of Paris’ finest hotels on the Champs-Élysées.

Martin, pulling from Jefferson’s diary writes,

“By February of 1919 Jefferson’s team of cartographers spanned five rooms, an engraving apparatus was provided, and armed guards were posted at the door.”

During the proceedings, Jefferson sat on the geographers’ commission. Other geographers and attendees were impressed and overwhelmed by the cartographic prowess of the American delegation. Chatter in the halls, parks, and hotels centered on the role maps played during the convention. They were not only the common denominator amongst a diverse delegation, but also the premiere communicator and persuader.

Martin concludes,

“The value of maps had been recognized prior to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, yet at Paris the map suddenly became everything.”

The momentum from this event followed those involved in the Inquiry back the United States. The State Department experienced firsthand the influential power of cartography and established their own geographic division and the Office of Geographer. The division’s maps and collections started with those made during the Paris Peace Conference. They were organized by Colonel Lawrence Martin who served under Woodrow Wilson and became the first head of the department in 1921.

Martin retired in 1924 and selected Samuel Whittemore Boggs to replace him. Boggs came to New York in 1914 and worked compiling and editing maps. In 1921 he began a Master’s program at Columbia studying under two professors who were also cartographers at the Paris Peace Conference. These men, like many of those involved in preparing for the conference, left idealistic that maps could lead to a fair and just conclusion of international territorial disputes.

Boggs embodied that spirit coming out of college and combined it with imaginative approaches and highly academic, technical cartography skills. It made him well positioned for the role political geography and cartography was about to play as territorial pieces continued to shift around the earth’s spherical chess board.

That proverbial board was also shrinking as the airplane became an increasingly important element of war and travel. The Library of Congress map librarian and geographer, Walter Ristow, called this ‘air age geography.’ The war, and the proliferation of maps, inspired interest from the public in world geography.

In 1942, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the radio in a Fireside Chat he called “On the Progress of War”. Pearl Harbor was a vivid reminder to the American public that air-age globalism had clearly arrived. He said,

“This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air-lane in the world.”

But then he did something I suspect no other president had done prior or since and asked the American public to pull out their own world map and following along with him. It’s an indication of just how pervasive and commercialized mapmaking had become.  He continued,

“That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you (the) a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me in the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war."

Maps as a tool of communicating geopolitics had hit the mainstream. By the 1940’s Boggs had recognized that maps he and others were producing could do one of two things: either ‘delude the public’ or ‘inform them.’ Being the idealist he was, he worried most about the risks of delusion.

He wrote an article in 1947 in The Scientific Monthly titled, Cartohypnosis. Referring to maps he used in territorial disputes in the deserts of Afghanistan he says,

“Map-conscious people, however, usually accept subconsciously and uncritically the ideas that are suggested to them by maps. In part because maps appear to represent facts pertaining to mother earth herself, veracity and authority are frequently attributed to them beyond their deserts.”

He continued,

“In what might be called ‘cartohypnosis’ or ‘hypnotism by cartography,’ the map user or the audience exhibits a high degree of suggestibility in respect to stimuli aroused by the map and its explanatory text.”

In what could be seen as now as a critical indictment of the U.S. government by an employee of the U.S. State Department he says,

“And frequently a sort of mass hypnotism is practiced by men who attempt to delude the public.”

All the while, he seemed to remain idealistic reminding us that,

“Sometimes self-hypnotism and illusion occur quite innocently…[and] may also be used effectively to dehypnotize people…we should therefore consider what maps may be made, and how they may be used to awaken people to an intelligent understanding of the world and the problems of our times.”

Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Hello Interactors,

This post is part of a three week experiment. I’ve divided my topic into three parts each taking a bit less time for you to read or listen. They each can stand on their own (maybe), but hopefully come together to form a bigger picture. Please let me know what you think.

Maps are such a big part of our daily lives that it’s easy to let them wash over us. But they’re also very powerful forms of communication that require our attention and scrutiny. If we don’t, we run the risk of being hypnotized and even deluded.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

Someone posted a map on Facebook recently showing just how close Russia is to Alaska. The post read, “This should make you 😳 America. My kids were not taught as much geography and history as I was growing up. This probably needs to be shared to remind us all. For those who think Russia is all the way on the other side of the world [it is] only 53 miles at the Bering Strait’s narrowest point. Like us driving from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo.”

The comments to the post echoed this worry with words like, “Too many don’t realize this.”; “There are small islands 25 miles apart.”; “OOOOOOOOO scary.”; and “I’ll admit that I didn’t realize this.”   

They probably didn’t realize this either: the United States and Russia not only share the largest maritime border in the world – a line stretching 1600 nautical miles dividing the Chukchi Sea to the north and the Bering Sea to the south – but it cuts straight through two islands called the Diomedes. On one side is Russia’s Big Diomede – actually part of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug a federal subject of Russia – and just two miles west is Little Diomede which is part of Alaska. Both have small fishing villages, one settled by Russians and the other Americans.

If folks are scared by the geographic proximity of 53 miles, two miles must really freak them out? And they’d best be sitting down for this little tidbit…there is no ratified treaty in place between the United States and Russia that enforces this boundary.

The last attempts made to negotiate a deal with Russia was in 1991. The person who chaired the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was none other than Senator Joe Biden from Delaware.

Biden addressed the committee with these words,

“…today the subcommittee meets to consider a measure that constitutes one small step down that path of cooperation. This measure, the U.S.-Soviet Maritime Boundary Treaty, represents the attempt of the two sides to resolve an important dispute through negotiation, compromise, and mutual pledge to abide by the solemn obligations of a bilateral treaty and international law.”

The dispute this treaty would lay to rest concerns the sovereign rights and jurisdiction of the United States and the Soviet Union in the seas between Alaska and Siberia. The treaty would govern each country’s right to manage fisheries and to conduct oil and gas exploration and development in a vast maritime area.”

In 1990, then Soviet Union leader, Mikhail Gorbachev sought to resolve the ordeal. But the Russian parliament believed he was acting in haste. The Soviet Union was beginning to crumble and they believed Gorbachev was giving away too much fishing, sea passage, and oil and mineral rights to the United States in exchange for other provisions. The USSR collapsed in December of 1991. This left Biden’s sixth month old efforts under the George H. W. Bush administration unanswered. No administration since has attempted to ratify the treaty and I doubt Putin is in the mood for Biden to resume talks.

The area maps referred to as Russian America, a piece of land nearly the size of Texas, is what we now call Alaska. It had already been colonized by Siberian fur trappers in the 1700s and the Russian Orthodox Church was already busy trying to convert Indigenous people to Christianity. By 1800 the Russian-American Company was established – organized by Emperor Paul I of Russia. By 1850, 300,000 sea otters were hunted to extinction. Seventeen years later, in 1867, amidst a fur market slump from over hunting, the end of the U.S. Civil War, a Russia battered by the Crimea war ceded Russian America to the United States as part of the Alaska Purchase. It didn’t become a U.S. state until 1959.

Russia sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million or $134 million in 2022 dollars. Russia feared they couldn’t defend the territory from the British who were busy trying to colonize Canada and had just defeated the Russians in the Crimea war with the help of the French. So, they expressed interest in selling it to the then U.S. Secretary of State William Seward who had already offered to buy it just a few years prior and was happy to negotiate the purchase.

Biden gave reference to the purchase in his Foreign Relations subcommittee pre-amble by joking,

“the 1867 Convention, by which Russia ceded Alaska to the United States, made it possible for Mr. Murkowski to become a U.S. Senator.”

The Maritime Boundary Agreement this committee aimed resolve, but never did,

“these conflicts by: One, declaring that the 1867 Convention line is the maritime boundary between the United States and the Soviet Union; two, establishing a precise geographic description of the line; and three, providing for the transfer of jurisdiction and Russia rights in four special areas.”

The first American to map the new state of Alaska may take issue with Biden’s use of the words ‘precise geographic description.’ Land wasn’t the only thing the U.S. got for their $7.2 million, they were also handed maps and charts of the region drafted by Russian mapmakers. These were promptly handed over to the man who was soon to become the head of the Pacific branch of the Office of United States Coast Survey, and premiere geographer of the time, George Davidson.

He excelled at geodesy and astronomy coming out of Girard College in 1845. By 1850 he was on the California coast determining accurate latitude and longitude of coastal features. He worked his way up the Pacific coast to Oregon and Washington mapping much of the Puget Sound and naming many of the Olympic Mountains on the Olympic Peninsula. Mt. Ellinor is named after his soon-to-be wife, Ellinor Fauntleroy. The Fauntleroy ferry in Seattle takes you from the Fauntleroy Cove to Vashon Island. Mt. Constance is named after her sister, and the two side-by-side mountains, The Brothers, are named after her two brothers.

His triangulation and astronomical observations were regarded as the highest precision geodesy recorded to that date. The baselines required to accurately triangulate and map the Pacific coast states are named after him – the Davidson Quadrilaterals. And before those Russian maps had been handed over to him, he had already been asked to make maps of the physiography and natural resources of Alaska by the U.S. Congress.

Most maps were copied from Russian maps and others drawn by an Indigenous Chief who knew more about the land than the Russians. A 1937 biography claims “Davidson always got on with Indians—he treated them as men.” These maps were included in a report to a congressional committee that resulted in a unanimous vote for America to purchase Russian America from the Russians.

Davidson was mapping Alaska at 51° to 71° latitude north amidst the mosquitos in August of 1867, but less than a year earlier the Office of Coast Survey had sent Davidson down to 5° to 7° latitude north, in January of 1867, to map a potential site for the Panama Canal.

