Compass Vol.2 Issue 2

MARCH 2016 | VOL. 02 ISSUE 02

ECUADOR: A FOCUS ON THE WILDERNESS

TRUMPONOMICS AND AMERICAN FOOTBALL

UNCOVERING ISRAEL’S HIDDEN DIVERSITY

CONTENTS

Photograph Credits: Hannah Marks

10 / VOICES FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH Seven women on why they took to the streets for the women’s march on January 21st

A LETTER FROM

THE EDITORS Welcome to the third edition of Compass!

The topical current affairs of Brexit and Trump take the spotlight in A Geographer’s Perspective, where we examine thoughts on the Women’s March and the link between Trump and American football.

Human Geography sheds light on our commemoration of the Holocaust and issues of homelessness in San Francisco. In Physical Geography conservation is the theme as we explore citizen science and sustainable conservation projects in Kenya. In Geographers in Action, we had the invaluable opportunity to interview Gillian Rose, Tim Marshall, and Danny Dorling. They discuss their recent research interests and answer some of the questions you have been itching to ask these renowned geographers. Finally, our travel section takes us from the diverse landscape of Israel to the exhilarating chaos of Mumbai’s transport systems.

Our thanks go to everyone who has contributed to the magazine with photos and articles, and the academics within the department and further afield who have given up their time to provide interviews and share their advice.

In particular, we’d like to thank our dedicated committee for putting in the time and effort to produce two wonderful magazines this year.

We hope you enjoy Compass!

Nathaniel Myers and Alice Guillaume Co-Editors-in-Chief 2 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

28 / IN CONVERSATION WITH GILLIAN ROSE Gillian Rose shares her research interests and top tips for successful study

06 14 18

A GEOGRAPHER’S PERSPECTIVE Trumponomics / Brexit / Voices from the Women’s March / Tim Harford

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Mapping Informal Communities / Homelessness / Commemorating The Holocaust

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

Citizen Science / Sustainable Conservation / Turtles / Ecuador

ON THE COVER // PHOTOGRAPH BY JEREMY EE Mount Rinjani, an active volcano on the Indonesian island of Lombok. It is the second tallest volcano in Indonesia, with a height of 3,726 metres. There is a crater lake at the top of the volcano known as Segara Anak (Child of the Sea).

GOT AN IDEA? CONTACT US. cugsmagazine@gmail.com Facebook/@cugscompass

16 / FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

18 / CONSERVATION AND COMMUNITY

Exploring our memories and understandings of the Holocaust

Sustainable approaches in the Northern Range Trust, Kenya

34 / MUMBAI

BY TRAIN

38 / PROFILING GLACIERS

Tips for navigating India’s largest city

Tom Chudley recounts his experience doing a physical geography dissertation

24 30 35

GEOGRAPHERS IN ACTION Danny Dorling / Tim Marshall / Gillian Rose

TRAVEL

Mumbai / Israel / Bedford Travel Grants

STUDY TIPS

Dissertation Tips / Revision Tips

3 / Compass / Lent 2017

EDITORIAL TEAM editorsinchief ALICE GUILLAUME and NATHANIEL MYERS ageographer’sperspective ISABEL DEWHURST and DAN BOWE humangeography CHLOE RIXON and HARRIET HALL physicalgeography FIONA DOBSON and JULIA GANIS geographersinaction ANGUS PARKER travel HANNAH MENDALL and ISABELLA DOE learningtips SARAH TURNER design team CATHERINE CHANG, SIOBHAN EASTMAN and SALLY JENKINSON contributors DANNY DORLING, GILLIAN ROSE, TIM HARFORD, TIM MARSHALL, ALICE EVANS, DAVID BECKINGHAM, TOM CHUDLEY, HANNAH GILLIE, DAN BOWE, ROGIER PRINS, ISABEL DEWHURST, ANGUS PARKER, REBECCA REBIS, HARRIET HALL, CHLOE RIXON, FIONA DOBSON, JASMIN REES, JULIA GANIS, CALLUM SWANSTON, TOM COLVERD, HANNAH MENDALL, ANIA GRUSZCZYNSKA, TESSA CALLENDER, RACHEL MUMFORD

T

here were two events which really marked the start of a busy and exciting year for the Geographical Society: the launch of Compass and the Garden Party in the sunny gardens of Darwin College.

I am very proud of the huge amount of support and success Compass has received and how the publication has engaged students from all years and different disciplines, as well as academics both within the Geography Department and from further afield. Having nurtured the idea from a seed to fruition I am pleased to see a dedicated team taking it forward into the new year.

Bunting, Pimms and acapella combined with a lucky break in the weather for the CUGS annual Garden Party which eased relaxed and happy members into the post-exam celebrations. The party is always a popular event and a good chance for members and nonmembers to meet and socialise over food, drink and outdoor games. This year I hope to see the traditional staff versus student sports game return to the summer celebrations too!

CUGS YEAR IN REVIEW 2016/17 Michaelmas saw one of the highest member intakes the society has had and the return of the colourful CUGS stash. From week one we have had a superb line-up of high profile speakers such as Andrew Goudie, Gillian Rose and Richard Wilkinson, and I hope you found their talks interesting and inspirational.

We didn’t quite manage to get Sir Dave but Luke and Heather enjoyed receiving a hand-written letter in response!

CUGS runs a huge variety of events during term and we were pleased to see the return of our Careers Fair in November. The employers and companies really reflected the diversity of careers geographers go into; from the British Antarctic Survey, to Unilever, to the Ordnance Survey, it was a fruitful experience for many who came. Hats off to James and Emma who worked hard to organise the evening.

4 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

Geographers seem to have a reputation for being highly sociable students and Charlotte, Georgia and Rosie on the Ents team have continued to foster this trend with a number of socials such as the Freshers’ Cocktail Night and the annual Christmas Dinner, where Dr Alice Evans entertained the hall with a humorous ethnography of ‘the Cambridge student’, whilst keeping us in continuing suspense for the long awaited backflip.

This has been a year of firsts for the society, one of them being the trip to Amsterdam in January. Over 50 geographers and non-geographers enjoyed bike tours, bar crawls and famous museums in the city and it was great to see everyone mixing and meeting new people (even if it was whilst attempting to pick up half a cereal box from the floor using only your mouth!). We all returned home safely and with happy memories, and I really encourage you to join us next year in another exciting European city.

The opportunities which CUGS has brought to its members this year has truly been expanded, such as chances to engage in student journalism, a new travel grant and even the Hugs from CUGS midterm breakfast. We are constantly thinking of new events and prospects for our members as well as updating basic functions of the society, such as our new website and Alternative Prospectus. An incredible amount of work goes on behind the scenes, and I would therefore like to thank my enthusiastic, committed and all round fantastic committee. Not only have you put so much energy into the events you have organised for members but you built a strong and fun team this year and I have thoroughly enjoyed working with you all. You should be very proud of what you have achieved for CUGS and I hope many more of you out there have been inspired to join this brilliant society!

5 / Compass / Lent 2017

CUGS love, Hannah

A GEOGRAPHER’S PERSPECTIVE

TRUMPONOMICS AND THE GEOGRAPHIES OF AMERICAN FOOTBALL

BY DAN BOWE

As

I write, Donald J. Trump is about to be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States and assume the position of ‘leader of the free world.’ This showcase of American democracy will feature the swearing in of the victorious candidate in last November’s election, as well as a triumphant Trump taking to the mic for his first Presidential address.

This speech will likely exhibit a very different tone to Trump’s first press conference as President-elect in early January. Here, the Donald faced a barrage of questions regarding a leaked, unverified intelligence dossier allegedly containing compromising information about his prior relationship with Russian officials and…showers. He also took the opportunity to elaborate on how he will prevent Presidential duties conflicting with his business interests, by handing the reigns of his business empire over to the distant, independent and not remotely closeto-the-Trump-administration Donald and Eric Trump.

Although, arguably one of the more overlooked parts of Trump’s press conference was a proposed policy to help bring investment and 6 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

jobs back to suffering, deindustrialised states like Michigan and Wisconsin - both of which he surprisingly seized in November’s election. Modestly proclaiming himself as “the greatest jobs producer that God ever created,” Trump cited the success stories he had already achieved before he had set foot in the Oval Office: “You saw yesterday Fiat Chrysler; big, big factory going to be built in this country as opposed to another country. Ford just announced that they stopped plans for a billion dollar plant in Mexico and they’re going to be moving into Michigan and expanding, very substantially, an existing plant.”

And he wasn’t finished there: “I hope that General Motors will be following and I think they will be. I think a lot of people will be following.

I think a lot of industries are going to be coming back.”

So, what was it about the President-elect that had inspired such confidence in the motor industry to choose Michigan, Milwaukee and the wider Midwest over Mexico? Was it assurances about taxes, access to markets or other financial incentives?

No - it was fear-mongering, specifically policies that will enable

unprecedented levels of trade protectionism, a stark contrast to the US’s recent history of embracing a neo-liberal, free trade agenda. Trump warned that companies who relocate manufacturing plants from the US to Mexico and attempt to sell their finished products back into the States will face a “very large border tax,” which will serve as a retrospective ‘fine’ for firing “great American workers” and replacing them with those pesky ‘murderers’ and ‘rapists’ south of the border.

However, on closer inspection, Trump’s proposals appear somewhat contradictory. While he appears hellbent on erecting barriers to companies who want to replace American workers with Mexican workers, an internal free market ideology means he has no qualms with corporations firing American workers and replacing them with…American workers: “…you can move from Michigan to Tennessee and to North Carolina and South Carolina. You can move from South Carolina back to Michigan. You can go anywhere — you’ve got a lot of states at play; a lot of competition. So it’s not like, oh, gee, I’m taking the competition away.

You’ve got a lot of places you can

move. And I don’t care, as along as it’s within the United States, the borders of the United States.”

Common sense suggests that this is unlikely to help reduce the number of Americans who are unable to find employment; 96 million, to be precise, a figure Trump regularly references to highlight a major failure of the Obama administration. Instead, the unique way taxes are determined by each US state means they will turn against each other, undercutting rival neighbours with the aim of becoming bargain-basement corporation tax havens. Incentives will be thrown at corporations haphazardly as they vie for investment, with job security becoming an obsolete concept. Car manufacturing may well return to Michigan, but only until South Carolina offers a more enticing proposal; then the old problems may return, self-inflicted by Trump’s active encouragement of free markets and domestic competition.

This is where the similarly dynamic geographies of American football are linked. In January alone, two teams from the National Football League (NFL), announced plans to relocate their entire franchises to new cities at 7 / Compass / Lent 2017

the beginning of next season. Firstly, the San Diego Chargers, who have operated in the city for more than half a century, announced plans to relocate 125 miles north along the Californian coast to the Inglewood suburb of Los Angeles. Their neighbours in the San Francisco-Bay Area, the Oakland Raiders, (not wanting to left behind) have recently followed suit and announced plans to relocate a mere 560 miles East into the desert and set up shop in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the space of two weeks, the Bay Area has experienced a mass exodus - from having 2 NFL teams to none, pending any hiccups.

Like Trump’s vision for the domestic auto-industry, the reasons for both relocations appear financially-motivated. Undoubtedly, ‘the City of Angels’ and ‘Sin City’ will provide more lucrative markets for both organisations and likely attract fans from across the globe, increasing merchandise revenues. The LA mayor, Eric Garcetti, said he is looking forward to “the extraordinary contributions they [the Chargers] will make to our entire region,” alongside the already established LA Rams - who themselves relocated from St Louis,

Missouri in 2016.

This clearly is an established trend in the sport, albeit one with many detrimental impacts. NFL commissioner Robert Goodell admitted “relocation is painful for teams and communities” at a recent press conference, while the University of San Diego estimates the city of San Diego will lose something in the ballpark of $100 million a year from the Chargers exit, including the loss of hundreds of jobs. It’s not as if employees of the Raiders will be able to extend their daily commute to Las Vegas every day, either.

