Honoring Ron

This post is primarily for BSU students who are part of the Environmental Action Team (EAT) sustainability club. The students were kind enough to invite me to speak at a club meeting again -- I had spoken at a meeting a year or two ago about coffee and they said they would like to hear more from me about that or any other topic.

After we made those arrangements, our dear friend Ron Maribett passed away after a brief illness. Some of the students in this organization had been as close to Ron as I had, and knowing that I would be in a bit of a state, they offered to let me out of the promise to speak.

I took this as my hint that I should make my -- and our -- legacy with Ron the point of departure for the conversation. I put together a few images and sounds and links. This post exists in case any of the studennts wish to follow up on our IN HONOR OF RON conversation.

FOLLOW-UP 

After our October 29 meeting, I thought about some possible follow-up activities and/or conversations. I am sharing them here so that they can be seen by those who were present or by other students -- especially members of EAT -- who might be interested in pursuing these ideas. 

One is a simple idea of Ron's that I meant to share. When a specific food came up in conversation, he would often say that he would include it in his "daily salad." That is to say that for him, salad would change with the seasons and with items that became available. But there would ALWAYS be a salad, typically with a few ingredients that would be included every single time. This provided a baseline level of fiber and vitamins, flavor and crunch every day -- plus an opportunity to stay in tune with the rhythms of local food through the year. 

During the talk, I mentioned that in our last few conversations Ron recommended a book and a few weeks later was genuinely grateful that I had read it. I think I failed to mention the book in question. It was Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Inevitably, I will be posting a review on Goodreads. I have not done so yet, but I can say that this is a perfect book to remember Ron by. It has the widest possible sweep -- over centuries and continents -- but also speaks directly to us as humans. 

Looking at the announcement of this meeting after the fact, I realized that I fell far short of addressing the coffee-on-campus discussion that it suggested. I did talk about Ron's connection to one of my favorite coffee estates, which he and Connie visited while their son was working as an intern. Selva Negra does indeed have a lot of relevance to any discussion of sustainability in food, tourism, and coffee. 

After the fact, though, I realized that I can suggest two much more specific areas for futher discussion. One is a vision of sustainable cafés that alumni and I have proposed for our campus. My 2015 TEDx-BSU talk provides an overview of what we were trying to achieve. The student who developed a café proposal with me was in the audience that evening. She is one of the founding organizers of the Equal Exchange Action Forum, a nationwide network of people interested in changing the food system. It is based at Equal Exchange in West Bridgewater. Please join, and tell Danielle I sent you! 

(Also, Equal Exchange currently employs my son on its team of delivery drivers bringing genuine fair-trade, organic coffee, tea and cocoa to Market Basket stores throughout New England. These are interesting positions for those who like to drive and have fuel-efficient cars to do so. My son has listened to so many audio books in his two years on the job. Equal is currently looking for both part-time and full-time drivers. See the Equal Exchange Careers page for details and again, let them know I sent you!

And finally (I think): I mentioned my upcoming sabbatical, in which I will be looking at coffee in Cape Verde. Mostly I will be trying better to understand what is a very niche coffee industry, little known to the rest of the coffee-producing world. It is of great interesest in southeastern New England, though, so I hope to help producers there make workable connections to potential markets here. EAT students might have a role to play in both parts of this work. Please look at the general discussion of My Fogo Sabbatical and let me know if the club would like to be involved. It may be useful to connect in person before my February 15, 2027 departure and then online during the peak of the season in late March or April.

MAGELLAN at NESTVAL

 

I am pleased to be discussing our MAGELLAN project with fellow geographers at the October 24, 2026 meeting of NESTVAL at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point. The New England and St. Lawrence Valley Geographical Society is a division of the Association of American Geographers, and is the most venerable geography society in North America. 

My BSU colleague Dr. Bob Amey and I established the MAGELLEN Network as a way to mobilize geographers and friends of geography for discussions of geographic education with their elected officials. 

As I often do when presenting at conferences and seminars, I am providing this post as a convenient way for attendees to reach the slide set used in the presentation. It is also, of course, a way to share our thoughts.

You are invited to visit our slide set and the MAGELLAN blog.

Abstract from the conference program:

When National Geographic established Geographic Alliances throughout the United States, educators at all levels in Massachusetts were among the most active. Geographers in colleges and universities collaborated with teachers in primary and secondary schools to provide for direct programming, professional development, and advocacy. Those partnerships led to the success of ongoing outreach programs as Project EarthView and to serious engagement with many members of the Massachusetts legislature. More recently, allies of geography in the legislature have filed bills that could help to advance geography both in K-12 curricula and in pre-service teacher preparation. The success of legislation is itself a geographic challenge, since legislators are tied to constituents through maps. MAGELLAN is an effort to connect advocates of geography education with their legislators. This session will explain the model for the benefit of Massachusetts geographers and of those elsewhere in New England who may wish to pursue similar engagement.