The Office of the Coast Survey was started by Thomas Jefferson in 1807 and still publishes the nautical maps of the U.S. – including the annually published 10 volume publication, United States Coast Pilot. Historically, these guides relied on local mariner knowledge and newspaper articles. They were a practical necessity for private, commercial, and governmental mariners. But in 1858 George Davidson was the first to provide his own accounts making this issue the first official United States Coast Pilot by the Office of the Coast Survey.

Davidson went on to become the president of the California Academy of Sciences, a University of California Regent, and the University of California, Berkley’s first geography professor. He was the department chair from 1898 until 1905.

Davidson defined the essence of what map making was at the time. It served the desire and need Jefferson had for precision, utilizing the best surveying and geodesic instruments and techniques of the time. Naturally these were used for exacting territories for colonizing, capitalizing, and exploiting. The United States had become an exuberantly expansionist, empire-building country. But by the middle of the 19th century through the start of the 20th another kind of map was entering its golden age – thematic mapping.

Thematic maps use information not readily observed but are nonetheless part of the geography. For example, maps depicting the weather or statistical information like demographics. They can also include strategic and political information.

The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of the United States as a global superpower and the start of the decline of England’s dominance. New territories, like Alaska, were not only getting mapped but were also helping to shift geopolitical dynamics. The world was sufficiently mapped such that world leaders need not send ships afar to determine political strategies.

One of the first and most influential of these geopolitical thematic maps came from England’s equivalent of George Davidson, Sir Halford John Mackinder. In 1904 he wrote a paper that included a map in The Geographic Journal called “The Geographical Pivot of History.” In the introduction here he writes,

“In 400 years the outline of the map of the world has been completed with approximate accuracy…But the opening of the twentieth century is appropriate as the end of a great historic epoch…The missionary, the conqueror, the farmer, the miner, and, of late, the engineer, have followed so closely in the traveller’s footsteps that the world, in its remote borders, has hardly been revealed before we must chronicle its virtually complete political appropriation.”

His map is an oval shaped Mercator projection that puts continental Europe, Africa, and Asia in the middle. Its shape gives it a spherical illusion. The map’s title is The Natural Seats of Power and features three crescent shaped concentric zones. At the center is what he called Pivot Area – which is most of continental Europe, some of Asia and what became the Soviet Union, the next ring is labeled Inner and Marginal Crescent – which is more of Europe, the British Isles and Japan, and furthest from the center are the Lands of Outer or Insular Crescent – which include continental America, most of Africa, and Australia.

Part of Mackinder’s goal was to not only illustrate to an island country — that came to power by sea — just how connected the world is by land. He also simplified the complexities of detailed coastal charts and topographic maps into easy to understand centers of power. Timothy Barney, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at the University of Richmond (and self-proclaimed map-nerd) wrote in the Routledge Handbook of Mapping and Cartography that, “Mackinder was prefiguring a social, economic, and political shift in the twentieth century towards a globalized world, all on the flat page of the map.”

Mackinder would not have known it then, but his ‘Pivot Center’ indeed became the focal point of not one, but two world wars that drew powers from all three of the Natural Seats of Power on his map. But he also put thematic geopolitical mapping at the center.

Hello Interactors,

This is the last week of winter. Next week I’ll start writing about cartography. Today’s post just may whet your appetite. All of the dislocation maps resulting from the war in Ukraine got me thinking about a pervasive human behavior; the ultimate interaction of people and place – migration.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

BOWLING FOR BALLERS

I was on a walk last weekend and as I approached an Indian restaurant I noticed two families gathered a car in the parking lot. The parents were saying their goodbyes as the kids tussled about impatiently. Just then a perfectly spherical white ball of wadded up paper came rolling down the parking lot entrance and on to the sidewalk in front of me. Chasing behind was boy, maybe thirteen years old, with his shirt untucked, coat half on, and out of breath. He glanced at me, swopped up the ball, swiveled around, and threw it back toward his family like a skilled cricket bowler.

A generation ago this would have been a rare sight. More likely it would have been a boy, probably White, winding up and pitching like his favorite pitcher on a baseball mound. I did a bit of pitching when I was that kid’s age. I was taller than most at that age and could throw pretty hard. So they put me on the mound. I threw hard alright, but batters trembled with fear. I had a control issues.

Give me a glove today and I’ll spare you the fast ball, but I still throw a mean knuckle ball. I kept a couple gloves at Microsoft and would occasionally go out and play catch with anybody willing. It was fun introducing that sport to team members from other parts of the world. At some point we decided to introduce each other to our respective national sports. First up was India and cricket.

Guess who volunteered to be the bowler – or pitcher in baseball terms. Me. The guy who pitched as a kid, but also hit a fair number of them too. We played on a patch of artificial turf on the Microsoft soccer field. That field has since been torn up to make way for more buildings and an on-campus cricket pitch.  

Cricket balls are quite hard and travel at great speeds so we decided a tennis ball would be best. I took to it pretty fast, according to my Indian teammate Deepak. The bowling motion is very different than a pitching motion, but he was a good coach. The arm is kept straight and is rotated around the shoulder joint. Much like Pete Townsend of The Who strumming his guitar.

I loved it. Until the next day...and the next. Ok, for a full week my arm, shoulder, and back were wondering what the hell I was thinking. That was the last of cricket. The next international sport came from a Dutch teammate, Martijn. It’s called Fierljeppen (or far-leaping). It’s basically pole vaulting over a canal. We had a nearby canal designated, but a proper pole never materialized. Probably for the best. I was pushing it on the liability front. Somebody was sure to end up in the water.

The would-be canal to be leapt was in Redmond, in the county’s biggest and oldest park, Marymoor Park. While Feirljeppen is unlikely to ever occur there, cricket soon will. Microsoft isn’t the only one building a cricket pitch in Redmond. Just a couple weeks ago the county approved a 20-acre Marymoor Cricket Community Park. Here’s what the King County Council Chair, Claudia Balducci, had to say,

“As our region grows, we see more interest in cricket, which is one of the most popular sports in the world. I can’t think of a better place for a world-class cricket pitch than East King County and especially Marymoor Park.”

When she says ‘world-class’ she means it. The city of Redmond and the county are partnering with Major League Cricket (MLC) to build the facility. Construction is expected to start in 2023 and may one day host professional cricket, the U.S. National Team, and maybe even the World Cup. If you didn’t know, the Cricket World Cup is the most watched sporting event in the world. An estimated 2.2 billion people tuned in during the 2019 cup.

The first international cricket match was actually between the U.S. and Canada in 1844 and was played in New York City. It was contested at the St. George’s Club Bloomingdale Park in front of 20,000 people. That site is now the NYU Medical Center. A decade later baseball began displacing cricket as one of America’s favorite sports.

American football was hitting the scene then too. It eventually displaced rugby in popularity in the U.S. after the American’s won the first gold medals in Rugby in 1920 and 1924. But like cricket, that sport is also hugely popular outside of the U.S. But rugby is again gaining popularity in the United States. One survey claims participation grew 350% between 2004 and 2011. In 2018, over 100,000 fans showed up in San Francisco for the World Cup Sevens tournament. The United States is bidding to host the Rugby World Cup in 2027.

Both rugby and cricket originated in England and spread throughout the world through colonization. Baseball also started in England and American football is a derivative of rugby. The forward pass was perfected and popularized by the Indigenous American Wa-Tho-Huk, or “Bright Path.” But he was named and baptized at birth as "Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe" – Jim Thorpe.

His father was half Irish and half Sac and Fox (two Great Lake area tribes forced to settle in Oklahoma) and his mother was half French and half Potawatomi. They were both practicing Catholics and so was their son until the day he died. Jim Thorpe and his Carlisle Indian Industrial School teammates are largely responsible for the style of American football you see today. Thorpe was also the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal and was a professional baseball player.

Baseball, cricket, and rugby – and it’s American Football derivative, originated in England but spread with White colonial settlers. Like a ball tossed from it’s origin to it’s destination. And now after generations of colonization, kids of parents born in those far away colonies – like the kid in that parking lot – will be tossing them to players with heritage as mixed as Jim Thorpe…on soil Bright Path’s Indigenous ancestors once called their own.

Colonization really did toss people as if they were balls. It very much was an origin and destination game. Slaves and indentured workers were pulled from their homes to imperial origins while White administrators and ‘adventure’ seekers were tossed to colonial outposts to ‘settle’ land and people. And then before long, in a postcolonial world, people from those extended territories began migrating to colonial origins.

It's what the Jamaican poet Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or “Miss Lou” referred to in her poem as, Colonization in Reverse. The first stanza reads:

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan in Reverse

HERE, THERE, EVERYWHERE

Much of social science has dwelled on this concept of migration being about people going from ‘here’ to ‘there’. This has drawn excessive attention to these locations and the effects of the movement of people from place to place. It leads some people to wonder what will happen to that place over ‘there’ when people leave? But even more people wonder what will become of this place ‘here’ as a result of them immigrating? Immigration is one of the most polarizing and thorny societal issues wrought with emotion and socio-political implications. People seem to be most concerned with the immediate situation and seek political near term solutions fearing their own lives and cultures may be threatened.

But there’s a growing number of postcolonial thinkers and researchers challenging the ‘here’ and ‘there’ obsession and the impulse to seek near-term solutions. One group of diverse cultural geographers assembled by the American Association of Geographers settled on two major themes of interrogation of postcolonial migrations. They relate to time and place:

* Broaden the temporal lens. Before jumping to remedies aimed to cure local symptoms of migration, reach back to its colonization origins to better understand it’s roots.

