#cultural geography

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[hezigler]

An Uber driver's views on Greater Cincinnati neighborhoods

Note: There are many neighborhoods that have White Tail Deer. In some areas of southwestern Ohio and northern Kentucky, more deer are killed by cars and trucks than hunters.

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[noctilionoidea]

Yeehaw it’s my favourite western character Texas man from British vampire gothic horror by famous Irish guy

[noticiasarquelogicasjaponesas]

[prokopetz]

This whole European bike helmet debate is somehow reminding me of that post that was going around a couple of years back claiming the reason American-style lemonade isn't a thing in Europe is because in Europe only hippies and children drink fruit juice – for everyone else it's exclusively a soda flavoring and/or a mixer for alcoholic beverages.

[fatehbaz]

when the British Empire's researchers realized that the cause of the ecological devastation was the British Empire:

much to consider.

on the motives and origins of some forms of imperial "environmentalism".

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Since the material resources of colonies were vital to the metropolitan centers of empire, some of the earliest conservation practices were established outside of Europe [but established for the purpose of protecting the natural resources desired by metropolitan Europe]. [...] [T]ropical island colonies were crucial laboratories of empire, as garden incubators for the transplantation of peoples [slaves, laborers] and plants [cash crops] and for generating the European revival of Edenic discourse. Eighteenth-century environmentalism derived from colonial island contexts in which limited space and an ideological model of utopia contributed to new models of conservation [...]. [T]ropical island colonies were at the vanguard of establishing forest reserves and environmental legislation [...]. These forest reserves, like those established in New England and South Africa, did not necessarily represent "an atavistic interest in preserving the 'natural' [...]" but rather a "more manipulative and power-conscious interest in constructing a new landscape by planting trees [in monoculture or otherwise modified plantations] [...]" [...].

Text by: Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley. "Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth". Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by DeLoughrey and Handley. 2011.

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It is no accident that the earliest writers to comment specifically on rapid environmental change in the context of empires were scientists who were themselves often actors in the process of colonially stimulated environmental change. [...] As early as the mid-17th century [...] natural philosophers [...] in Bermuda, [...] in Barbados and [...] on St Helena [all British colonies] were all already well aware of characteristically high rates of soil erosion and deforestation in the colonial tropics [...]. On St Helena and Bermuda this early conservationism led, by 1715, to the gazetting of the first colonial forest reserves and forest protection laws. On French colonial Mauritius [...], Poivre and Philibert Commerson framed pioneering forest conservation [...] in the 1760s. In India William Roxburgh, Edward Balfour [...] ([...] Scottish medical scientists) wrote alarmist narratives relating deforestation to the danger of climate change. [...] East India Company scientists were also well aware of French experience in trying to prevent deforestation [...] [in] Mauritius. [...] Roxburgh [...] went on to further observe the incidence of global drought events which we know today were globally tele-connected El Nino events. [...] The writings of Edward Balfour and Hugh Cleghorn in the late 1840s in particular illustrate the extent of the permeation of a global environmental consciousness [...]. [T]he 1860s [were] a period which we could appropriately name the "first environmental decade", and which embodies a convergence of thinking about ecological change on a world scale [...]. It was in the particular circumstances of environmental change at the colonial periphery that what we would now term "environmentalism" first made itself felt [...]. Victorian texts such as [...] Ribbentrop's Forestry in the British Empire, Brown's Hydrology of South Africa, Cleghorn's Forests and Gardens of South India [...] were [...] vital to the onset of environmentalism [...]. One preoccupation stands out in them above all. This was a growing interest in the potential human impact on climate change [...] [and] global dessication. This fear grew steadily in the wake of colonial expansion [...]. Particularly after the 1860s, and even more after the great Indian famines of 1876 [...] these connections encouraged and stimulated the idea that human history and environmental change might be firmly linked.

Text by: Richard Grove and Vinita Damodaran. "Imperialism, Intellectual Networks, and Environmental Change: Origins and Evolution of Global Environmental History, 1676-2000: Part I". Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 41, No. 41. 14 October 2006.

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Policing the interior [of British colonial land] following the Naning War gave Newbold the opportunity for exploring the people and landscape around Melaka […]. Newbold took his knowledge of the tropical environment in the Straits Settlements [British Malaya] to Madras [British India], where he earned a reputation as a naturalist and an Orientalist of some eminence. He was later elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Familiar with the barren landscape of the tin mines of Negeri Sembilan, Newbold made a seminal link between deforestation and the sand dune formations and siltation […]. The observation, published in 1839 […], alerted […] Balfour about the potential threat of erosion to local climate and agriculture. […] Logan brought his Peninsular experience [in the British colonies of Malaya] directly within the focus of the deforestation debate in India […]. His lecture to the Bengal Asiatic Society in 1846 […] was hugely influential and put the Peninsula at the heart of the emerging discourse on tropical ecology. Penang, the perceived tropical paradise of abundance and stability, soon revealed its vulnerability to human [colonial] despoilment […].

Text by: Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells. "Peninsular Malaysia in the Context of Natural History and Colonial Science". New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 11, 1. June 2009.