Painful, yes. But the numbers we are discussing here are in the thousands. Meanwhile, the man addressing the Washington crowd on my laptop screen will potentially be juggling with millions of jobs, and breaking his promise to the people of Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio of returning prosperity. An interstate tax war awaits, and under his premiership more Americans than ever before may be hearing the words “You’re fired.” But as the man himself so eloquently put it, “I don’t care, as along as it’s within the United States.”

a GEOGRAPHEr’s PERSPECTIVE

BEYOND BREXIT AND TRUMP: A LOOK AT THE FUTURE OF EUROPEAN RIGHTWING POLITICS

BY ROGIER PRINS

O

ne day after the inauguration of Donald Trump, Europe’s leading rightwing populists met for the first time in public at a convention in the German city of Koblenz. The main speakers were the leaders of three European nationalist parties: France’s Ms Le Pen of the Front National (FN), Mr Wilders of the Freedom Party (PVV), and Germany’s Ms Petry of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, all of whom face national elections in 2017. They were in a jubilant mood.

For them, the election of Trump constitutes a second victory in a widespread popular uprising against politically correct and unpatriotic elites, after the unexpected win in the Brexit referendum. As Ms Le Pen put it, ‘2016 was the year in which the Anglo-Saxon world woke up. 2017, I am sure, will be the year in which the peoples of Continental Europe wake up.’ This conviction was seconded by Mr Wilders, who has embraced the hashtag #MakeTheNetherlandsGreatAgain: ‘Yesterday a new America, today Koblenz, and tomorrow a new Europe!’ Does 2017, then, herald victory for Europe’s nationalists, in the wake of Brexit and Trump?

Certainly, the parties of Ms Le Pen, Mr Wilders and Ms Petry have more than a few things in common with the movement which has become known as ‘Trumpism’. Although the AfD party also has a somewhat more liberal wing, the appeal of all three European parties comes primarily from their harsh stances on nonwestern immigration. FN and the PVV, like Trump, combine this with pledges for increased welfare 8 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

spending for the ‘native’ populations.

This is consistent with the fact that support for xenophobic populism is strongest among white men who are non-university educated and working-class, and therefore hit hardest by the financial crisis. Finally, the AfD party and the PVV are like Trump in that they make use of what an AfD strategy paper called ‘targeted provocation’, where a party member scores headlines by saying something particularly controversial, from which the party then half-heartedly distances itself, having accomplished the twin goals of gaining media attention and extending the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. One example of this is the execrable suggestion made on 18 January, the 75th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, by the regional AfD-leader Höcke to remove the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, calling it ‘a monument of shame in the heart of the capital’. Likewise, in 2014, Mr Wilders managed to divert media attention from his party’s poor performance at municipal elections by calling for ‘fewer Moroccans’ in The Netherlands. Indeed, the latter also resembles Trump in his constant attacks on two pillars of democracy, the media and the judiciary. When found guilty in December 2016 of public insult and incitement to discrimination for precisely the action mentioned above, he responded by calling the law court ‘fake’ and implying that the judges who had sentenced him must have been members of the liberal Democrats (D66), the Dutch political party most strongly opposed to Wilders.

Still, Europe’s Trumps are unlikely to achieve significant power in 2017, with Ms Le Pen having probably the

biggest chance of electoral success.

Mr Wilders is leading in the polls, at around 20-25%, but will almost certainly be excluded from power by the ten-odd other political parties likely to gain seats in parliament.

In Germany, Angela Merkel reigns supreme, with one poll showing an approving rating of as high as 74 per cent. Indeed, some of her popularity seems to rest on her ability to provide stability in the midst of geopolitical revolts occurring elsewhere; another poll showed that Merkel’s popularity rose by 9 per cent within days of the Brexit vote. In France, although Ms Le Pen will certainly reach the second round of the presidential elections, much depends on the quality of the other candidate to reach that round.

Given that the supporters of the other parties contending in the election are more strongly opposed to Ms Le Pen than to each other, the candidate opposing her in the second round would have to be only reasonably acceptable to accrue the support of a majority. French voters excluded FN very successfully in this manner during the regional elections of December 2015, when Ms Le Pen won 44% of the vote in northern France, but failed to gain its presidency after the Socialist Party (PS) campaigned for the centre-right candidate.

In the end, then, victory for the European nationalists seems improbable. So it seemed, however, for Brexit and Trump. Moreover, If Ms Le Pen were to win this would have truly dramatic results; for one thing, her commitment to a ‘Frexit’ referendum would render the future of the EU uncertain. There is no reason for complacency; the ‘populist revolt’ might not be over yet.

VOICES FROM THE WOMEN’S MARCH

a geographer’s PERSPECTIVE

SEVEN WOMEN ON WHY THEY TOOK TO THE STREETS FOR THE WOMEN’S MARCH, JANUARY 21ST BY ISABEL DEWHURST

KATE

Only a few months in and it seems 2017 will be a year of social movements. Marches are emerging from left and right across the globe, and whether they speak out against Trump’s travel ban, abortions, or the continued sidelining of climate change, they demand to be heard.

Social media has made it easier to mobilize thousands worldwide in support of a movement, but fake news and biased media also make it difficult to separate the reality of these social movements from the headlines. To put individual voices to the media’s generalizations about the Women’s March on January 21st, seven women from universities in the US and the UK tell why, exactly, they marched.

"Why did I join the women's march?

Throughout 2016, I felt myself becoming numb to stories in the news that even just a few years ago would have shocked me to the core. The more hate and fear reported in the news, the less I seemed to notice it. I clicked on the Facebook event for the women's march in London mostly because I saw some friends were going. But the more reasons I read for it taking place, the more I realised I wanted to be there. I felt awful that sexist, racist, and homophobic comments from world leaders no longer made me shout, they barely made me 'tut'. The march made me (literally!) shout again, and I felt so much better! But beyond the excitement of the day, the messages on the placards have stayed with me and made me pay attention to the news again. The world might be becoming a horrible place, but at least I'll have noticed."

ABIGAIL COSTIGAN “I marched because it is a concrete way to make my voice heard. I marched because I had to stand up to the bully that is now our president and for all the victims he left in his path.”

Photograph credits: Meg Chandler

10 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

a geographer’s PERSPECTIVE

ANNA PHILLIPS-BROWN

“I attended the march because I felt really betrayed and unsafe when Trump, a man who has openly and unapologetically objectified women and joked about rape and assault, was elected to office. I actually performed a personal demonstration shortly after the election where I stood on the National Mall blindfolded and let people write on me what “woman” means to them, because I wanted reassurance for myself and others that women would never become objects. Recently, I tweeted something about pro choice not meaning pro abortion, and I received an onslaught of hateful responses from primarily white supremacist accounts, telling me to kill myself, that I was a slut, that I should kill my children, just really awful things. That all compelled me to be at the march even more, so I blew up one of the hateful tweets directed at me and put it on a poster to prove instead of letting it sit inside me and hurt, I would use my frustration and anger to invoke change.”

MARGARET MAUCH “At the most basic level, I marched because women’s rights are human rights.

Something powerful happens when women come together with similar intentions. I wanted to feel that power and use it to fuel and motivate me to move forward during the difficult times ahead. There is power in solidarity and it was comforting and hopeful to come together with so many people who felt the same way.”

Photograph credits: Anna Phillips-Brown

NIKTA “I’ve wanted to be a lawyer since I was eight years old. So in undergrad I was part of the mock trial team, which is an activity where you get a fake legal case and you travel across the country competing against other universities in simulated courtroom proceedings. And I remember spending so many mock trial practices infuriated by the things I had to deal with that my male teammates didn’t: I couldn’t be too loud as an attorney or I’d be accused of being aggressive, I couldn’t be too quiet or I’d be accused of being timid, I couldn’t wear pantsuits because that was unconventional, I couldn’t wear skirts that were too short because it would be unprofessional, etc.

So I marched on behalf of all the women who, like me, have felt the frustration that comes along with trying to find your voice in a male-dominated world. I marched because it’s important to remember the value in what we have to say.”

Photograph credits: Meg Chandler

KYRA MAXWELL

MEG CHANDLER

“I marched because I don’t think President Trump has any real respect for women or their rights both in the United States and abroad. At the march itself I had an amazing, very positive experience - everyone there clearly really cared about the rights of women as well as various other minority groups in the US. To me the message was loud and clear: although Trump is president we’re not going to let him stand by and take away our rights.”

“I marched in the Women’s March on Washington because I believe in the power of democracy. I believe in a unified United States as a diverse, accepting, and nondiscriminating nation of all ethnicities, genders, sexualities, classes. I marched because this is not the America I see today. As a white, middle-class, straight, educated woman, I have a voice that can be heard. It is my duty to fight for my rights as well as the rights of those who are not as privileged.”

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a geographer’s PERSPECTIVE

CAUTIOUSLY NAVIGATING UNCERTAIN ENVIRONMENTS We live in a society that has become saturated with information. The challenge that confronts people is how to manage and comprehend this data in a meaningful or effective manner. TIM HARFORD, The Undercover Economist columnist at the Financial Times and presenter of ‘BBC More or Less’, has become accustomed to investigating and commenting upon the unusual aspects in this age of information and interrogating the statistical claims that our societies are persistently exposed to.

BY ANGUS PARKER

£

350 million – perhaps the most striking statistic of 2016, emblazoned across the Vote Leave bus during the EU referendum campaign. Despite the questionable validity of the statement, it proved that statistics have immense power and can provoke quite profound debates surrounding political life – remarkably, it is probably the only fact that most people remembered after June 23rd. However, the use of statistics has proliferated alongside the increased diffusion of information.

As globalisation has intensified the digital revolutions and facilitated unprecedented flows of information, an environment has been created where statistics can be deployed apparently objectively without substantial thought or attention.

“I think that we’ve got to an unfortunate situation where a lot of people have forgotten that statistics are an essential way of understanding the world and making better decisions,” the economist Tim Harford argues. “Far too many politicians are using statistics purely to prop up an argument. It is a bipartisan thing, all politicians on all sides do it.”

The Vote Leave statement, the statistics surrounding Jeremy Hunt’s claim about poor weekend care in the NHS – the list of political claims buttressed by statistics is somewhat limitless. What is troubling is the frequency in which the statistic takes precedence over debate about the fundamental policies of particular governments. However, this attitude is somewhat pervasive and a statistic is only as effective as to how it is received and understood.

“We are often uncritical consumers. There is a degree to which we have come to appreciate statistics as decoration. We feel like an argument has got to have some 12 / Compass COMPASS / Lent LENT 2017

numbers, even when we don’t fully understand what they mean - it feels rigorous. People in the fact checking business have to be careful in how we potentially support this dynamic and ensure that statistical interrogation does not usurp the role of a statistic in understanding the world.”

But Harford believes that the current situation poses further challenges to understanding statistics for what they objectively mean. “The situation is getting more unevenly distributed,” he argues. “If you want really good solid analysis and detailed explorations of what statistics really mean, it’s never been easier to access.

On the other hand, if you want utter bulls*** or outright lies (bulls*** is making things up but lies are deliberately designed to deceive) it’s never been easier to encounter this as well.

“We need to understand that statistics are subjective but you often need to go deeper to understand what they mean. Quite often we hear an objective sounding statistic, and in many ways it is an objective statistic, but we put a subjective meaning on it before we’ve really understood it.”

The cautionary attitude towards statistics perhaps explains why Harford is reluctant to proffer any predictions for the condition of the global economy in the years to come.

Despite the words ‘expert’ and ‘forecast’, becoming universal in the lexicon of economics, for Harford, forecasting is

“a mug’s game” and one which economists have regrettably become intrinsically entangled, especially as the public’s insatiable desire for certainty heightens demands for such prophecies.