* Reassess the ‘here’. What is ‘here’ today is a product of the relationships it formed with ‘there’. The people and the land of colonizers have been shaped by the people and lands of those distance territories.

Within this framework, ‘here’ and ‘there’ no longer exist or have lost their distinction. Centuries of colonization and migration have created a multi-faceted tapestry of trans-territorialism and mix-ethnicities in a beautiful, albeit complex, cross-cultural milieu.

This blurring and multiplicity is a very hard sell in a world that is becoming increasing polarized and nationalized. Nationalists would like a Hogwarts-style sorting hat from Harry Potter fame. They’d like to place this hat upon the head of every immigrant so they may be sorted into ‘here’ or ‘there’ categories. Many immigrants, if not most, feel the pressure to act, look, and speak in ways that reduce the chances of people wondering are they one of us or one of them? They’re forced to reduce their vibrant, complex heritage to fit a binary ‘here’ or ‘there’ dichotomy with questions of race intertwined.

Meanwhile, those Western colonizers who were sent or ventured to faraway lands absorbed, stole, interpreted, and profited from those distant cultures and traditions. Their kids went to school there, made friends, and maybe even stayed, married a local, and raised their own mix-ethnicity family. And of these countless families, many returned to their colonial homeland but few are asked to place the sorting hat upon their head. They then wrote books, told stories, and painted pictures of people and places of faraway lands – and still do – while the people of those lands are often denied entry to their country.

And what do we make of the effects of territories carved, fractured, and divvied up among Western imperialists? Susan P. Mains, a professor of Geography at Dundee University in Scotland, is the lead author on a 2013 paper Postcolonial Migrations. She quotes two historians writing on the partitioning of Indian and other South-Asian territories by the West. They write that,

“’...18 million [Indian refugees who] struggled to resettle themselves and the energies of at least two generations were expended in rebuilding lives shattered by the violent uprooting caused by the partition’.” Mains continues, “Displacement and ongoing territorial conflicts are the legacy of this fracture.”

In 1947 the British divided the subcontinent into two independent states, India and Pakistan. The partition was largely along Muslim and non-Muslim lines. Those religious tensions and divisions have been reignited recently as India’s Prime Minister, a Hindu, has increasingly been blending his politics with his religion. His critics accuse him of being Islamophobic and say he’s guilty of igniting hate crimes against Muslims. Human rights watchdogs are seeing more evidence of this and warn it may get worse – especially in impoverished neighborhoods. The sorting hat, a British import, seems to have followed a well trodden path to India.

This current conflict will no doubt cause Muslims to migrate creating even more displacement and fracturing of family and friends. Again, the focus by most media and academics will be on where they are from and where they are going. Are those people over ‘there’ coming over ‘here’?  But little attention will be given the diaspora within the sub-continent, the historic origins of conflict and violence by imperialists, and the impact on the individual human lives.

For many, the fear of where these migrants will land outweighs their concern for their well-being. This fear strips them of the curiosity needed to assess how their own actions, and those of their ancestors, contribute to the plight of the disenchanted, disowned, and dislocated.

GO WITH THE FLOW

In 1885, the Geographer and German immigrant to England, Ernst Georg Ravenstein published what he called “The Laws of Migration”. It was a paper that appeared in the Journal of Statistical Society. But, as my former Geography professor, Waldo Tobler, pointed out in 1995 (the 100 year anniversary of Ravenstein’s laws) Ravensein failed to provide a single mathematical equation to support his so-called laws.

It seems, like his contemporizes in Economics, he was seduced by the mathematical certainty of Physics. He sought laws to describe the migration patterns he observed in 19th century England, but forgot the math. Or perhaps he knew, like many economists, that human behavior lacks the certainty of physics and these laws were more suggestive than declarative. Either way, this lack of certainty and clarity doesn’t keep social scientists from continuing to borrow metaphors, research techniques, and language from physics.

For example, Tobler says,

“It is most curious that the literature on migration is replete with this kind of [fluid physics] terminology. We speak of "migration flows" and "migration streams" and "counter-currents", and refer to intellectual or cultural "backwaters", as if there were eddy currents. One can be "outside of the mainstream". And there are "waves of immigration", etc.”

Tobler also found an 1885 map Ravenstein created for his paper that “seems to have been completely ignored by scholars, historians, and cartographers.” The map is titled, as expected, “Currents of Migration." Tobler was a pioneer in computer cartography, but even he admitted it would be “difficult to see how one could program a computer to produce this map using the kinds of statistics available [in 1995]. Certainly it would be a challenge.”

Mapping migration continues to be a challenge for cartographers. As Putin seeks to reassemble a former Soviet Union partitioned into independent nation states in the early 1990s, he’s induced mass migration. Different media outlets use different ways to communicate these migrations with varying degrees of success.

James Chesire is Professor of Geographic Information and Cartography at University College London and he took to Twitter a couple weeks ago critiquing the BBC’s crude interpretation of the crisis. He wrote,

“It’s time to innovate the ways we show people fleeing war. 8 arrows for 874,026 human beings is not good enough.”

He goes on to illustrate how arrows imply ‘flow’ in a particular direction from ‘here’ to ‘there’. As you can see, even today, we seem to be stuck using centuries old flawed physics metaphors while continuing to emphasize place based abstractions that imply binary flows from one place to another. Lost are the heartbreaking stories, the historicity that lead to mass movement of people, and cultural and ethnic complexities that define the region.

One map he points to from 2016 is by the mapping company ESRI. It attempts to bridging the gap between stories, images, and cartography in communicating what they title, “The Uprooted: War, sectarian violence, and famine have forced more than 50 million people from their homes—the largest number of displaced people since World War II.”

But somehow it still portrays the movement of people solely as a crisis. People indeed are suffering crisis, but migrations and movement of humans, of all animals, doesn’t have to be articulated as perpetual crisis. We don’t have to keep focusing on the spatiality, the borders, the nations, the states, and the cascade of political and social hierarchies they instill. Migration is an artifact of human existence – of animal existence – whose fate can be reduce to arrows.

Arrows typically show movement in one direction. What about migrants that return? Where are their arrows? In the Handbook of culture and migration Dr. Julia Pauli, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, writes,

“In all regions of the world, state policies frame human migration by enabling, encouraging, restricting, punishing and hindering movement. Major events like the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ have made this very visible…New policies and programs worldwide aim to encourage migrants to leave their host and destination countries and return to their original communities.”

She cites other researchers who point out, “’there is a significant overlap between the latest surge of interest in return and efforts to remove unwanted immigrants from destination countries.’” And many countries are capitalizing on return migration. Citing Asia as an example, Pauli says “Countries like Vietnam perceive wealthy and well-educated migrants more and more as a resource that needs to be returned home.”

You can bet the state policies Pauli cites will include government sponsored technologies to track, trace, and true these flows of humanity. Trump is as crude as the wall he wants built. Meanwhile, Biden is as stealth as the cameras, drones, and biometric AI technologies he’s funding on the southern border of the United States. A report titled The Deadly Digital Border Wall was jointly created and published between Mijente, Just Futures Law, and the No Border Wall Coalition. They write,

“By exposing these technologies, this report aims to empower border activists, organizers, and residents to challenge the corporate tools used for border control and immigration enforcement by U.S. government agencies, and to more effectively advocate for a surveillance-free world.”

It's striking that Ukraine had the second fastest declining population in the world in 2018. Russia’s birthrates climbed after the fall of the Soviet Union but they too have declining birthrates. Coupled with high mortality rates, especially among older men, from alcoholism, depression, accidents, homicides, and suicides most of the former Soviet Union states were barely holding on to citizens well before this war.

Russia was offering families money to have two or more kids. Payments were not in cash, but in a ‘mother’s trust fund’. Women could draw from the fund at a later date to pay for a mortgage, education, and a small pension. Few found that offer attractive. Since 2014 Ukraine has been offering $1,500 cash over a 3-year period for every kid a woman births. Critics warned this may only lead to more orphaned kids as parents may prefer take the money and abandon the kids. Another potential dislocation migration story waiting to happen.

China’s birthrate dropped for the fifth year in a row last year despite their lifting of the ‘one child policy’ in 2015. It’s their lowest rate since 1949 and the birth of Communist China. Rising living expenses is the number one reason parents give for not having more kids. Two centuries ago, women in the U.S., China, Russia, and India all would have had five kids or more, but now they’re all clumped together around two births per woman – just below the world average of 2.44.

Meanwhile low income countries are declining but average 4.34 children per woman. Many of these countries will also be the first to suffer the effects of climate change, war, and increased risks of poverty.

Nationalists around the world, including the more powerful U.S., China, Russia, and India, cling to a narrative that roots their feet in the ground of a given homeland, as if ordained by their God to take root. They then build border walls that restrict, repel, or release people based on their own delusions of righteousness. This grasping of false identity, yearning for elusive security, hungering for more land, money, and resources, and fretting over dwindling birthrates of their ‘chosen ones’ only makes them tighten their grip on faith, pump their inflated egos, and deepen their roots of nationalism.

Meanwhile, for a myriad of simple and complex reasons, people move. We like to draw lines to form borders and arrows on maps. Draw attention to binary origins and destinations – ‘here’ and ‘there’. But Susan Mains and her colleagues believe arrows are forms of “intellectual violence” and remind us that

“Lines do not determine boundedness of the communities from which folk came; or those to which folk are moving. Instead lines acknowledge that circulation, movement and cultural transfer have been integral to human populations, their cultures and society.”

