GeoCurrents

St. Petersburg’s Building Boom and the China Connection

2012-02-22T20:21:32Z

The Russian committee on intestment and strategic projects has recently reported that 2011 has seen an increase of 17% in foreign investments into the St. Petersburg economy, whereas direct foreign investments there have nearly doubled, from $538 million to $1.07 billion. But not all areas of the economy receive those higher investments; in fact, many have shrunk considerably. For example, investments into processing plants dropped from $4.76 billion to $4.38 billion, and their share in the total investment package has dropped from 91% to 71.5%. The funds invested into the food industry have seen a precipitous drop from $550 million to $47.7 million, and their share in the investment package decreased from 10.5% to 0.8%.

The real growth in foreign investments is focused in one area of the economy: real estate, both housing and commercial. In 2010, foreign investment in real estate amounted to $181 million, whereas in 2011 this number grew to $751 million. Most of these investments are connected to such large-scale real estate projects as the reconstruction and modernization of the Pulkovo airport and the construction of the housing complex “The Pearl of the Baltic”.

The modernization of the Pulkovo airport is much needed. The last time new facilities and buildings were added there was in 1986. Since then, the service has nearly doubled, so that the current infrastructure is overused. Also, Pulkovo is the sole airport serving St. Petersburg, which is the largest city in Europe with just one airport providing both local and international flights. The surrounding area is also to undergo modernization and much needed constructions, with hotels, exhibition pavilions, conference and business facilities to be added.

Another major construction project underway in St. Petersburg is the building of a new housing development dubbed “The Pearl of the Baltic” on the southwest shores of the Gulf of Finland. The territory of this development will be 205 hectares, and the apartment complexes are meant to house 35,000 people. Before the building of the actual housing can proceed, however, re-enforcement of the coast must be completed to prevent the water-logged soil from washing into the Gulf of Finland. More than a third of the newly constructed square footage will be given to commercial real estate: shopping centers, office buildings, hotels, restaurants, sport facilities, and so on. There will be schools, hospitals, and sports facilities built, as well as parks and promenades.

The developer behind this project is a subsidiary of a Shanghai corporation, and the issue of Chinese investment has been approved at the very top of the Russian and Chinese governments. Many in St. Petersburg, however, view this massive Chinese investment as part of Chinese economic expansion. (Curiously, the project’s website is available in Russian and Chinese, while the English version is defunct.) Some even worry that it might lead to the creation of the first Chinatown in Russia. Another major debate surrounding this project involves transportation issues: the earlier planned “overland express” project has been frozen before the construction even began, and it appears that even if it is ever built, it will connect the Moscow train station in the center of the city with the Pulkovo airport, rather than serve the newly built housing in the southwest of the city, as was originally proposed.

Burma’s Electricity Quandaries

2012-02-21T21:02:32Z

In late 2011, Burma surprised the world by cancelling the massive, Chinese-financed Myitsone dam in Kachin state. In early 2012, the Burmese government again astounded many by suspending an $8 billion, 4,000-megawatt, coal-fired power plant at Dawei in the southern part of the country, due mainly to environmental concerns. As reported by Bloomburg, “the Dawei project, undertaken by Thailand’s Italian-Thai Development construction company, is to be a massive heavy industry zone with a total investment of more than $50 billion, and the cancellation of the power plant may hinder its development.” Reuters has also cast doubt on the Dawei project, which Burmese officials had hoped would become the “new global gateway of Indo-China.”

Although environmentalists were delighted by the cancellation of the dam and power plant projects, many Burmese are concerned about the country’s chronic shortage of electricity. Admittedly, the Dawei project would have been of little help on this score, as most of the power generated would have been exported to Thailand, just as most of the electricity from the Myitsone dam project would have gone to China. But the question remains open as to how Burma can supply itself with adequate electricity. Although the country has large supplies of natural gas, most production is locked into long-term export contracts with China and Thailand.