“I think forecasts are kind of like snack food – we consume them, we know they are not really doing us any good but we go for them anyway.

Forecasting is difficult; anybody finds forecasting difficult, not just economists. But we economists have got ourselves into this weird situation whereby people expect us to make forecasts. John Maynard Keynes once said it would be great if economists could be viewed as a useful professional like dentists - when you go to your dentists, for example, you don’t ask ‘How many teeth do you think I’ll have when I’m 65?’

– you ask them to

a geographer’s’ PERSPECTIVE

“We are often uncritical consumers.

There is a degree to which we have come to appreciate statistics as decoration.” give you advice on healthcare and how to fix problems. Economists need to get into that situation in terms of forecasting.”

It is an astute observation but the “snack food” nature of prediction has created an industry in the twenty-first century that thrives off speculation, principally within the discipline of economics. However, Harford’s attitude is admirable in his more measured, composed approach – one in which judgement has to be reserved until statistical and factual certainty have been established. When asked about Trump, he maintains his stoic resistance to prediction; “We don’t know what he is going to do and, even if we did know what he was going to do, we don’t know what difference it is going to make. Who knows, who knows, wait and see.”

Despite Harford’s plea for change, forecasts, predictions and assertions made by politicians, economists and the media will not fade from our societies and will continue to be bolstered by statistical claims that need further evaluation. One of the principal ways in which we can improve our appraisal of statistics is watching for our own confirmation biases which permeate our thoughts and often cloud our judgements and thinking.

“Motivated reasoning is a principal influence on everyone. We tend to believe who and what we want to believe – if people see something they are suspicious of, they look very hard for disconfirmatory evidence that will discount it, if they see something that rings true they don’t look at all for disconfirmatory evidence – the concept of confirmation bias is everywhere.”

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Harford draws upon an example from physics to elaborate his point: “When Millikan first measured the charge on an electron there were errors in his estimate but it took fifty years for physicists to realise that Millikan had been wrong. When you look at the history of re-estimates they move in the same direction - gradually away from the original estimate. What was happening was that if people got a result that was a long way away from Millikan’s they would dismiss it but if they got a result that was close, they’d accept its validity.

What you had was a very gradual creep from what was Millikan’s number to what people now think is the real number.

If people had been willing to say Millikan is completely wrong, you would have got to the real number far quicker - this is just confirmation bias and it’s ubiquitous.”

Detaching oneself from the culturally produced biases that have been constructed within your life is not straightforward; however, Harford believes that the task is not as complicated as many people believe.

“If you want to check a claim, a little bit of back of the envelope maths, some basic questions such as – what does this number mean, what is being measured, who produced it, is it an official source, is there a trend, how big is it. “‘Is that a big number?’ is a classic question – potentially big numbers aren’t in reality that large. Politicians might say, for example, we are going to spend £100 billion on schools over the next five years. That’s £20 million per year therefore about 30p/person per year, so less than 1p/person per week. Suddenly you realise that you are going to be spending less than 1p/ person a week improving schools and

that’s obviously not big!”

By analyzing numbers in this way, statistics can become appreciated and understood by a greater swathe of people and the cloak of uncertainty that politicians exploit can be more decisively removed. Yet, as Harford’s reticence towards forecasting illustrates, the future is one area that retains its cloak of uncertainty and the economist is anxious about what it might hold.

“I’m nervous about 2017.

I’m nervous, not because I think everything is terrible, I’m nervous because I think we have got a lot to lose, we’ve got a lot of progress to guard. Global average longevity is

“I think forecasts are kind of like snack food – we consume them, we know they are not really doing us any good but we go for them anyway.” now over 70, when I was born it was 60, 100 years ago it was 30 – this is huge progress. The world economy is growing at least 3% per year, almost every year in living memory, so it’s doubling every 20 to 25 years; despite all the trouble that we’ve had, the world economy keeps growing, energy efficiency is increasing, violence, torture, genocide and wars are on the decline. There are lots of problems in the world but we do need to remember the positive aspects too and we could lose this.”

This should not be seen as simply a banal truism; it reflects a considered and reserved approach that was eminent throughout our interview.

Complication and uncertainty should be avoided. Instead of demanding certainty over our future, we should first grasp the validity of the present.

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

OUT OF SIGHT

OUT OF MIND

BY REBECCA REBIS

L

et’s be honest: as soon as we discovered Google Maps, we all googled our own houses. There was something so exciting to see our homes, something so familiar, somehow out there on the web: a place where anyone could type in the address and see that we existed.

Frivolous as this ability to find our houses on Google Maps seems, it’s actually an incredibly important gift.

And it doesn’t belong to everyone. The mundaneness of having an address is not a universal state; nor is the access it provides to vital services open to everyone. Imagine not having a street name or house number. How do you tell someone where you live? What information do you give to a doctor’s surgery when you go to register? And in an emergency, how do you tell an ambulance where to find you? Having an address goes from being a fact of life to a vital piece of information.

Let me take you to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where steak is king and tango is queen. It’s home to over 20 informal settlements, or villas miserias as they are sometimes called. As one might expect, these settlements often lack access to basic services such as plumbing, electricity and regular rubbish collection; but until recently, one of their biggest problems was the fact that they did not appear on city maps. Instead of their streets and businesses being labelled like those in other parts of the city, all that was shown were grey patches: empty spaces where no casual map-reader would assume a whole neighbourhood existed. This state of affairs made it incredibly hard to apply to the city government and demand amenities such as a reliable electricity supply, as no address meant they were not technically a part of the city and therefore not strictly the government’s problem.

14 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

Fortunately, this is different now, thanks to the efforts of a local organisation named ‘Caminos de la Villa’ (or ‘The Ways of the Villa’).

This project, the brainchild of civil rights group ACIJ and tech start-up Wingu, began through a desire to allow residents of the villas to register complaints about their lack of services.

The idea is simple: get residents to log in to the site, have them click on the place on a map where the services are not working and categorise the complaints so that they can be passed on to the appropriate authority.

The project had to expand when the lack of online maps forced the organisation to create maps themselves. This was achieved through the use of handheld GPS devices – with the help of the residents, members of Caminos de la Villa would walk up and down the streets of the slums and use the signal from the devices to track their movements. This signal could then be converted to map form, refined and edited by the team and by representatives of the villas, then uploaded to the site. And, just like that, villas suddenly exist on a map.

Several years on, the organisation have managed to map over twenty informal neighbourhoods and provided over a hundred claims to the city government for improved services.

However, their real triumph lies in how they have made the invisible visible. Villa inhabitants no longer have to exist in the shadows, without an address and without a voice. Now they are able to look at a map and find where they live. And as the Caminos de la Villa project continues to grow and evolve, it is hoped that non-residents will be able to look at the maps and not see an empty space or even just a collection of problems. Instead, they can see a neighbourhood of their city: very different from theirs in terms of living conditions, but just as entitled to be seen.

Photograph Credit: Rebecca Rebis

human geography

STUCK IN LIMBO: HOMELESS IN SAN FRANCISCO

S

an Francisco is a city of newfound wealth, a thriving centre for the booming technologies of Silicon Valley. Yet, as a newcomer walking the iconic hills and tramlines across the city, it is near impossible to ignore the stark inequalities that have accompanied these new tech start-ups, the influx of middleclass ‘IT geeks’ and rapid gentrification. These inequalities appear in their most blatant form on the streets of San Francisco as a proliferating homelessness problem, with rough sleepers huddled just a block away from the shiny tower of the Twitter HQ. Call me naïve, but when I made the decision to research homelessness here for my third year dissertation despite reading about staggering numbers of homeless people I didn’t expect the desperate situation to be so obvious. The Civic Centre and the Tenderloin district are overwhelmed with rough sleepers and littered with personal possessions, with an estimated 6,500 people falling into the ‘homeless’ category at any one time.

So why are these people homeless? The first conclusion many people jump to is drug and alcohol abuse. This is certainly an issue. People shoot up on the streets at 11am, needles crunch underfoot in some areas of the Tenderloin and many of the homeless people I spoke to had struggled with substance abuse. But as I talked to more people on the streets and witnessed the inequalities across the city, I increasingly questioned how fair it is to label all homeless people as addicts and place the blame for their predicament on individual choices.

Structural issues such as lack of physical space, 15 / Compass / Lent 2017

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

BY HARRIET HALL

gentrification and local resistance to new housing projects has hindered any real progress in housing the poorest San Franciscans. The focus of the City Government is misplaced as they pump funding into a flawed homeless shelter system with limited beds and alienating regulations. But as calls for more forceful policing of homeless people in public spaces around the city increase, the homeless population are stuck in limbo. With simply not enough shelter beds and measures to outlaw private functions in public space, they have little choice but to live a criminalised existence.

I spent days exploring the city on foot, discovering anti-homeless measures actually built into the cityscape folding benches, studded walls, gated enclaves - to deter any lengthy sitting, leaning and lying on the sidewalks.

These people literally have no place to go.

Of course San Francisco isn’t the only US city with prolific homelessness, just as California isn’t the only state and the USA is not the only country. But while different places experience and deal with the issue differently, the fact that there is such stark inequality and so many homeless people is distressing and concerning in prosperous countries. But the main thing I have learnt from my experiences of homelessness in the UK and the USA is that structural issues often underlie any individual choices keeping the chronically homeless on the streets. In San Francisco, the city must keep working to improve the shelter system and increase affordable housing to ensure the benefits of the expanding tech companies are felt by all, rather than relying on punitive measures to restore order to public spaces.

Photograph Credits: Darrel Long

FORGETTING TO REMEMBER

BY CHLOE RIXON

I

t is a common incantation that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it (George Santayana, 1906); it accompanies the familiar litany of prosaic quotes to mark historic anniversaries, prefaces innumerable texts, and serves as an effective justification for any historical analysis.

And yet, whilst we remember this incantation, do we always remember to remember the past?

January 27 2017 marked international Holocaust Memorial Day: a day completely and totally dedicated to remembering the Holocaust, to remembering not to forget it.

I’ve struggled with the idea of a defined temporal bracket set aside for the purpose of memorial for a while, traceable, I think, to sitting crosslegged on a classroom floor, listening to my primary-school teacher translating the news of London bombings and asking us to be quiet for a minute to remember the victims.

Amidst several other fidgeting, crosslegged kids, I scrunched my eyes and willed myself into remembering. Every few seconds I’d soften the scrunch in one eye to a split vision, checking that everyone else was still remembering.

I’d then resume focus on my own remembering. I don’t think I thought 16 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

about the victims for more than a few negligible seconds; what really occupied my minute of remembering were tangential thoughts about the act of remembering, why on earth I was being told to sit in silence and remember something that no one I knew had experienced and I certainly hadn’t experienced, or what other people were thinking about and, oh! I wasn’t remembering what I was supposed to remember! I kept forgetting! I’ve observed countless minutes of silence since my crosslegged, scrunched-eyes experience, and I always find myself returning to this circular questioning of performing commemoration of particular memories within a defined, imposed minute of silence – or, by extension, a universally dedicated day.

I do not dispute the dedication of minutes of silence or days of dedicated memorial to remembering particular events/victims. What I seek to question is the everyday alternative(s) to these normalised forms of ritualised commemoration.

Around the time of said minute of silence, I was obsessed with a series of self-musealisation books styled around the concept of ‘My Story’: ‘My Story: Blitz’, ‘My Story: Pompeii’, ‘My Story: Slave Girl’, etc. Published by Scholastic UK, these children’s novels

are written as fictional diaries of someone living during an important historical event. They narrate the event from an explicitly individuated, situated perspective, engaging you through the construed story rather than reproducing historical truth in the objective manner of factual listings and rigid analyses. It was a natural progression to ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ and, from there, a host of other historical narratives, fictional and non-fictional. As another common incantation goes, “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, whilst the man who never reads lives only once” (George R.R. Martin, 2011); ultimately, such narratives exposed me to the exploration of historical events and realities (if somewhat trivialised) that I otherwise would never have encountered, or, likely, that my memory would have naturally dismissed.