Cricket, rugby, baseball, and even Jim Thorpe’s American football are all demonstrations of circulation, movement, and cultural transfer. Even the passing glance between me, a middle-aged man of mixed European ethnicity and a boy likely of mixed sub-continental Indian ethnicity is an acknowledgement of cultural transfer. Our age difference broadens the temporal lens of our own colonial origins. Soon he’ll be playing on a cricket pitch in Redmond on colonized land shaped by the people of distance territories.

Hello Interactors,

Wars, gas prices, eventual food and mineral shortages, inflation, a nagging pandemic, homelessness, immigration, migration, social and economic inequities, rising health prices, home prices, climate change, and natural disasters. What am I missing? Global society needs a hug but we’re all afraid to offer one. We need fixed, I believe, but we are fixed in what we believe.

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

TWISTED UP AND HOG TIED

As bombs dropped across Kyiv and surrounding areas last Saturday causing destruction in their path, large missiles were also descending on portions of the state Iowa. These were trees and debris launched by a series of tornados moving at a groundspeed of 45 miles an hour generating winds upwards of 170 miles per hour. They swept across a swath of land 117 miles wide. The storm was rated at a level 4 on a five point scale. Level 4 tornados create devastating damage. Well-constructed houses are leveled; structures with weak foundations are blown some distance away; cars are thrown; large missiles are generated.

This storm swept through the town where I grew up, Norwalk. None of my friends or family were impacted, but seven people died just south of Norwalk in neighboring Lucas County. Another nearby county, Madison – made famous by the book and movie The Bridges of Madison County – was also hit. The National Weather Service said, “This is second longest tornado in Iowa since 1980.”

March is a little early for tornados in Iowa and July is a little late. But last July twelve swept through the state with top wind speeds of 145 miles an hour. And on July 18th of 2018 they had 21 twisters hitting 144 miles per hour.

In 2020 the state was hit with a derecho – a long-lasting wide-spread blast of tornado-level winds that destroyed tens of millions of bushels of corn. Together with the stresses of the pandemic, this event pushed many farmers over the edge. It was enough to prompt Iowa State University to create a program called, “I Worry All the Time: Resources for Life in a Pandemic.” It offers steps to help people answer the question posed by the university’s outreach director, David Brown: “How do we maintain our resilience in the face of these challenges?”

These natural events and human adaptation programs signal what the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms worldwide, “Globally, climate change is increasingly causing injuries, illness, malnutrition, threats to physical and mental health and well-being, and even deaths.” The panel of climate experts warn,

“The extent and magnitude of climate change impacts are larger than estimated in previous assessments. They are causing severe and widespread disruption in nature and in society; reducing our ability to grow nutritious food or provide enough clean drinking water, thus affecting people's health and well-being and damaging livelihoods. In summary, the impacts of climate change are affecting billions of people in many different ways.”

You would think existential threat would be a top concern. Especially among citizens of the United States given our outsized per capita-consumption of energy, goods, and resources. Nope. After President Biden’s recent State of the Union Address, Pew Research reported on a poll taken in January examining American’s views on major national issues.

Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said ‘strengthening the economy’ should be the top priority for the president and Congress to address this year. Second was ‘reducing healthcare costs’ at 61 percent. ‘Dealing with climate change’ came in 14th out of 18 topics with 41 percent believing it is something government should address.

Survey participants who lean both politically Left and Right believe the economy is most important. Though, Republicans believe it more than Democrats. But not my much – 82% versus 62%. A 20 point difference. But on climate change the differential is the largest of all 18 issues surveyed. Only 11% of Republicans surveyed believe the government should prioritize reducing effects of climate change versus 65% of Democrats. That’s a 54 point difference in opinion. This suggests that of all the things Americans are divided on, the one that poses the biggest threat is the one with which we differ the most.

This survey targets adults age 18 living in the United States. I’ve been thinking about those youngest and oldest surveyed. I try to imagine what effects climate change will have on them in 20 years. The IPCC paints a grim picture. They created three periods of time that reflect what life will be like on planet earth given where we are today.

The three periods are near-term (up to 2040), mid-term (2041-2060), and long-term (2061-2100). By 2040, the near term, a good chunk of the upper end of baby-boomers (who dominate federal government) will be dead or nearing death. Those ages 18 today will be 36 in 2040. The year 2100 seems far off, but if that 18 year old is lucky they’ll be 96 in 2100. A child born today will be 78 years old.

They’ll read about those suffering Iowa farmers devastated by natural disasters, economic hardship, and a pandemic with envy. The IPCC says

“children aged ten or younger in the year 2020 are projected to experience a nearly four-fold increase in extreme events under 1.5°C of global warming by 2100, and a five-fold increase under 3°C warming. Such increases in exposure would not be experienced by a person aged 55 in the year 2020 in their remaining lifetime under any warming scenario.”

We are most likely too late to avoid this reality. The focus now is on adaptation. Our multi-legged, winged, and gilled friends are already trying. There is ample evidence of species climbing to higher land, shifting to cooler regions, or diving to greater depths in the ocean. This will have ripple effects throughout the ecosystem on which every living being relies – including humans. We have the mental capacity to do more than other animals than just adapt, but appear unable to do so.

The IPCC says, “Adapting successfully requires an analysis of risks caused by climate change and the implementation of measures in time to reduce these risks.” They ask these five questions:

* Is there an awareness that climate change is causing risks?

* Are the current and future extent of climate risks being assessed?

* Have adaptation measures to reduce these risks been developed and included in planning?

* Are those adaptation measures being implemented?

* Are their implementation and effectiveness in reducing risks monitored and evaluated?

On the first they claim there is increased awareness that climate change is causing these risks. Anecdotally, I see historically climate denying institutions, companies, and individuals calling for adaptation and mitigation strategies and technologies. It’s hard to say how many of them are acknowledging climate change out of fear or just seeking financial gain. Like our healthcare industry, many see opportunity in human suffering as a result of climate change.

But the IPCC also says “given the rate and scope of climate change impacts, actions on assessing and communicating risks, as well as on implementing adaptation are insufficient.” These IPCC reports can’t get any more direct. They conclude,

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.”

GET ALONG LITTLE DOGGIE

Norwalk, Iowa is home to two movie star super-heroes, the lead in “Aquaman” Jason Momoa and Brandon Routh who played Superman in “Superman Returns”. Another famous actor was born in nearby Winterset, Iowa in Madison County – home of the covered bridges. His name is John Wayne.

Or Marion Morrison, as he would have been known back in Winterset. His family moved to California when he was nine. He got the nickname ‘Duke’ when a local fireman started calling him ‘Little Duke’ after frequently seeing him walking his dog, Duke. ‘Duke’ sounded better than Marion and soon everyone was calling him by his nickname, Duke. His stage name, John Wayne, came with his first leading role in the 1930 film The Big Trail.

John Wayne claims to have been a socialist while attending USC pre-law, voted for FDR in 1936 and supported Woodrow Wilson. But by 1944 he became concerned with communism and helped create the politically conservative organization Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. He and its members believed the motion picture industry, and the country, was being infiltrated by communists.

But critics said the organization sympathized with fascists, was anti-Semitic, against unionization, and endorsed the Jim Crow laws of the South. It broke up in 1975, but by then John Wayne’s views were well publicized. He told Playboy magazine in 1971 that

“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility.”

And it’s fitting he often played a cowboy because he believed America was not

“wrong in taking this great country away from the Indians. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

Playing leading roles as both cowboy and war hero, John Wayne became the symbol of American exceptionalism, individualism, strength, and masculinity. When Kirk Douglas played the role of Vincent van Gogh in a 1957 film Wayne told him,

“Christ, Kirk, how can you play a part like that? There's so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not these weak queers."

On welfare John Wayne said,

“I'd like to know why well-educated idiots keep apologizing for lazy and complaining people who think the world owes them a living.”

Ronald Reagan was a close friend of John Wayne. They were both actors, shared conservative worldviews, and had a shared vision for the American ideal that each of them personified. They remain idols of the Republican party to this very day. I’m guessing roughly one-third of the country still align to their worldview. It’s a view that holds hierarchy and authority, usually male authority, in high regard. They believe individuals control their destiny, government should not hold them back, and are skeptical of what John Wayne called ‘well-educated idiots.’

This would likely include the scientists who authored that IPCC report I keep quoting. By extension, they are largely skeptical of the risks of climate change. And they see attempts by the UN, EU, or any governmental agency to enact mitigation measures as impeding individual, industry, and economic progress.

But those who favor a more egalitarian and communitarian worldview see many of these strict social hierarchies and entrenched capitalistic traditions as the sources of social, economic, and environmental inequities and destruction. They seek restrictions on individual gluttony, corporate excesses, and industry exploitation.

This group, often characterized as ‘The Left’, tend to believe that if they could just ‘educate’ the public, especially their counterparts, ‘The Right’, they’d come to realize the threat that we face. They’re convinced education is the answer. Clearly this isn’t working.  

In 2012 a group of scientists decided to test this education theory. What they found is that not only is the theory wrong, but that

“Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest.”

We believe what we want to believe based largely on which crowd we want to be affiliated with and experts are not immune. And ordinary people on both ‘The Left’ and ‘The Right’ use the best available science to justify their beliefs. And the more knowledge we accumulate the more entrenched we become.

