Compass Vol. 7 Issue 2

LENT 2022 | VOL. 07 ISSUE 02

NATURE PROTECTING ITSELF | NOMINATIVE GEOGRAPHIES | INTERVIEW WITH BHASKAR VIRA

Welcome to the Compass!

LENT 2022 | VOL. 07 ISSUE 02

THE COMPASS TEAM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Miles Smith

PUBLICITY OFFICER Effie Roberts

HUMAN EDITORS Cecily Perara Tilly Wring

DESIGN OFFICER Bridget Atkin

PHYSICAL EDITORS Eva Mills-Thomas Matthew Harris

BLOG EDITORS Anna Gardner Ellie Brain

TRAVEL EDITOR Mathilde Corcoran

SECRETARY Elo Wilkinson-Rowe

INTERVIEW EDITOR Claudia Davey

OUTREACH OFFICER Georgette Payne

CONTRIBUTORS Alex Teeuw Bhaskar Vira Carlotta Lazarus Céline Vidal Chris Pang Dino Kadich Georgie Turner Hannah Harrison Ilona Kater Lili Csada Mathilde Corcoran Matthew Harris Michael Bravo Michael Fleetwood-Walker Miles Smith Philip Howell Tom Spencer FRONT COVER Sourced from May Zhao, Fitzwilliam College BACK COVER

Qattara Depression, Egypt, USGS, Unsplash 1|

It was decided early on in production that this issue would be themed around ‘Home’: what it means, where it can be found, how it can be made. I am proud to say we’ve collated a range of well-considered reflections on this theme from both students and department staff. As part of this, the Compass would like to extend a sincere thank you to everyone who has offered their time and effort.

When discussing this theme my immediate thought was that of the Euro 2020 football championship that took place last year and the ubiquitous sentiment that It was finally Coming Home. While the warming weather does harken back to those halcyon days, our contributors have been somewhat more thoughtful. Hannah Harrison’s leading article reflects doubly on the Earth as our home and the belonging that we can find in climate justice movements, while Michael Fleetwood-Walker posits a historical consideration of the domestic nuclear family and how it is used rhetorically. Lili Csada explores the highly political contestations around a lake which straddles the Austrian-Hungarian border. While Lili calls this location Lake Fertő, it also possesses various other names; a theme reflected on by Chris Pang in his article on nominative geographies.

I would be remiss to finish without mentioning the contributions of our departmental staff to this issue. We’ve compiled a variety of thinkpieces from various academics around what ‘Home’ means to them, including words from Michael Bravo, Philip Howell and Céline Vidal. We also present a conversation with Bhaskar Vira as he comes towards the end of his leadership of the department. We wish him well in his new role, alongside everyone who is retiring or leaving at the end of this year.

Miles Smith Editor-in-Chief cambridgecompassmagazine.wordpress.com compass@cugs.org.uk cugscompass compass_cugs

CONTENTS

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20

33

Nature The Musician Skiing (Social) in the bubble of miracle and Slopes Protecting Itself wonder

Geographies of First and Second Homes in the Alps

Finding home within youth climate advocacy

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23

What’s in a name?

A home for whom?

Nominative Geographies

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A Conversation with Bhaskar Vira

15

The Earth in the Anthropocene

Home is Where the Hazard is Learning to live with a noxious neighbour

29

The Future of Lake Fertő

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31

How the Family was Made

Photography Competition

26

What is Home?

A compilation

37

A Home Away from Home

Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are those of the individual authors only and do not represent the views or opinions of Compass Magazine as a whole or the University of Cambridge Department of Geography.

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FEATURED

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Image sourced from Eyoel Kahssay, Unsplash

Nature Protecting Itself:

Finding Home within Youth Climate Advocacy Hannah Harrison “Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there anymore” Robin Hobb My journey within climate advocacy began at the start of the pandemic, the content of my academic studies (the financialisation of nature, sustainable development, and climate justice) coinciding with much of the literature resurfacing due to the pandemic.

During the early days of the pandemic I picked up books about shock politics. Many of the authors and their proponents view the pandemic in two ways: first, as a symptom of the current ecological crisis and, second, as an opportunity to properly pursue a greener, more fair way of living. Back in 2020, Arundhati Roy described this time - a time that we are very much still in - as a ‘portal’.

Additionally, I also became aware of the communities around the world who felt as compelled by ideas of degrowth, collectivism, anti-oppression, and climate justice as me. This was the moment I decided to commit myself to climate action.

Two years on, and now having come towards the end of my year-long tenure as a coordinator of the Sustainable Development Working Group at Generation Climate Europe (GCE), I have the space to reflect on my relationship with youth climate advocacy, its relationship with ideas of ‘home’, and what this means for the planet’s future.

As can be expected from an environmental NGO, a lot of the work we do at GCE is about advocating for the protection and best interests of the planet. In climate work, when we think of ‘home’ we are – of course – immediately drawn to the idea of Earth as home. It provides the foundations for the lives of all living plants and animals, both now and in the future, and has held this mantle for billions of years.

But as we creep further into what has become understood as the climate emergency, I’d like to write on behalf of the youth climate movement, which I would describe as an additional - and equally important - home.

The home of youth climate activism, built by communities who have been operating mostly remotely of late, may be more difficult to see compared to the physical world outside; it may have only grown out of the past century, but has been cultivated in the name of protecting the Earth: its survival is vital if we are to reverse the warming trends we are currently facing.

Home as Hope. Within climate activist circles, the writing is on the wall: young people are unhappy with the way current systems of capitalist extractivism support all types of oppression, competition, relentless individualism and maltreatment of the planet. From gas explorations encroaching on Indigenous lands to oil spills and the rise of monocultures: youth want transformative change. They don’t just want the ‘greening’ of growth or sustainability paid only through lip service, but a complete paradigm shift.

Our demands are often prescribed by the media as idealistic, impractical, or overly romantic. However, a lot of how we communicate policy recommendations is about careful framing: deciding what aspects to emphasise and omit, and the response we want our work to generate. How fellow youth and proponents frame our demands, and a frame I subscribe to instead is one of hopefulness. Youth simply would not propose ideas like degrowth unless they truly Image sourced from NASA, Unsplash

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thought we had the capacity for it to become our reality. It is precisely this belief in the capacity to change, despite much of the news we read, that characterises the youth climate movement as a home of the 21st century.

Home is People, Not a Place. Over the past two years, I have had the great privilege of working with a number of people around the world who are interested in contributing to climate activism. For me, these people are mostly made up of undergraduates and master’s students, individuals completing their respective doctorates or those who are already working in exciting new green jobs that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

They are of course a fraction of the youth making up the climate movement but I believe they speak to the values of the movement more widely. They are united by a belief in climate solutions and the hope that there is an actionable alternative to the status quo.

I love the fact young people bring their knowledge and enthusiasm to the table, and irrespective of age are willing to learn from one another. They are my cheerleaders, teachers, counsellors and friends, not just for their own ends, but for the ends of each other. They are kind, attentive, and want to build lasting communities with those they support.

Such community-building is what provides many young people – including myself – with the motivation to keep advocating for change, despite unsettling trends and the media’s climate doom. It reminds us that we are not just defined by the climate advocacy we do, as what persists beyond our roles

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as volunteers are the friendships made with the individuals who make up the movement. This is what makes the youth climate movement a home of its own. It goes beyond the physical meaning of home and formulates the concept of finding home in other people.

Outgrowing Home. None of us currently involved within youth climate groups will remain young forever.

As young people complete apprenticeships and university degrees, heading into the world of work – many into environmental roles – we may ask whether the home that we have created within the youth climate movement, one that exists because of and in spite of business-as-usual, will persist within our professional careers.

I asked this question to an individual working in a new climate start-up a few weeks ago, and her response was one of optimism. It was a call to recognise that our future professional lives and the world of work have the same capacity to become what youth have made of climate advocacy. That is, to become a space of encouragement and empowerment; of solidarity, trust and education; of resilience, optimism and friendship. Indeed, if we are to creatively re-organise society with the Earth as our focus, they will have to. ■

This article is written with thanks – and many hugs – to my friends who have played no small part in making climate advocacy home for me.