I don’t remember first encountering the Holocaust.

Contingent with my love of reading, I get the sense that it’s always been there in my periphery, gradually and progressively brought into focus by my habitual and often arrogant reading habits. What I do remember, however, is when my friend first encountered the Holocaust. My friend comes from a Jewish background, is a

human geography year older than I, and had never heard of the Holocaust until I mentioned one day, aged 16, that I was reading ‘If This Is A Man’ by Primo Levi. ‘What’s that about?’ she asked. I replied that it was a Holocaust testimony, thinking that a normative grounding for the book’s context. ‘The Holocaust?’ she asked, ‘What’s that?’

I didn’t explain the Holocaust to her, but asked her to pose the question to her parents, recommending Spielberg’s (1993) ‘Schindler’s List’ if she wanted to explore it independently. She came back to me a week later having watched the film, dubious as to how – and indeed speculative of why - she had never encountered such a significant event, still a living memory for many older generations today.

I directed her to other narrative (re)productions, myself, having normatively assumed conscious global awareness of the Holocaust, aghast and genuinely concerned at her lack of previous encounter with it.

I went to a high-school where Holocaust education formed a consciously prominent and normatively diverse part of student development, encouraged by my head, Dame Helen Hyde, a fellow in Holocaust studies at the Imperial War Museum, member of the chair of education committee for the National Holocaust Commission, and recipient of a DBE for services to national and Holocaust education. In 2013, I spent a week with Dame Hyde tracing the Holocaust’s spatiality from the Nazi regime in Berlin, Germany, visiting several memorial sites, to the Wannsee villa, where the Wannseekonferenz is attributed with conceiving the Final Solution, to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, Poland and, finally, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps. Comforting me as we left Auschwitz-II Birkenau, the RS teacher who also accompanied us turned to me and suggested that perhaps the reason I was so affected by the visit, more visibly and particularly so than many of the other girls, was because I had studied neither History nor Religious Studies and therefore wasn’t used to the images or reality of the Holocaust as the other girls who had studied such subjects were.

“Actually, why did you come on this

trip?’ she asked.

I come back to these questions as I continue to read about and explore the Holocaust, which ultimately inform my motivation and interest in analysing Holocaust memories and commemoration for my undergraduate dissertation: ‘What is the Holocaust? Why have I never encountered this before?’ and ‘Why did you come on this trip?’

Several events in Cambridge marked Holocaust Memorial day, and the

by recall but imaginative investment, projection and creation. To account for this, post-memory – contextually defined as the adoption of Holocaust memory by individuals and groups whose relation to the Holocaust is a construction (Martin Modlinger, 2015) – has been engaged in a fictional turn, such that the collective memory of the Holocaust refers to an increasingly fictional archive. As such, mediums like film and literature can effectively and ontologically be theorised and understood as memorials in and of themselves: ‘Schindler’s List’, ‘Sophie’s Choice’, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’, ‘The Reader’, ‘Sarah’s Key’, amongst others, offer a multitude of narratives of the Holocaust, promoting its commemorative performance in a way neither spatially nor temporally restricted as defined temporal brackets of dedicated commemoration and archetypal memorials to historic events are, and, hence, constituting and promoting more everyday performance(s) of Holocaust memory.

I hope that the specifically dedicated temporal bracket of January 27 as Holocaust Memorial Day assists in reminding us not to forget, and performs commemoration in a way that leaves no child cross-legged with scrunched-eyes unaware of what she is supposed to be remembering and hence performing somewhat useless commemoration, answers the subconscious questions those who have yet to encounter the Holocaust inevitably hold, and incites interest or at least awareness beyond the boundaries of formal education. But I hold to the significance of everyday alternatives, both spatially and temporally, which, in my personal experience and increasingly supported by evidence in studies across the social sciences, are performed effectively by literary and film narratives, ultimately supporting the dedicated day. Without such support, memories and understandings of the Holocaust risk being reductionist in their spatial and temporal consignment, implicitly normalising the events with performative closure as something that happened long ago and has been dealt with, serving a very acutely defined sense of commemoration.

The deliberate and defined temporal bracket of a day dedicated to remembering the Holocaust is important for this very unconscious reason of reminding us not to forget.

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adaptation of Deborah Lipstadt’s libel case with prominent Holocaust denier David Irving, ‘Denial’, was released across cinemas; but you had to be on the right mailing lists or intentionally search for the events to know about them, and, whilst I’ve long had the date pencilled into my diary and several reminders featured in radio stations in the week preceding, it’s not a date etched into the conscious memory or everyday performance of most – particularly those of us to whom it is only a postmemory, inherited, encountered, translated. The deliberate and defined temporal bracket of a day dedicated to remembering the Holocaust is important for this very unconscious reason of reminding us not to forget.

But what has formed the backbone to my understandings and awareness of the Holocaust, as I hope to have implicated, has ultimately been literature, and, by extension, film.

As we grow ever more temporally removed from events of the Holocaust and those to whom it forms a lived memory become fewer, particularly in contexts like my own where temporal remove is reinforced by a lack of spatial proximity to the urban landscape(s) of its perpetration and direct experience, our connections to the past are mediated increasingly not

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

CONSERVATION AND COMMUNITY

A Hirola

Sustainable approaches in the Northern Range Trust, Kenya

BY JASMIN REES Physical Natural Sciences

W

e all want to help save the world (or at least I hope we do) but figuring out the best way to go about it sometimes feels like some sort of logic puzzle. What do we prioritise? Which organisations do we trust? What even makes effective conservation? When considering all this, it is so easy to forget to look at the bigger picture and instead focus on short-term benefits or just one aspect of change.

Conservation is often bigger than just the ecosystem it is helping to sustain; it is about forming relationships and ties between the surrounding human populations in order to foster future sustainability.

Whilst human presence is often the cause of the need for conservation actions, it can, and to some extent must, also be part of the solution.

Conservation organisations which take into account surrounding human society not only reap some of the most beneficial rewards for the wildlife in question, but can even lead to improved relations between different population groups. If conservation actions are not planned to incorporate individual societal needs, they can lead to detrimental economic or social consequences and even in some cases continue to perpetuate an already prominent cycle of poverty – 18 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

ultimately leading to the breakdown of any ecological benefits. But when the needs of these societies are catered to alongside the ecological needs of the environment, conservation becomes more self-sufficient and short term benefits can evolve into long term solutions.

Northern Range Trust (NRT) represents how this co-ordination can lead to such positive results.

Based in Kenya, NRT aims to not only conserve natural resources and habitats (focusing on a large number of endangered animals such as the Grevy’s zebra, the black rhino and a wide range of hoofstock) but also aims to secure peace between the fifteen different ethnic groups in the region.

Representatives from county councils, as well as from wildlife forums, Kenya Wildlife Service, the private sector and chairs of the separate conservancies of which it governs, make up the highest governing body.

This level of integration has led to the formation of new government regulations concerning conservation in the region and a higher level of community involvement. In 2015, a total of KSh 130 million was committed to county governments for funding of conservation, with NRT also playing a role in the economy and education in the region by funding

school programmes and providing permanent jobs.

Through these actions, the community’s perspective on the importance of wildlife conservation on their wellbeing has improved, with 92% believing that wildlife is part of their future. Between 2012 and 2015 alone, poaching levels in the NRT territory dropped from 81% to 38% and the population of the critically endangered hirola doubled. The hirola (or Hunter’s antelope) is only found within the Ishaqbini region of Kenya and there are only a few hundred left in the wild. For species like this, effective conservation is vital.

In the last two years, Cambridge University Wildlife Conservation Society has raised over £500 for the Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy and now aims to continue to raise money for other projects that build sustainable community and conservation foundations. Ultimately, building conservation around a society helps set realistic goals which not only benefit the human population and wildlife but can also encourage a future environmental legacy. There are so many things to unite people across the globe; why not make it conservation?

physical geography

CITIZEN SCIENCE TAKES FLIGHT

BY FIONA DOBSON

G

etting people enthused about the natural world is something that every environmentalist dreams of, and now, with the use of citizen science, this is becoming more possible than ever.

Citizen science is a relatively new approach to research where members of the general public are encouraged to participate in scientific data collection or analysis. The term first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014 and is also known as crowdsourced or civic science, often making extensive use of the internet to collect and generate ‘big data’. While citizen science can be used within a wide variety of scientific disciplines, it plays an especially important role in modern ornithology.

All you need to do to go out and ‘bird’ is to keep your eyes open (binoculars do come in handy), have a willingness to explore the outdoors, and sometimes have a little patience.

Birdwatching has long been one of the most accessible of pastimes for people across the world; whether you live in rural or urban areas, birds are everywhere. Now, thanks to the dedication, expertise and creativity of scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, citizen science is being used to encourage regular birdwatchers to contribute to the wider study of birds.

Running since 2002, eBird is a realtime, online checklist program that provides critical data for science as well as tools for birdwatchers around the world. Anyone with access to 19 / Compass / Lent 2017

the internet can create an account and submit their bird observations, which feeds into a huge database and generates a wealth of comprehensive information that can be analysed both spatially and temporally. The program is rapidly becoming one of the largest biodiversity data resources, with over 9.5 million bird observations reported in 2015.

Of course, with any project involving this many people there are likely to be issues with data validity, however all submissions are checked by built-in data quality filters and any records for species that are unusual for a region are reviewed by local experts before they enter the database.

All of the data is accessible on the eBird website, and is incredibly useful for a range of actors. For ornithologists, eBird greatly aids their study and understanding of birds; for the wider scientific community, it contributes to the study of global biodiversity (eBird data feeds into the Global Biodiversity Information Facility); for regular birdwatchers, it provides an incredible way to discover real-time information about the places that they live and visit.

Clicking on ‘Explore Data’ on the eBird website leads you to a wealth of information, from a database of bird photos and sounds, to species distribution maps, charts and graphs for regions across in the world. For example, you can pick a particular species to visualise its current distribution and compare that to distributions over time to see if and how they change. This can lead to interesting ecological questions of

how species adapt to human impacts, such as reduced natural habitat availability due to urbanisation or changing climate conditions due to global warming. You can also simply search for a list of species that have been recorded in a specific area or region, so you can discover what to expect to see there, or to particularly look out for. For example, 63 species have been observed at the Cambridge Botanic Garden, and 40 at Girton! eBird has brought together the recreational activity of birdwatching and the scientific discipline of ornithology to revolutionise the way that we report, access and understand information about birds.

Programs like this which use citizen science at their core not only aid scientific research, but allow the general public to contribute to the pursuit of knowledge in a way that was not possible before. They also help us to engage with the natural world to a greater level, making us think about what we see and start to question why. With the current state of environmental change and uncertainty, gathering and analysing as much data as possible about the biodiversity of our planet is becoming more important than ever. We need this information so that we can gain a greater understanding of how the world’s wildlife is responding to change, helping us to develop more effective methods of protecting it.

Please consider contributing your bird sightings to eBird at www.ebird.org/ or even just exploring the website to find out more about the bird life in your local area.

physical geography

TURTLES OF THE CARIBBEAN

The Jumpy Bay Hawksbill Project WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

BY JULIA GANIS

a hawksbill turtle

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Antigua, part of the twin island country Antigua and Barbuda in the Caribbean, is a nesting site for all types of Sea Turtle. On a small island to the North East of the mainland you will find the longest continuous project studying Hawksbill Sea Turtles – the Jumby Bay Hawksbill Project. This project focuses on the islands nesting habitats and in 2014, I was lucky enough to spend four weeks working as with them as a field assistant.