This study confirms what others have shown which is we are polarized in our beliefs about climate change. But it also reveals that those who claim to be politically ‘moderate’ or ‘centrist’ don’t necessarily share worldviews despite be co-located on the political spectrum. Those who ‘lean Republican’ or are ‘slightly conservative’ and those who are ‘Independent’, ‘lean Democrat’, or are ‘slightly liberal’ showed their respective opinions on climate risk were exceedingly different than those claiming to be decidedly ‘conservative Republicans’ and ‘liberal Democrats.’

In other words, their study suggests polarization isn’t just about Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, or the Far Right and Far Left, it’s about our individual worldviews and the communities we pick. And, importantly, what opinions members of those communities deem acceptable to believe and communicate. The risk of be ostracized by your in-group is so great that we resist admitting we may agree with some of what the out-group believes – even if deep down we believe it to be truthful.

Here’s an extreme example inspired by the study. Imagine a diehard Republican Iowa farmer, Scott, who lost a family member in one of those tornados. Perhaps he heard of a farmer friend of a friend who had crops damaged by those storms in 2020 and became bankrupt. Scott may have become so troubled and anxious that he even attended one of those therapy sessions Iowa State University holds.

Somehow these unfortunate life events eventually convinced him climate change is real, but he largely keeps his opinion to himself for fear of not fitting in. Then one day he gets invited to go on a hunting trip in North Dakota by an old high school friend who works on a fracking rig. There he is surrounded by his buddy’s work pals, oil guys, talking s**t about liberals who get riled up over climate change. How likely is Scott to admit to these guys that he believes in climate change? It makes no difference that he’s a Republican or they are, he knows it’s his clan and he knows the social cost of speaking his mind. He knows climate denial is part of what keeps him in the club.

On the other side, the environmental science community and some activists, across the mostly liberal spectrum, are splintering over mixed worldviews on energy policy. Many environmental scientists weigh the risk of human lives due to climate change against accidents from nuclear energy reactors and are coming out in support of nuclear energy. They get skewered on Twitter for advocating in favor of nuclear power even though they’re doing it in the name of saving lives and the planet. The “No Nukes” movement of the 70s is so strong to this day among the environmentalist crew that anybody who dares to say “Yes to Nukes” is shamed, blamed, and defamed.

It turns out that when we feel bounded in our rationality, we are really good at seeking knowledge to unbind it. Psychologists and sociologists called it ‘motivated cognition’. Our memory does it on our behalf. For example, we tend to remember our successes more than failures. And if a recollection of an event doesn’t match our current worldview, we’ll unknowingly reshape the memory to suit our current motives.

We also tend to preference and ingest new and novel information when it suits our immediate interest and desires. We tend to want to believe a study even when we know the sample size is too small or is poorly designed. This makes bite sized social media fed by our social feeds perfect appetizers for the full meal deal found in a longer article, news report, podcast, or talk show.

But this study – that my own motivated cognition led me to – points to an even more weighty form of cognition: ‘cultural cognition’. This theory is frequently used to better understand how we evaluate risk. It states that our personal values are what lead us to seek facts so we may conduct our own risk analysis. And we are more likely to believe what our in-group wants us to believe than what may actually be true.

LOVE ‘EM UP

We live in a diverse society of conflicting opinions. For us to minimize the effects of climate change, to make kids born today not suffer more than they have to, we’re going to have to come together now. Yesterday.

So what do we do? Sadly, there are more studies identifying these behaviors and theories explaining them then there are confirming solutions. But the authors of the study offer a clue. It has to do with minimizing the self-threat people feel when confronted with information they disagree with…or more specifically, with opinions and knowledge they deem representative of the out-group.

When we are presented information that affirms our beliefs, we use that as evidence to bolster our position in our in-group. This is referred to as self-affirmation bias. It’s what keeps us polarized in our camps. It makes us feel good and raises our self-esteem. But there are many things that can raise our self-esteem that aren’t related to our consumption of self-affirming sound bites.

When we’re presented with information that feeds our self-affirmation bias we have a choice to make. We can gobble it up as another self-esteem boost or we can interrogate, question, and evaluate it. We have agency to choose whether this is true or not or even worthy of consideration.

And studies have shown that the best way to get ourselves in this frame of mind is to find another way to boost our self-esteem before consuming the information. Just by writing down one thing that we value about ourselves or others value in us is all it takes. That self-esteem boost is sufficient enough that we loose the craving for that self-affirming nugget of information being fed to us from members of our tribe.

For example, in one study they found

“a capital punishment proponent should feel more open to evidence challenging the death penalty’s effectiveness if he or she feels affirmed as a good friend or valued employee. Self-affirmations, [they] argue, trivialize the attitude as a source of self-worth and thus make it easier to give up.”

This reminds me of the Seattle Seahawks head coach approach to coaching. Pete Carroll is known for signing players who excelled at one position in college or professionally and then convincing, converting, and committing them to become equally proficient, or more, in a different position. They are invariably resistant. After all, they have their ego, identity, and paycheck wrapped up in their history as a certain kind of player in a particular position. They’ve even created their own in-group fan club they don’t want to disappoint.

Carroll’s solution is very easy and unorthodox for a football coach. Instead of focusing on what new skills they need to learn, an anxiety he knows they already possess, he reminds them of what they’re good at. He builds up their self-esteem by focusing on them as humans or on their athletic skills unrelated to the position. As Pete says, “I love ‘em up.”

He finds that within a short time they are the ones that come to him saying, “Coach, I think I’m ready to try that position.” He barely has to mention it. By boosting their self-esteem Coach Carroll puts them in a frame of mind whereby they no longer need to rely on their ego boosting, self-affirming biased past to feel good about themselves. And, by in large, they’re better for it.

This demonstrates that we need not wait for others to find alternative ways to build self-esteem. When confronted with people who you find resistant to your position on issues to do with the environment, economy, or equity try offering them a compliment. Maybe ask them what makes them feel good in the world. Ask them what they like doing, what they’re good at. Maybe even ask them what they fear.

You’ll be triggering pangs of self-esteem in them. You’ll be reminding them of how special they are. And let’s face it, we’re all special and we’re all afraid of something. My experience is that when I do, I may not win them over right there and then – or ever – but I just might find what we have in common. You may find, as I have, that just by this act you’ve boosted your own self-esteem such that you may be open to their opinions.

I wonder what would happen if our friend Scott, the right-wing farmer in Iowa, reminded a couple of those North Dakota frackers what makes them special. Maybe it’s a hidden talent, hobby, or award they earned at work. And I wonder if in doing so he would have found an opening to ask them about what they really felt about fracking, fossil fuel, and the impact it was having on the land they were walking on and the animals they were hunting. For all we know, they’re all afraid of the effects of climate change but fear the backlash from their peers more than the world ending.

The latest IPCC report emphasizes the complexities surrounding the interaction of people and place and the role these interdependent interactions play in the cause and effects of climate change. They write, “This report has a strong focus on the interactions among the coupled systems climate, ecosystems (including their biodiversity) and human society. These interactions are the basis of emerging risks from climate change, ecosystem degradation and biodiversity loss and, at the same time, offer opportunities for the future.”

They go on to state that “Human society causes climate change…impacts ecosystems and can restore and conserve them.” [my emphasis] They also remind us that

“Meeting the objectives of climate resilient development thereby supporting human, ecosystem and planetary health, as well as human well-being, requires society and ecosystems to move over (transition) to a more resilient state.”

A sizable chunk of disadvantaged members of our global community have been forced into a perpetual and exhausting resilient state for centuries. All at the hands of generations of a relatively small advantaged few. The outreach director at Iowa State asked weary farmers, “How do we maintain our resilience in the face of these challenges?”

Our increased polarization is taxing the resiliency of our respective out-groups. It’s time we restore and conserve them, embrace the diversity of opinion, recognize all worldviews are coupled systems that make up the messy but necessary human condition. Yes we have a climate crisis, but we also have an empathy crisis. Planetary health starts with mental well-being. Let’s boost our own self-esteem, the esteemed members of our clan, and even those you can’t stand. Those born today will appreciate it when they’re your age.

Hello Interactors,

The 80s band Tears for Fears released a new album recently. Their biggest hit, Everybody Wants to Rule the World has new meaning this week. What is it about empire building sociopaths in the West and the East that makes everybody want them to stop trying to rule the world?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

CHRONICLING THE TRUTH OF THE RUS

Rurik, a Norse Viking prince, made his way south from present day Denmark, to establish a ruling government in Novgorod in what is now Russia. He was invited by Slavik and Finn-Ugrik people to apply his governing skills to their feuding tribes.

Rurik then extended his presence further south to a city called Kiev in 850. It took another 1000 years for Kiev to be pronounced Kyiv in Ukrainian. In Russian it’s still pronounced Kiev. This outpost became the center of what became the Kievan Rus; a loose collection of Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic peoples of Eastern and Northern Europe. The city was well positioned on a visible bank on a northern edge of the Dnieper River. Its convenient and defensible position allowed Rurik to reign over what became the Rurik Dynasty.

The people of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus all stake claim to this origin story.

Rurik was replaced in 882 by his kinsman Oleg. It was Oleg that declared Kiev to be the capital of the Kievan Rus. Given the nexus of trading activity in Kiev it became a contested region. Oleg led many wars against semi-nomadic tribes from the south and the east.

One hundred years later one of those leaders from the east, the Byzantine ruler Basil II, came asking for money. Then leader Vladimir of Kiev agreed so long as he could marry his sister. Basil II gave his sister over on the condition Vladimir, a pagan, convert to Orthodox Christianity. He not only agreed, but insisted everyone in the region convert as well. He baptized the people of Rus in 988 and just like that Christianity was spread throughout the region.

