Geography Newsletter - Spring 2024
Chair Update
This semester we welcomed Dr. Bharat Rastogi to our baby直播app as a new Assistant Professor. Dr. Rastogi’s research focuses on examining the role of CO2 emissions on climate change and impacts on a variety of territorial ecosystems. We had a busy semester that included three job searches for new baby直播app and transitioning Isaac Rivera’s Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for Faculty Diversity to a tenure track Assistant Professor position in our department. Dr. Rivera, featured in this newsletter, will join the Department of Geography as a new baby直播app member in August 2024. Additional new hires, include Katherine Siegel, who will join the Department of Geography in fall 2024, focusing on environmental data science, and Dr. Federico Andrade-Rivas, a health geographer focusing on global environmental health and human well-being, and will join our baby直播app in the fall of the 2025 academic year. We are also in the process of hiring a new Assistant Professor in Physical Geography.
This semester we also hosted two groups of first year CU undergraduate students involved in the Miramontes Program at CU-Boulder through their Science Bound program. One group was interested in learning more about Physical Geography and GIS, and the other group was interested in Human Geography and Environment-Society relations. We hope to continue these types of outreach programs in the future to grow our undergraduate majors.
Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee initiated several new programs this semester. The first program, which we will continue, incorporate holiday traditions from different cultures that are celebrated by some of our baby直播app, staff, and students. In February we celebrated Lunar New Year, featured in this newsletter, and in April we celebrated Nowruz, a Persian New Year celebration. These events offered the opportunity for baby直播app, students, and staff to learn about these holidays and participate in hands-on-activities such as dumpling making for Lunar New Year, and egg decorating for Nowruz.
The DEI committee organized a two-day inclusive pedagogy workshop that was facilitated by . This workshop provided an overview of inclusive practices for all aspects of teaching, and practical hands-on activities for baby直播app to implement in their courses. In addition to this program, we implemented a tutoring program for undergraduate students, provided by graduate students, Alek Berg, Taylor Johaneman, and Nic Tarasewicz, and George Charisoulis.
This June 8-9, 2024, we are hosting an Alumni and Friends of Geography Celebration that will include an open house in Guggenheim, Cocktail Party followed by Dinner at Chautauqua on Saturday, and then a field-visit to the Mountain Research Station on Sunday.
In closing, I would like to congratulate all of the students who graduated this semester. We are proud of you and wish you all the best in your future pursuits.
Warm Regards,
Jennifer Fluri
Faculty News and Updates
On April 10, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) Director and Geography Professor Waleed Abdalati, along with Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) Director Dan Baker met with staff members of baby直播app congressional delegation to discuss the impacts of science reductions in the President’s 2025 budget request to the interests of the State of baby直播app, its educational institutions, and businesses. They met with staff from the offices of Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and Congressmen Neguse and Pettersen. While the primary focus was on risks to Earth and Space Science at NOAA and NASA, the impacts of the broader reductions were discussed as well. During that same visit to Washington DC, Abdalati, along with several directors from other NOAA-funded cooperative institutes met with staff from the House Science Committee to also discuss the implications of federal budget challenges on the interests of the institutes, our universities, and the nation.
Picture: From the visit. Waleed Abdalati (left) and Dan Baker (right). The photo was taken by Heather Bené in CU Government Relations
As the Arctic experiences rapid and significant environmental changes, there is a need for federally-funded research to be conducted differently – in closer coordination with Arctic communities, and increasingly led by Arctic community members and Indigenous Peoples. The Navigating the New Arctic (NNA) Initiative is the largest federal investment in Arctic research that has incorporated a focus on co-production of Arctic science and the applicability of research projects to addressing the challenges facing Arctic residents as the climate changes. This briefing highlighted how a co-productive approach to Arctic research has been applied in NNA research projects investigating river health, fishery management and education, and permafrost thaw.