The project, which studies the life history and population dynamics of the Hawksbill turtle , will be entering its 31st year in June. It was begun by an Antiguan lawyer, Dr. Fuller, who in 1986 attended a conference on sea turtles, and the risks facing them. That following summer Dr. Fuller invited two friends back to begin doing nightly patrols of the beach. That is still what the project is today: two field assistants every summer doing hourly patrols every night from sunset to sunrise.

The main aim is to tag every turtle that comes up and nests, and to record the location of each nest. This is done in the hope that the findings will serve as a foundation for wise management and sound, scientifically-grounded policy making.

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BUT WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

In order to answer this it is important to first learn about the Hawksbill Turtle. The Hawksbill turtle is currently categorized as critically endangered and the source of this can be brought down to two main reasons.

Firstly, they suffer hugely from poaching, and secondly the coral reefs they depend on are being threatened by unsustainable fishing and climate change. The turtles lay 3-6 nests a season, each with roughly 150 eggs. This may sound like a lot but not all those eggs will hatch, and, once the hatchling makes it to the ocean, they are at the bottom of the food chain. Only 1 in 1000 hatchlings is expected to make it to adult hood: a tiny proportion. The more we know about these turtles, the more we can educate those in the area about what affects them and therefore hope that protective policies are put into place.

physical geography

SO WHAT SPECIFICALLY DOES THE PROJECT DO?

The main aim of the project is to record the nesting sight of every turtle that comes up to nest (right). Turtles can be located usually from the trail (far right) they left behind on the beach. Once located, the team has to wait until the turtle started laying eggs before they could be processed any further. This is because once they start laying they enter a hormonal trance. This essentially means the turtle is unaware of their surroundings, whereas before they can be skittish, and any human activity could scare them off from nesting at all.

Once they start laying there are a number of things that had to be done. The first step is to see who the turtle is. The projects turtles can be identified in two ways – by a tag in their flipper with a code on it, or a sequence drilled in the bottom of their shell. If the turtle was new to the beach, it would be the job of the research assistant to tag her. Next would be to take “environmentals” (all the details about the nest): where it is, what the weather’s like, what vegetation it’s in and so on. The final step is then to note observations about the turtle herself, for example, as in the picture (right), her flipper is damaged, potentially from an attack from a predator. By doing all this, the team can begin to put together data of which turtles nest when, where they prefer to nest, and for much of their life they can nest.

The next major thing happens once the eggs have hatched, following an incubation period of 55-70 days.

This is a nest excavation. Nest excavations involve digging out the nest, counting the number of broken eggshells, and then cracking open unopened ones to see what stage of development they got to. This is not always the most pleasant of jobs, with nests often containing rotten eggs. However, on the positive side, sometimes hatchlings still making their way out of the sand are found and therefore saved. All this data is then recorded to give an indication of the nest success. Thus the main reason to do nest excavations (other than to play with the babies) is to collect data that would give us an indication about which environments support a healthier nest, and whether for example younger/older turtles have a healthier nest.

Whilst I was working with the project they were collecting genetic samples from nests. This was to assist a PhD student who was trying to determine the paternity of nests, in order to learn more about the males as they never come on land. This involved caging the nest, and collecting the hatchlings once they hatched. After this, they would be taken back to our base and would have their length, width and mass measured, and small samples from the back of their shell for DNA analysis.

Processing a Nesting Turtle

Turtle with an injured flipper

Trail visible behind turtle heading out to sea

Julia undertaking a nest excavation

A hatchling having been pulled out of a nest

An Albino Embryotic Turtle that Failed to Hatch Hatchlists collected for genetic sampling

THE FUTURE

The Jumby Bay Hawksbill Project is going to continue collecting data for the foreseeable future, and perhaps even spread onto different beaches. I will be returning to work with them again this summer to undertake my dissertation research, looking at how projected sea level rise could affect the nesting habitats on the island. Sea turtles have been around for hundreds of millions of years. They are an indicator species, meaning they provide an insight into the well being of the ecosystems they live in, and they are the home to species such as barnacles, which cannot survive without them. If nothing else they are a majestic species that deserves to be respected, and action needs to be taken now to protect these animals and their environments.

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If you would like to find out more about the project visit http://www.jbhp.org/

physical geography

ECUADOR: A FOCUS ON THE WILDERNESS PÁRAMO VEGETATION IN THE ANDEAN HIGHLANDS WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

BY CALLUM SWANSTON

T

he Andean mountain range of South America is home to some of the world’s most impressive spectacles. This includes stunning mountain vistas looking out over the Andes, active volcanoes such as Chimborazo, and even sulphuric lakes in extinct volcanic craters. In this land of wonders, climate change and growing human developments are threatening these stunning natural landscapes which desperately require some form of protection.

The specific focus of my experience and admiration is on the Central Andes; the section of this enormous mountain range passing through Ecuador and where I spent four weeks trekking and volunteering last summer. I spent the majority of my time in Central Northern Ecuador, trekking around the Quilotoa Lagoon and its surrounding region.

It was here that I was introduced 22 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

to the concept of ‘páramo’. Essentially, this umbrella term refers to a tundraesque ecosystem existing at too high an altitude for large trees to colonise. It is specific to the South American Andean highlands, and varies in species type, distribution and coverage across different Andean areas. Such a diverse ecosystem survives and thrives in the harshest of environments, even in the rain shadow of the Andes where an arid landscape provides little rainfall to sustain vegetative life. Despite being cited as one of the fastest evolving ecosystem regions on Earth – having to adapt to strong diurnal temperature differences at an otherwise seasonally stable equatorial latitude – páramo need protection. This safekeeping usually comes under the national conservation legislation, such as the formation of the Cotopaxi National Park, protected due to its ecological

significance as a biodiversity hotspot.

Ecuadorian páramo is particularly threatened. The soil it grows on has excellent water retention thanks to volcanic substrates and therefore in an otherwise arid area the soil water supply encourages cultivation by indigenous populations. This water supply also contributes to that of settlements at lower altitudes. Anthropic land use thus relies on the clearing of páramo vegetation for the cultivation of crops such as quinoa, which is interestingly harvested as branches from which the edible seeds can be shaken out. A growth in the ecotourism industry also places pressures on the land, which I am unfortunately guilty of contributing to. Excessive foot traffic around particularly scenic areas can cause serious footpath erosion that not only damages plants but leads to significant soil erosion.

While many human activities rely on the páramo ecosystem, they also

physical geography ecosystem, they also destroy it through the very same activities.

In an increasingly ecologicallyminded age, the conservation of threatened ecosystems has been prioritised by national governments, with more countries to hopefully follow suit in the future. Already being responsible for conserving the famous Galapagos Islands, the Ecuadorian government is proactive in its conservation developments. In accordance with the multi-disciplinary nature of the study of geography, their government has combined politics with environment, subsequently affecting national culture. The Ecuadorian Government passed a 2008 Constitution legalising the Rights of

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Nature; Mother Nature is now recognised as a legal entity with human rights that are to be protected by the state as much as any other. Exploitative development and damaging industrial practice that would damage nature are thus politically opposed, a bold and hopefully effective move in the preservation of natural landscapes and their inhabitants.

Though the experience of high altitude pรกramo vegetation may have only constituted a small part of my trip, it was one that has stayed in my memory. Ecuador is a beautiful country blessed with a friendly population and bountiful natural landscapes to bring

joy to even the least physical of geographers. It was very worth the visit, and I would recommend it to anybody.

GEOGRAPHERS IN ACTION

CAN A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME TACKLE INQUALITY? Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford and has conducted widespread research into inequality and the multifarious origins and expressions with which it emerges in our societies. He has published numerous books pertaining to the underlying inequities within British society – most recently examining “A Better Politics: How Governments can make us happier”. Compass’s Angus Parker met him in Oxford to discuss history, government policy, Brexit and, above all, inequality.

I

nequality is a pervasive force in any society. It is more than purely an economic gap but represents an intrinsic sociopolitical rift which can spread into the institutions and culture of a populace and shape a nation’s identity. However, despite occasionally being categorised as an inevitable effect of globalisation and the Western economic system, Professor Danny Dorling is eager to explain that recent inequities are quite distinct to the United Kingdom and the United States.

“There is nothing inevitable about inequality. In many rich countries, it hasn’t happened. The turning point in the US and the UK was the 1970s and 1980s as both societies began to struggle economically. The US had made money partly because of its dominant position after WWII and, as that dominance was eroded, it couldn’t sell things as effectively as before. In the UK, the loss of colonies was deeply destabilising. We never grasped that the colonies were a benefit to us, that they gave us an unfair economic advantage and access to markets – there was a massive underappreciation of Empire.”

Professor Dorling is forward in emphasising the power of normality; the concentration of wealth within the 1% has become so naturalised that an awareness of the empirical chasm is not widely understood. However, in an era of growing inequities, people are acutely attentive to austerity.

Public spending in the UK is set to be cut to record lows of 34% of GDP as further savings are pursued by the British government to reduce the budget deficit in the wake of recent financial instability. But the short-term consequences of these economic crises veil deeper structural and cultural problems within British society.

“We are still adjusting downwards 24 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

from being an Empire and we don’t do anything of great value in the world” explains Professor Dorling. “I think a form of austerity is necessary but it can be a very different kind of austerity. We could subsidise the arms industry less, we could reduce the size of the army, we could tighten controls on the super-rich who, since 2010, have seen a further £900 million cut on their tax bills.

“Apart from Italy and Greece we have got the most underfunded health service in Europe – the NHS is incredibly efficient but we have cut spending down to the bone”. This is a startling revelation.

The NHS, an apparent bastion of Britishness, an institution that is lauded by the public as an asset and privilege, is essentially struggling compared to

our European neighbours. “In France they have 50% more beds and 30% more doctors than in the UK, and the German system is better than the French and the Swiss is even better than the Germans – so we are a long, long way behind. It’s a very depressing story.”

So how should we reduce inequality and work towards a more equal and sustainable society? There is not a straightforward answer nor a silver bullet. However, one potential, albeit contested, long-term solution is that of a universal basic income. Professor Dorling believes that this could provide a lasting resolution. “It actually saves you money and it possibly saves the planet,” he declares. “It avoids means testing, it mitigates homelessness, it can

geographers in action

Source: Wolff, E.N. (2012) The Asset Price Meltdown and the Wealth of the Middle Class, Occasional Paper, New York University, Table 4 page 60, https://appam.confex.com/appam/2012/webprogram/Paper2134.html Source: Dorling, D. (2011) Underclass, overclass, ruling class, supernova class. Chapter eight of A. Walker, A. Sinfield and C. Walkers, (Eds.) Fighting Poverty, Inequality and Injustice, Bristol: Poverty Press http:// www.dannydorling.org/?page_id=2446

encourage a low-consumption lifestyle and it’s economically very efficient – when people do work that they want to do, productivity goes up - it’s why productivity is higher in countries where you can be unemployed because you’ve removed the problem of forcing people to work.”

The premise is that all members of society receive a basic customary income regardless of their employment status, enabling a universal level of subsistence. The principal criticism is that it could serve as a disincentive for work; however, Professor Dorling believes that our society needs such a policy. “We don’t need more people working, there isn’t enough that needs to be done and it’s hard to invent jobs. A universal income enables you to emerge into a proper economic market because you have to increase salaries for the jobs that people initially don’t want to do and reduce those for the jobs that there is a strong will to do; you can use market forces to get salaries to more appropriate levels. It’s worth remembering how quickly things change – unemployment was only invented as a word in 1888.”

It is a bold policy and would require significant shifts in political and public opinion, however, the turbulence and ephemeral nature of

Figure from: Dorling, D. (2014) Inequality and the 1%, Verso Books: London.

politics in 2016 indicates that current norms and customs should not be taken for granted. Brexit was an earthquake for the political system in the UK and reflects a dissatisfaction with the established order and the growing anti-globalist sentiment amongst a significant segment of the populace. In terms of inequality, the referendum decision potentially serves as a destabiliser of the ‘inequitable stability’ that Professor

the election of Donald Trump, signal a rise in populist feeling. In fact, Professor Dorling doesn’t agree that populism has yet materialised in a conspicuous form in world politics.

