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A Rwandan journey (video)

March 21, 2013
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On the last day of my recent visit to Rwanda I traveled from the capital city of Kigali, in the center of the country, through the hills to the town of Gisenyi in the Great African Rift Valley. It rained (no, make that poured) for part of the day, and a problem with the car meant that the journey back to Kigali was largely in the dark. Not ideal circumstances for taking photographs, but I managed to get enough footage to make a short, six-minute video giving some idea of the people and landscapes part Rwanda (I also took a lot of still photographs, posted here.)  

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An ocean apart? Religion in Europe and the United States

February 18, 2013
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An ocean apart? Religion in Europe and the United States

  I did something very unusual for me last Sunday: I went to church. I didn’t go to just any church; I went to an evensong service in Worcester’s magnificent cathedral, located at a site where Christian worship has been taking place since 680 CE. The structure I visited is the new cathedral; construction on it began in 1084, and took several centuries to complete. From the outside it is an imposing structure, with ornate Gothic spires, and a 62 meter high tower that dominates to town skyline. The interior is even more awe-inspiring; its huge size and lofty ceiling made me feel small and insignificant as I sat waiting for the service to start  (and even smaller and more insignificant when I noticed  that I was sitting...

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Where we have been and where we are going: some reflections on this blog

February 13, 2013
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Where we have been and where we are going: some reflections on this blog

The past When I started writing this blog a little over four years ago, I thought that it really would be a blog. I would regularly write short posts in which I would use my own experiences and observations to help readers see ordinary places and issues from a geographic perspective. My readers, I thought, would mainly be students in my World Regional Geography classes at the University of Mary Washington, and I hope they would learn a little bit about both geography and  current events from it. Most of all, I hoped they would enjoy doing so. Some of what I had planned has come to pass. Most of what I have written has been based on places I have visited in the...

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The vanishing rainforests (and cultures) of eastern Cambodia

December 27, 2012
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The vanishing rainforests (and cultures) of eastern Cambodia

I am writing these words in Sem Monorom, the small and sleepy town that serves as capital and market center for Cambodia’s remote eastern province of Mondulkiri. This is the country’s most sparsely populated province; its forested hillslopes, mild temperatures, and the presence of a most members of Cambodia’s Phanong minorty make it a very different place from the flat, hot, and rice covered plateau most of the country’s majority Khmer people live. This area is known for its magnificent waterfalls and its forest vegetation and wildlife, but until recently distance and poor roads have insulated the region from tourism, commercial farming, and pretty much everything else. But all of this is quickly changing. Brand new paved roads and bridges link the province with...

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The geography of guns and gun homicide

December 15, 2012
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The geography of guns and gun homicide

I am writing these words less than 24 hours after the killing of twenty children and eight adults by a young gunman at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. It is too early to analyze the motives of the shooter, or to know the impact this latest mass killing will have on gun policies in the United States. It is not too early – indeed for today’s victims it is too late – to take a hard look at geography of guns, gun ownership, and gun homicide, and ponder what role it may have played in this latest tragedy. Actually, it takes only a quick glance rather than a hard look to notice that the U.S. leads the world in both the number of guns in...

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Is the United States of America a democracy? A geographic (and personal) perspective.

November 25, 2012
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Is the United States of America a democracy? A geographic (and personal) perspective.

In the 2012 election for the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrats received 1.4 million votes more than Republicans, yet Republicans kept  control of the House by 234 seats to 201. In the 2000 presidential election, Democrat Al Gore won more votes than his opponent, George W. Bush, but it was elected. How could this be? I make the argument here that the United States has much of the appearance but not enough of the substance of a democracy. One of the major reasons for this is an electoral system that constraints, distorts, and undermines the views of the country’s voters. If we want to create a viable democracy in this country, we need to redesign our electoral system from the bottom up, learning in...

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