Image sourced from Casey Horner, Unsplash

Image sourced from Lewis Parsons, Unsplash

Image sourced from Matt Palmer, Unsplash

Image sourced from William Justen de Vasconcellos, Unsplash

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Nominative Geographies: what’s in a name?

Chris Pang In the China Miéville novel The City and the City, the twin cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma are twins in more sense than one. Not only do they share aspects of language, culture, and history, they are (to borrow a word from the novel) grosstopically entwined, overlapping in geographical space as well as anthropological psyche. There are areas where you can solidly say you are in one city, areas where you can be solidly in another, and areas where the borders of the cities weave between city blocks, around public transport systems, and in one memorable case literally down the road. Children who grow up in this doubled locale from a young age are trained to unsee the other city, a form of mental code-switching that denies the existence of the neighbour whose reality they cannot deny with their senses, a suppressed “alter” that they re-recognise when they cross the border and mentally realign themselves to the other space-occupier. Two spaces entangled, each with a different identity.

For those of you who have grown up in stable nations that have never known the threat of realignment or the power of geographical reimagination, what I am saying may sound like idle fancy, an interesting thought experiment dreamed up by a hyperactive imagination. The 38th parallel divides the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea, de facto. De jure, both sides claim the entirety of the Korean peninsula as their territory, except that approximately half has been unlawfully occupied by enemy forces. Two spaces entangled, each with a different identity.

Perhaps this has convinced you of the power of names. But then again, perhaps not. Let me tell you another story about names, this time a space with two names. East of China lie the Diaoyu islands, named after the Chinese verb to fish. But wait!

Wikipedia gives the name Senkaku islands, named after the Japanese word for tall tower. Each side will send warships to exert the right to their name (and, accordingly, access to the oil reserves under the islands). Will names kill?

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Perhaps you believe it is not the name that kills.

So far, we have merely witnessed names that act as proxies for greater conflicts, territorial disputes waged with pen and ink instead of gun and sword.

Let us consider another, more subtle example. The Wet’suwet’en Nation, in Canada, asserts that their lands were never ceded, and hence attempts to use their right to the land - in essence, their right to call themselves a sovereign Nation - to block a pipeline through their historical territory. Here there is no dispute of powers, no equal or unequal armies to enforce their vision, only fragile bodies standing in the way of inexorable, self-destructive, progress. But the war to assert their name over that of British Columbia is waged in the legal courts, in the history books, and in the courts of public opinion. Already, some British Columbian citizens have proclaimed themselves as “living on the unceded land of the Wet’suwet’en Nation” - by using that name, they perform the act of unseeing that children are taught in Besźel and Ul Qoma. They deny the name of British Columbia, and with it the legitimacy of the government that wields it.

But the power of the name is not only psychological, it is also technological. Consider how much of our global identity, our perspective of what is in the wider world beyond our immediate purview, has become mediated by and defined by technology. If Google and Apple claim in their maps that the name of the Republic of Crimea (member of the Russian Federation since 2014) is “true”, while denying the name of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (autonomous yet integrated part of Ukraine since 1995), who are we, fettered as we are to our screens, our knowledge distributed across a thousand “free” services, to oppose that decision? The choice of names will be made over and over again this century, in Kashmir, in Taiwan, in Ukraine proper. In some cases it will be obvious, in other cases not. In every case, it will be a choice.

Finally, a name is a shield, a guarantor of identity. A name is also a fetter. When Japan occupied Taiwan

Image sourced from Eti Meshau, Unsplash

(Formosa) and Korea (Choseon), the population were incentivised to discard their old, Chinese-inflected or Chinese surnames, and take on new Japanese surnames. When Japan took over Northern China, it was given a new Japanese name, Manchukuo, under which the fiction of independence was to be carried out. In both cases, the name was to affirm what was involuntarily foisted upon, to write over the old with the new, to certify, and thereby, destroy.

To name is to write, to name is to certify, to name is to destroy. In 1860, the Qing dynasty ceded Southern Kowloon to the British as part of the treaties that concluded the first Opium War. Years later, in 1934, when the boundaries of the colony of Hong Kong had long since moved northwards into the New Territories, a street was built along the old boundary, for the purposes of defining borders for taxation rates.

The border is known as Boundary Street. Besźel is not a fiction, and neither is Ul Qoma. Both live on, in the world of names: our world. ■ COMPASS | 8

A Conversation with Bhaskar Vira Interviewed by Miles Smith

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Image sourced from Cajeo Zhange, Unsplash

How have your three years as head of department been?

I’ve been in the department and had roles within it for a long time but only when you become head do you really understand how each part of the department works together and the ways in which everyone contributes to making the department function. But overall? It’s been challenging - completely different to what I anticipated.

One of the things that I wanted to do had been accentuated by the pandemic but not caused by it. Because of the nature of collegiate universities - Cambridge in particular - I feel there has been a real difficulty trying to get people to treat the department as a space for people to congregate in a regular way. Obviously students come in for lectures and there’s spaces where they might spend time but I think it was more of a challenge for academic staff, many of whom have college offices and commitments.

One of the first things I did in October of 2019 - when I took over - was to organise a department away day for the academic and research staff. They’d not been together for the last ten years. An opportunity to meet each other in a less formal setting - not just in meetings where you’re transacting business. It was something people really appreciated. We didn’t go very far - it was held in Magdalene - and people had opportunities to talk to each other about the things they were doing academically, new research ideas, bits of conversation around teaching - but more importabtly just get to know each other outside

the formal structures of the department. I feel that those relationships work to make an institution function better - you spend a lot of time working to build social capital with which you can make an institution function better.

We managed to have another one in early March this year and they’re landmark events because we’ve had so little interaction with each other. The positive is just how much we like each other as a community!

The opportunities to bring people together have been the high moments - when I see staff (and students) interacting and benefitting from each other you feel the department is doing something right - because ultimately the department is made up of people in it - and if they don’t get an opportunity to interact with each other then we’re missing out on the vital things that connect us.

Lots of stuff happened and I will look back on all of that with pride because it was all happening in unprecedented times. So each little achievement was fantastic. But lots of people contribute to that: the fact that we ran exams in that first year was the collective effort of everyone who’s involved in the exam process. The fact that people didn’t scream at us was the tolerance that you’ve shown as a student body. It’s that mutual thing which keeps the department going. What I’ve tried to do in my time is to emphasise the importance of the collective. I think I put a lot of time into being available and communicative and maybe, in a sense, trying to break down the hierarchy of what the

department is. So whether that’s good or bad I can’t judge, but that’s been my strategy.

Are there any books you’d recommend? Any fiction?

I would really encourage you to read Amitav Ghosh. He’s an Indian author who writes a lot of fiction. He’s won the Booker and a lot of stuff but he’s also very sensitive to the world that we’re living in. His most recent writings are all about climate change. But he starts out as just being a fiction writer, a beautiful fiction writer. I suppose he has an Indian magical realism to his work. I would really like people to go into the genre starting with his fiction. And then today, I mean, his most recent book, The Nutmeg’s Curse is very much a geographer’s book.

But I wouldn’t start there. Read him through and start with his earliest books, I think they were called The Shadow Lines, and The Circle of Reason.

Some people might not know this but you weren’t originally a geographer. What was it like studying economics in the heady days of the late 80s and early 90s?

It was a fascinating time to be studying economics so I guess that was partly why I was attracted to the subject. When I came up here to Cambridge it was ‘88, Thatcher was still in power and we were experiencing the first waves of British privatisation. So the railways were being privatised, the utility companies were being privatised and they were being privatised on the back of a set of economic theories that suggested this will improve efficiency.

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Image sourced from Cajeo Zhange, Unsplash

I was lucky enough to be taught economics in Cambridge at that time in a traditional political economy approach which was healthily sceptical about many of those questions. That’s actually why it was such a lively place to be studying because they were openly critical of neoliberal reform even though there were textbook economics that justified that reform. They were able to recognise the difference between the textbook model and the real world as well as the distributional consequences - the downsides of those reforms because some people will be hurt.