“There are complaints around the word populist - you have to reserve it for when you get very different voting patterns,” he contests. “90% of Trump ballots were Republicans voting for the same party as they did in 2012, which isn’t that unusual. Le Pen winning in France would be populism but Trump wasn’t standing on his own, he was standing for the Republicans.

There is a thirst for something different but we are not yet electing so-called populists.”

Although it might not yet reflect explicit populism, there is a yearning for change.

Whilst this could imbue our societies with a shroud of instability, it analogously serves to focus the minds of the general populace away from the inequitable normality that has come to be accepted, especially within British culture. The salience of Professor Dorling’s work will only strengthen as these inequities are more rigorously scrutinised by a wider audience, and concepts such as the universal basic income could expand beyond mere quixotic pipe-dreams.

Whatever the next few years hold, greater appreciation of Professor Dorling’s work would be advantageous for both the government and the public alike.

“We are still adjusting downwards from being an Empire and we don’t do anything of great value in the world.”

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Dorling’s research has shown has emerged in recent decades.

“People were upset with the status quo and were prepared to play Russian roulette to see what the difference would be,” Dorling explains. “Something different was more palatable to slightly more people.

In hindsight, I’m happy that what has happened has happened because we wouldn’t have had a strong remain vote and we would still be reluctant members of the European Union.”

Yet he does not believe Brexit, or

geographers in action

CONFLICT, TRUTH AND HUMAN NATURE “In the abnormality of conflict you find a lot of truth. You find out about human nature and how people help each other in times of need. You find out about identity, tribalism and nationalism and these are themes I’ve remained interested in.”

Tim Marshall describes his work in conflict zones with an assurance that is somewhat juxtaposed with the bustling atmosphere of the café in Chiswick. The former news journalist reported from frontlines throughout Europe and the Middle East but, after thirty years of broadcasting, he decided to concentrate his expertise and knowledge on writing and analysis. He met with Compass’s Angus Parker to discuss his two recent publications Prisoners of Geography and Worth Dying For - The Power and Politics of Flags as well as the predominant contemporary issues facing Britain and the global societies in the twenty-first century.

Getting Back to Landscape

The enduring power of the physical environment is frequently obfuscated by the complex interrelationships of the modern world system. However, the influence that it continues to have upon the geopolitical machinations of political leaders should not be disregarded. Tim Marshall’s publication Prisoners of Geography pivots upon this narrative: that the natural landscape remains a fundamental aspect and influence on the decisions of world leaders – at least in theory.

“It should inform them but I don’t think it does - politicians are busy doing politics. If you were looking at the next 20 years, you would look at demographics, technology and how that’s going to change – I understand that, but there are also these fundamentals which you need to examine too, such as the physical constraints.”

Marshall draws particular attention to the role that the landscape has had for Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The North European Plain, for example, has preoccupied the minds of Russian leaders for centuries, with the vast exposure of flat land to the east of Moscow exposing the capital city to the threat of invasion. In more recent times, the lack of any warm 26 / COMPASS / LENT 2017

water ports has acted as a further motivation to push out against the physical cards that the nation has been dealt.

“The Russian psyche is steeped in an understanding of place. They may not frame it like that but whenever you learn about Russian conflict, you get a geographic element. The same way that we are an island: we don’t walk around conscious that we are an island but I think it influences how we think about ourselves and the world.

Putin has embodied that more than most because he’s a nationalist.”

But Mr Putin is more than simply projecting his power in the “nearabroad”: the Kremlin’s increasingly assertive foreign policy appears to suggest that historical tensions are resurfacing as Moscow looks to reaffirm its presence on the world stage. It is perhaps presumptuous to assume that a ‘Cold War 2.0’ is imminent but Marshall believes a new relationship is emerging.

“There’s certainly a chill”, he explains, “it’s not exactly reminiscent of the previous one. Nevertheless I think it is a Cold War because Russia and the West are fighting proxy wars in Syria, and Russia is reaching deep into our politics, using soft power to define itself partially ‘in opposition to us’. Putin is determined to restore

Russia’s place and influence in the ‘near abroad’ and the world. I think after ten terrible years for them in the 1990s, they’re back - Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, the perceived threat to the Baltics, the military build-up on both sides, the rhetoric, the cyber warfare – you put it all together and, for me, it’s a new Cold War.” But, to a certain extent, this environment has been fuelled by the foreign policy pursued by the Obama administration, particularly the attempts to extricate the USA from the conflicts that they had become involved in. Despite the coherence of such policies, it does leave a vacuum and geopolitics abhors vacuums.

Thus, new conflicts will undoubtedly emerge and Marshall explains that America will soon get drawn back in.

“The power of America makes its presence on the world stage indispensable. They go through periods of isolationism and then get drawn back in because their interests are global. Syria is quite important strategically for America: it affects the heartland of the Middle East, it affects global terrorism and they are caught in a battle of wills with Russia.

An added factor now is that the Chinese are an economic power and, as they use both hard and soft power to position themselves, they will be

geographers in action

“It is only through the prism of history that we are able to see how developments emerge and how they change us” able to influence events to their liking - already you’ve seen Duerte in the Philippines talking about cosying to China. America will respond because they cannot just let, one-by-one, their allies in the Pacific begin to switch sides. The Pacific is crucial for them.”

That said, Marshall is keen to point out that physical geography and historical precedents are just one of a number of explanations of why national policies are framed as they are. He draws upon his experience of the Middle East as an example where such knowledge is not enough to abundantly appreciate the dynamics of the region.

“I had a good grounding in history but I was lacking an understanding of Islam. We come from an almost postreligious society, and it was important to quickly get a handle on what the beliefs were and, equally importantly, that they were believed. It is a deep culture and if you don’t understand religion, it is hard to understand the Middle East.”

The Fluttering Discourse

The complex analysis of the immutable physical environment can perhaps serve to create the idea that we are powerless to the forces of nature, reinforcing an idea of detachment from national identity.

However, Marshall’s detailed analysis of the power and politics of flags serves to reject this assertion: we are connected through a shared sense of ‘material’ belonging to these humble pieces of cloth which distinguish our nationalities and our identities. Yet, the innocence of flags is a veneer for the powerful communicative function that they possess: flags are not merely inanimate objects of identity but 27 / Compass / Lent 2017

influential entities of discourse.

“The colours say things and we imbue them with meaning – it’s a two-way conversation. The US flag says that there are 50 states because there are 50 stars on it, and 13 original states because there are 13 stripes; it’s conveying information, but simultaneously we convey things back to it with our meaning and ideas of what the flag stands for – it’s always a two-way conversation.”

However, flags have a duality of being both extremely unifying as well as highly divisive. In an increasingly deterritorialised world, a flag can engender an indispensable sense of belonging but it can also serve to incite tension and conflict. In this sense, perception is of utmost importance – is a flag perceived to be an assertion of identity or an exhibition of power?

“Flags can be symbols of both power and identity – and sometimes your identity is powerful. The flag of Micronesia does not project power, it projects identity whereas the flag of China does both.

“Kenya have knitted together very distinct peoples under their flag but have put a pan-African symbol at the centre - the Masai tribe are one of the smaller ethnic groups and thus not perceived as a threat. If they had put the battle symbol of the largest tribe in the centre of the flag, that would send a very negative message of domination. Many nations are having to invent their combined identity and a lot of them have been quite successful in doing so through flags.”

Globrexitisation

The flag of the European Union is one such artefact that appears to have lost its power to unify and it would be foolish to ignore the elephant in the room of British politics. Brexit was a earthquake for the political landscape of the United Kingdom. Marshall believes it is not merely an indication of a swing in British opinion but

harbours important signs of a more intrinsic international shift in the political paradigm.

“Psychologically it’s a signal that makes people understand that the trend of globalisation has halted.

Globalisation has not gone into reverse but its stalled and Brexit is the biggest symbolic sign of that - it’s the story that engenders an understanding that things are not ‘as they were’. It also gives a fillip to nationalism, a fillip to people who think that they can go it alone – whether that be Catalonia or Western Sahara.”

With anti-globalist sentiment apparently growing, the future of international development and politics is shrouded in uncertainty.

However, Marshall does not believe that there is need for great alarm.

“The super-highways, be they physical or digital, are still open and connected, they are not going to stop being open and connected”, he argues.

“Even though there will be setbacks to our connections, it’s still the 21st century. We are more connected now than ever and I don’t see that stopping.

It’s very easy to see a future of doom and gloom – I think it has become the default position for some people.

“The Marxists believe that there’s an end point in time and religious people similarly believe there are end points to history. Francis Fukuyama got it wrong that the end point of history would be liberal democracy – life isn’t like that; history isn’t like that. It’s a continuum, there is no endpoint. Human beings will continue to be divided, it is best to recognise that and manage it appropriately.”

In a time of great uncertainty and contestation, this is a salient point. Whilst society evolves, the apparently fundamental structures will always remain as the foundations and cornerstones, underpinning and stabilising the seismic shockwaves that the world will inevitably experience.

“It is only through the prism of history that we are able to see how developments emerge and how they change us.”

geographers in action

IN CONVERSATION WITH GILLIAN ROSE In Michaelmas 2016, CUGS hosted the wonderful Gillian Rose, Professor of Cultural Geography at the Open University. Gillian illustrated how digital technologies of various kinds are the new means through which many cities are made visible and their spatialities negotiated.

From casual snaps shared on Instagram to elaborate photorealistic visualisations, digital technologies for making, distributing and viewing cities are increasingly pervasive, and hold considerable implications for the cultural politics of urban representation. Heather Rigby and Luke Dell spoke to her before the talk to find out more.

What is your current field of research?

I’m a Professor of Cultural Geography.

What I’m currently interested in are the ways in which digital visualising technologies of all sorts, from things like smart phones and cameras through to very sophisticated high end software packages, are creating all sorts of new ways of looking at and experiencing cities.

Source: Wikipedia

Where did your interest in this field, or Geography in general, begin?

I did my first degree in Cambridge. I was very keen to go, but was told that I wouldn’t be able to get in for English because I wasn’t bright enough. My second A-level was art and at that point I was studying Art History, but you had to have a second language, which I didn’t have. So that left Geography as my third A-level subject. I applied, and got in at Sidney Sussex College.

At that point I think the ‘cultural’ term in Geography was just about beginning to develop and emerge. The idea of being able to challenge established

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knowledge rather than just having to learn them and repeat them was totally liberating. That’s what got me into the Cultural Geography field.

At which point did you realise you were going to pursue a career in academia?

I hadn’t ever really had a particular career plan as such. So I did my undergraduate dissertation, and at that point I was a historical geographer and I loved the idea of doing your own research. I figured that the way to continue doing research was to get a studentship to do a PhD. I left Cambridge at that point and went to Queen Mary in the University of London and did my PhD there. I was then really fortunate to find a lectureship there once my PhD had finished. So it was one thing after another rather than a plan from an early stage.

Do you have an exciting stories to tell from your career?

I was actually just reading a piece in a magazine this week about Clive Oppenheimer going off and looking at volcanoes and so on. I just thought ‘my gosh, my work is so boring in comparison’.

But things like writing my first book was pretty extraordinary. Because I’m an academic person who loves writing, seeing the front cover and the whole physical pack of books was a real highlight.

If there was a piece of advice or a study tip that you could give to our undergraduate geographers, what would it be?

I’ve had quite a period of working part time when my kids were really little, and I think that what impressed me about that was the need to be really organised and able to focus on a variety of things. I think that looking at my kids in part means not being distracted by too much social media, which wasn’t around when I was studying my undergrad. I am on Twitter and I have a blog, so I’m not against social media for work, but I think that you have to have clear time with no distractions when you can think and be creative. Finally, my third tip would be that if you’re working really hard on something, some of the most creative things happen when you stop, go away and do something else.