As The Irrawaddy summarizes the situation: “Amid all the expansive talk of Burma being on the cusp of an economic boom, with special business zones, ports, railways, factories and half a million tourists queuing at the door, there’s one very vital ingredient missing—electricity.” Or perhaps more than one; the same article concludes with a quotation noting that, “Corruption, a weak legal system and judiciary, continuing human rights abuses and a lack of protection for investors are significant risks that may take some time for Myanmar [Burma] to fully address.”

Mapping Mormonism (and Religious Adherence)

2012-02-22T08:14:39Z

Slate Magazine recently published an excellent interactive map of “Mormons in America,” which shows “where the country’s largest homegrown religion thrives—and where it doesn’t.” By moving one’s cursor over the map on the Slate site, one can see how many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints reside in almost every U.S. county. My one criticism of the map is that its highest category is only 13.8 percent. In most counties in Utah and southeastern Idaho, the percentage of Mormons is much higher. As a result, I have outlined all of the counties in which church membership exceeds 40 percent of the population. In most of these counties, the figure is significantly higher still.

In the “religious adherents” map posted here, the Mormon belt stands out for its high overall level of religiosity. This map is surprising to many, as it shows relatively low levels of religious adherence in parts of the southeast, the so-called Bible Belt. Religiosity is shown as particularly low in the coal-mining counties of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest parts of the country. The northwest, urban and rural counties alike, is also low in this regard. Northern and southern California are also differentiated. Note as well the high level of religious adherence in the Lutheran zone of the north-central region of the U.S.

Northern Californian English: Hella Different?

2012-02-21T18:07:52Z

As discussed in earlier GeoCurrents posts, Northern California, and especially the Greater Bay Area, is demographically, culturally, economically, and politically distinct from the southern part of the state. Are there differences in the speech of Northern and Southern Californians as well? Accents and dialects take time to form, but while English has been spoken in the eastern part of the United States for several centuries, yielding vastly different regional accents, it came to California quite recently. English-speaking settlement began in the early years of the nineteenth century, but stable communities did not form until considerably later. According to linguist David De Camp, even as late as 1940, speech of Californians was indistinguishable from that of the East Coast residents. If anything, there was – and to some extent still is – more differences among the different racial, ethnic, or social groups, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Whites, gays, rich and poor, and so on. Moreover, while some linguistic features cut the state into North and South, other peculiarities split California into coastal and inland areas.

One well-known difference between the speech of Southern and Northern Californians concerns highway nomenclature (note that Californians are peculiar in using the term freeway where most other Americans would say highway). Southern Californians refer to their freeways using the definite article the: “the 405 North” or “the 605 (Freeway)”, and so on. Northern Californians do not use the; hence, when driving up from Los Angeles to San Francisco, one gets on the 101 (pronounced ‘the one-oh-one’), but gets off of simply 101. By the way, Northern Californians typically refer to freeway exits by name rather than by number. Another major road connecting Northern and Southern California is actually named differently in the two parts of the state: in Northern California, State Route 1 is called “Highway 1” or simply “One”, whereas in Southern California, it is called the Pacific Coast Highway or simply “PCH”. Pardon, the PCH…

The distribution of these contrasting nomenclatures is irregular and complicated and, according to the Wikipedia article, “indicates the extent of integration with the Greater Los Angeles economic sphere of influence”. Along Highway 101, the shift occurs at the Santa Ynez Mountains; residents of Santa Barbara County speak of “the 101”, but those of northern San Luis Obispo County omit the. Along Interstate 5, this border is less clear. Residents of Bakersfield, over the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles, speak of “the Five” and “the 99”, but not residents of Fresno. Towns in the Mojave Desert tend to use the at least as far as Las Vegas, indicating the city’s notable historic ties to the Los Angeles area. Residents of San Diego, the Imperial Valley, and Phoenix, Arizona follow Southern California usage as well.

