Lauret Savoy on landscape

Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, talks with Associate Editor Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky about seeing with new eyes, how landscape leaves its traces on us, and the unvoiced history of the American continent.
Savoy argues that contending with both the beauty of American landscape and the violence of American history requires recognizing that the power to segregate memory has worked in concert with the power to segregate people throughout American history, and how a fragmented understanding of human experience on this continent has led to an artificial separation between ideas about nature and ideas of race, concepts that were intimately connected even before this nation began.

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Ideal scenery

Check out this Robert MacFarlane tweet, and the replies that follow for a whole host of ideas on different people's ideal landscapes... Some wonderful images and brief descriptions ideal for sharing... "Tramlines and slagheaps, pieces of machinery, That was, and still is, my ideal scenery." WH Auden Question: what is your "ideal scenery"? pic.twitter.com/8QLS0HRZt9 — Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) July 6, 2017

The path more travelled

I'm currently reading Nicholas Crane's new book on the history of Britain's footpaths: how they came about originally following the drowning of Doggerland , and were then refined by successive waves of change: horses, the Roman invasion etc. It's a dense and scholarly work, with plenty of points of interest and relevance to geographers exploring the connections between people and the landscape. He's taking his book on the road in a series of talks, with three confirmed so far. Here's the description for his talk at Stanford's book shop at the end of the month . He's also speaking in Exeter and Stamford. Walking is a cornerstone of British identity and the most popular form of exercise in the UK. But how much do we know about the paths that we walk? What is their history? Why do they follow the routes that they do? Are they permanent? Can we designate more of them? The Path More Travelled is a coast-to-coast history of footpaths from the stone age paths...

Glacier Melt Visualisation

This nice interactive infographic visualises the ice loss from Switzerland's glaciers. It is one of several from the VisQuill site , developed by Dr. Benjamin Niedermann.

"Look at it this way"

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