Panelists:
Dr. Jessica Black, TAMAMTA, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Dr. Keith Musselman, Institute of Arctic & Alpine Research, University of baby直播app Boulder
Dr. Howard Epstein, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia
Dr. Nikoosh Carlo, CNC North Consulting and NNA Community Office
Moderated by: Dr. Twila Moon, NNA Community Office and National Snow & Ice Data Center, University of baby直播app Boulder
In baby直播app, people flock to the Rocky Mountains when the summer heat gets unbearable. Animals seek shelter too when temperatures become extreme, and forests serve as critical sanctuaries for small tree-dwelling animals like lizards.
In a published March 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists from CU Boulder and Tel Aviv University in Israel revealed that deforestation combined with climate change could negatively impact 84% of North America’s lizards by the end of the century. Nearly one in five could face population decline.
Unlike mammals that can maintain their body temperatures in a variety of ways—sweating when it gets too hot and relying on warm fur when it gets too cold—cold-blooded animals such as lizards have limited strategies to thermoregulate. Tree-climbing lizards move around tree trunks to bask in the sun for warmth. When the ground gets too hot, they climb higher or move into the shade.
“What's really interesting about lizards is that they just need to be able to move a short distance around the tree trunk to get to a very different climate and habitat environment,” said Keith Musselman, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “These microhabitats are particularly important when we think about how we modify our natural environment and make conservation decisions.”
Using computer simulations, the team showed that global warming can actually benefit lizards living in colder regions or at higher latitudes in North America. Warmer weather increases the animals’ activity time, meaning they have more time to look for food or mates during the day. However, deforestation would largely reverse these positive effects by reducing opportunities for shade in hotter climates that help them cool down.
The team simulated lizard models for different climate regions across North America. They found that tree loss could decrease lizards’ activity time by an average of 34% by the end of the century. Without trees, the animals would have to hide under rocks or in caves to avoid overheating. The impact would be especially prominent for species that already live in warmer regions, where future summers will become too warm for activity on the ground.
The team estimated that deforestation would accelerate population declines for 18% of lizards in North America.
“Our work provides new insights into the mechanisms by which deforestation may cause population declines in the face of climate change,” said Ofir Levy, a zoologist and Musselman’s collaborator at Tel Aviv University. “The decline in lizards can lead to a cascading effect as they are an important part of almost every ecological system.”
Despite international pledges to halt deforestation, tree clearing continues to happen globally. From 2001 to 2022, , or 12%, of global tree cover disappeared.
“Deforestation is a worldwide problem, and our conclusions can help decision-makers on other continents in designing conservation and habitat restoration programs that consider climate change,” said Omer Zlotnick, the paper’s first author and a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University.
Lizard populations are already . In , scientists estimated that 54% of lizard populations in Mexico would go extinct by 2080 because of their inability to adapt to the rapidly warming planet.
Deforestation would further exacerbate the threat by taking away these animals’ refuges.
“Here in the Rocky Mountains, elevation provides an escape for animals that can travel longer distances, including us humans. On those summer days when it hits 100 degrees, many of us will go into the mountains. But small animals like lizards can’t travel far. They heavily depend on the refuge provided by the local landscape, including tree trunks,” said Musselman. “The study highlighted the importance of understanding which elements in the environment can serve as refuges for other organisms on this planet.”
This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Israel Science Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Geographic.
Reprinted from CU Boulder Today, article by Yvaine Ye (March 4th, 2024)
Emily Yeh has been named Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of her exceptional service, teaching and research. This revered title is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international acclaim who college peers also recognize as exceptionally talented teachers and colleagues. Honorees of this award hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.
Dr. Yeh will be honored on Friday, April 26th, 2024 in the annual Arts and Sciences Recognition Reception.
In addition to this prestigious award, Dr. Yeh has received the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar award in 2023-2024, as well as other awards and honors in recent years such as the Campus sustainability award (2023) and the AAG-Kaufmann award for best paper for Geography and Entrepreneurship (2022). Dr. Yeh has served as the Vice President (2020-2021) and President (2021-2022) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). We cannot wait to see what she will do next!