Another lexical – and to some extent, even grammatical – peculiarity of Northern Californian English, hinted at in the title of this post, is the use of the novel intensifying quantifier hella (and its more euphemistic version, hecka). It is most frequently found in the discourse of young speakers in the San Francisco Bay Area, as discussed by Rachelle Waksler of the San Francisco State University. This word is unusual in several respects. First, it can used as an adverb similar in meaning to ‘very much’, ‘so’ or ‘really’. In this syntactic function it can modify either an adjective or a verb, as in My dad was hella mad and I hella didn’t know what he said for so long. But unlike other intensifying adverbs such as very or really, hella can also quantify nouns. In this function it is unusual too: most quantifiers in English are limited to certain groups of nouns such as mass nouns (e.g. much sand but not many sand), count nouns (e.g. many boys, several boys but not much boys), or even just singular nouns (e.g. each boy, every boy but not each boys or every boys). Unlike those other quantifiers, the new intensifying hella does not care about the mass/count or singular/plural distinctions. It can appear with a mass noun, a count plural or singular noun, as in the following examples:

I bought hella cat food last week and it’s all gone now!

Dude, there were hella freaks at the Civic Center last night.

There’s been hella crackdown on pharmacists.

In this, hella is similar to the standard English a lot of. But even a lot of cannot appear in front of another quantifier (nor can any other quantifiers in standard English). But hella can, as in You have hella too many CDs that you don’t even listen to! Semantically, hella seems to express the speaker’s opinion that the amount or degree in question is larger/higher than some contextually determined expectation, similarly to such expressions as whopping, as in a whopping hundred megabytes.

Differences between Northern and Southern California are not purely lexical, as some involve pronunciation of certain sounds, especially vowels. Some pronunciation differences between the two parts of the state can be explained by earlier settlement patterns. For example, the Bakersfield area in Southern California, settled heavily by migrants from Oklahoma and Arkansas in the 1930s, is known for its pin-pen merger (that is, pronouncing pen the same as pin), which is typical of the Southeastern quadrant of the United States. Conversely, in the San Francisco area the cot-caught merger (that is, pronouncing cot the same as caught) is still incomplete (see map at the top of the post). In most of the Western half of the U.S. the two words are pronounced the same, probably as a result of a southward spread of an earlier Canadian pronunciation peculiarity. In San Francisco, however, older speakers tend to retain the pronunciation difference.

Another set of pronunciation idiosyncrasies is often associated with Southern California, or more precisely with the speech of white, rich, (pre-)adolescent girls known as “Valley Girl Talk” (where the “valley” in question is the San Fernando Valley in northwestern Los Angeles). However, as Stanford linguist Penny Eckert has shown, many of these pronunciation features – and some additional ones – are found in the speech of some Northern Californians as well, so she dubbed it “Northern California Vowel Shift” (though perhaps a better term would be “Coastal California Vowel Shift”), by analogy with the Great Vowel Shift, which happened in Renaissance England, as well as several other ongoing regional changes such as the London Vowel Shift, the Australian/New Zealand Vowel Shift, the Northern Cities (Great Lakes) Shift, the American Southern Shift, and the Canadian Shift. As do these other vowel shifts, Northern California Vowel Shift involves systematic, coordinated changes in the pronunciation of vowels in certain lexical sets—one can think of them as a game of “musical chairs” played by the vowels in the mouth. These changes are schematized in the diagram on the left.*

First, unusually for such vowel shifts, two vowel phonemes, /ɪ/ as in pit and /æ/ as in pat undergo the so-called nasal split: their pronunciation differs depending on whether the following sound is a nasal. Before /ŋ/, /ɪ/ is pronounced with a higher position of the tongue, so that for example the vowel in king is pronounced the same as in keen, rather than as in kin, as in all other varieties of English. In other contexts, /ɪ/ has a fairly open pronunciation, so that did sounds more like dead; this is in effect the opposite of the pin-pen merger. A similar bifurcation characterizes the vowel /æ/ as well: before nasal consonants (n, m, ng) it becomes a diphthong, and the first part of the diphthong is shifting towards /iy/, so that stand sounds more like stee-and. Before other consonants, it shifts in the other direction, making hat sound like hot elsewhere in the U.S.. However, as has been shown by Prof. Eckert, not all of these changes necessarily happen together: according to her, most Anglo speakers in Northern California (those who exhibit the shift at all) show a split between /æ/ before nasals, which fronts and raises, and /æ/ elsewhere, which lowers and backs. Chicano speakers, however, show lowering and backing of /æ/ before non-nasals, but far less of a nasal split, and many show no split at all.