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British colonial forestry was arguably one of the most extensive imperial frameworks of scientific natural resource management anywhere [...]. [T]he roots of conservation [...] lay in the role played by scientific communities in the colonial periphery [...]. In India,[...] in 1805 [...] the court of directors of the East India Company sent a dispatch enquiring [...] [about] the Royal Navy [and its potential use of wood from Malabar's forests] [...]. This enquiry led to the appointment of a forest committee which reported that extensive deforestation had taken place and recommended the protection of the Malabar forests on grounds that they were valuable property. [...] [T]o step up the extraction of teak to augment the strength of the Royal Navy [...] [b]etween 1806 and 1823, the forests of Malabar were protected by means of this monopoly [...]. The history of British colonial forestry, however, took a decisive turn in the post-1860 period [...]. Following the revolt of 1857, the government of India sought to pursue active interventionist policies [...]. Experts were deployed as 'scientific soldiers' and new agencies established. [...] The paradigm [...] was articulated explicitly in the first conference [Empire Forestry Conference] by R.S. Troup, a former Indian forest service officer and then the professor of forestry at Oxford. Troup began by sketching a linear model of the development of human relationship with forests, arguing that the human-forest interaction in civilized societies usually went through three distinct phases - destruction, conservation, and economic management. Conservation was a ‘wise and necessary measure’ but it was ‘only a stage towards the problem of how best to utilise the forest resources of the empire’. The ultimate ideal was economic management, [...] to exploit 'to the full [...]' and provide regular supplies [...] to industry.

Text by: Ravi Rajan. "Modernizing Nature: Tropical Forestry and the Contested Legacy of British Colonial Eco-Development, 1800-2000". Oxford Historical Monographs series, Oxford University Press. January 2006.

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The “planetary consciousness” produced by this systemizing of nature [during the rise of Linnaean taxonomy classification in eighteenth-century European science] […] increased the mobility of paradise discourse [...]. As European colonial expansion accelerated, the homogenizing transformation of people, economy and nature which it catalyzed also gave rise to a myth of lost paradise, which served as a register […] for obliterated cultures, peoples, and environments [devastated by that same European colonization], and as a measure of the rapid ecological changes, frequently deforestation and desiccation, generated by colonizing capital. On one hand, this myth served to suppress dissent by submerging it in melancholy, but on the other, it promoted the emergence of an imperialist environmental critique which would motivate the later establishment of colonial botanical gardens, potential Edens in which nature could be re-made. However, the subversive potential of the “green” critique voiced through the myth of endangered paradise was defused by the extent to which growing environmental sensibilities enabled imperialism to function more efficiently by appropriating botanical knowledge and indigenous conservation methods, thus continuing to serve the purposes of European capital.

Text by: Sharae Deckard. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden. 2010.

[vintage-russia]

Cards from a "Deck of cards to familiarize children with the geography of the Russian Empire" (19th century)

[valyrfia]

charles and max proving again that they are the hottest couple on the grid in the new grill the grid

[fantodsdhrit]

assaulted student flats i can hear your conch shell ganges dream 

i want your name to mean something

you're thrashing them for their fictions 

your fictions rota proudly idolatrous

im creakingly cowardly for you all my chairs are tables black sparrows

you can't loathe what loathes itself

you die for meticulous death monsoon

no one's better than a gold bar not even your all exclusive vietnam vacation

not even macrobian man or aesthetics

culture wars spin out haemal haircut 

approaching heat my sole perplexed friend a kitchen wasp

we spiel elle korean pop nuclear launch

cyberpunk filtered photo resembles the flashy filter same uniqueness

your mughal era land survey uniqueness

wait for their ozymandian prophecy 

everyone believes in something bigger than vainglory themselves

so make me your little baby fish symptom

[enjoyedbygod]

Elvas Castle situated in Elvas, Portugal, was first built during the Moorish period of rule and occupation of the area between the 8th and 12th centuries. The castle was fought over repeatedly between Moors and Christians and changed hands several times. Afonso Henriques took the castle around 1166 but it was subsequently retaken, then lost, then retaken again. Elvas Castle was eventually abandoned by the Moors in 1230 when their base in Mérida (Spain) was under threat.

Elvas Castle was also besieged in the 14th century, this time by the armies of Castile. As a result of these attacks from the across the border with Spain, Elvas was reinforced with a taller keep and artillery positions in the 15th century. King Manuel I further strengthened the castle during his reign in the early 16th century adding towers to the walls.

In the 16th century Elvas Castle became part of the ever more sophisticated walls and fortifications of Elvas built to withstand attack from neighboring Spain. Elvas Castle resisted many attempts to take it but was eventually stormed after an attack by the French in 1807 during the Peninsular War (1807-1814). However, a year later the castle was back in the combined hands of the British and Portuguese armies opposing Napoleon's forces.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[marcdurm]

It’s so funny when you realise tsimikas and dom are glued like that bc their ✨eastern europeanism✨ and ✨balkanism✨ made them bond

[kafkasapartment]

"Is Geography Distracting You From the World Series?", 1952. Charles Kerins. Tempera on board.

[alexiazart]

Forgot Arabic... I again have nothing to post help