WKU Geography and Geology Blog

The latest issue of the international Journal of Latin American Geography features an article by Geography and Geology Department Head David Keeling on the region’s transportation challenges.
After working in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, over the past nine months on social and economic development issues, he found that accessibility and mobility adequacies explained much about the inability of Latin American societies to build up their economies.
Inadequate transportation infrastructure not only plagues Latin America but continues to be a serious problem for the United States. Many of the infrastructural weaknesses highlighted in this article are also evident throughout North America, as illustrated recently by interstate highway bridge collapses, computer failures at major airports, and a lack of alternate sources of energy (A recent Op Ed on this issue is available here.)
Solutions to Latin America’s transport ills include the introduction of new analytical techniques such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), more attention to regional integration opportunities and new infrastructure.
Dr. Keeling will follow up on this regional research with a more in-depth analysis of transportation challenges in Colombia as part of a long-term research project funded by the American Geographical Society and the Foreign Military Studies Office.
Others from WKU participating in the Colombia project are assistant professor of sociology Dr. Holli Drummond; adjunct history instructor John Dizgun; GIS Center director Kevin Cary; geoscience graduate student Brandon Fowler of Bowling Green; and Gatton Academy student Samuel Crocker of Franklin.

More information about the Colombia research is available here.

July 21, 2008
Bowling Green, Ky. - Faculty and students from Western Kentucky University’s Department of Geography and Geology returned this past weekend from 10 days in Colombia studying community change in Medellín.

Department Head Dr. David Keeling is the lead investigator for the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expedition to Colombia, now ending its first full year of analysis.

The AGS Bowman Expeditions were established in 2005 as part of the Society’s broader goal of combating geographic ignorance in all sectors of society. The Bowman Expedition to Colombia is the third of these projects, following successful research in Mexico and the Antilles.

With full funding, the AGS would send a geography professor and two or three graduate students to every country in the world for a full semester each year, with teams rotating on a five-year cycle so that each country could be understood by five separate teams. Each team would collect open source GIS data and conduct one research project of the investigator’s choice.

Accompanying Dr. Keeling to Medellín were History Instructor John Dizgun and Brian Blickenstaff of Claremont, Calif., a Southern Mississippi University geography graduate student, as well as researchers from the WKU-GEOSCIRE Research Center in Bogotá.

Dr. Jerry Dobson, professor of geography at Kansas University and president of the American Geographical Society, along with Dr. Geoff Demarest from the Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., also joined the WKU team in the field. The research team met with the mayor of Medellín, government officials in planning, housing, security, transportation, and reconstruction, and with neighborhood leaders in Comuna 13.

The goal of the Medellín project is to create a virtual geographic and historical Atlas of Comuna 13, a neighborhood in the city afflicted by terrible violence over the past 20 years. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when narco-traffickers such as the infamous Pablo Escobar terrorized the city, murder rates in the neighborhood of Comuna 13 soared past 400 per 100,000 inhabitants (the world average is eight per 100,000).

After the death of Escobar in 1993, paramilitary gangs and guerilla groups like the FARC (Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia), ELN and CAP, among others, seized control of the community and murder rates again soared. An alliance of national police, military and local security forces finally broke these groups’ stranglehold on the neighborhood with a series of operations in 2001 and 2002, culminating in Operation Orion.

Since 2003, the neighborhood of Comuna 13 in Medellín has enjoyed a minor renaissance, with enhanced security through local policing, new schools and medical clinics, a community library, and other infrastructural improvements. The WKU-led AGS project in Medellín will assess these changes in the context of the neighborhood’s geography and history, with the goal of producing the virtual atlas and several academic journal articles.

More information about the project is available online at www.amergeog.org/bowman-colombia.htm.

More WKU news is available at www.wku.edu. If you’d like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.

For information, contact David Keeling at (270) 745-4555.

In partnership with the American Geographical Society and the Foreign Military Studies Office, Dr. David Keeling has been awarded a competitive grant to conduct research in Colombia. The FMSO already has a team of Colombian researchers in place, and Keeling’s role is to evaluate their materials and harmonize for open source publication on the Bowman Expedition website of the AGS. A workshop held recently in New York (see news story posted online) presented results from the México Indígena project led by Dr. Peter Herlihy at the University of Kansas (visit the website here). For more information about the AGS Bowman expeditions, visit the AGS website.

Over the past few months, there have been myriad news stories about problems with America’s transportation infrastructure. From congested airports, cancelled flights, collapsing highway bridges, and other tales of woe, the U.S. has a serious challenge ahead in providing adequate infrastructure to facilitate more productive engagement with the global economy. My latest Op Ed about this issue - titled Who will put America back together again? - was published in the Honolulu Hawaii Reporter and reprinted in Haitiweb online on September 29, 2007.