One of the really interesting moments when I came up here in ‘88 was about a month later they launched this report. It was the Brundtland Report! “Our Common Future”: suddenly you’re living through this kind of moment when these things are happening and obviously as a socially committed individual I got interested in this kind of stuff.

Had I studied in a very hardcore neoclassical department I think my economics would have been very different. I find that the education I got has been very useful because I understand economics with depth, but I also studied it with enough openness to recognise its own limitations and how much it benefits when it has conversations with other social sciences and natural science disciplines, which is what I do: I interface between social science and natural science in the context of environment and development.

Can you reflect on what it’s been like to be at university from that time? Perhaps the 11 | COMPASS

changes that have taken place over the last 30 odd years?

It’s remarkable when you reflect back on it. I mean, firstly, just everything is done in a much more structured, thoughtful way. I think I was probably at the very end of a time where people were treating the whole university experience in a less formal way. And maybe there were benefits of that - there weren’t as many committees for sure. But as a result, there wasn’t that much accountability. The student experience was taken for granted and we rested on the laurels of having amazing people in Cambridge, who used to often care deeply about their students. But there weren’t safety nets when that went wrong.

So if you had a course that had been badly taught, there was no room to complain about it, there was no recourse to improve that. There’s been what you could see as a formalisation. Certainly colleagues see it as an over-bureaucratization of the process, but it tries to create structures so that people have layers of accountability for the education that we’re meant to provide. Everyone’s still deeply committed to it but you just need to have those kinds of structures in place.

And, of course, it was a less pressured time in all sorts of ways. There was a much slower pace during those years. People used to do slow research: sit around and write a book once every two or three years.

In some senses, there’s an academic pressure at the moment - people feel like they’re on a treadmill. So I think it’s become more fast paced, and how we can return back to a slower pace is an interesting question.

I think we should be going back to the core values of why we do this. When it’s driven by metrics - some of the evaluations of universities are done by the numerical output rather than the quality of work - I think they start to become artificial, because they’re just driving their own incentive structure. People are being forced into playing an ever increasing game of “I’m going to produce more and produce more”. To what end?

Because one of the things I reflected on was what is the public purpose of a university? We’re a publicly funded institution.

Leading on from that, what are you going to be doing once you step down?

Well, I thought I was going to have a year’s sabbatical. The intention was all along that I will do a three year tenure as head of department and then I was due a sabbatical which I haven’t actually had for 10 years - a long time - so that I could step back into my research more. It’s been difficult to keep the pace of my research going with all the demands as head of department.

So it’s an opportunity to reconnect with bits of your work and to see what you want to do next.

I’ve currently got two big things that I’m continuing to think about: one is around the future of work, the other around the continued question around how we engage with nature in ways that better reflect more than just the instrumental ways in which economists try and monetize nature. So those are two strands of work that I wanted to maybe try and bring more closely together. Things like the green New Deal and so on are trying to actually converge those agendas.

As it happens, the university advertised this position for the next Pro-Vice Chancellor for education. Within the university’s hierarchy, the Pro-Vice Chancellor looks after educational experience for both undergrad and grad students. As with most things in this university, they don’t have a lot of power, but they have the ability to influence the ways in which colleges, departments, and faculties treat the core educational mission of the university.

Image sourced from Cajeo Zhange, Unsplash

So I was then faced with this very difficult dilemma because it was, in terms of senior university leadership, one of the few jobs that I would be really keen on because I do care so much about education. At the same time, it meant giving up a year’s sabbatical: the job wasn’t going to wait for me. They needed a successor. So having thought about it a lot, I decided to apply for the Pro-Vice Chancellor role and give up my sabbatical - they tell me that I can save it for later.

What I’ve already said indicates I’m quite sceptical about just churning out more outputs.

You know, maybe some people would have read the book I could have written, maybe some people would have read the articles I’d write. But this feels like in the year I could have more influence on the educational process.

The other thing was that this is the moment when change is happening. We’re coming out of the pandemic, hopefully.

And we’re looking back at the things that worked well, and the things that didn’t work well.

I hope for example, in Geography, we will never go back to COMPASS | 12

Image sourced from Bogdan Todoran, Unsplash

making students sit in an exam hall and write exams in three hours, which used to be the default mode of examination across Cambridge. Nobody would have dared to challenge that had the pandemic not come along: there’s no question that those conversations were just not on the cards. So we’re now in this new world, where the Pro-Vice Chancellor of education can help colleagues to think about how we assess, how we teach, and how we can build the best lessons of what we were forced to do for the last two years into the new education experience that students will have. So it’s not like I could have done the job three years later, because three years later, those choices would have been made. The person who takes over next will be right at the heart of helping the university and the colleges make those choices. So it’s a fantastic opportunity in that sense because an 800 year institution doesn’t always embrace change.

And at this point we are going to change.

Do you have any advice for students?

You have to manage the demands that you’re making of yourself. And I suppose the lesson that comes with that is about prioritisation, because you can never complete all the jobs in the day, at least I find. So I think it’s about learning how to choose what are the things that are really important, and allowing yourself to let some things go, because maybe they don’t matter that much. You’ll always find that you’re having to make choices between different things and some sense of 13 | COMPASS

self awareness about yourself and caring for yourself because I think we otherwise can exploit our own selves. I’m probably a bad example. I don’t practice it enough. But you need to be able to kind of recognise when you need to stop, when you need a change, when you need a break.

Self awareness, mindfulness, I guess, in a sense.

What does home mean to you?

I was remembering something that someone who I really respect a lot, who has been a kind of academic mentor to me, said. He said home is where you go when you dream, where your dreams take you. I’m not a dreamer who remembers his dreams that much. But it was so powerful when this mentor of mine said it many years ago he’d grown up in the same place that I went to school. He loves the place as much as I do - it’s in the foothills of the Himalayas. He said “because I grew up here, that’s where my dreams take me back”, even though he doesn’t live anywhere near there anymore.

So let’s interpret that: it’s a place of comfort, security, that you can create in multiple places, because so many of us are also very mobile - migrants, immigrants. We’ve built homes for ourselves as we’ve moved. I’ve lived in Cambridge longer than any other city in my life. So Cambridge has become a home but I’m not a native resident of Cambridge. So you then build a home through people - it’s a place of memory. I think that’s important. ■

Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

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HUMAN

What is Home?

A Compilation

Image sourced from Tom Podmore, Unsplash

Geography is fundamentally about approaching the world relationally. We’re coming up to the 40th anniversary of Donna Haraway’s landmark essay where she declared the human had always been a ‘cyborg’ made up of many components: simultaneously human, animal and machine. Indeed, no geographer is an island - we only exist through our relationships with other people, creatures, things and ideas.

We approached various figures around the department and asked what ‘Home’ means to them. Within each of their answers one can trace the impact of their experiences and particularly the influence of their geographical studies. Once again, thank you to all those who contributed, and we hope you enjoy these reflections.

Michael Bravo, Associate Professor at the Scott Polar Research Institute 15 | COMPASS

‘Where are you from’ is the question I am still asked about my speech and accent. There is a restlessness that marks out my sense of being out of place. The art critic John Berger talked about writing from a position of exile and the unfulfilled promise of home, seeing in ourselves the condition of being fugitive, knowing home by experiencing difference and displacement in time and space.

This speaks to the story of my family and so many others, emigrants from Eastern Europe, born in South America, raised in North America. Living out several decades once again on the edges of Europe has taught me resilience, an uneasy sense of being unsettled and ready for the next move to higher ground, safer latitudes. Jacques Derrida cautioned against inhabiting geographical imaginaries built on certainties and teleologies. Hunting societies understand very well that every prevailing wind has a deceptive counter-wind. Reading the

contours of the sand or the horizon is part of the constant practice of re-orientation that enables safe returns. For Immanuel Kant, to ask ‘where am I’ was also to ask ‘who am I’.

Through art, I experience resonances of home in “the road to my horizons” (Nick Sykes, Painter).