This Rus-Byzantine religio-political arrangement was no doubt influenced by the Roman Catholic Church who sought influence over this important Eurasian borderland. By 1054 there came an East-West schism in the church. Eastern Orthodox churches in Constantinople and those in Rome each viewed the other as drifting from the ‘true church’. They split between Orthodox Catholics of the East and Roman Catholics of the West. Though they both continued to largely share the same beliefs and practices.

There is no central Orthodox Church in Ukraine any longer. It has since splintered into a variety of denominations along with a myriad of other religions. It’s estimated 75% of Ukrainians believe in a Christian God. But another East-West schism has emerged this week as Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill seek to pull Ukraine back from the allure of the West. They both seek a centralized Russian Orthodox Church under Kirill and a central government under Putin. A forced religio-political unification of the people of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine under a single language, religion, and government. Echoes of Oleg and Rurik and historic east-west tensions – Vladimir of Kiev meets Vladimir Putin.

In 1113 a document called The Primary Chronicle was written from which this history is documented. The first sentence reads,

“These are the narratives of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus’, the first princes of Kiev, and from what source the land of Rus’ had its beginning.”

Seventy-four years later came another source of regional history, the Hypatian Chronicles, and with it the first printed occurrence of the word Oukraina – Ukraine.

The etymology of this word is debated to this day. The most popular interpretation comes from a Slavic word for ‘borderland’ or ‘frontier region’ but others argue it’s more possessive as in ‘territory’. Perspectives are as variable as their lineages.

A Dutch map from 1645 shows the word Okraina in the middle of wilderness. Wild indeed. By this time in history this region was known to be wild with wars fought over its land, riches, and strategic position between Europe and Asia. From the days of Rurik to today territories in western Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova have cyclically been claimed by Germany, Astro-Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. These boundaries have been contested, drawn, and redrawn since the invention of maps.

Maps played a significant role in attempts to ‘permanently’ define the boundaries of territories, and so did the proliferation of books that defined their historic narratives. The Gutenberg press, invented in the late 1400s, offered those with power and money to write and disseminate narratives coincident with territorial boundary maps that fit their view of the world and of history. This was the world’s first use of mass-media to control a particular geo-religio-political narrative and competing counter-narratives concerning regional communities. Many of which were communities of the imagination.

NATIONALISM; JUST IMAGINE

Imagined Communities is the title of a book by a Cornell political scientist, Benedict Anderson. He addresses the still vague notion of ‘nationalism’ – a squishy idea with a powerful force. He argues for a definition that transcends historical attempts to define it by self-interested ideologues. The word ‘nationalism’ was not widely used until the 19th century. It has since become a term we insist on ascribing to every human just as we do gender, race, or ethnicity

The Scottish political theorist Tom Nairn wrote,

“’Nationalism’ is the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual…and largely incurable.’”

Anderson proposes this definition of nation: “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” By imagined he means even the most sparsely populated nation will include enough people that one will ever be able to know, meet, or even hear their fellow residents. And yet, everyone claims to be able to imagine who they are. The British-Czech social anthropologist, Ernest Gellner succinctly writes,

“‘Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.’”

Imagined communities became sovereign nations during ‘The Enlightenment’. Faced with historical dominion by religions while simultaneously discovering the multitude of religions in the world, even the most devote elite came alive with dreams of their own imagined free nations – accepting they must also fall under the guise of a given God. Hence the existence of the United States – one nation under God.

A God that some interpret as encouraging, excusing, or mysteriously ignoring communal inequalities and exploits in the name of national identity and comradeship that runs as deep as it does wide. As Anderson surmises,

“Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

One of the unifying elements of these imagined communities is language. In the 18th and 19th century the people of the northern Balkans witnessed the invention of a number of literary languages. In the 18th century the Ukrainian language was ‘tolerated’ by the more dominant Russian speaking population as a folk language spoken by yokels in Ukraine – or “Little Russia” as it was called.

But in 1798 Ivan Kotlarevsky, a Ukrainian writer, wrote a poem in Ukrainian about life in Ukraine. It became very popular. Six years later, in 1804, the Kharkov University was founded and became the literary hub of Ukraine. In 1819 the first publication of Ukrainian grammar was printed. Russian grammar was defined just 17 years prior.

By 1830 more Ukrainian writers were published in their native language. This is the date that established the language as a bonding element of Ukrainian nationalism. In 1846 the first nationalist organization was founded. And not by a politician with a sovereign agenda, but by a historian.

Language invention was happening in many places during this time. In 1820 Finland, for example, an interest in Finnish tradition and culture emerged and was written in Latin and Swedish. This created a groundswell of nationalism by writers, teachers, pastors, and attorneys. They stitched their collective past stories and dialects and published dictionaries and grammar guides. They forge a more confident and self-determined government and national identity defined by their borders and their language.

These writers, lexicographers, folklorists, and composers were not acting solely out of national pride, but to feed a burgeoning print market. And who were they selling to? Affluent and powerful families. Only half of the most advanced states in Europe were able to read in 1840. Over ninety percent of Russians could not read.

But it wasn’t just the old ruling classes and nobility that were becoming literate. A rising middle class was emerging. Former plebes and appendices amassed wealth and become professionals in a growing worldwide commercial and industrial economy. And with it a growing number of wealthy upper class – the nouveau bourgeoises.

As the number of capitalist and wealthy land owners increased through the rise of the industrial age, so did the number of languages they spoke. Latin was displaced by local dialects. This enhanced the bond between commercial and political elite separated by distant cities but united by their language, national identity, and status. Status is what they shared with those in other nations that may not speak their language. Whether it was across a border or an ocean, they knew they were dealing with another well-educated, wealthy man beaming with national pride just like them.

And with this growth in wealth and status came increased investment, bureaucracy, and debt in budding nation states. Infrastructure, civil and social services, and militaries were needed. Between 1830 and 1850, Russia’s expenditures grew 44 percent, 75 percent in America, and over 90 percent in Netherlands. All amidst the proliferation of print media in a local vernacular aimed to strengthen the bonds of a growing population of literate masses; imagined communities forged together in a shared belief of an illusory nation, identity, and an expected entrenched in-group allegiance to an irregularly shaped border drawn on a map by someone invested in securing it.

TRUST EMPATHY

The national borders of Ukraine were absorbed into the larger Soviet Union in 1944. The Dnieper River forms a natural east-west boundary that also divides ethnicities. Putin has strategically captured those cities in Ukraine that already have sizable ethnic Russian populations. These cities have a long history of bouncing back and forth between more ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ ruling nation states.

My brief version of this rich and complex history cannot be reduced to east versus west, good versus evil, or Russian versus Ukraine. And yet that’s what mass media does every single day. Our brains seek efficiency, our short attention spans lead us to crave easy answers – a team to root for, a nation to blame, a person to hate. An imagined community which to affiliate.

Whether it’s The Primary Chronicle of the early Rus, the dissemination of Gutenberg pressed books, invented languages, or mass-media pumping out sound bites they all share a common goal. They propagate propaganda from a group of selected, elected, or protected imperialists and (usually) capitalists invested in perpetuating, protecting, and expanding imagined nations. They speak, act, and plot on behalf of a group of diverse collections of people; portions of whom believe they share something in common, a common identity, an imagined community. Nationalists.

But another portion of whom see these imaginary nations as vacuous, illusory, and increasingly weakened by a growing global cyber-connected mass of humanity. They are introduced to, awakened by, ‘woke’ to the widespread voices of the historically squelched, discarded, sidelined, and suffering. Individual lives directly impacted by powerful, greedy, and imperialistic power brokers.

The three most dominant modern-day authors of nationalism, select sorcerers of imagined communities, and cunning cartographers of calculated cartesian colonies are China, Russia, and the United States.

Their influence can come in three flavors:

* Formal geo-politics by academics, intellectuals, and think tanks. One example is The Pentagon’s New Map of 2004.

* Practical geo-politics by politicians. For example, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ or Obama’s ‘world without weapons’ – a drone policy that targeted and killed innocent people in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.

* Popular geo-politics by filmmakers, artists, and musicians. These geo-political messages target ordinary people in books as inert as Readers Digest or as overt as James Bond books and films. Not to mention the more obvious Captain America.

These catalysts of nationalism contain messages that create unhealthy biases in ways that only neuroscience can detect. Neuroscientist Emile Bruneau dedicated his academic and professional career to achieving peace in the world by understanding the negative effects of bias, often fed by governments through media, can have on behavior.

As an undergrad he worked as a counselor in Ireland with a non-profit that brought troubled youth riddled with the historic tensions of their Protestant and Catholic upbringing. After a week of successful trust building between these kids, the staff were patting themselves on their altruistic backs for a job well done.

And then, unexpectedly, a fight broke out between two boys. The next thing they knew all 129 kids were wailing on each other. He left that experience convinced he and his fellow counselors had somehow made their condition worse. He sought neuroscience to help him uncover the biological evidence behind what he experienced.

What Bruneau’s novel research techniques have revealed are three aspects of our intuition that we should evaluate with care, caution, and suspicion: trust, empathy, and dehumanization.

* Trust: For the first time those Irish kids trusted each other despite their differences. But the instance that trust was broken betrayal set in and with it violence toward the perpetrator. The greater the trust, the greater the fall at the first sign of betrayal. Altruism isn’t always true nor is it always permanent.