Then you realise that there has been something going on in the back of your mind and that you’re in a further stage than you were when you left it.

So: organisation, clear time and taking breaks.

TRAVEL

Geiranger Fjord, Norway Photograph Credits: Luke Dell

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TRAVEL

UNCOVERING ISRAEL’S HIDDEN DIVERSITY

D

uring my gap year I spent ten months immersing myself in a programme located in the Old City of Jerusalem, Israel. It was a year filled with opportunity, excitement and challenges. I was most captivated by how Israel, a relatively small country, has such a diverse geography.

My main base was the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, where I studied world religion, theology, history, philosophy and law in an intensive learning programme. What captivated me most was where I was living; Jerusalem and the Old City is the cornerstone of Abrahamic religions.

It is a place rich and abundant with cultural flows, exchanges and religious practice. I enjoyed discovering and learning about these sites of religious significance, such as the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock. Climbing and then standing atop the Mount of Olives once at midnight, with a panoramic view of Jerusalem below, provided me with a moment of contemplation about the beauty yet complexity of the Old City.

Alongside studying for five days per week, I participated in an interfaith and leadership programme and played in the Hebrew University

Western Wall, Jerusalem Photograph Credits: Hannah Mendall

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Orchestra in Jerusalem. Living in such a diverse society gave me opportunities to engage with others from different backgrounds and faith.

Above all, travel was my favourite way to spend weekends and holidays.

It was a year filled with opportunity, excitement and challenges The Dead Sea was one of the first places I travelled to on a weekend of exploration. Diving into the Dead Sea I felt my skin sting, before I arrived at the surface of the water and was floating. I could feel the hypersalinity of the water against the sweltering heat, creating a harsh environment where flora and fauna battle to survive. Situated in the Jordan Rift Valley at a transform fault line by the African and Arabian Plates, it is also the lowest point on Earth, 430 metres below sea level[1]. Historically, this

by HANNAH MENDALL

extreme environment has contributed to Israel’s chronic water shortages and its status as one of Earth’s driest countries. Israel is now a global leader in desalination technologies; abstracting and converting saline into drinking water today meets 40% of the country’s water demand[2].

I then explored the barren landscape beyond the Dead Sea: the Negev Desert. The Negev is vast, spanning over half of the country’s land area. What fascinated me most about this exploration is that communities have created hubs of life amidst the barren, bleak landscape.

I travelled to ‘Sde Boker’, a Kibbutz community in the southern Negev desert, where families live collectively in a commune based on agricultural production. This is where Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, was buried; he dreamed of the rejuvenation of desert area through technological development. Other memories include hiking across the ridge of the Ramon Crater, where I battled against the wind on a stormy November morning at the onset of a flash flood.

I continued my journey to Eilat, the southernmost city in Israel.

Contrasting the inaction of the Negev, I was greeted by the buzz and vibrancy

Photograph Credit: Hannah Mendall

Ramon Crater Photograph Credits: Hannah Mendall

of this coastal city. Renowned for its coral reefs and marine life, I enjoyed scuba-diving with dolphins and snorkelling in the Red Sea, which revealed an underworld of beauty and nature.

Another city I explored was Tel Aviv. Located on the Israeli Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country’s technological hub and financial centre. Climbing atop the Azrieli Tower and looking beneath me, I witnessed Tel Aviv’s skyline of highrise construction and skyscrapers.

Dubbed a ‘mini Los Angeles’, Tel Aviv is known for having the highest concentration of start-ups in any city outside of Silicon Valley, particularly those in the high-tech industry[3]. I enjoyed the entertainment and visual arts from the Tel Aviv Performing

I was greeted by the buzz and vibrancy of this coastal city Photograph Credit: Hannah Mendall

A harsh environment where flora and fauna battle to survive

Arts Centre and learning about the city’s rich history since its radial growth from the Old Port of Jaffa, to now being the world’s LGBT capital.

My last travel experience was exploring northern Israel, characterised by a geography of mountainous areas and greenery.

My favourite destinations included Lake Kinneret, also known as the Sea of Galilee. Taking a boat ride across this large freshwater expanse provided a perfect moment for rest, contemplation and relaxation, before arriving in Tiberias on the western shore. With much religious diversity and practice, it is considered to be one of the four Holy cities of Israel. Hiking the Golan Heights, including Mount Hermon to the abundant Banias waterfalls, reminded me of Israel’s refreshing geographical beauty, yet the geopolitical implications of this region as the borderline between Israel and Syria.

Spending one year exploring Israel’s geography and indulging myself in the culture, society and language revealed to me the hidden diversity of this small country.

Nagev Desert Photograph Credits: Hannah Mendall

[1] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2016. Dead Sea [Online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/place/Dead-Sea [2] Jacobsen, R. 2016. Israel Proves the Desalination Era is Here. Scientific American [Online] Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/ article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ [3] Tel-Aviv Capital, 2016 [Online] Available at: http://www.tlvc.co.il/

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TRAVEL

STORIES FROM THE FIELD Below are four examples of how the Bedford Travel Grant has enabled students to explore different parts of the world.

The Bedford Travel Grant is a unique fund for undergraduate members of Cambridge University Geographical Society (CUGS). Our generous donors have made explorative, exciting and global fieldwork destinations possible.

We hope this inspires your studies of Geography, whether thinking about dissertation projects to summer travel plans.

I

used the Bedford Travel Grant for my dissertation research in Hartford, Connecticut (USA), which I visited in September in order to examine the relationship between Polish migrants’

English language proficiency and their position in the labour market.

I interviewed a number of migrants including homecare workers, real estate agents, and business owners, in order to investigate how social characteristics such as gender, age and educational background intersect with language to shape the way in which work is experienced by the migrant community. One aspect which surprised me was the wealth of inspirational stories to which I was exposed. In Hartford, I even had a chance to talk to an actor who was in the same class as Meryl Streep at Yale and worked with the Academy and Tony Award winning directors.

Some people have asked me why I travelled to Hartford when there are so many Polish migrants in the UK. 1. Migration flow in the USA is far less studied and 2. I wanted to use

Photograph Credit: Ania Gruszczynska

Hartford, Connecticut, USA

my dissertation research to travel. If you are a Part IB students wondering whether you should conduct your research abroad with assistance from the Bedford Grant, my advice is: don’t hesitate and let it be your adventure!

- Ania Gruszczynska

Photograph Credit: Rachel Mumford

Photograph Credit: Ania Gruszczynska

T

ravelling to South Korea to research Gangnam Style seems unlikely as a dissertation topic, but that’s geography for you! For my research this summer I ventured to South Korea to explore the ways in which twenty-first century South Korean popular culture has shaped nationalist sentiment in the country. I looked at how and whether South Korea is increasingly viewed as a dominant cultural producer across wider Asia, including in North Korea.

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more confident in some interesting situations (such as missing the last subway home), and making contacts from all over the world. I’m really grateful that the funding meant I was able to spend so long in Seoul. And of course, I made the pilgrimage to Gangnam to see it for myself!

-Rachel Mumford

Photograph Credit: Rachel Mumford

Seoul, South Korea

I was lucky enough to receive a Bedford Travel Grant and used it to fund my 3 week stay in Seoul, South Korea. I stayed in my own studio-like apartment, and conducted valuable primary research. My dissertation would have taken a completely different form had I not been able to go to South Korea myself and immerse myself in the culture and country.

Travelling on my own was also hugely beneficial for me personally, allowing me to learn more Korean, become

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

T

his summer, I visited the Santa Marta favela located in the south zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in a region called ‘Botafogo’. The favela, one of hundreds

in the state, is of particular interest to me as it was the first favela to undergo the government’s pacification (pacificação) programme in 2008.

This programme sought to regularize basic services and infrastructure and was the focus of my dissertation. I used a multi-methods approach to analyse the population’s everyday

experiences of infrastructure; specifically, how residents engage with infrastructure in informal ways and how their experiences connect with their perceptions of the Brazilian state. I spent my time in Brazil directly engaging with residents of Santa Marta favela to research the nature of water, basic sanitation and electricity infrastructure provision. During my time in the favela, I was able both to visualize the precarious state of infrastructure access and quality in the favela and research the perceptions of the residents themselves. I learnt a huge amount spending my time engaging with residents in all parts of the favela in Portuguese. Utilising the Bedford Travel Grant enabled me to conduct my fieldwork abroad and spend six weeks in Rio de Janeiro.

-Tessa Callender

Photograph credit: Tessa Callender

A

fter a morning of hot, dusty, and tiring work I proudly held aloft the largest beetroot I had ever seen.

Deep red and muddy, we each held the grapefruit sized beet pondering which culinary dish would best showcase its flavors. I added it to the pile of garlic, potatoes, broccoli and onions from today’s harvest and paused to appreciate the new found camaraderie and the work the five of us had achieved together that sunny Michigan morning. The beet fed three of us that night: myself, Cathy and Gary, who’s AirBnB I was staying in, turning our stir-fry a rich, juicy pink.

Former boom town and Motor City, Detroit is now the poster child of

decay, a post-apocalyptic ghost town of bankruptcy, crime and poverty. Or so I had thought. True, there were no supermarkets, public transport was almost non-existent and there were deserted neighborhoods of empty, burnt out housing. But urban farms are pockets of hope, life and renewal, run by local heroes building and strengthening communities, and, increasingly, local economies.

With over 1400 community, market, and family farms cultivating around 400,000 pounds of produce each year, Detroit is fast becoming a global hub for ‘urban ag’.

Spending five weeks in Detroit researching for my dissertation, I questioned narratives which heralded Detroit as a ‘food mecca’, and explored issues of gentrification, food justice and urban regeneration. My trip took me to 11 farms, numerous

Photograph Credit: Hannah Gillie

Detroit, Michigan, USA

farmers’ markets, soup kitchens, food pantries, health centers, pop-up food vendors, schools and restaurants. I volunteered at seed distributions, took part in the annual Keep Growing Detroit urban farm bus tour and at the end of every day shared fresh, local produce with inspirational community members. Whilst digging in the dirt or wrenching weeds, I made friends and connections and shared many moments of satisfaction and friendship as I volunteered at farms and gardens across the city. My network of growers and market stallholders led me to their consumers, chefs and food vendors, as well as food business entrepreneurs and those promoting farm-to-table business models. Over coffee, fresh Swiss chard or a shared water break, volunteers, interns, apprentices and even an app creator discussed their experiences with me.

My trip to Detroit has given me more questions than answers, and this is certainly the most intriguing, inspiring and challenging task I have pursued.

-Hannah Gillie

Photograph credit: Hannah Gillie

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TRAVEL

M

umbai is a city of slowmotion chaos. Nobody seems particularly busy, unless you count the man trying to get the stray cow out of the main road, and yet nothing stands still for an instant. Ashamedly, I saw this great city over the course of one month on my gap year – a naïve English boy who had never heard of Edward Said.

This piece serves as an ethnographic reflection on my brief stay, making use of an anecdotal train journey that stood out among my many novel experiences there. Hopefully, unlike the typical travel article, this piece offers something a bit different – a survival guide, if you will. During my time in Mumbai, I stayed with a family friend who some of you may have heard of. Sachin Tendulkar is famous worldwide, yes, but in India he is something of an idol. I therefore write this article from the perspective of someone who was totally out of his depth, living with the Indian David Beckham in a disorienting city of over 20 million people, leading very different lives to you or me. In India’s largest city, it’s easy to get lost. Here are my three tips for a successful trip.

