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As I mention quite often in this space and elsewhere, the greatest advantage of teaching is that I get to keep learning from my students. (Sadly, some of my colleagues are not very open to this, but those who enjoy teaching are.) In this case, I asked my honors coffee students (yes, that is a thing!) to read an important BBC article entitled  The Disease That Could Change How We Drink Coffee . It is about  roya , also known as coffee leaf rust, also known as one thing that might motivate some people to pay attention to climate change. We had discussed the disease in the context of my  Coffee Bellwethers TED Talk , and I decided this article would be a good way to delve further into the topic. Being a habitual user of open-ended questions, I did not ask them specific questions about the article; rather, I asked the students to write questions that the article led them to ask. Several of the questions had to do with the differences between Arabica and robusta coffees, which BBC reporter

CARtography on the open road As a geographer, I know the damage that automobiles and automobile-dependent landscapes run counter in many ways to social and environmental sustainability. A search of the word " sprawl " on on this blog points to many of the specifics, and the car-sprawl-car feedback loop is a subject on which I can give a one-hour lecture at a moment's notice. Still, I love cars and open roads. I have visited well over a thousand counties in 47 U.S. states, and I have to admit that public transportation was limited to airplanes in most cases. I have been through a few dozen counties in the Northeast by train, but only places I had already visited countless times by car. In other words, I am hopelessly part of the automobile problem. And I would have enjoyed being one of the many cartographic fact-checkers that verified the layout of open roads for map-making companies on the eve of World War II. These CARtographers were lauded by the automobile industry at

Because I have long been a fan of both biography and public radio, the BBC series Witness  has become something that I look forward to most weekday mornings. This 9-minute program comes on at 4:50 each morning, which encourages me to get the coffee grinding done in time to enjoy an interview with someone connected to major historical events.  Careful readers will note that I have blogged about a few of these before; the most recent to get my  attention was an interview with a coworker of geologist Marie Tharp . Her work is central to a lot of my teaching, yet I had never heard of her. In short, it was her careful mapping of seafloor soundings that identified the world's largest physical feature -- the mid-Atlantic ridge -- and confirmed the theory of plate tectonics that had been disputed by geologists for about a century. The leader of her team -- who was still an undergraduate while she had earned two master's degrees -- had initially dismissed her interpretation of the data

A privately-branded, publicly funded stadium looms over downtown Minneapolis, while the bank in question pilfers the schools. A criminal enterprise known as the Minnesota Vikings has extracted a half billion dollars toward the construction of the stadium shown above, from which its kingpin Zygi Wilf will receive $200,000,000 each year  in profits. Citizens of Minneapolis will pay $7,000,000 each year toward operating expenses, and will receive no discounts of any kind. Minnesota's politicians have allowed Wilf to privatize profits while socializing expenses. This is common in professional sports, but this may be a new extreme. It should have been easy to predict the fiscal deficit as well as the people most likely to bear the brunt of this malfeasance: teachers and children . In the United States, children are "our most precious resource" only when making speeches, not when setting budgets. This drama plays out just as cities across the United States are playing a similar

Q: Why do Unitarian Universalists sing so poorly in church? A: Because they are always reading ahead to see if they agree with the words. My UU congregation in Bridgewater has made an effort to move -- if only a little -- away from this well-earned stereotype by adopting one new hymn each month. Singing it each Sunday of the month allows us to learn a new tune, and examine new lyrics for ourselves. The Spanish version of the title and chorus  make clear that the intention is  to open the window together. Still, we must start by being open as individuals. On the first Sunday of April, I noticed that "Open the Window" is printed in our hymnal with an alternate chorus in Spanish and I was surprised that we left it on the page without trying it. I was pleased that we were able to do so later in the month. I noticed a few parishioners were somewhat apprehensive, presumably because they knew they might not pronounce the words fluently. The results, however, were beautiful. As I di

Local journalist Sara Cline recently reported on a local environmental case that illustrates an important and little-understood aspect of national environmental policy. The town of West Bridgewater has been asked -- politely but through legal counsel -- to pay $42,000 toward the clean-up of a contaminated property 35 miles to its west , in another state. More details about the site are available (for now at least) on the Environmental Protection Agency's Peterson/Puritan page. The 500-acre (0.8 square mile) site, located along the historic Blackstone River, contains multiple sources of serious groundwater pollution. As detailed in the site background portion of the page , severe pollution of the sensitive riparian environment resulted from several kinds of manufacturing, combined with at least one major spill, a fire, and the operation of a landfill. Learn much more about this location from the interactive community cleanup map . As is often the case on designated Superfund (or Na

The peace sign between my church and my campus is in many languages. Most people who know me know that although I am not fluent in any language other than English (and that one is debatable), I regularly use other languages to the extent that I can, and that I have benefited greatly from being able to do so. I understand why some students resist studying foreign languages; I declined to do so the first time it was an option for me, in 8th grade. My next opportunity was in 10th grade, and I loved it! In my senior year, I took German III, Spanish II, and Latin I, and enjoyed all three.  Below is a statement I presented as part of current debates about bringing a language requirement back to my university, where it was removed about a decade ago.  ----------------------------------------------- Buenos tardes. Boa tarde. Guten abend. If you understood any of that, you can thank the general-education program at your own undergraduate institution. Thank you for the opportunity t

UPDATE: On March 30, Peter Giuliano -- an industry leader I have seen in coffee documentaries and in the coffeelands of Nicaragua -- issued a s trong statement on behalf of the Specialty Coffee Association in response to the legal ruling. He cites several medical authorities in objecting to the legal decision I discuss below. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "But that's a very low animal!" my friend exclaimed (in Portuguese), as he tried once again to get me to explain the plethora of lawyer jokes in the United States. He was referring to the use of the word "snake" to describe lawyers, which he had heard from American television or movies, probably more than once. Throughout the first several weeks of my 1996 research project in Rondônia , he would ruefully regale me (if that is possible) with the latest examples of lawyer jokes he had heard, and would even allow me to tell him a few more. He was, as