Abstract: Originating in Denver, baby直播app in 1907 and exported as a national holiday in 1934, Columbus Day enacts the logic and institutionalization of conquest. Yet despite the seemingly totalizing imaginary of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples continue to resist erasure. Mapping the Terms of Freedom & The Ongoing Refusal of Settler Imaginaries, traces the making and unmaking of settler imaginaries in Denver and the ways in which the city’s Indigenous communities choose to represent their stories of resistance to the world. I connect the way institutions of knowledge maintain settler imaginaries in place through the entanglement of visual and digital knowledge practices in settler colonialism. Using ethnographic, archival, and participatory research methods, I trace self-determined Indigenous representations of strength through the community curated (Re)Mapping Native Denver art exhibit that maps Indigenous geographies and dismantles the logics implicated in the settler imaginary. Held at Denver University (DU) in 2021, the (Re)Mapping Native Art Exhibit stood as a site of public facing education, demonstrating the liberatory power of retelling geo-history on the terms of Indigenous peoples.
We look forward to her symposium talk!
Student Updates
My research over the past two years has been focused on improving COVID-19 hospitalization forecasting, a critical component of pandemic response and preparedness. Building upon previous work in COVID-19 case forecasting, I have led the development of predictive models specifically tailored to anticipate hospitalization rates, aiming to better prepare for the virus's impact on healthcare systems. Using data-driven methodologies, particularly deep learning techniques, we have designed a novel Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) framework to forecast daily incident hospitalizations at the state level across the U.S. What sets our work apart is the incorporation of a unique spatiotemporal features, built on data from Facebook's social connectedness dataset. This innovative feature acts as a proxy for population mobility and interaction across state lines, enabling us to effectively capture transmission dynamics across various spatial and temporal scales in our predictive models.
Our involvement in the , a collaborative initiative, was aimed at putting our research into practice. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used forecasts submitted to the Forecast Hub, serving as a vital resource for public health authorities and policymakers, furnishing them with essential insights for informed decision-making. Importantly, our model's superior performance during the submission period from February 27, 2022, to June 10, 2023 as evaluated by external researchers at the Forecast Hub, highlights the innovative nature of our models and spatial considerations, in enhancing predictive accuracy for complex public health challenges. By leveraging advanced AI techniques and integrating insights from social media data, our models enrich this collaborative effort by providing actionable insights into hospitalization trends, thereby facilitating targeted interventions to mitigate the spread of the virus and alleviate its impact on communities.
Geography offers academic experiences for students in environmental science, social sciences, and cartographic practices. Sarah Schlosser coordinates the GIS certificate which will familiarize students with RStudio, Python, and ArcGIS Pro for mapping platforms. Professor Taneesha Mohan coordinates internships for the department while teaching courses on methods and skills for socially conscious research. Professors John Adler and Rachel Isaacs teaches remote sensing and mapping climate change, both giving students the opportunity to implement remotely sensed imagery into their map products. Professor Stefan Leyk organizes the GIS Track of the Geography major with a heavy emphasis on spatial analysis, modeling, and programming. Studying Geography taught GIS methods I apply in my Honors thesis for clean energy site selection with an environmental justice lens.
The goal of my Honors thesis is to illustrate wind and solar energy potential in the state of baby直播app, with the possibility of remediating contaminated environments on EPA REPower sites within Energy Communities. It is important to consider land ownership, indigenous sovereignty, baby直播app policy at state and federal levels, solar and wind resourcing data, and potential environmental impacts. Qualifying advanced energy projects focus on commercial viability, greenhouse gas impacts, domestic labor/manufacturing, and community engagement.
A federal interagency working group has created the Energy Community initiative, geographic identification of areas for reinvestment as power sources are decarbonized. The EPA has designated contaminated sites with potential remediation efforts of renewable development called REPower sites. The Tribal Government territories of the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain are officially recognized Southwestern baby直播app. Solar and wind data is provided by NREL’s archived RE-Atlas. By further honing in on EPA REPower sites within Energy Communities we can affordably remediate contaminated lands while decarbonizing power sources with qualifying advanced energy projects. My research uses multivariate criteria analysis of ethical, baby直播app, policy, and environmental data to make recommendations for the initiative.
