I am obsessed with geography to an unhealthy degree. In this thread we shall compare maps and landsat images and talk about places, preferably with some kind of graphic.
What you see are charts and images of Alaska's north slope of the Brooks Range, a really bizarre tundrascape of lakes and melting permafrost. The majority of Alaska's wealth comes from this region in the Prudhoe Bay oilfield off the coast. Oddly enough, America's national petroleum reserve AND America's largest wildlife preserve are both in the North Slope. The region is traditionally—and to this day almost entirely—inhabited by Iñupiat people. Most Iñupiat made their living off of coastal hunting of seals, pilot whales, and other northern animals, but there are some inland Iñupiat who traditionally subsisted off of caribou herds. Anaktuvuk Pass is one such community in the middle of Gates of the Arctic National Park. It's a fascinating community that I recommend you look up because I should really take out the trash and don't have time to write about it (had sardines for lunch and they're stinking up the can). Anyhow here's a picture of Anaktuvuk Pass
I'm currently rebuilding my experiential geography of my hometown. Last fall I moved back to my hometown after six years, a place I lived from birth until I left for college. I didn't have a drivers license as a teenager. I just rode around with my family or friends thinking about anything other than where I was or where I was going. Now I'm back and things are the same but different. Parks are much smaller than they used to be. Most of the places I go are farther away than they used to be. Sometimes I have a hard time picturing how to get to a family member's house or a store because they are islands in my mind. Locations are isolated in my memory because I was never responsible for getting to them before. I don't know the names of the roads that I've [been] driven on my whole life. Now I'm in the process of connecting the memories of those locations and as it turns out, it sucks to slog around in my car. It was a lot more fun when my parents or friends would come pick me up from wherever I was and take me where I needed to go.
I studied geography in college, and I read a lot of David Harvey and James C. Scott. All the papers I wrote were about how continents are a myth, the futility of borders, the failure of top-down modernist city planning, the alienated, pornographic gaze of satellite imaging... navel gazing college stuff. Now I engage with geography in a much more mundane and practical way. I work for a surveying company now and I spend a lot of time looking at maps and property records. Everywhere I go I think about rights of way, building setbacks, ingress/egress easements, all the petty little ordinances that shape the built environment. I'm getting to the point where my personal geography of the area is based on childhood memories and parcels of land per the property appraisers office. Not how I pictured my future in geography a few years ago but it works.
I studied geography in college, and I read a lot of David Harvey and James C. Scott. All the papers I wrote were about how continents are a myth, the futility of borders, the failure of top-down modernist city planning, the alienated, pornographic gaze of satellite imaging... navel gazing college stuff. Now I engage with geography in a much more mundane and practical way.
Honestly never was able to enjoy dark ecology for the exact reason of it not engaging with one's surroundings enough. I like some more "critical" geography projects don't get me wrong (love the Mojave Project and I'm a Scott fan) but I really only get fulfillment for following my idiosyncratic passions in the world, like my ongoing fascination with arctic communities and land use. I'm sure it's not nearly as rigorous or edifying but it's been extremely therapeutic for the past year after some pretty awful personal tragedies.
rubymtn wrote: ↑Wed Mar 31, 2021 12:49 am
I am obsessed with geography to an unhealthy degree. In this thread we shall compare maps and landsat images and talk about places, preferably with some kind of graphic.
Can you elaborate on these lake forms in the picture? They’re shaped and arranged uniformly enough that my first impression is that they’re periglacial in origin, like the elongated polygon shape of patterned ground/ice wedges on a slope, or formed by glacial detraction, or a combination of processes... I’ve never seen anything like it!