Philip Howell, Professor of Historical Geography “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?,” asks the philosophical pessimist E. M. Cioran. With respect to the gloomy Emil, who had his reasons, the easy answer is no. Home is in fact 90 minutes away up the Great North Road, even if I haven’t lived in Nottingham for 30 years. More generally, home for me is the amorphous expanse of England known as the provinces. I have written elsewhere about the role of populism, parochialism, patriotism, and provincialism as competing

of English identity, but the latter is certainly the dominant motif. My home is an English “Midlands” more properly northern than any southerly suburbanity implied by “Middle England.” Claiming the pangs of exile would seem a bit silly, but I have nothing but pity for those of you who haven’t had the great good fortune to be born there.

Ilona Kater, Teaching Associate Home is an interesting concept, which to me has largely been influenced by multiple moves during my upbringing, and during adulthood moving yearly due to studies and work.

As such, home is not a physical place “where I came from” or “where I grew up” because many locations have played a role in influenced my life. What is home then? To me home is where I feel fully at ease. This can be a physical place - my house at that point in time - or it can be a context with people, being with dear friends and family regardless of location, even across space if we are calling one another. Geography has provided comparisons to other ways of seeing place and home, contrasting my experience with those of people who have spent multiple generations in the same location, those who have been forced to move away from a beloved place, or those who have moved many times and identify with a larger environment, culture or social group rather than a location. Whilst showing the variety of ways to view place and home, it also shows it can be a fluid concept, and we create new definitions in our own lives of what we want home to be.

Céline Vidal, Lecturer and Volcanologist In my experience, the classic meaning of home is a concept of attachment created out of a longing to belong. It is only temporarily satisfied materialistically until belonging is found. I left my hometown after school and lived in seven cities in France, Spain and the UK. I am blessed with a job and curiosity that sent me all over the world and had life transforming experiences in Indonesia, eastern Africa and the Comoros. The more I travelled and discovered the flaws of every culture I got in contact with, the less I felt comfortable in the places I would call home. I have found home every time I have felt part of a community.

Whether this was through gazing in a tribal woman’s eyes in the middle of the Ethiopian desert, hugging a relative, or reuniting with friends. Home is the invisible space created between me and another person when we see each other for who we are. It is the fabric of connection.

Dino Kadich, PhD Candidate If you’re searching for profundity from someone who looks like me, you’ll do much better to consult one of the vaguely sad, vaguely wealthy Indie musicians based in Brooklyn. Peter Silberman, of The Antlers, likens love and home in the song “Palace”: “We won’t need to take a ton of pictures, it won’t be easy to believe / The day we wake inside a secret place that everyone can see.” Like love, home’s visibility is deceptive: we frequently visit the homes of others, even interrogate Image sourced from Ashim d’Silva, Unsplash COMPASS | 16

Image on right sourced from Paul Hanaoka, Unsplash

them. We notice unclean dishes, neatly organized cupboards, and sprawling bookshelves.

But home is a “secret place,” a relationship that is mysterious even to its bearer. I, for one, don’t understand why the strong artificial scent of lavender cleaning fluid comforts me as I walk through the entrance of my apartment building in Sarajevo, while that same dizzying smell sends me straight out onto patio (alongside the dogs, similarly inclined) at my parents’ house in Arizona. The labours of home are embedded in that lavender scent, sometimes sweet and sometimes sickly. When we defamiliarize the home, we can start to see how this labour of making the ‘secret place’ is itself made secret, papered over and ignored.

Tom Spencer, Professor of Coastal Dynamics When the Compass asked me to write a few lines on what ‘home’ means to me, I immediately thought of ‘the Earth as the home of man’ by the great communist and anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus, the finest definition of Geography that I know. So reminded, I went back to the obituary of Reclus in the Geographical Journal by that other great geographer-anarchist Peter Kropotkin. ‘ Not only’, wrote Kropotkin ‘ is his work free from absurd national conceit, or of national or racial prejudice, he has succeeded in indicating ... what all men have in common - not what divides’.

In our current world, never have we needed more Reclus and Kroptokin’s activist vision for Geography as a vehicle for developing humanitarianism and social justice. ■ 17 | COMPASS

Image above sourced from Tim Mossholder, Unsplash

How the Family was Made Michael Fleetwood-Walker, Urban Studies Msc at University College London At least in the Anglophone world, the family can at times appear to be fundamental. The vast majority of housing stock in the Five Eyes nations is designed to furnish a family of three to six with all the facilities needed for comfortable living. A large bedroom, for the parents, a few more, for the children, a kitchen, a living room replete with television, and so on.

A garden is also ubiquitous, giving parents a space first to allow children to play safely, then as they age, a space for quiet relaxation. It is more likely than not that most readers of this piece have spent much of their lives in similar places; living as a family, in a sea of other families, in an environment purpose built to support such a lifestyle.

Thatcher was an insightful observer of this condition of modern society. As she rails against apparently left-wing collectivist impulses, she argued “there are [only] individual men and women and there are families”. While trivially correct, it is telling that the unit of family is elevated to the same status as the holy individual in her worldview. The family is the only level of societal organisation that is, in the neoliberal imagining, valorised as ontologically independent from its priors. That is to say, the family is allowed to exist even when the existence of a broader society is vehemently denied. As might

perhaps be expected, Reagan thought similarly. He positioned himself the great defender of the nuclear family, a unit that he saw as coming under strain from overtaxation, drug usage and the tyranny of Big Government. The family acts as a symbol of sensible conservatism; harking back to a simpler and more genuine time before modern evils. The world of family is a world of nostalgia, of honesty and humanity.

When the traditional family is accepted as a major constituent of one’s worldview, it readily becomes a cudgel to be wielded against those who are not typically included in rosy-cheeked depictions of ‘normal’ families. Reagan’s frequent allusions to drug use and single mothers are easily read as condemnations of impoverished black communities’ apparent denigration of the family, rhetoric at once promoting and justifying conservative racism. Yet sexual and especially gender minorities find themselves on the receiving end of this familial-derived hatred in a very pervasive manner. By rejecting the assumed standard modes of attraction and being together, queer individuals often find themselves alienated from the familial standard. This may be due to traumatic rejection from their own birth families, or immersion in a queer culture that places much less COMPASS | 18

value on this apparently traditional mode of being, or it may be they find themselves locked out forcefully. Gay marriage is in much of the world illegal, and visibly participating in non-heteronormative modes of being is still imminently dangerous even in apparently tolerant nations.

It is thus important to unsettle the image of the family as a fundamental and historically stable institution from the central position it currently occupies in our societal and thus political imaginings.

Yet, rejection without understanding is unlikely to win any hearts and minds, so a deeper knowledge of the situated and contingent nature of our current understanding of ‘family’ is required. Social historian John Gillis rejects the notion of home as always acting as a hallowed space, wherein parents and children share Godly affection. Home, in fact, for much of European history, had no such special meaning. Until around the 19th century, households were larger; not constrained purely to parents and their direct offspring. For the wealthy, servants and various house-staff were incorporated into the social fabric of the group. For agrarian communities, childcare was often a duty spread across multiple locals. Naturally, these practices varied significantly by time and place, but the fact remains that the nuclear family cannot so easily be called valuable by dint of tradition.

So then where can we locate the roots of our present understanding of family? The rise and development of protestantism lays the groundwork for the shift towards the modern family. An increased focus on the material and personal acts of godliness led to an ethos of homely production. By raising a good and productive family in service of God, the head of the family proved their religious devotion, and thus the family per se began to emerge as a cultural fascination. This head was of course male, though the early modern period saw also the patriarchal nature of the western family strengthen. As absolutism sought to invest kings with unchecked power over their subjects, political theorists justified this by reference to the family. By seeing fathers as having innate and absolute power over their children (and, though less strongly, their wives), monarchists likened this to the king, who acts as the head of the national family.

Thus, both the prominence of the family in cultural imaginings and the prominence of the father figure at the head of the family steadily increased over the early modern period.

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The final shift towards today’s family was of course the industrial revolution and associated scientific progress. The transition towards a single-income model of production left women without economically-productive labour. This acted to keep the woman at home, caring for the children, so making the household the wife’s responsibility - much closer to today’s archetypical nuclear family. This change in labour also is said to have changed attitudes towards the family. As the home and the workplace diverged, the public sphere became that of work; unpleasant, cold and rational. The home then became a source of warm comfort and relaxation, elevating it in society. The late Victorian period thus saw the mythologizing of the home, inventing rituals of home and appropriating the religious into the domestic. This is the genesis of modern Christmas.