Recently passed, the baby直播app Clean Energy Plan is a policy mandating Xcel Energy to reduce statewide energy-based carbon emissions 80% by 2030 as compared to 2005 levels. Greenfielding is a term I use to describe geographic areas which contain both the highest wind potentials and the highest solar potentials in their region. Below you will find a map of baby直播app I made taking each criteria into account. I successfully defended my Honors thesis on April 8!
My name is Nathan Korinek, and I am finishing my final year as a master’s student in the Geography department. I’ve been working with the Geography department and CU’s Earth Lab since 2017. I went from an undergraduate to a research assistant and am now receiving my masters. During my time, I have been working with my amazing advisor, Dr. Jennifer Balch, under an NSF grant focused on compound disturbances (i.e. insect kill, fires, and droughts) in Western US forests. Compound disturbances can have drastic impacts on landscapes and ecosystems, threatening ecosystem changes such as forests dying off or the removal of a species from an ecosystem altogether.
My work for the last few months has studied the effects of compound fires in an area by looking at what happens when a fire burns an area that had been previously burned. Specifically, I was interested in what happens to the fire severity of these reburned areas. Fire severity is a measure for how much change a fire caused in the landscape, ecosystem, and vegetation of a burned area. To quantify this, I used the Composite Burn Index (CBI), which is an on the ground measure of burn severity. CBI data is not widely available and difficult to obtain, so I used a modeled CBI dataset for the Western US developed by Tyler McIntosh at Earth Lab. I combined this with other data sources from FIRED fire boundaries, ERA5 weather data, and more in order to get a complete picture of these reburn events. I found that fires burning in previously burned areas have a lower average severity than fires burning in areas that had not been previously burned.
My thesis work is one small piece of the puzzle when looking at compound disturbances in western US forests. In my time at Earth Lab, I have also contributed to this grant in other ways outside of my thesis. This includes visualizing different disturbances in our study region of the western US, flying drones over burn scars in baby直播app in order to help quantify vegetation regrowth, going out into the field and identifying individual plants to label the drone data by plant type, and more. My time at Earth Lab and the Geography department has been filled with amazing colleagues and research opportunities, making it an incredible experience overall. I look forward to continuing my work with Earth Lab this summer!
In October and November 2023, Lauren Herwehe conducted preliminary dissertation fieldwork in the Sofala and Gaza provinces of Mozambique. This research was undertaken in collaboration with Eduardo Mondlane University and made possible by a Solstice Graduate Research Award from the Geography Department. Herwehe is a PhD student advised by John O’Loughlin, studying how cyclones and other climate change impacts affect rural livelihoods, specifically through causing and exacerbating disputes and cooperation over natural resources.
In the last decade, Mozambique has suffered from Cyclones Kenneth, Idai, and Freddy, several of the most devastating to ever hit the southern hemisphere, as well as a variety of civil unrest, including the onset of armed attacks related to natural resource development in the northern province of Cabo Delgado that have killed thousands and displaced approximately one million. Due to its propensity for cyclones, paired with being one of the world’s poorest nations, Mozambique is considered severely vulnerable to climate change. These factors make research at the intersection of climate change, conflict, and natural resources there timely and relevant to policy and humanitarian efforts.
For this work, Herwehe conducted interviews with 42 farmers, 17 fishermen, and 13 government and humanitarian workers covering questions related to climate change impacts, adaptive behaviors, and disputes and cooperation over agricultural and fishing resources. She compared responses from the Sofala province, which was devastated by Cyclone Idai in 2019 and several subsequent cyclones, with the Gaza province, where cyclones are uncommon. Further facilitating comparative analysis, the northern and central regions of the country where Sofala is located have also historically experienced political and sociobaby直播app marginalization.