As is the case with other vowel shifts, such as the Great Vowel Shift or the Northern Cities Shift, the various changes subsumed under the heading of Northern California Vowel Shift are interconnected: as one vowel encroaches upon the space of another, the adjacent vowel in turn experiences a movement in order to maximize phonemic differentiation. For example, the short-u vowel in look is shifting towards /ʌ/, as in luck (this is exactly the opposite of the pronunciation characterizing most Northern England dialects/accents). To keep the two sets of words distinct in pronunciation, the vowel /ʌ/ shifts towards /ɛ/, so but sounds like bet. But now the ʌ-pronounced-as-ɛ must be distinguished from the original /ɛ/. As a result, the /ɛ/ shifts toward /æ/, so that bet is pronounced like bat. And what of the original /æ/? As mentioned above, it acquires the long-a quality as in father. In addition, the pronunciation of the vowels /u/, as in boot, and /ow/, as in boat, has shifted forward, accompanied by the unrounding of the lips; a similar process happens in the Southern Vowel Shift, as well as in the Midwest and other areas of the Western U.S. Thus, boot sounds more like bi-oot and boat – like be-oat.

Unlike the more widespread and well-established Northern Cities and Southern Shifts, the Northern California Shift is still in its infancy stage, and is therefore not found in the speech of all Northern Californians, and certainly not to the same extent. As is typical for historical, dialectal pronunciation changes, the Northern California Shift probably started as a sociolectal marker, most common among younger, female speakers of a certain social class (think of the snooty girls of Legally Blonde). In the case of certain components of the Northern California Shift, their conscious association by Northern Californians with the frivolous speech of Valley Girls, “surfer dudes”, and other Southern California types (and sometimes even with “gay talk”) may actually slow down the spread of this shift in Northern California. Another problem with describing these changes is that they are rarely noticed by average speakers. Luckily, advances in speech technology, such as the availability of high-quality recordings and computerized spectrographic analysis, allows researchers to document even subtle distinctions in pronunciation, not easily detected by the ear. Being able to record long stretches of natural conversations also allows researchers like Prof. Eckert to avoid the problem of denial; people whose speech is being studied are often blissfully unaware of the peculiarities of their pronunciation, and sometimes explicitly deny that they pronounce certain words in a certain way. If asked to pronounce a certain word, moreover, they often veer away from their own natural pronunciation and instead give what they think is the correct pronunciation.**

____________________

* This diagram is meant to represent the so-called vowel space, that is the positions of the tongue in articulating the various vowels. The left side of the diagram represents the front of the mouth closer to the teeth, the right side of the chart being the back of the mouth. The top of the diagram represents the high position of the tongue (and the lower jaw), and the bottom of the diagram – the low position.

** This is true not only of pronunciation peculiarities and not only in English. For example, one study showed that many Russian speakers who used the so-called “second genitive” u-forms (e.g. butylka konjaku ‘a bottle of cognac’) in natural speech, vehemently denied using them when interviewed.

Google Translate Tackles Geography

2012-02-22T08:19:30Z

Google as a whole can hardly be accused of geographical illiteracy, as Google Maps and Google Earth have become standard tools for numerous professional geographers and amateur travelers alike. But there does not seem to be a good information flow between Google’s geographical departments and its linguistic tool, Google Translate. Or perhaps too much information is also a bad thing.

Case in point: how Google Translate handles translation of toponyms, say, from Bulgarian into English. According to Ivan Derzhanski, the same location can be translated four different ways, depending on punctuation. Or rather, on punctuation mistakes. The properly punctuated Bulgarian name and location of Vasil Levski National Military University, Национален военен университет «Васил Левски» (Велико Търново), is translated into English as National Military University “Vasil Levski”(Montana). Before you worry about moving Bulgaria’s national military academy into Western United States, some 5700 miles (~9200 km), it should be mentioned that there is a city called Montana in Bulgaria, about 165 miles (265 km) to the northwest of Veliko Turnovo. To achieve a more correct translation, the closing parenthesis must be omitted, for an unknown reason.