Cabo Verde 2026

In July 2026, I am pleased to be making my third visit to the country of Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) an independent nation in the north Atlantic and former Portu guese colony. My two prior visits had been in 2006 to lead Bridgewater State (College) University's first travel course to the country -- many more were subsequently led by colleagues in education and in art. I then returned in 2024 to lead my Geography of Coffee travel course -- my 14th offering of that course but the first outside of Central America.

This time, I was not leading anything -- my visit has been in support of the BSU-UNICV-UTA-Biosfera collaborative project known as HERITOR. Colleagues in biology and science outreach (CASE) have received a grant for a very well crafted, three year research project involving teams of undergraduate researchers -- and one amazing graduate student leader. 

Assemblage piece at CNAD, the fantastic art museum of Mindelo.
Both in the subjects of the art and the materials used, this museum teaches about
the entire country. I chose this piece, because it represents part of what the
HERTIOR collaboration intends to protect.

I know that the participating students have taken thousands of photographs of their entire experience -- I have just a couple of hundred gathered in my Cabo Verde 2026 folder on Flickr. As of this writing on my last day in the country, I have posted all of my photos (edited) but not yet many annotations. This post is mainly for the convenience of the students I have been visiting. 

Also for the convenience of those students, I am including a link to my little corner of Goodreads. These students are such avid readers and curious citizens of the world that they have formed a book club for their "spare time" during the project. Several of them commented that they enjoyed books that they read in courses they took with me in the past, and several of them have asked me for further recommendations. My reviewed shelf includes my thoughts on about 150 books several genres, in no particular order. I just added a few that might be of special interest to these students: The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring, and above all Cape Verde: Crioulo Colony To Independent Nation.

Lagniappe 

I had several reasons for wanting to visit the HERITOR group in the first of its three field seasons. One is that this might be a vehicle for realizing long-standing ambitions to bring Project EarthView to Cabo Verde. I am no longer directing that program, but have had many conversations about this with my successor, a former student of mine who also has a longstanding interest in the country. 

Another important reason for making this journey has been to prepare for my next and final sabbatical, to take place in February to May of 2027. That will be focused on coffee on the island of Fogo. I knew that some language and travel experience would be helpful -- I had the unexpected bonus of meeting owners of two different coffee farms during this trip and of actually visiting one of those farms. Both are on Santo Antão. With a day trip to that island, by the way, I have now been to half of the islands of the archipelago. 

Mapping Habit

I came of age as a geographer just as digital mapping technologies were gaining ground. One of my undergraduate professors invented MapQuest -- a couple of years after I had barely passed his fully analog cartography course. During my master's program, I learned about computers in general and computer mapping in particular during many hours as an assistant in our new digital cartography lab. During my doctoral program, I taught a rudimentary computer cartography course because I knew more about the subject than any of the professors -- a situation that began to change dramatically with a brilliant faculty hire that took place at the end of my second year. 

All of which is to say that I was poised to become a GIS hotshot. I even took some online courses with ESRI in my "spare time" as a professor. But gradually, other interests squeezed out my GIS pursuits, and I am a rank amateur at this point. 

See Google MyMaps for annotated links to many of these maps.

Enter Google Maps. Flawed as it is in some important ways, it is a convenient way for me to make and share maps, so I use it a lot -- one could even say compulsively. I use it to make cartographic "life lists" of many places that have mattered to me, as a planning tool for personal or professional travel, or even as a supplement to articles or stories I encounter -- even a song can sometimes need a map!

At this point, I have created almost 100 Google Maps. I can see them all at once by typing "mymaps.google.com" but the resultant list is visible only to me. Above is a snapshot of the top of the list at the moment. If some reader knows a way to make such a list shareable, please let me know. Until then, I have created an annotated list of just a couple dozen. maps -- including some very new ones. Spoiler alert: the newest one as of this writing is Todas las Casas -- a life list of every place I have resided. 

Cabo Verde e Sua Geografía: HERITOR

 

I am very pleased that several of my university colleagues have received a grant for an ambitious environmental project in Cape Verde. The HERITOR project will involve more than a dozen undergraduate students over the next three years. 

They will conduct field-based research on important questions of coastal water quality AND assist in science outreach with youth in the study area. The HERITOR project is a collaboration among the Biology Department, the CASE program, and the Pedro Pires Institute -- plus many non-BSU collaborators and the National Science Foundation. 

I am not officially part of this project, but my broader experience in Cape Verde enables me to contribute to the preparation of the team. This will begin with my  CAPE VERDE GEOGRAPHY   presentation for the opening class session. I share it here as an easy way to make all of its illustrations and its many links available to the HERITOR participants. 

The Where of Coffee

Over the past several years, World GIS Day has become my department's most successful annual event. As the local part of a global network of events highlighting the many uses of Geographic Information Systems, the BSU Geography celebration brings together real-world examples of GIS from our undergraduate and graduate students and from professionals in industry, non-profit organizations and local, state, and federal agencies. 