In both provinces, she found that there were many mechanisms linking climate change with disputes between individuals, the government, and multinational corporations over land, fishing, livestock, irrigation water, and disaster aid resources. Relatively few mechanisms were found to link climate change with cooperation. The Sofala province appeared to experience a wider variety of resource disputes related to climate change than Gaza. Herwehe’s dissertation will involve a multimethod approach using remote sensing paired with a survey of farmers and fisherman and this interview data was instrumental in determining what future data will be valuable.
Fishermen in Sengo, Sofala, where interview respondents reported that depleted fish populations following Cyclone Idai caused disputes over nets tangling and fishing areas. Government attempts to alleviate overfishing through longer enforced fishing hiatus periods, which have increased from two months prior to Cyclone Idai to six months at present, have exacerbated these disputes.
Eduardo Mondlane University master’s student and research assistant Aldimiro Carlos translates from the local language of Sena to Portuguese while Herwehe takes notes during an interview with a farmer in Metuchira, Sofala.
By: Josie Welsh (Graduate Student, CU GEOG), and Bridget Mendel (communications at Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL))
In a large windowless room and with the hum of a motor steadily pumping water, brightly painted sticks are dropped one at a time into the top of a model river system. Carried by the flow of water, these sticks travel downstream and bump into vertical dowels which form an artificial floodplain forest. Sometimes the sticks bounce off of the dowels and continue their trip. Other times, they get stuck. Slowly, large accumulations of sticks are trapped behind the model trees. Nearby, Master’s student Josie Welsh watches her computer monitor: each dropped stick generates new data that she will spend the upcoming months analyzing.
Josie is finishing her first year as a graduate student in the geography department at CU Boulder, under advisor Dr. Katherine Lininger, who leads the Riverine Ecogeomorphology Lab at CU. Her work is part of a larger NSF funded project that seeks to answer the question: How does wood move through floodplains, where does it accumulate, and what controls the resulting patterns we observe on floodplains?
To answer these questions, Josie travels to the in Minneapolis, MN. SAFL has specialized equipment and expert engineers that have made Josie’s experiments possible, allowing her to isolate and explore particular relationships in complicated natural systems. For each experiment, she models different forest, floodplain, and flow scenarios, like larger floods, more or less dense forest stands, or a narrower or more topographically varied floodplain. In the coming months, Josie will analyze the data from these experiments and determine relationships between these scenarios and the behavior of wood.
Josie hopes her findings will be useful to those working on river restoration projects. Adding wood habitat into landscapes is an increasingly popular restoration technique, but, like sediment, wood moves within the system. This poses a challenge for restoration experts who want their designs to be effective in the long run. How big does a flood need to get to move the wood, how does it move, and where does it go?
Is it as fun as it looks? “This is just like something I would have done as a child," says Josie, "Except now I have to keep track of a lot of numbers.”
On February 9, 2024, the Department of Geography held a Dumpling Making Party to celebrate two cultural events: the Chinese Spring Festival (春节 chūnjié) and Tibetan New Year (Losar). Both cultures follow their own calendars for festivals and holidays. This year, these two holidays coincided with February 10 marking the first day of their respective new years. Geography baby直播app, staff, and students, along with their families and friends, participated in the party.
We were getting ready to make dumplings.
We were having fun!
And it was the first time that many of us made dumplings…
Many thanks to our fellows and friends for their help with the party, including bringing their steamers, wrapping the red envelopes, chopping vegetables, setting up the table, and cooking and serving the dumplings. Special thanks to Hauqingjia (Palchengyal) from the Department of Religious Studies; Aleksander Berg, Drolma Gadou, Annika Hirmke, Shruthi Jagadeesh, Alaric Akhil Kothapally, Michele Lissoni, Taneesha Mohan, Briana Prado, Nic Tarasewicz, Neda Shaban and Gabriella Subia Smith from the Geography department.
Special thanks also to Karen Weingarten, Gabriela Sales, and Brandon Brown for putting together the lovely, festive décor at the Guggenheim Building, and to Sean Dunn for coordinating the food purchase.