SURVIVAL TIP 1: SOMETIMES, SLOWER IS FASTER. The quickest way to cover distance in the heart of Mumbai is by choosing perhaps the slowest vehicle in all of India. The auto rickshaw. Through combining the heart of a moped with the skeleton of a van, the rickshaw ensures that its top speed is nothing to write home about. Usually saddled

with at least one too many passengers in its confined rear seat, it is the slowest form of motorised transport in the city. However, what rickshaws lack in innate speed pales in comparison to the audacity of their drivers. For those of you who have been to mid-town Manhattan and think that you have observed aggressive driving, think again. The Mumbai roads transgress confrontation and enter a realm of pure surrealism, whereby vehicles squeeze into impossible spaces and weave through unthinkable routes.

A skilful rickshaw driver never stops even in the densest of traffic jams, and if you can bear to open your eyes it is a marvellous thing. My first journey using this form of transport ended with me at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station.

SURVIVAL TIP 2: MIND THE GAP, REALLY. In our world, when a train stops in a station, you wait patiently for the prior users of said train to disembark knowing that your time will come to board. In Mumbai, it doesn’t quite work this way. My experience of boarding trains here was much like my experience of rugby at school – frustrating, painful and notably characterised by compression in a frenzied mob of people more eager than yourself. As soon as the train stops, the battle for Helms Deep begins. Positioning myself somewhere near the fringe, I had enough of a view to see a man fall into the gap between the platform and train as those behind him pushed forwards. Thankfully,

BY TOM COLVERD Photograph Credit: Tom Colverd

MUMBAI BY TRAIN

he was unhurt and even had enough composure to push in front of me which I let slide. Eventually, I myself bridged the gap and found myself in what can only be described as a sardine tin.

SURVIVAL TIP 3: DON’T BE AFRAID OF ENGAGING IN CONVERSATION. Inside the train, I relived my first day of school as people stared at me inquisitively. With no idea of the etiquette I made my way towards the opposite door, refreshingly wide open, as the train pulled out of the station.

As I did so, however, one man jumped from the open door. Wondering, therefore, if the overbearing stench was in fact me I looked out of the door to see that he and several others were hanging from the side of the train. I found out from my family friend later that day that this is highly common in Mumbai, and felt a little less offended.

Turning back into the carriage, I made eye contact with a seated man who proceeded to stand up and walk over to me. In perfect English, he asked me whether I knew Sachin Tendulkar.

Fearing that I had been followed, I said no. He looked at me doubtingly, but to my relief simply informed me that we were passing by Sachin’s former residence. I thanked him, and said that I would look into it when I got home...

So, there you have it. Mumbai is a diverse, bizarre and fascinating place.

With these three tips you will be more prepared than I was, and I could not recommend a visit more.

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‘I’ll get back to studying in a mo...’

Snow Monkey, Niseko, Kutchan-cho, Japan 35 / Compass / Lent 2017

STUDY TIPS

ALICE EVANS DEMYSTIFYIES THE DISSERTATION In the summer break after the first year, what How much work should one already do in the can one do for the dissertation? summer break before returning to Cambridge?

Step one: relax, unwind and breathe deeply. Congratulate yourself on surviving the giddying, anxiety-laden, exhilarating whirlwind that is Part 1A. You made it!

Complete all primary research in the summer break.

Complete all primary research in the summer break.

Complete all primary research in the summer break.

Step two: pop into Heffers and choose a (non-fiction) title that intrigues you. Take this glorious opportunity – the long summer break – to learn more about a fascinating issue.

If you enjoyed that book then pick another, with a slightly different perspective on the same topic.

Use your holidays wisely. Get ahead, so that you can concentrate on taught papers during term time. Otherwise you will be stressed, panicked, exhausted, and over-worked, with insufficient data.

To find related literature you can: physically peruse the library shelf for scintillating titles; search for key words on Google Scholar; or click ‘cited by’ on articles you’ve enjoyed.

For example, if I’d enjoyed Emma Mawdsley’s lectures, but was keen to hear dissent, then I’d read papers that cited her work.

1.

On Google Scholar, type in ‘a post-aid world?’. The first result has Emma Mawdsley as the primary author.

2. Click ‘cited by’ underneath.

3. This takes you to a list of similar works, that have cited the first in their bibliographies.

The journal Progress in Human Geography provides brilliant, critical synopses of current research fields, so that’s another superb start. Download the articles onto your Kindle, find a sunny spot and get reading!

How can one get a good balance doing one’s normal academic work and working on one’s dissertation during the year?

As above, complete all primary research during the summer holiday. Complete your draft over Christmas – festive jumper optional. Any delay will eat into your revision time.

The Bemba people in Northern Zambia have a proverb: ‘akaya mailo apwishe ubunga’. The person who procrastinates – saying ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’ – ends up finishing their sack of maize and having nothing left to eat. Don’t be that idiot.

Learn from the Bemba people; plan ahead.

Around when should one aim to have the majority of work for one’s dissertation finished?

The end of the Christmas break.

Should one let fellow geographers read one’s work, or does one risk having one’s work being But as you read, keep note. What are the key debates too influenced? in this field? What are the different arguments? What is contested? What has been under-explored? What issues and methodologies does the literature tend to neglect?

How could various propositions be further investigated? Do hypotheses developed in one context apply in another?

Should one go for a fun option for one’s dissertation or for the safe and clear option?

Definitely choose an intriguing topic! Pick something that excites, enthrals and entices you into work mode. The topic will need to sustain your interest for 18 months.

But do be cautious with your methodology. Rumour has it that when (Professor) Dennis Rodgers studied at Cambridge, he did an ethnographic study of urban violence in Nicaragua.

He joined a gang, with only one proviso: he wouldn’t kill someone. That’s probably *not* the safe option.

Choose a methodology through which you can access data that enables you to answer an important, unanswered research question. I strongly recommend that you substantially reduce the risk of catching a stray bullet – or the metaphorical equivalent thereof.

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You are surrounded by the most brilliant minds I have ever met. Use this fantastic resource!

Share your ideas with others; explain your hypothesis and methodology; seek their advice; and learn from them. Only by listening do we consider alternative propositions, and thereby refine our theories. No individual has a monopoly of wisdom on any issue. Furthering knowledge is always a collective act. And wow, Cambridge, what a wonderful collective to be part of.

How likely is it that one’s dissertation might influence whether one continues further studies or not?

To paraphrase Beyoncé (2009):

PROFILING GLACIERS

by TOM CHUDLEY

I

clearly remember being sat in our DoS’s office as a second year, listening to the annual dissertation presentations from the third years. The presentations were detailed, coherent, and exciting – the complete opposite of the few scraps of ideas I had for my dissertation at the time. The first few decisions tend to be easy: human or physical (physical) and a broad subject area, probably based on your favourite paper (glaciers).

After that, narrowing down to a final topic can be quite hard, especially in the middle of second year when the lecture reading is out of control and coursework deadlines are rolling in!

However, most decisions made by my friends and I were quite obvious – in retrospect. Our dissertation topics were all somehow linked to previous interests and events: for instance, a previous political internship in a developing country; a desire to travel to see the mountains of a particular region; or an ongoing involvement in a particular social movement were all linked by friends of mine to themes in the Tripos to produce coherent dissertation topics. For me, it was a trip to the Indian Himalaya between my first and second years that sparked an interest in the glacial dynamics of the region, which are particularly unusual globally (see Bolch et al. 2012). I noticed when reading

the literature that the particular range I had visited, the Ladakh Range, had received nearly no attention or even observations: I had a blank slate to research.

It became obvious as time rolled on that a field-based study in the area just wasn’t feasible. In fact, if you want to do glaciological fieldwork, ignore my previous advice on topic choosing as you can’t afford to be picky: email one of the glaciology lecturers early expressing an interest and hope for the best! As I wanted to collect observations of glacier behaviour, I chose a remote sensing study over modelling. I would recommend considering this route for any physical geography dissertation – yes, even over exciting fieldwork! The risks are low (you’re not under pressure to collect all of your critical data during your time in the field), the data pool is huge (for instance, Landsat has fortnightly data available back to 1972), and you can pick any recent event or time period and you know that data will exist for it. It’s interesting to explore this data – I was able to use American spy imagery dating back to the 1960s.

I did the majority of data collection, as well as the beginning of the results, over the summer

holidays between second and third year. I came back to Cambridge for a fortnight so I had access to the correct software and could receive technical support from the department – College was happy to fund me for this even though I wasn’t actually going to the ‘field’. I then spent Michaelmas writing the literature review, which allowed me to mull over the data I had produced in the proper context – a useful task as spending so much time focussed on data collection over the summer can often mean you lose track of the bigger picture. This put me in good stead to go back and finish the results section and discussion towards the end of Lent and during the Easter holidays.

A lot of people might get put off by the daunting planning required to do a physical geography dissertation, especially in a remote location.

However, physical geography doesn’t just have to be done in the field, and the results can be just as rewarding – as well as completed with a lot less stress!

Bolch, T., Kulkarni, A., Kääb, A., Huggel, C., Paul, F., Cogley, J. G., ... & Bajracharya, S. (2012). The state and fate of Himalayan glaciers. Science, 336(6079), 310-314.

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STUDY TIPS

REVISION TIPS FROM DAVID BECKINGHAM What is revision?

Our exams will be different to the formats you know from school. Be prepared to change the way you work.

Firstly – ideally over the vacation – consolidate your notes.

Go through the course guides and lecture handouts, getting to grips with key themes from the course, filling in any gaps and seeking connections.

How should I divide up my revision?

1. You will need to find a pattern of work that suits you. For some people this involves switching venues. It might be doing a morning on one topic and then an afternoon on another.

2. Don’t cheat yourself into thinking that you can measure the success of your work by time alone. Telling yourself you have spent three hours in a library studying coastal geomorphology or geopolitics is not the same as reflecting on the quality of the time you spent covering those topics. Particularly not if you really spent the time checking your email.

3. Keep a revision diary: record the topics you have covered, what you feel comfortable with, and what needs more work. This will help you plan for revision supervisions, for which you should also look at past papers.

4. Write timed essays and review them alongside the marking criteria. ‘Revision’ also involves extra reading: use it to test your understanding.

How should I use supervision essays?

Don’t rely on ‘learning’ supervision essays. I would be concerned to hear someone say ‘my question came up’ after their exam. They might have seen a familiar topic as

an invitation to regurgitate their supervision work, without paying close enough attention to the question. Understand how supervisions relate to the course: what broader issues do your case studies illuminate? How might you address them to other questions?

Supervision questions are just one approach through complex problems and literatures. You need to be flexible in your revision as the exam will likely pursue others. I advocate drawing diagrams to see connections within and across lecture blocks. Talk to your supervision partners, particularly if they were answering different questions.

How important are references and quotations?

Answers need to build on relevant literature. This doesn’t mean learning long quotes. It does mean having access to the ideas and positions that informed the work you want to cite. It also means demonstrating technical understanding.

Phrases like “huge change” are far less successful than quantifying, say, a 2% change over 20 years. Note this naturally presents a platform for elaboration and argument: was that more or less significant than the previous 20 years, and so on? Always reflect on the significance of what you have read.

How should I manage my time off?

Take breaks. Plan activities, things that really help you get away from work. Play sport, go to the cinema. If you have time off in a familiar environment it will be all too easy to find yourself thinking about work.

Remember to keep exams in perspective: this is a short period of time in a year’s work, in a three year degree.

Is this the kind of relaxing you had in mind?

Pulau Saparua, Indonesia Photograph by Anjali Gupta

Photo credit: Anjali Gupta - taken in Pulau Saparua

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Inside back cover and back cover by James Stevens

THANK YOU

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We would like to thank our sponsors - Christ’s College, CMS law, Research Europe, and the University Societies Syndicate - and James Stevens, our head of sponsorship, for securing funding to make Compass possible.

Remember, if you would like to be involved with Compass next year, applications for the new committee will soon be open! The roles include sub-editors, publicity officer, secretary, treasurer and the design team.

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