Conflicts over boundaries (terrestrial and oceanic) continue to make news around the world. Iran’s disagreement over British naval activities in the Gulf, and ongoing debate about the US-Mexico border are just two of the most recent areas of conflict. Geographers have a long history of contributing to analyses of boundaries - Isaiah Bowman served as President Woodrow Wilson’s official geographer during negotiations at the Versailles treaty talks in 1918-1919 as boundaries in Europe and elsewhere were being redrawn and renegotiated. My recent Op Ed Commentary addresses the issue of boundary disagreements and argues that the U.S. should be less concerned about building bigger fences along the Rio Grande than in helping to develop stronger economic communities south of the border. Bigger fences do not always make better neighbors.

With the International Polar Year underway, more research attention is being focused on the implications of global climate change for the planet’s polar regions. Missing from the discourse, however, is any serious consideration of the policy implications of global climate change for these regions. In a recent Op Ed column, I argue that a failure to consider the geopolitical, environmental, and resources implications of a melting Arctic could have serious implications for the U.S. and its neighbors. Clashes between Russia, Canada, and the US could develop over trans-Arctic shipping. As the Arctic ice melts, it will be easier for large ships to travel across the Arctic Ocean between Asia, Europe, and North America. More shipping in this environmentally sensitive region raises important concerns about territorial sovereignty, pollution, piracy, and new infrastructure. The US needs to take the lead on starting a dialogue that can begin to address these critical long-term policy implications of global climate change.

Despite recent advances in the teaching of geography in the K-12 and university classrooms across the U.S., most Americans remain woefully ignorant of the world around them. Assessments of geographical knowledge in general education classes at WKU, for example, routinely reveal a level of ignorance about the world’s basic geography. Less than 20 percent of students tested typically are able to find places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico, or Vietnam on a map, and far fewer are able to provide geographically informed analyses of key issues such as global climate change, conflict, environmental damage, or resource use.
My recent OP ED column on this topic for the American Geographical Society’s Writers Circle calls for a No American left Geographically Ignorant Act to go along with the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act. This commentary was published in the Henderson (KY) Gleaner and in the Northwest Arkansas Times. Americans cannot succeed in a global economy, nor can they vote wisely about issues that have global implications, without a basic level of understanding of the world around us!

Over the past couple of years, challenging weather conditions like hurricanes, storm surge, and snow/ice storms have highlighted the U.S.’s continuing vulnerability in the transportation arena. This past week’s scheduling disaster for JetBlue airlines (see online report) in the wake of a severe storm event in the northeast points out significant weaknesses in all areas of the U.S. transportation system. Highways are inadequate to cope with emergency evacuation, there is no emergency disaster plan to utilize America’s railroads for evacuations (how many lives could have been saved in New Orleans if 50 or 100 passengers trains had been available to whisk people away from the city), and the U.S. airline system (controllers, ground personnel, airport facilities, airline companies, and public transit)) is just too schlerotic to cope with big events like the one last week. The U.S. transportation system is broken - it needs radical surgery if America is to cope successfully with the bigger challenges of global climate change, economic globalization, and another major terrorist attack. Which of the 2008 presidential candidates is likely to tackle this issue?

One of the latest additions to the world’s growing network of high-speed rail systems is Taiwan. Work began on a dedicated high-speed rail line between Taiwan’s two major cities - Taipei and Kaohsiung - in 2000, with the 345-kilometer route expected to debut sometime in late 2007 (see report online that discusses the details). Taiwan would join countries like Japan, Germany, Italy, Britain, France, and Spain, among others, who have developed state-of-the-art high-speed rail systems. But what about the United States? High-speed rail (the ACELA service between Washington, New York, and Boston is hardly worthy of high-speed designation!) development in the US is decades behind these other countries. The US addiction to oil, autos, and freeways is not likely to encourage high-speed rail development anytime soon - unless, of course, gasoline jumps to $5 a gallon or higher!

Globalization is a hot topic these days. The Department is offering an Honors Colloquium (Nationalism and Terrorism), as well as a senior/graduate course titled Globalization and Nationalism this Spring 2007 semester. My own research has focused on globalization’s impacts, especially the role of transportation in shaping global social and economic interactions. My article on how globalization has affected Latin America (see Journal of Latin American Geography article) argued that researchers and commentators tend to focus too much on the macro-level indicators of global change (GDP, currency, trade, etc.) and not enough on the microlevel indicators (what’s happening to people at local scales). Right here in Bowling Green, KY, you can see the impacts of global change, especially in the cultural and economic spheres. Look around your own communities and examine how landscapes, people, and the economy are changing as a consequence of greater interaction with the global community.