After the party, participants were gifted a red envelope (红包 hóngbāo) containing one brand-new Chinese one-dollar bill (元 yuán, approximately $0.14 USD). This bill is known as “压岁钱 yāsuìqián,” literally meaning money to suppress a demon named “Suì.” During the Chinese Spring Festival, it is a tradition to gift red envelops to friends and family. According to the Chinese legend, Suì terrorized children while they slept on Spring Festival Eve. The red envelope is believed to dispel this demon, symbolizing good wishes and prosperity for the new year ahead. Karen kindly added a lucky node (同心结 tóngxīnjié) to each envelope to double up the good luck and prosperity people brought to their homes.
This event was part of a departmental effort, spearheaded by department Chair Jennifer Fluri, to recognize diverse groups and cultures on our CU campus, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Losar Tashi Delek to our Tibetan friends, and 新年快乐 (Xīnnián Kuàilè) to our Chinese communities
Organizer and editor
Xiaoling Chen, Research Assistant and Ph.D. Candidate in Geography
Alumni Updates & Dept News
I will always remember my time as a student in the geography department fondly. From playing GeoGuessr with the geography club, to late nights in the KESDA lab, and everything in between. Though the coronavirus pandemic changed my and my classmates’ college experiences completely and presented great challenges, overcoming these challenges was made possible with the support of the people that make this department what it is. Our baby直播app truly personifies the joy of learning and discovery. They say it takes a village and I’m lucky to have found mine in the community at CU Geography.
Following my graduation from CU Boulder, I completed a brief contract with the Macroecology Lab at the department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona in coalition with the Santa Fe Institute as an assistant researcher conducting dendrologic land surveying out of the Mountain Research Station in Nederland, baby直播app. The research conducted sought to advance towards a more predictive understanding of biodiversity and ecology by deepening our understanding of how organisms interact with each other and their environment. Today, I am a full-time geospatial analyst. In my day to day, I get to work with satellite data from all over the world to conduct imagery analysis and information extraction using GIS software. It is extremely fulfilling to see a culmination of my geography education come together as I launch my career as a young professional, and I am excited to see what the future has in store as I continue learning and growing as a geographer!
The accompanying 35mm photos are from the field!
I am a Masters student in the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona working with Dr. Andrew Curley. My research draws from political ecology and Indigenous geographies to study environmental politics in the US West and examines how the energy transition is shaping the political and baby直播app futures of Native Nations. My Masters research is focused on the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, a federally-recognized tribe, whose reservation is located in southeastern Montana. This is coal country, part of the Powder River Basin, the most productive coalfields in the US. The Northern Cheyenne Reservation is surrounded by large coal strip mines on three sides and is 20 miles from the Colstrip Generating Station, once one of the largest coal-fired power stations in the US. In this remote region, coal extraction represents a reliable source of income for tribal members. However, coal’s future is uncertain, and the Colstrip Generating Station has closed half of its units that produce electricity. Against this backdrop, the Tribe is exploring options for developing its own tribally-owned utility based on renewable energy production, which has the potential to reduce the Tribe’s dependence on external electricity providers (e.g. costs for heating in winter are extremely high) and could employ tribal members.
My research is grounded in qualitative methods involving interviews with tribal government officials, baby直播app development experts, coal miners and plant operators, and renewable energy developers, among others. These interviews are supplemented by participant observation at regional energy events and conferences focused on the energy transition. My preliminary findings suggest that the energy transition seems likely to reinforce existing inequalities. The same power companies that own coal infrastructure are developing renewables that will compete with the Tribe’s own ambitions. Furthermore, existing paternalistic bureaucracy that structures the relationship tribal nations have with the federal government presents roadblocks that make it very difficult to pursue baby直播app development in general. For example, the Northern Cheyenne must negotiate with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency, in addition to any energy developers before constructing solar on tribal trust lands, while private energy developers operating off-reservation face no comparable obstacles.