The nostalgia and valorisation of the family in its current form is the result of centuries of religious, political and economic change. I highly doubt Thatcher - or any of her modern sycophants - have this in mind when they preach of family values.

Family has always been a very fluid and contingent concept, so should not be pedestalized to berate our gay, trans or otherwise non-conforming peers.

Family and a solid home can be a wonderful, even radical imagining. But to do so it must be open to change and acceptance, to love in whatever form it takes. This false tradition is no excuse. ■

Image sourced from Raphael Renter, Unsplash

The Musician in the Bubble of Miracle and Wonder Alex Teeuw It is 35 years since the musician Paul Simon (of Simon and Garfunkel fame) released the single The Boy in the Bubble. The song was from the commercially successful album Graceland, other notable tracks including You Can Call Me Al, with each incorporating an elaborate but controversial mixture of Western and South African musical techniques.

The Boy in the Bubble (written in collaboration with Forere Motloheloa) combines an accordion riff with a powerful bassline and driving drum beat to create a fast-paced song that invokes the intensity of modernity.

Image sourced from Steward Maswneng, Unsplash

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Image sourced from John Paul Henry, Unsplash

tions used to disguise underlying economic processes. We continue to be led to believe that these are the days of miracle and wonder! Why should anyone cry? Fundamentally, the uncritical optimism fostered by some media forms and capitalist narratives (especially in advertising, as notably written on by David Orr) overlooks the suffering found in many parts of the world, both close to or at home and in distant places.

Simon intended to create this specific atmosphere in the song. The lyrics deconstruct the contradictions of uneven capitalist development satirically, as highlighted in the chorus:

The way we look to a distant constellation That’s dying in a corner of the sky These are the days of miracle and wonder Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry Here, Simon makes an observation that is insightful but hardly novel. There exists a long-held assumption in wealthier places that contemporary society should be optimistic, with everyone experiencing a universal improvement to material standards of living. Modernity is absolute and guaranteed, with time representing inherent progress. It is an issue that has been raised by critical scholars for some time, from Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England to Marshall Berman’s analysis of the capitalist contradictions in the 1980s and Raymond Williams’ 2020 study of landscapes in literature. A common theme among these scholars is a focus on how inequality operates as a prerequisite for the operation of capital, with media representa21 | COMPASS

Graceland was written in collaboration with black South African musicians during Apartheid. Whilst working there, Simon became aware of how (some, I would like to be clear) people in the West had the impression that life was great, with more progress being made everyday in an ever more connected and transformed world. At the same time Simon witnessed an almost completely antithetical world in Apartheid South Africa, where the black majority were not looking to a distant constellation, but rather looking for their next meals, shelter, safety, and most fundamentally equality and liberation. Simon was not ignorant to this – it was one of the motives for him to write Graceland in collaboration with musicians who had experienced these very issues.

He wanted to highlight that the wealthiest globally were living in an illusionary bubble which simultaneously overlooked and facilitat ed a reified, almost sadistic, enjoyment of global ine quality vis-à-vis Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology.

As Ken Fuchsman (2016) has highlighted, Simon saw Graceland an accessible medium to communicate the issue to those in the western bubble. By collaborating with black musicians, he felt that this alone was a radical move contravening the very premise of racial segregation. However, Robin Denselow has shown that in other respects his concern for those experiencing Apartheid in South Africa is thoroughly questionable. During Apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) imposed a cultural boycott of South Africa, on the logical premise that any cultural involvement would be considered implicit condonation of the government and the system of segregation. Therefore, by recording the album in Apartheid South Africa, Simon knowingly contravened the cultural boycott.

It is important to understand the significance of this violation. For the many counter-arguments Simon has provided, the former UN ambassador for Ghana James Victor Ghebo noted that Simon could not escape the fact that he “live[d] in designated hotels for

Image sourced from Luis Vaz, Unsplash

whites. He spen[t] money the way whites have made it possible to spend money” which went “to look after white society, not to the townships”. During his time recording in South Africa, Simon himself lived in the exclusive white “bubble” in a brutally divided society, thereby perpetuating ignorance towards racial segregation and financially endorsing it. He reproduced and reinforced the very same ignorance which he sought to raise in The Boy in the Bubble.

Hence Simon’s political message is thrown into disrepute. Despite his benevolent intentions, Simon profited out of inequality in South Africa, ironically perpetuating ignorance towards major issues whilst seeking to raise awareness about them. Yet the main theme of the song is nevertheless profound. It undeniably raises questions of modernism, specifically regarding how the development of modernity was, and continues to be represented. However, Simon’s ambivalence towards the cultural boycott imposed by the ANC makes us question the underlying ideological force behind Graceland, as well as the general issue of situated production of culture and knowledge in an unequal capitalist world. A great many people – including, to some extent, myself – continue to live and construct the ultimate Spectacle (as used by Guy Debord), a subjective experience of an absolute epitome of history. We need to collectively understand, respect, and ultimately burst the bubble some of us live in instead of reinforcing it as Simon did. In other words, it’s time to ‘get real’ before we party ourselves off a cliff characterised by climate change, inequality, discrimination, political and economic unaccountability, and mass-alienation. To quote Simon, it’s a “long-distance call” from the tear-stained places we dream of: home, whether it’s close, far away, or perhaps already here. ■ References: Berman, M., 1983. All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: Verso Books | Chang, R., 2020, Paul Simon: The Controversial South African Trip That Inspired ’Graceland’, at https://www.biography. com/news/paul-simon-graceland-inspiration-south-africa | Debord, G., 1967, The Society of the Spectacle.

Bread and Circuses Publishing. | Denselow, R., 2012, Paul Simon’s Graceland: the acclaim and the outrage, The Guardian | Engels, F., 1950 [1845], The Condition of the Working Class in England, Edinburgh: The Riverside Press | Fuchsman, K., 2016. The Age of Miracle and Wonders: Paul Simon and the Changing American Dream.

The Journal of Psychohistory, 43(4), p.288. | Ghebo, J.V., quoted in Runtagh, J., 2016 “Paul Simon’s Graceland: 10 Things You Didn’t Know”. Rolling Stone.

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PHYSICAL

Image sourced from Naja Bertolt Jensen, Unsplash

Matthew Harris and Hannah Harrison

Earth in the Anthropocene: A Home for Whom?

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A diversity of life – microbial life, animal life, plant life – calls Earth its home. From the bottom of Earth’s oceans, to the top of its mountains, life thrives on this planet. Life has survived throughout the tumultuous periods of Earth’s past, through greenhouse and icehouse conditions, glacials and interglacials, and through five mass extinctions. Life has persisted, and Earth has remained a safe home for life – in one form or another – to survive.

This home is now threatened. Humanity is pushing the boundaries of what makes Earth a safe home.

With biodiversity crises, climatic change, and perturbed biogeochemical cycles, the Earth System is being pushed to its limits, threatening the existence of humanity, and the rest of life.

The Planetary Boundaries is a conceptual framework for understanding the extent to which humanity has affected Earth. First proposed by Johan Rockström and his colleagues in 2009, the planetary boundaries framework designates what they called a ‘safe operating space for humanity’: it is the extent to which humanity can conduct its activities without causing non-linear and abrupt environmental change that would threaten Earth’s capacity to support humanity. It sets limits as to how much Earth’s systems can be perturbed by humanity, such as the different biogeochemical cycles, use of freshwater, and change in land use.

However, this framing is anthropocentric: it focuses on how humanity uses the different and complex systems of Earth, rather than how humanity can live with and within these systems. With this anthropocentric mindset, humanity is seen as apart from nature, rather than part of or within nature. The planetary boundaries suggest that humanity must live within these boundaries in order to survive, in order to not disturb its home. But Earth is home to more than humanity; Earth is home to millions of species.

Anthropocentrism permeates not just conceptual scientific frameworks such as the planetary boundaries, but through modernist economic systems – ones of extraction, greed and perpetual growth; through the language we use to describe the non-human living world; and through the way we frame the climate and biodiversity crises, and their solutions.