There is also the question of whether first vowel in the second word of Велико Търново is best rendered in English with an “i”, an “a”, or a “u”, as all of these spellings occur either on Google Maps, Google Translate, or in Wikipedia articles. In terms of its pronunciation, the sound spelled in Bulgarian with a “ъ” is a schwa-like mid central vowel, intermediate between /i/, /a/ and /u/. In English words this vowel can be spelled with an “i” (bird), a “u” (turn), or even an “o” (love).

While dropping the closing parenthesis gives us the correct translation, dropping the closing quote mark from the name of the university makes Google Translate move the military academy to another city: Plovdiv, about 115 miles (185 km) to the southwest of Veliko Turnovo. And what if we combine both of these punctuation mistakes, omitting both the closing parenthesis and the closing quote mark? The university moves once again, this time to Stara Zagora, located approximately 65 miles (105 km) to the south of Veliko Turnovo.

While in some instances punctuation does change the meaning of a phrase, this is clearly not the case here. And why mistyping punctuation should move a geographical location is one of those mysteries of Googl e Translate that are beyond human, or at least my, understanding.

New Rare Earth Deposits in Mozambique – And Elsewhere

2012-02-20T22:34:54Z

Over the past several years, China’s near monopolization of the supply of rare earth elements has received much attention in the global media. Less widely reported is the quest to locate and develop alternative supplies. Currently, an Australian firm is building a rare earth refinery in Malaysia to process radioactive ore from Western Australia. In late January 2012, Malaysia granted a license for the project to proceed, despite protests from local environmentalists. Estonia is now extracting rare earth oxides in sizable quantities from mine tailings; according to a January 27 press release, “The US-incorporated producer of rare earth metals Molycorp Silmet, based in northeastern Estonia, may soon become the world’s largest producer of niobium, a rare earth metal used in electronics, aviation and energy production.” According to the Wikipedia, France is currently setting up two factories to recycle rare earth elements from electronic waste.

Last summer, another report indicated that rare earth minerals are abundant in “deep sea mud” in parts of the Pacific. The report further claimed that these deposits “are also much higher in heavy rare earth elements — the kind that are more important in technology products — than those in China.”

More recently, the Australian firm Kimberley Rare Earths announced what could be a massive new ore discovery in western Mozambique. The complexity of rare earth deposits is evident in the news release: “A sample [was] found to comprise major xenotime and minor monazite and zircon. In addition to yttrium, the xenotime shows appreciable dysprosium and erbium.”

Meanwhile, MarketWatch reported in mid-February that, “Over the last month Rare Earth stocks have outperformed the broader market by a large margin as demand for the 17 elements continues to skyrocket.” The same article mentions new rare earth mining projects in Alaska, British Columbia, and Wyoming.

The Indigenous Peoples of Mendocino County: From Genocide to Marijuana Cultivation

2012-02-21T18:09:09Z

Previous GeoCurrents posts on historical instances of genocide have elicited critical comments from several readers, including one who took us to task for not mentioning genocidal events perpetuated by the United States. There is no denying that the U.S. government has been guilty of numerous genocidal assaults on indigenous communities. The United States engaged in wholesale “Indian removal,” often disregarding accommodations made by indigenous groups to American rule. The classic case was the Trail of Tears, the forced and deadly deportation of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes from the southeastern United States to what is now Oklahoma in the 1830s.

The struggles between indigenous peoples and the U.S. government and its citizens are now relatively well covered in the American school curriculum, which no longer ignores the atrocities committed by the victors. California, however, is often left out of the story. The only “Indian war” of note in the state was the Lava Beds Campaign of 1872-1873, during which Kintpuash (“Captain Jack”) and his fifty-three Modoc warriors kept the U.S. military at bay for almost a year. In standard histories of California, the bloody dispossession of the American Indian communities elsewhere in the state in the mid-1800s is given little attention. California’s native peoples have generally been construed as non-warlike, and the conflicts that ensued when their territories were overrun by white settlers deemed undramatic if not unimportant.