My research at Arizona builds off the research and experiences I had as an undergraduate in the Department of Geography at CU-Boulder. Under the guidance of Dr. Joe Bryan, I completed my honors thesis on the role of US public lands and historical mapping in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, which together have gone on to shape the terrain upon which present-day Indigenous campaigns to protect southeast Utah’s Bears Ears region must struggle. This area was made famous in part by the Trump administration’s rollback of federal protections, centering on its status as a National Monument. Bears Ears, like all public lands, was mapped and managed to facilitate extraction and settlement at the direct expense of Indigenous people and the land itself, putting Indigenous claims of authority over the landscape at a significant disadvantage to the those made by white settlers and miners.
Moving forward, I hope to continue to pursue engaged research that examines the tangled legacies of colonialism and resource extraction on Native Nations in the US. I owe much of where I am to the baby直播app and peers I had at CU-Boulder.
My time wandering the halls and climbing the central staircase of Guggenheim really was a long time ago – Class of 1994?!? Heck, that’s pre-internet! However, it doesn’t feel like a galaxy far, far away…I learned so much about so many things in such a short-but-immensely influential epoch during my years at CU…and indubitably the best knowledge stemmed from The Best Building On Campus, The Simon Guggenheim Bvilding!? No doubt this present-day tangibility with my time at CU can partially be attributed to wandering through campus on occasion, as I both live and work nearby. However, the core reality is that my education at the University and in particular the pedagogy that sifted into my noggin during those Geography baccalaureate years represented a sea change in my understanding of the world and how to make one’s way through life with a more conscientious approach.? The multiple sparks of imparted knowledge stoked internal fires of curiosity, and if you walk over to the “trophy case” by the Geography Office, you can see some bloke with my name on the Albert W. Smith Scholarship for 1993-1994.
Since that time, I’ve been a high school social sciences teacher in Denver Public Schools; an AmeriCorps volunteer for a year in southern Georgia; a GIS analyst in Fremont County, baby直播app; and following a Master of Urban & Regional Planning (greatest degree acronym of all-time: MURP) degree from CU-Denver, fell into my current career a few years back as the manager of planning at Boulder’s JUWI Inc., a utility-scale solar energy facility development, engineering, and construction firm. Best job of all: dad to two kids, one who graduated from our wonderful archrival CSU with a zoology degree last weekend and the other…give it a minute! My wife and I have raised our kids mostly in the lovely burg of Longmont, along with a few chickens and goats.
Many a professor influenced my years in GEOG, though perhaps no one more than Brock Brown, who happened to provide an intro to the University during an orientation session for College of Arts & Sciences incoming Freshman in Chem 140, where among other things he spoke about The Big Picture Of Human Decision Making, focusing on America’s prolific focus on growing a plant that can’t be consumed – Kentucky bluegrass lawns – and the repercussions of that decision. That single orientation session cemented my already smoldering passion for All Things Geography into a flame that burns brightly today. Which brings me to…
A MOST IMPORTANT SIDEBAR:? my 18-year old son Quinn Kimmett is an incoming Freshman this Fall at CU and…drumroll…his major?? GEOGRAPHY!? I promise I didn’t force this upon him…must be something genetic or in the water!? I’m soooooo so so excited for him to enter the wide world that the CU Geography Department will open for him.
A special thanks to Morteza Karimzadeh who asked if I could write something for this newsletter! AND a well-earned KUDOS to all of the professors in GEOG who are crafting the next generation of critical thinkers, helping to establish a foothold of hope in a tumultuous world!
Giving Back
We realize that COVID19 and its effects have been hard on everybody. However, if you are in a relatively resilient financial situation, your support now will go a particularly long way for those who are most precarious and who have been most severely affected, including some of our students.
Your gift to the Department of Geography can take many different shapes. The information below may help you find the type of gift that best meets your needs, the impact you want, and the way you want to give. The CU Foundation can also assist you with your needs, be they for targeted or unrestricted programs.