Our current socio-economic systems appropriate the complex processes of the Earth system and ecosystems, in both practicality and language.

Biogeochemical cycling, food web dynamics, free-flowing rivers, and energy flows have all evolved through time and support life on Earth. But these are now framed as ‘ecosystem services’; forests and rolling hills are described as ‘green infrastructure’; and biodiversity and habitation are considered ‘asset classes’. Writer George Monbiot describes this framing as ‘massively failing’, as it reduces nature to a usable financial asset, with the purpose of serving humanity.

Human appropriation of nature can, to some extent, be sensibly quantified: in 1986, Peter Vitousek and colleagues first introduced the idea of human appropriated net primary productivity (HANPP), to measure human impacts. Net primary productivity is a measure of the balance between plant photosynthesis and respiration. They suggest that NPP is one measure of the total food resource available, and therefore the implications of human use for other species. However, they note that other species “must use the leftovers”, and discuss how many people Earth can support. This, again, highlights the anthropocentric view that humanity is separate from the rest of nature. Furthermore, the whole concept of NPP arguably exemplifies the relationship that humanity has with the rest of nature. ‘Productivity’ is a highly-charged capitalist word, which implies nature’s life is measurable, and its value defined by its utility. The existence of nature should not be reduced to usefulness and profitability; and its ‘usefulness’ is determined by the system humanity has created, in which everything must serve, or have no use.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘service’ is the particular skill(s) or help that a person is able to offer. So the question remains, to help whom?

Is the purpose of ecosystems to help humanity? To offer its life-supporting processes? When conceptualising both the impacts of and solutions to the current crises, humanity must not be at the centre.

Nature is not here to solely serve humanity.

Reforesting isn’t just about sequestering carbon, it’s about restoring habitats: restoring the homes of the multitude of species that live there. Increased forest fires do not just release more carbon, they threaten the safety of the plants and animals who live there; they threaten their homes. Rapid climate change doesn’t only threaten cities and agriculture, but the ecosystems around the world which have become adapted to the current climate. Some animals can COMPASS | 24

migrate, shifting their ranges, to similar climates.

But others lose out: due to encroachment of other species – human and non-human; impacts on food availability; and space limitations. Plants cannot migrate; the species may shift its range, but individuals cannot move. There is much evidence that plant species across the world are unable to keep up with the pace of current climate change.

Scientists and activists alike have stated that Earth is in the midst of a sixth, human-induced, mass extinction. The way we are framing the conduits that make up the home we share with 8.7 million different species is contributing to its destruction; only benefiting a fraction of just one of the species present on Earth. By continuing to financialise nature by continuing to look at nature and economic worth

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in an anthropocentric way - we push our home further into the system destroying it and increase the chances of unprecedented biodiversity losses continuing.

While ideas of nature holding inherent worth may seem overly romantic, idealised and impractical, they – alongside the importance of assigning a moral character to how we think of the Earth - are certainly gathering weight. From the degrowth movement, to religious ecological publications such as Laudato Si, individuals and institutions are recognising that the only way to avoid ecological collapse, to avoid trophic cascades ricocheting around the world before our eyes, is to look at the Earth as home: a home not just for people everywhere, but for every living being on the planet. ■

Image sourced from Marous Kauffman, Unsplash

Home is where the Hazard is: Learning to live with a Noxious Neighbour Georgie Turner Volcanoes are both a threat to life and essential to it. They have been the principal medium through which the gases that comprise Earth’s life-supporting atmosphere have been propagated, including emissions of nitrogen, water, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide.

Volcanic outgassing does not have to accompany explosive eruptions. Indeed, more sulphur dioxide is released globally from subdued degassing than eruptive events. Gases emanate from active (and sometimes dormant) volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. During explosive eruptions, gases are released from bubbles in magma. If unaccompanied by an eruption, degassing can occur through gas advection (heat transfer via the movement of fluid) through weaknesses in the volcano, where gases are channelled and released through geologic chimneys called fumaroles.

Image sourced from Waranont Joe, Unsplash

Although these vents can be closely monitored using UV spectrometers on-site or from satellites, degassing can be a sporadic or constant phenomenon, and many emitted gases are toxic, including sulphur dioxide. In this sense, volcanoes predisposed to degassing, such as Masaya in Nicaragua, act as natural industrial plants – the difference being they are not bound to air quality regulations, and preventing the release of toxic gases is unfeasible. Furthermore, degassing can heighten eruption explosiveness. Therefore, building a life in the shadow of an effervescent volcano, as people in the vicinity of Masaya know, means to experience the hazard of toxic gas ingestion.

The insidious and incessant nature of degassing adds to its power, fostering unawareness and laxity at times. This is juxtaposed against meticulous planning for acute, visible volcanic hazards — an effort

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undertaken in the National Response Plan of Nicaragua’s disaster management centre, SINAPRED, providing negligible self-protection advice for toxic gases in comparison to that for earthquakes and eruptions. Attention to degassing is long overdue.

Masaya is located roughly 25 km south of Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, and is a member of a broader sequence of volcanoes called the Central American Volcanic Belt. The belt runs from Guatemala to Costa Rica, tracing the margins of the subduction zone where the Cocos plate is sinking under the Caribbean plate. It is a basaltic (but surprisingly explosive), caldera volcano which exhibits shield-like morphology and encompasses 13 vents and several craters.

The caldera spans an impressive ~11.5 km width within the Masaya national park.

There are many reasons why people reside by volcanoes like Masaya: increased prospects for productive agriculture linked to high soil fertility, family or cultural heritage, spiritual importance, and complacency due to frequent eruptions and high barriers to moving elsewhere.

A 2009 review found that since 1972 Masaya has released roughly 1100 tonnes of sulphur dioxide each day and that it has been in a phase of high gas release since 1993 – coincident with an eruption that created a new lava lake by the Santiago Crater. Another study from the same year found the maximum recorded concentration of sulphur dioxide reached 471μg m−3 even 6km from the vent – a figure far exceeding the annual limit suggested by the World Health Organization of 50μg m−3, and dangerously close to their highest recommended exposure for 10 minutes at 500μg m−3.

This tripartite issue of consistent degassing, exposed communities, and the relatively low altitude of Masaya means sulphur dioxide seeps constantly into people’s lives. The town of Masaya is at low-moderate risk of harful fumigation as prevailing winds are easterly, but ambient levels still regularly exceed WHO limits — as do those in the capital. Yet settlements west of the crater like Tamoa are threatened and El Panama, only 3 km from Masaya, is frequently engulfed by gaseous plumes.

The human health impacts from sulphur dioxide exposure are broad. In a series of interviews conducted in 2014, members of proximal communities revealed their most common physical symptoms were 27 | COMPASS

burning skin, eyes and throat, breathing issues and stained teeth (from the various sulphurous gases).

One interviewee claimed their eyes felt as though they were being rubbed with chillies. More inconspicuous effects included kidney and heart issues, tumours and joint pain, with cattle also experiencing the latter alongside arthritis. These chronic afflictions are often endured daily. Whilst inhaling sulphur dioxide increases susceptibility to cold and flu for everyone, children are especially vulnerable, being prone to worse respiratory outcomes.

Concerning livelihood impacts, vegetation - and by extension agricultural productivity - is harmed by subjection to high sulphur dioxide concentrations through three principal mechanisms: soil acidification from (sulphuric) acid raid, fumes burning foliage, and plants respiring sulphur dioxide via their stomata. Essentially this means many crops, especially coffee, bananas and avocados, fail or produce low yields, meaning farming can be a gamble to rely on. Furthermore, toxic traces of heavy metals from volcanic ash and gases can be found in foodstuffs grown near Masaya like bananas and plantains, risking the poisoning of consumers internationally.

Most tragically, the risks of agriculture near volcanic outgassing is exemplified by reports of cattle deaths as a consequence of poisoned grass.

Degassing also permeates homes. Roofs are generally built from zinc iron and tin as they are cheap.

