Year: 2012

Congratulations to Dr. Ryan Bergstrom whose paper, with Dr. Lisa Harrington, won first place in the 35th Applied Geography Conference‘s Student Papers Competition last week! The paper title and abstract are below. SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN THE GREATER YELLOWSTONE ECOSYSTEM: A CASE STUDY OF JACKSON, WYOMING To facilitate community objectives toward sustaining the natural environment,…

As part of the course GEG/ENV-250 Nature and Society, students visited two dairies in Nicollet County, Minnesota, earlier this month. The students didn’t want to leave the calf barn!

The students from Dr. Bjelland’s GEG-336: Urban and Regional Analysis class used the Nice Ride bike rental system to explore park design, historic preservation, and gentrification along the Mississippi riverfront in Minneapolis. Students bicycled through the city’s Mill District, North Loop, and Nicollet Island neighborhoods. The students enjoyed a brisk, sunny fall day as they…

Philosopher, environmental ethicist, and nature writer, Kathleen Dean Moore, was on campus earlier this week as part of the Nobel Conference 48: Our Global Ocean. Dr. Moore is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University and author of numerous award-winning books. It was a great pleasure for me and two Gustavus students, Mary Patterson…

For those interested in Mexican history: Prof. Sujay Rao’s Colonial Latin America class is watching the Mexican film La Otra Conquista/The Other Conquest tonight (Thursday, October 4) at 8pm in Beck 215. The film focuses on the religious and cultural transformations occurring in Mexico after the military conquest of the Aztec. All interested students are…

Lencho Bati, visiting instructor of geography, delivered a presentation to the U. S.  State Department in Washington, D.C. on September 24, 2012. Mr. Bati gave his talk to the staff of the African Bureau of the State Department. He urged the United States to take an active role in stabilizing Ethiopia and promoting democracy in…

The work of Ben Penner, a frequent guest lecturer in geography and environmental studies courses at Gustavus, was featured in a recent StarTribune article. Ben directs the Open Arms farm at the Prairie Institute in Belle Plaine, MN. The farm produces organic produce for free distribution to persons living with life-threatening illnesses.Volunteers work on the…

Google’s treasure house of geographic data, maps, and images is incredibly valuable and has driven a great deal of internet traffic to their site since they launched Google Maps in 2005. Google employs 7,000 employees to accumulate and update their map data including the streetview photo crews who drive or bicycle down streets around the…

Please join me this evening for popcorn and a screening of the documentary The Wilderness Idea. This 1989 film is an “exploration of the first national controversy about America’s wilderness: Should Hetch Hetchy, a valley within Yosemite National Park, be dammed and flooded to form a reservoir for San Francisco? On one side, utilitarians argued…

One of the most valuable tools in GIS is the ability to overlay two images of the same location and then compare before and after images. ESRI has a website that allows the user to go back and forth between Landsat Satellite images using a simple slider bar. You can see the dramatic transformation of…