I have been proud to promote this event, but until this year I have played a very minimal role. This year, I am serving coffee to participants and using it as an opportunity to shed some light on the geography of coffee and to give a couple of examples of how GIS supports coffee growers. 

I brought coffee (see below) to serve to participants and shared a poster to highlight a few applications of GIS in coffee. The main purpose of this blog post is to allow visitors to view thos projects. 

Detail from
The Coffee Economy

One example is an infographic entitled Bean to Billion Dollar Business, which won a communication award at the 2025 ESRI user conference.

See The Coffee Economy on the ESRI Map Gallery for information about the team that produced this graphic, and to explore the details it provides about this important crop and beverage.

Also hosted on an ESRI site is Mapping the impact of global warming on suitable coffee-growing land in Costa Rica by Leslie Spencer, who was an undergraduate biology student at Tufts University when she created it in 2021. This is an excellent example of what GIS is good for -- allowing comparisons among different kinds of spatial information that operate at different scales. This kind of analysis is increasingly important in coffee studies, as farmers and others in the industry respond to very rapidly changing climatic conditions in the context of non-climatic factors. 

This single image draws on many thousands of pieces of information
of different kinds and at different scales.

(For more on Costa Rica and coffee, see my annotated collection of photos at Costa Rica 2020.)

The third example on my poster is a 2020 article in the International Journal of Geo-Information. This is an excellent, peer-reviewed journal that makes its articles fully available online.  Rolando Salas López led a team of researchers who wrote Land Suitability for Coffee (Coffea arabica) Growing in Amazonas, Peru: Integrated Use of AHP, GIS and RS.

Their study identifies the locations of existing farms and identifies appropriate locations for future coffee production. This is very important work for farmers whose are vulnerable to market fluctuations, uneven terms of trade, and multiple threats from climate change. The latter can affect both the timing and amount of precipitation and the prevalence of pests and crop diseases. Because coffee is a tree crop that does not produce until after four years of care and investment, this information is crucial to the economic viability fo farmers.

The coffee I am serving at the event is Pacha Glow from Sunrise Trading, which -- coincidentally -- is from the region of Peru studied by López and his team. I had bought 5 pounds of this coffee for my Spring 2025 Secret Life of Coffee course (an Honors Second-Year Seminar). 

Urusula Ortiz, Coffee Grower

I loved it so much that when I tried to buy it in August and found that it was only available in café-sized bags. This beautiful bag has been in our living room ever since -- though it is only about half-full at this point.

This coffee is from the Peruvian Amazon -- about 1,000 km by road from Cusco and about 3,000 km from my old stomping grounds in Porto Velho. I present this map, zoomed in on the site of the growing area. "Site" is a term geographers use to refer to the characteristics of a place -- in this case, the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve (BIOAY) where the coffee is grown is a site of heavy rainfall, dense forest, and rugged topography. 

A good use of Google Maps is to start here and change scales and basemaps to explore the region in various contexts. The "directions" tool can help to illuminate its "situation" -- a term geographers use to describe relative location -- its distance and direction from other places.

Future Coffee

The story of the Ben Linder Café is very mixed. A BSC graduate helped to create the first fair-trade café in Nicaragua. The story of this café is told in the book Javatrekker by recently retired coffee importer Dean Cycon. This predated Bridgewater travel courses in the country, but students did later visit the café and the landmine-rehabilitation projects it supported. They were so inspired that they developed a proposal for a café in the DMF building. 

Over 1,000 people endorsed the proposal, along with almost every department on campus at the time. The architects of the DMF building even created the framework of a café -- from which good, ethical coffee is occasionally served. The status of the proposal is unresolved. The student who co-led the effort is now a leading organizer in the coffee industry (and the entire food sytsem, actually). We still hope to realize that vision on our campus. 

From Liquidation to Little Village

 

Sixto Rodriquez Mural, Vernor West, Detroit

I am pleased to have co-authored a presentation for the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers with my son Harvey. It builds on a paper he wrote as a college freshman and is entitled From Liquidation to Little Village: The Arts in Detroit. Anything in these slides that looks like a link IS a link. Our abstract is below.

Early in the twentieth century, Detroit was among the most prosperous and successful cities in the United States, in which a social compact between labor and industry had broad benefits. The later abandonment of Detroit by key industries combined with a political culture of austerity to bring about the city’s economic, demographic, and fiscal collapse. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the city declared bankruptcy and the state of Michigan reluctantly intervened. Among many proposals to resolve the crisis, the most radical envisioned selling much of the artwork that had become part of the city’s patrimony during more prosperous times. This approach was strongly contested and ultimately rejected, in part because of the inherent and abiding value of the arts. More recently, the Little Village project has vindicated those who defended the arts in Detroit. It serves as an example of arts-based community development that has so far avoided the common pitfalls of gentrification.

I took the photo above, which comprises the final slide in our presentation, while exploring the city during the conference. The building is featured in the 2012 film Searching for Sugarman.