* Empathy: Having empathy is a prized virtue especially in intergroup conflict. Western media has clued into this. Muslim terrorists are portrayed as violent and selfish sociopaths who lack even an ounce of empathy for others. And yet the first woman Palestinian suicide bomber, Wafa Idris, was one of the most caring, sensitive, and selfless members of her community. She even trained as a volunteer medic. Bruneau discovered the measure of one’s empathy is not a predictor of violent behavior. But what is a consistently strong predictor is the gap between empathy for your own in-group relative to the empathy for the out-group.

* Dehumanization: The sure fire way to reduce empathy for an out-group is to dehumanize them. History is ripe with nation states bombarding their imagined communities with images and words depicting their enemies as animals. As the British colonized Ireland they portrayed the Irish as monkeys. The Germans portrayed Jews as rats. The US pulled, and continue to pull, from a veritable zoo of animals to portray Japanese, Germans, Iranians, Mexicans…the list is embarrassingly long.

When the U.S. was negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran Mike Huckabee was quoted as saying, “I think we underestimate the radical nature of these animals who run Iran.” The accompanying graphic, presumably from Fox News, included an illustration of a sewer drain over Iran with insects streaming from it.

Bruneau used this occasion to conduct an online experiment. He presented Americans with a picture of the evolution of humans from the hunched chimpanzee to upright homo sapiens. Beneath it were three sliders; one for Americans, Europeans, and Iranians. He then asked them to slide the slider to the appropriate stage in evolution from animal to human for each group. Iranians fell 13 points shy of the reportedly 100% human Americans and Europeans.

He conducted similar experiments while people’s brains were being scanned by an MRI machine. When people were shown imagery of out-groups or people in social classes lower than their own, like the homeless, the same region of the brain was activated for those people as for animals.

But here’s the good news. Bruneau said he can find small sets people where these effects are minimized. They’re people whose occupations lead them to have empathy for out-groups. For example, Israeli peace activists brainwaves match those of Palestinians. They’re indistinguishable.

Bruneau discovered that just five minutes of explaining what happens in our brains is enough for people to shift their behavior toward empathy for members of an out-group. If you reveal the fact that bias exists in all of us, we’re motivated to overcome it.

As we continue to be inundated with words and images by academics, intellectuals, think tanks, politicians, pundits, broadcasters, artists, cartoonists, mapmakers and other creators of mass-media, be mindful of how they portray Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. Know that Russian, Ukrainian, American, and European political and commercial institutions have a vested interest in preserving their imagined communities.

Those representing the interest of the geo-political states of Russia, China, and the United States will, as always, be using dehumanizing tactics as a way to reduce empathy for members of out-groups while boosting empathy for their own in-groups. It’s this gap, Emile Bruneau warns, that we need to mind.

I feel pressure every day to take a side in this war, but I’m trying to resist. Putin must be stopped, that much I know. But if I must choose, I choose ordinary people and other members of our animal world. I choose empathy for the Russian mother whose son is being forced to commit crimes against humanity; empathy for the Jews throughout Ukraine who have experienced extermination attempts at the hands of both Russian and Ukrainian hate groups over the years; empathy for those fighting for their lives in Ukraine, seeking asylum in other lands, and the brave souls who continue to share real images and stories from a living hell brought on by yet another sociopathic imperialist.

I am suspicious of attempts by governments and corporations that ask me to trust them, to side with them, given centuries of betrayal. Yet I need government and companies to live a safe and comfortable life. And I need them to act on behalf of the living world and not imagined communities. I seek empathy for all creatures who feel depressed, suppressed, or oppressed by their political and commercial institutions, contained by their imaginary borders, and routinely manipulated through dehumanizing mass media propaganda that only serves to widen humanity’s collective empathy gaps.

It is believed that the Slavic people seeking peace in their land said to Rurik, 'Our land is great and rich, but there’s no order in it'. Those words have never been more true. Though, I suspect a Viking ruler lacked empathy for out-groups. But, then again, it was Christians who painted horns on the helmets of Norse sailors to dehumanize them as the devil.

Hello Interactors,

There’s talk of turning a nearby hotel into transitional housing for the homeless. Everyone agrees the county needs to address the homeless crisis, but they never imagined the solution would impact them. What is it about people that makes them reluctant to share their space with those who have been displaced and disgraced?

As interactors, you’re special individuals self-selected to be a part of an evolutionary journey. You’re also members of an attentive community so I welcome your participation.

Please leave your comments below or email me directly.

Now let’s go…

GET OFF MY LAWN

I joke that Bellevue – once a sleepy Seattle suburb – will one day become the Manhattan to Seattle’s Brooklyn. If real estate prices are an indicator, it’s already happened. The median price of a Bellevue home is now $1.56 million compared to Manhattan’s $1.25. It’s even greater than San Francisco’s median price of $1.33 million. But San Fran’s own wealthy suburb, Sunnyvale, has a median price of $1.69 million which some believe will be eclipsed by Bellevue by the end of this summer.

The population in western Washington’s Puget Sound region has grown exponentially in the last 60 years – from 1.5 million people in 1960 to 4.3 million in 2020. King County, which includes, among others, Seattle, Bellevue, and Kirkland, is just one of five counties in the country to add more than 300,000 people in the last ten years.

These two factors, record high home values and exponential population growth, has created a housing and homelessness crisis. King County estimates “about 40,800 people in 2020 and 45,300 people in 2019 experienced homelessness at some point in the year.” It prompted the creation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Their “mission is to significantly decrease the incidence of homelessness throughout King County, using equity and social justice principles.” The organization is led by Marc Dones.

Dones recently spoke at a U.S. Congressional hearing on “Addressing Challenges in Serving People Experiencing Homelessness.” Dones talked about how prior investments “have been over focused on service systems” and not on actually housing the homeless. They said, “it simply doesn’t matter how many social workers attend to a person’s needs…if we don’t have anywhere for them to go.”

They continued,

“homelessness disproportionately impacts people of color as a direct result of this country’s history of racialized exclusion from housing. While Black people represent only 12% of the general population, we routinely make up 30 – 40% (or more) of the homelessness population. Native people, who make up only 1% of the general population, often make up 3 – 6% of the population experiencing homelessness.”

“Homelessness is an economic issue. It’s about not having the money to pay the rent.”, Dones said. It’s long been a problem, but Dones is calling for the county to respond as if it is a crisis. They recommend acquiring and repurposing hotels and motels. Dones says, “it’s critical to double down on supporting communities to engage in this work now, to rapidly online housing and shelter options that can bring people inside.”

One such acquisition the county is considering is a La Quinta Inn that sits right on the border of Kirkland and Bellevue. It’s conveniently located near a major highway onramp to Seattle, close to a transit hub, and has easy access to bike paths. But it’s also next to a handful of daycares, private schools, and affluent, predominantly White, neighborhoods.

It’s rumored one of the La Quinta employees leaked the news the county was considering the purchase. The Kirkland City Manager was forced to issue a public statement ahead of the typical public review process. As you might imagine, it exploded. Parents of children who’s kids attend nearby schools became terrified of the thought of homeless people being housed next to their kids. Area residents fumed over what this might do to their neighborhoods and home values. Over 3,000 people signed a petition opposing the purchase. Others expressed gratitude that the county was finally acting on the crisis and applauded Kirkland’s willingness to work with the county on making this location a success.

Most of the public comment I witnessed dwelled on drug use, gun violence, and sex offenders. These are legitimate concerns grounded in real fear that are not to be diminished. Alcoholism, domestic violence, and sex abuse can all increase the risk of becoming homeless, but they can also be introduced and perpetuated because of homelessness. People can also turn to alcohol and drugs in the lead up to loosing a job or a home. Substance abuse can become a means of numbing the pains of living on the street. The bodily discomfort of sleeping on the ground, the mental anguish that comes with being ignored or shamed by society, and the physical and cognitive stress that comes with increased vulnerability to crime and violence would make anyone seek comfort from drugs or alcohol.

Meanwhile, one 2021 study reveals how “homeless youths frequently engage in survival sex as a means to get their basic needs met…The literature suggests that coercion, economic necessity, substance use, and having friends and peers involved in survival sex are key factors...” The researcher concludes that solutions should not only focus on getting these youth trauma-informed care and treatments for substance abuse, but also jobs and to “help secure transitional or stable housing.”

It's what leads Marc Dones to stress,

“The reality is that every day we allow someone to experience homelessness, the harder it will be for us to connect them with the resources they need.”

Homelessness in America increased notably in the early 80s. In 1983 there was a sudden and dramatic increase in homelessness after the 1981-82 recession. It resulted in the formation of the Emergency Food and Shelter Program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). It specifically calls for "sensitivity to the transition from temporary shelter to permanent homes and attention to the specialized needs of homeless individuals with mental and physical disabilities and illness and to facilitate access for homeless individuals to other sources of services and benefits."

Long time Urban Institute researcher Martha Burt was asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the program in the early 80s. She said it was too convenient to blame the recession alone for this increase. Others pointed to the Reagan administration policies that cut funding for social services and mental healthcare facilities that were more abundant in the 1970s. But she resisted attempts to pin causes on any one single factor. She said,

“The causes of homelessness include structural factors, personal factors, and public policy. Most important, homelessness is associated with poverty and the accompanying inability to afford housing…”

She found the housing problem fell into two buckets: One, some cities simply have a housing shortage. Two, those with sufficient housing have units that are too expensive. Those who can’t make rent or mortgage payments typically exhibit physical, mental, addictive, educational, or social disabilities and deficits. This makes them more vulnerable than the rest of the population. She found this to be a “failure of social and mental health support programs, and the absence of any coordinated efforts that include government housing resources.”