However, this means that settlements downwind of Masaya must replace or coat their roofs as regularly as twice a year. It is not possible to use nails to repair roofs because they rapidly rust in an atmosphere saturated with volcanic gases, meaning house structure is precarious. Cooking equipment like pots and pans similarly rust, meaning degassing even impedes routine household tasks. Most importantly, perhaps, is how sulphur dioxide infiltrates water systems, making even the most basic requirements of life noxious.

These consequences highlight the pervasiveness of degassing — transcending bodies, resources and homes. Although the effects sketched out merely skim the surface of those which directly influence local livelihoods, this is not to depreciate climatic impacts such as the cooling effect of sulphurous aerosols injected into the stratosphere.

Hazard prevention and mitigation are somewhat out of the question. Instead, focus is channelled into

protection and the reduction of vulnerability. Education and personal protection including masks, medication and inhalers are beneficial but somewhat inconvenient. Regarding agriculture, farmers can plant crops like dragon fruit which are more resistant to ambient pollution than others, although mono-cropping has many downfalls. Water can be delivered in sealed barrels to protect against fumes and chlorinated, although there are challenges with distributing to remote homes and the consumption of chlorine.

Learning to live with chronic degassing is no easy feat. Keeping communities healthy will require further collaboration to establish strategies and continue the essential provision of appropriate monitoring and protection. ■

Image sourced from Tobias Tullius, Unsplash

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Image sourced from Sandra, Grunewald, Unsplash

The future of Lake Fertő Lili Csada Lake Fertő, a 315 km2 lake located on the border between Austria and Hungary, is not only a World Heritage site but is also a part of the FertőHanság National Park, the Natura 2000 network, and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. Therefore, the last picture that we would envision is a landscape dominated by hotels, apartments, and harbours with a capacity of 850 sailboats.

However, this reality has been so ever since initial investment into local tourism in 2017. Despite opposition from national and international organisations as well as local residents, the work has continued risking the ecological integrity of Central Europe’s third-largest lake.

Lake Fertő is surrounded by the foothills of the Alps from the west and the Little Hungarian Plain from the east. This convergence of contrasting landscapes has given Lake Fertő unique physical and biological characteristics. It is the largest endorheic lake in Central Europe meaning that it is without outflow to any external bodies of water, its water and chemical balance almost entirely dependent on the ratio between incoming precipitation and waterflow and outgoing evaporation. During summertime, when the evaporation rates are at their highest, salt content can reach 2000 g/m3 and on several occasions the lake has disappeared entirely.

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Despite the fact that these swings in the lake are seasonal phenomena, sedimentation patterns and progressive vegetation successions indicate that the lake has already moved into a stable ‘final’ stage of its life cycle. However, the same cannot be said for the local wildlife. The Fertő is home to one of the most important breeding places for birds in Europe, as a significant part of the lake is occupied by reeds, providing a perfect nesting and resting location. Over the year, almost every species of European migratory waterbird can be observed in the area.

The World Heritage title was awarded to the region in the cultural landscape category, acknowledging the Hungarian rural architecture and lifestyle around the lake and the symbiotic relationship between nature and the locals. Human settlements have been around the lake for more than 1000 years, during which people learned to live with nature in a state of balance. Sustainable viticulture, stock raising, fishing, and the historic reed industry created a unique cultural landscape unlike anywhere else in Europe.

Visible changes in land use began to be observed during the socialist era, in 1985, although that was the last attempt at development until the most recent project. Meanwhile, the section of the lake located in Austria Image sourced from Patrick Hendry, Unsplash

has begun to be developed, with the construction of a floating theatre and high-quality cycling paths.

water and intercepted the sediments, and so with its removal and the addition of impermeable surfaces, runoff patterns will change locally. The sedimentation of the lake would also increase, leading ironically to more dredging work needing to be done.

Therefore, the recent Hungarian government unveiled a significant development project in order to boost tourism and keep up with their Austrian counterparts. In an official report from Besides filtering, reeds also 2020, the government proposed provide habitat, shelter, and building harbours which would nutrient sources for numerous have a total capacity of 813 sailspecies, especially for birds. Unboats and 500 boats. According fortunately, with the removal of to Greenpeace, further projects the plant, those functions are include the building of 880 lost, and developers even elimparking places, a 100-roomed inate the possibility to replace hotel, and a sports complex them with alternatives, like with swimming pools. The total nesting under the pier or houscost of the construction, which es. Since removing already-excovers 60 hectares, is at least isting nests is prohibited, com30 billion forints (70 million panies have placed plastic nets GBP), which is the seven-year under old houses preventing budget of all the ten Hungarian nest formation. ConImage sourced from Francesca Difurther Pasqua, Unsplash national parks. struction companies have also applied for a permit to continue The president of the national building all year round, removpark claims that they are not using the breaks during which ing a larger area than before for nature can gain ground again. touristic purposes, and, while They have also chosen to ignore this statement is true, the area the local wildlife’s vegetation will be used significantly more and hatching cycle. They have intensively. One of the most received the permit as, accordimpactful environment shaping ing to the Győr-Moson-Sopron processes is dredging, which is County Government Office, the fundamental for allowing sailconstruction site has already ing to take place, since the averbecome a hostile place for the age depth of the lake is 1 m. The flora and fauna, meaning the removal of the mud not only animals have already migrated changes the geomorphology of and so there is no wildlife to be the lake’s bed leading to changthreatened. But as some sort es in hydrodynamics but also of compensation, the investors removes the natural habitat for assure that the project involves invertebrate species that act as the formation of artificial swalimportant sources of nourishlow nests. ment for birds and fishes. This coastal management also inUnfortunately, the natural and volves the removal of the reed, social consequences of this inas well as covering the coastal vestment could be listed for sevarea with tarmac to a larger exeral more pages, but the general tent than before. The reed natutendency can be observed from rally filtered the incoming these details. The relationship

between humans and nature has changed here. Reading the definition of ’Cultural Landscape’ from UNESCO, Fertő is supposed to be a ‘combined work of nature and humankind, expressing a long and intimate relationship between peoples and their natural environment’.

We cannot be sure for how long this statement will remain true for the lake. Fortunately, there are ongoing protests by Greenpeace and objections made by the EU and UNESCO suggest that there is light at the end of the tunnel, with the hope that in the future these actors will come together as a dominant force and challenge the actions of the Hungarian government with regard to the Lake Fertő development project. ■ Image sourced from Carissa Rogers, Unsplash

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TRAVEL

A Home Away from Home Mathilde Corcoran For many, travel is a move away from the comforts of one’s home and a step into the unknown and the exciting. For many more the art of travel involves seeking those comforts found at home but abroad and in such unknown places. It is safe to say that the discipline of travel has diverged and evolved into so many different forms in the modern age that it’s hard to distinguish where the idea of “home” slots in anymore. One particular phenomenon that challenges the classical definitions of travel and holiday is the ownership of second homes and the expression of finding a “home away from home”. This phenomenon manifests itself in many ways across a variety of different cultures, moving far beyond the mainstream controversies of second home ownership and small-town degradation seen in the media.

In this article I would like to explore this concept of finding a “home away from home”, how it affects and manipulates the identities of not only individuals but communities, and what future lies ahead amidst the changing uncertainties of the modern world.

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Image sourced from Pelayo Arbues, Unsplash

Across even just the European continent a ‘home away from home’ reflects different traditions oftravelling which each provide unique insight into the cultures of nations. In Spain, citizens have had a unique relationship with the historic process of urbanisation which has produced a unique travelling tradition followed by many of moving up and down the country each year. For many in Spain the idea of a “home away from home” involves returning to their roots each summer, to a family village and community where perhaps some elderly relatives still live. This phenomenon has been described within Spanish culture by the famous director Pedro Almodóvar, who depicted the life of women between the city and the village and the identities they forged in the Spanish countryside. On a more personal note, in many of my experiences travelling in Spain, a nation I hold a special connection to, I have encountered many friends who have recounted the joys of each summer returning from the big city to the comfort of the village and their family. As such, a home away from home for Spaniards is not so much a search for the same comforts of home, but a rediscovery of heritage and connections.

While the Spanish case reflects a tradition of regional migration, such a need can also transcend borders.

