Professor Matt Huber, of Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs was Colgate Geography Department’s 2017 Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU) speaker. His talk was titled “Who produced your carbon footprint? Class, climate, and the politics of responsibility.” Professor Huber works on a range of topics and he is most well known for his work on oil and energy geographies. As a political ecologist who examines capitalism’s forces over the world and on the world’s resources, many of geographers find points of intersection with his work.

Afterwards, GTU members, new and old, met with the speaker at a dinner.

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Professor Yamamoto, along with Mitsuo Yamakawa, co-edited two volumes: Unravelling the Fukushima Disaster and Rebuilding Fukushima.

For Unravelling the Fukushima Disaster, the publisher notes: the Fukushima disaster continues to appear in national newspapers when there is another leakage of radiation-contaminated water, evacuation designations are changed, or major compensation issues arise and so remains far from over. However, after five years, attention and research towards the disaster seems to have waned despite the extent and significance of the disaster that remains.

The aftermath of Fukushima exposed a number of shortcomings in nuclear energy policy and disaster preparedness. This book gives an account of the municipal responses, citizen’s responses, and coping attempts, before, during, and after the Fukushima crisis. It focuses on the background of the Fukushima disaster, from the Tohoku earthquake to diffusion on radioactive material and risk miscommunication. It explores the processes and politics of radiation contamination, and the conditions and challenges that the disaster evacuees have faced, reflecting on the evacuation process, evacuation zoning, and hope in a post-Fukushima environment.

Rebuilding Fukushima gives an account of how citizens, local governments, and businesses responded to and coped with the crisis of Fukushima. It addresses principles to guide reconstruction and international policy environments in which the current disaster is situated. It explores how reconstruction is articulated and experienced at different spatial scales, ranging from individuals to communities and municipalities, and details recovery efforts, achievements, and challenges in the realms of public transportation, agriculture and food production, manufacturing industries, retail sectors, and renewable-energy industries. This book also critically investigates the nature of the current reconstruction policy schemes, and seeks to articulate what may be required in order to achieve more sustainable and equitable (re)development in afflicted regions and other nuclear host regions.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork and local surveys, this volume is one of the first books in English that captures the knowledge and insights of native Japanese social scientists who dealt with the complexities of nuclear disaster on a day-to-day basis.

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The Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute (Picker ISI) recently announced the 2015-2016 grant awards supporting interdisciplinary approaches in innovative research. The grants bring together Colgate faculty and other researchers with complementary expertise to open new areas of study and to tackle existing problems in creative new ways.

Professor Jessica Graybill (Geography and Russian & Eurasian Studies) and her collaborators Andrey Petrov (University of Northern Iowa) and Gleb Kraev (Moscow State University) have received a one-year award of $37,430 for their project “Tundra Tracks: Mapping Community and Carbon Mobilities in the Russian Arctic”. Vehicle tracks have a long term impact on the tundra in Arctic Russia. Unused tracks remain recognizable from satellite images ~40 years after creation. The tracks damage plant cover, compact and disengage soil layers and change energy and matter fluxes. Their impact on large scale climate is unknown. They are also intertwined with human activity and community in these regions. This project will explore how carbon fluxes vary on or near tracks, how the tracks vary in density and distribution and how their presence interacts with nearby human communities.

Professor Michael Loranty and Heather Kropp (Geography) and their collaborators Nick Rutter (Northumbria University, UK) and Chris Fletcher (University of Waterloo, CA) have received a two-year award of $136,545 for their project “Impacts of boreal climate feedbacks on climate change”. Boreal forests represent approximately one-fifth of the Northern Hemisphere land surface and strongly influence global climate. Declines in the duration and extent of seasonal snow cover across the boreal region increases the absorption of solar radiation, which amplifies climate warming. The strength of this positive feedback varies widely between climate models because it is difficult to represent complex snow-forest-climate interactions. This project will confront climate model representations with field measurements and satellite observations of boreal forest-snow energy dynamics. The researchers aim to improve the understanding and climate model representation of interactions between boreal forest structure, snow cover, and climate dynamics.

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Each year Colgate’s Geography Department celebrates the induction of new members into Gamma Theta Upsilon (GTU) the International Geographical Honor Society. As part of the celebration, on October 7, 2015, the department welcomed guest speaker Jessica Hayes-Conroy from Hobart & William Smith Colleges. During her presentation, Dr. Hayes-Conroy used perspectives from corporeal feminism, critical race theory, and visceral geography to expose the need for nutrition discourse that embraces socio-cultural differences. The presentation was co-sponsored by the Lampert Institute for Global and Civic Affairs.

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