After 40 years of continually increasing homelessness, King County is finally trying heed her advice and are coordinating efforts with city governments and private parties to provide government housing resources. We may actually be on a path to bringing relief to victims of homelessness – to our King County neighbors who are suffering and vulnerable. So why are so many Kirkland and nearby Bellevue residents insistent on casting themselves as suburban victims of a government that is attempting to solve an urban problem everyone admits we have?

Is it because these people believe their suburban space is being invaded by what they perceive to be strictly urban problems? The homeless and homelessness are both undesirable elements of society that many see as an urban problem. Modern suburbia was invented as a place nearby desirable urban resources but detached from ugly urban realities. But it wasn’t always that way.

MY SPACE

The word suburb comes from Latin: sub- ‘near to’ + urb ‘city’. Early suburbs were areas outside the walls of cities that hemmed in the privileged and weeded out those engaged in undesirable, polluting, dangerous, and agricultural pursuits. By 17th century England, especially around London, the suburbs were considered “inferior, debased, and licentious”. A suburban sinner was slang for “loose woman, prostitute.” In 1613 Shakespeare wrote, “There’s a trim rabble let in, are all these your faithfull friends o’ th’ Suburbs?”

In the United States suburbs began appearing in the 1820s as ‘borderlands’. Then by 1850 they became picturesque enclaves in response to the ill-effects of the industrial age. That prompted the expansion and development of rural land connected by rail called ‘streetcar buildouts’ in 1870. Then came Sears and Roebuck ‘mail-order’ homes that resulted in ‘self-built’ suburbs starting in 1900. By 1940 mass-produced ‘sitcom’ suburbs emerged which were accelerated by freeway and highway expansion. This allowed for faster commuting in private vehicles from developments far from urban cores creating the ‘edge nodes’ of the 1960s. And by the 1980s suburbs stretched into the ‘rural fringes’.

Each of these periods of suburban development were catalyzed by responses to the conditions the previous periods created. Each sought to escape the other. The last three periods of which were aided by federal subsidies like the home mortgage interest deduction. But these schemes locked out poor people and especially people of color and other ethnic and religious minorities. Meanwhile, local governments and private developers created restrictive zoning laws and covenants that dictated what kind of homes could be built and who could live in them. Those unqualified were confined to urban regions and systematically blocked from living in the suburbs. The effects are alive today.

Black home ownership in the Puget Sound has declined from 36% in 2000 to 30% today. Even in once segregated areas of Seattle Black home ownership is down as increasing housing prices force them further from the area. But there are only so many places they can go.

In 1990, in response to ever expanding suburban developments in the ‘rural fringes’, the state passed a Growth Management Act that curtailed further conversion of rural land into yet another suburb. As the population increases in an area restricted spatially, it puts pressure on building more housing on existing land. But zoning laws in single family neighborhoods restrict duplexes, triplexes, or even small apartments and condos from being built. As a result, problems once contained to urban areas, like homelessness, spill over into these neighborhoods and surrounding suburban areas.

When Seattle created their first suburb, they annexed a remote area around an algae plumed lake called Green Lake. Some Seattle residents fumed that officials would waste resources on such a remote area. Meanwhile, others were eager to escape an increasingly bustling Seattle for a shiny new suburb to the north. No one today would recognize or regard Green Lake as a suburb. Most Green Lake home owners would scoff at the accusation they live in a suburb! But they’re also scoffing at their homeless neighbors residing in the tents pitched in the popular park that surrounds it. A plight they could have never imagined.

Nor could residents of Bellevue and Kirkland imagine transitional homeless accommodations in their backyards. Many chose to live in the suburbs because they feared aspects of city life, like the homeless. Some of those same people also fear those who look, pray, or act different from them. They bristle at the thought of them becoming ‘their’ neighbors, frequenting ‘their’ stores, and walking ‘their’ sidewalks. Choosing to live nearby the city also meant living apart from ‘those’ people. They thought, “Give me my space, because this is my place.”

This distinction between space and place is vague practically and linguistically. Space requires context and can shift in granularity from a place on a shelf to my place in the universe. But for the purpose of this essay, let’s stick to the dictionary of geography. It offers a space-oriented definition of place that says they are spaces “’organized into places often thought of as bounded settings in which social relations and identity are constituted’”.

These relations and identities are shaped over time. Kirkland and Bellevue, as prime examples, were created as White suburbs of Seattle especially after the timber, steel, and coal industries dried up. But even housing for these workers were segregated. It’s now unlawful to segregate suburbs, but zoning restrictions and property values still create ‘bounded settings’ that indirectly create and maintain certain ‘social relations and identity’ found in that definition of ‘place’. A place that historically and still predominantly centers on exclusionary White culture – a culture currently being challenged by undeniable shifting demographics.

The Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan says places are “archives of fond memories.” “’To know the place’”, he says, “’is to know the past.’” The Canadian geographer Edward Relph says places are “’the present expressions of past experiences and events and of hopes for the future.’” Tuan says, “’it is only the repetition of experiences that turn[s] space into place.’”

This repetition enhances memories that also serve a spatial cognitive function – orientation and navigation. Our memory forms cognitive maps that not only organize and arrange components of the environment in our mind, but also the ordered pattern in which they come together to get us from point A to B. These relative locational assignments of places are triggered by memories and help cement these divisions between urban and suburban spaces. For suburban dwellers, homeless encampments become physical geographic landmarks ‘over there’ relative to ’here’. That space is their place over there and this space is my place over here.

An uncomfortable interaction with a homeless person in a specific geographical location can form a memory that gets cataloged as a landmark. These experiences give meaning to places. We want to be distanced from locations formed by negative experiences while seeking safety, security, and comfort in places shaped by positive experiences. In the book, Sense of Place, Fritz Steele writes,

“’place is created by the setting combined with what the person brings to it. In other words, to some degree, we create our own places; they do not exist independently of us.’”

LANDING IN A PEACEFUL PLACE

The geographer’s John Agnew and James Duncan highlight “three major elements of place:

* locale, where the social relations are constituted;

* location, which is the geographic areas…that frame the localized social actions and networks;

* and sense of place, which is defined as the ‘local structure of feeling.’”

One of the ways to structure feelings of place is by shaping the social relations of a given locale. One way to do this is for local governments to pass ordinances that shape the environment through law. It’s what the geographer Susan Massey calls “politicized space” and it’s what redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and rigged home mortgage agreements were all about.

The Civil Rights Law of 1964 makes it illegal to create such outwardly biased laws and legal agreements. But intentional and unintentional biases still exists. To help make progress on more equitable housing, the state of Washington signed into a law last year a provision requiring cities to eliminate barriers that could provide emergency or transitional housing. It also requires by law that cities incorporate solutions to affordable housing in their city’s comprehensive plans.

But local politicians and staff intent on perpetuating a certain “culture of place” find creative ways to do so. Medina appears to be once such city. Medina is a sleepy little wooded enclave abutting Lake Washington just west of downtown Bellevue. It’s home to some of the region’s super-wealthy, including Bill Gates. The median price for a home in Medina is $7.15 million.

On Valentine’s Day last week, the city of Medina issued a memo that included draft revisions to some of their zoning ordinances in response to the new state law. While they can’t outright restrict attempts to build transitional or affordable housing, they can limit them. It’s still debatable as to whether this language will be deemed too restrictive. One proposal says “permanent supportive and transitional housing facilities are permitted”, but under certain conditions.

The list of conditions is long but here are a few,

* The number of “standard dwelling units” on a given piece of land must be limited…presumably to one given the strict single family home zoning laws.

* The units cannot exceed a maximum of “eight residents at any one time, plus up to four resident staff.”

* Facilities must be a “24-hour a day facility where rooms or units are assigned to specific residents for the duration of their stay” with a minimum stay of 72 hours.

* Meals, laundry, and social programs “are limited to the residents and not available for drop in use by non-residents.”

* No facilities “may be located within half a mile of another” facility “calculated as a radius from the property lines of the site.”

I can’t help but imagine small high-security pseudo prisons as I read these restrictions. But on the positive side, it’s a start. And a big step for a city like Medina.

I don’t know who’s crafting these words but I can imagine they’re keen to uphold a certain suburban nostalgia of an idyllic, bucolic, and affluent reserve. But let’s not forget this is a plot of land stolen from Indigenous people, raped of old growth forest for timber, tilled to grow crops for Seattleites, and then carved up by developers to build a golf course and fancy homes a short distance across the lake from the Emerald City. An itty bitty bit of pretty nearby but distant from the nitty-gritty city.

In the Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography, Pragya Agarwal, summarizes that,

“Place is inherently spatial. However place is not static, and time cannot be detached from place.” She adds, “Not only is time associated with change in the physical aspects of place, but also the meanings of place are variable and dynamic…”

The separation of place and space is inherently vague and ever changing. We are all experiencing morphing societal normality, increasing population reality, forcing an adaptation of our spatial capacity. Our emotions are informed by our experiences, shaped by the interactions we have with people and place. As Herb Simon says,

“The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

It's true nobody dreamed the Kirkland La Quinta would become a single occupancy transitional home to hundreds of victims of homelessness. But then again, nobody born into this world dreams of becoming homeless. For all of us to get comfortable, we should consider the patterns of suburban sprawl and recognize there is no escaping the complex and bitter realities that surround us.

It’s the yearning to escape that these nearby places take shape. But suburban formation breeds urban damnation. Spatial attempts to avoid distress, leads to contempt of places of homelessness. Let’s drop the pretense and nostalgic purity, and gift our neighbors with housing security.