There are many citizens of dual nationality working and raising family abroad; people for whom there is a special connection to the idea of a home away from home. For many when we think of second home ownership images of middle- and upper-class privilege come to mind. However, the reality of the situation for many is that the ownership of a second home is a means of holding or returning to the comforts and culture of a home country and roots. From personal experience, returning to France for each year allowed me to foster an affiliation to my mum’s roots and the culture that I have inherited an affiliation to. A home away from home in this case can provide a feeling of nostalgia, of childhood memory and comfort.

In France a home away from home can refer to the landscapes people feel most comfortable in at different times of the year. It is tradition in France that in winter families attempt to make a getaway to the mountains, whether they be the Alps, the Pyrenees or the Jura. Meanwhile, in summer it is tradition to venture over to the West and South to enjoy the sun on the coast. As such, a home away from home in this case draws to mind a cycle of places which people visit each season. It’s so seriously adhered to that the French school calendar splits regions of the country into zones and organises two weeks off per region at staggered times in order to spread out the flow of people through the mountains each winter.

In Summer and Winter there are travel forecasts on weekends assessing how bad the circulation of traffic will be as the nation migrates from the cities to these second landscapes of comfort.

As explored above, the phrase home away from home packs a lot of nuance and variation in interpretation. It is difficult to determine how such a phenomenon will evolve with the changing modern world. As Ukraine comes under siege from Russia and refugees spread out across Europe, many will be wondering when they will be able to return to their country of origin. In other aspects, the crisis unfolding around climate change may leave one’s home degraded or simply eradicated. One thing is for certain is that we humans, as a species that has always migrated across the planet, share roots to places we could never have imagined, and the human race as it travels will continue to evolve the meaning of ‘home’ for centuries to come. ■

Image on right sourced from Fabien Bazanegu, Unsplash

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Skiing (Social) Slopes:

Geographies of First and Second Homes in the Alps Carlotta Lazarus

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Image sourced from Patrick Mueller, Unsplash

Image sourced from Jim Divine, Unsplash

Centerstage of Netflix’s most recent attempt at teen drama ‘Kitz’, Kitzbühel is an Austrian town marked by duality. As one of the most sought-after winter holiday destinations in Europe, Kitzbühel attracts a very specific demographic, namely upper-class families with a second home in the area who come to spend the weekend or holidays. Such temporary occupation of another region and its public places can disrupt resident everyday life through clashes of cultural and spatial identities. In combination with a mutually beneficial codependency between the two groups, this gives rise to a complex mix of social relations.

A long-time star on the sky of alpine tourism, the interesting thing about Kitzbühel is that it’s not exactly an obvious candidate for a winter sport destination.

On the contrary, with an elevation of 750m, there are truly better places in the Alps to hit the slopes.

So, what is Kitzbühel’s secret?

Part of its popularity is attributed to its infamous annual “Hahnenkammrennen” – where skiing acts as an important medium through which Kitzbühel was produced as a brand. A legendary downhill race, famous for being one of the most dangerous and difficult in the world, it attracts up to 90,000 visitors every year. The race entails an action-packed weekend in January, full of après ski and champagne showers - popular with celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bernie Ecclestone, and Patrick Dempsey. And from then on follows a virtuous cycle of people wanting to be where other people are, increasing the attractiveness of a second home there by a mile.

Contrarily, Kitzbühel’s traditional culture is characterised by its deep sense of attachment to the landscape and its history. Aside from the touristic service sector, the region is mainly agricultural and local politics remain conservative. The mountains, the skiing and traditionality are a large part of what Kitzbühel defines itself through. And the Rich and Famous love Kitzbühel for exactly that - its downto-earth, cozy, rustic sense of normality as a dichotomous escape from the stressful city life.

However, this is only one side of the story. The presence of such clientele in such a place is a natural clash. Kitzbühel’s touristic industry caters to the wishes of its guests and Four Seasons hotels, Methuselahs of Dom Pérignon, and Michelin-star restaurants whose mountain cuisine of bluefin tuna and

Chateaubriand bear little resemblance with Austrian tradition. The old city centre is now an Alpine rendering of Rodeo Drive as Moncler, Prada and Co. have recognized Kitzbühel for the goldmine it has become. The local real estate market has been soaring for years, with property prices reaching up to €6500/m2 - and there is no end in sight.

The dual identity of Kitzbühel carries social implications of both costs and benefits. The elephant in the room is that tourism anywhere can manifest as a highly intrusive activity, with strangers coming into another community’s first (and only) home - and calling it theirs. High-price segment tourism specifically works to exclude certain groups from certain spaces, by tailoring public places not around the needs of natives but around those of seasonal visitors. At the same time as mountain chalets are auctioned off à la Selling Sunset, local authorities invest in social housing to counteract the displacement of natives. Kitzbühel and second-home tourism in general therefore represent an interesting case study for perceptions of home when it is accomodated to make an opposite demographic at home.

Standing out is the inherently different experience of space. For tourists, coming to Kitzbühel is an escape from their everyday life, leading to a fetishization of the landscape as “simple” and “natural” - something that is deeply rooted in privilege. Only those who can afford an idyllic second home on the sunny side of the mountain are able to experience the environment in this way. Tourists also view the landscape through a highly purified lens of luxury services, which obscures the human labor and costs of the local population entertaining them. In contrast to this hidden labor, outsiders are basking in their extreme visibility in the landscape, strolling, skiing and sunbathing. While Kitzbühel therefore becomes more and more of a home to visitors, it turns into a place of work and even alienation for original residents.

It is necessary to consider these developments in the wider context of mutual co-dependency. While a first natural reaction might be resentment towards the metropolitan invasion, the economic stimulation that second-home tourists bring to Kitzbühel creates immense wealth for the region. Many family businesses profit massively from the yearly inrush of tourists, such as the Frauenschuhs – who have been manufacturing luxury ski clothes and equipment since 1950. To an extent, it is a given fact and collective understanding that guests bring money and that COMPASS | 34

serving tourism is an intrinsic part of Kitzbühel’s identity. Realistically, second-home tourism is very much a two-way street - tourists come for leisure and relaxation, willing to pay considerable sums of money for high-quality experiences. For the wealth and prosperity this brings to the regional economy, the arguable part-time surrender of their home is accepted by some as a tolerable trade-off.

So, is second home tourism to blame for making people feel less “at home” at home? It is easy to narrate Kitzbühel as another tale of “identity-lost-andsoul-sold-to-capitalist-tourism”. But for all the glitz

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Image sourced from Matthieu Petiard, Unsplash

and glamour Kitzbühel exudes and caters to for half the year, it might be worth to look at the ways in which Kitzbühel has stayed surprisingly true to itself. Historical local businesses and artisans are thriving (regardless of how much they are charging), unemployment is the lowest it’s been in two decades and with the capitalization of the mountainous environment also comes a sense for the immeasurable value of preserving it. At the end of the day, despite all the differences it harbours, Kitzbühel somehow manages to preserve something uniquely authentic as a place, uniting people across space, time and social backgrounds. ■

Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

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Photography Comeptition During Lent term we ran our annual photography competition, the theme this year being ‘Home’. We received many fantastic entries, but alas there can only be one winner (and a runner up of course!). Here we have presented the winning photographs, along with some of our other favourite entries!

Winning photograph (above) of Qinghai Hu, Qinghai Province, China, by Leo Li. Runner up (right) of Lyall Bay, Wellington, New Zealand, by Sophie Mance.

Photographs on next page (moving from right to left, top to bottom): Agra Fort, Uttar Pradesh, India, by Freddie Sehgal-Cuthbert; Waitawheta River, Kaimai Range, New Zealand, by Sophie Mance; Qinghai Hu, Qinghai Province, China, by Leo Li; Northern Quarter, Manchester,

by Bridget Atkin; Aldermans Hill, Saddleworth, by Bridget Atkin; Da Feng, Gu Niang Shan, Sichuan Province, China, by Leo Li; Shahjahani Mahal, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India, by Freddie Sehgal-Cuthbert; Hannah and Yifei, credit to Yifei Zheng.

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Image sourced from Ahmet Sali, Unsplash

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