In actuality, the decimation of native Californians was plenty dramatic and shockingly cruel. Consider, for example, the almost forgotten Mendocino War of 1859. The Wikipedia article on the conflict amounts to three terse sentences, noting only that “several hundred American Indians were killed,” and that “many young Indians were sold into servitude in the white settlements.” It does, however, link to historical documents that outline the conflict in some detail. Some of these reports recount outrages committed against the Indians, specifying that the main cause of the conflict was simple cattle theft. The “majority legislative report of 1860” is worth quoting:

“Indians continue to kill cattle as a means of subsistence, and the settlers in retaliation punish with death. Many of the most respectable citizens of Mendocino County have testified before your committee that they kill Indians, found in what they consider the hostile districts, whenever they lose cattle or horses; nor do they attempt to conceal or deny this fact. … The testimony shows that … in one instance, an expedition was marked by the most horrid atrocity …”

The report concluded with a simple question: “Shall the Indians be exterminated, or shall they be protected?” The decision went for protection, but by today’s standards, the “protection” afforded would itself be considered genocidal. In the end, most of the surviving native people of Mendocino were forced into the Round Valley Reservation in the remote northeastern corner of the county, one of the few large reservations in the state (36 sq mi [94 km²]). The Wikipedia’s description of the removal process is stark:

“Indians came to Round Valley as they did to other reservations — by force. The word “drive”, widely used at the time, is descriptive of the practice of “rounding up” Indians and “driving” them like cattle to the reservation where they were “corralled” by high picket fences. Such drives took place in all weather and seasons, and the elderly and sick often did not survive.”

The deportees faced further travails as they settled in their new home. Round Valley was the designated refuge for a half dozen or more separate ethnolinguistic groups, several of which had long been bitter enemies. Establishing concord was not easy. And despite its reservation status, Round Valley attracted white settlers as well—many of whom proceeded to attack the Indians, requiring intervention by the U.S. army.

In time, the various tribes forced into Round Valley amalgamated into a new hybrid group. Numbers were small, intermarriage was necessary, and hostility from outsiders enhanced internal cohesion. Today the reservation’s official website specifies that it covers the “Round Valley Indian Tribes: A Sovereign Nation of Confederated Tribes.” As of 2000, this nation’s total population was 300.

By most definitions of the term, the Round Valley nation is not sovereign, but it does possess a degree of legal autonomy. How far such autonomy extends is much disputed. As is true elsewhere in Mendocino County, the most contentious issue is marijuana. In 2007, the tribal council voted to allow the growing of up to thirty-three plants per household while restricting the practice to specific areas. Limiting cultivation to particular parts of the reservation was designed to reduce participation by Mexican cartels, which have a reputation for both violence and environmentally destructive growing techniques. A 2010 Indianz.com article claimed, however, that much of the cultivation on the reservation was still being carried out by “the Mexican mafia.” The article also quoted tribal police chief Carlos Rabano as saying that although federal law prohibits the planting of marijuana in “Indian Country,” he still “tries not to interfere with tribal member’s yards.”

Many of the other surviving Native American communities in the region have enacted anti-marijuana policies. Unlike their counterparts in Round Valley, whose homeland is too remote to attract gamblers, the tiny (40 acre [16 hectare]) Hopland Reservation in southern Mendocino County has a profitable casino to protect. In February 2012, for example, the police chief of the Hopland Reservation told reporters, “Most people who visit the Sho Ka Wa Casino or elsewhere on the Hopland Reservation know better than to bring marijuana, even if they have a doctor’s recommendation to use it.” Another Hopland tribal leader put the policy in its broader context: “We could do something like Round Valley and … tell our officers not to enforce (federal marijuana prohibition), but the BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] could revoke our federal deputization.”

The Pilbara to Populate?

2012-02-19T17:42:26Z

The Pilbara is a vast, sparsely settled region in northwestern Australia noted for its gargantuan reserves of iron-ore and other minerals. Covering 193,823 sq mi (502,000 km²), the Pilbara is substantially larger than California, yet it has fewer than 50,000 permanent inhabitants. The region’s workforce, however, is much larger than its population would indicate, as most of the employees in the booming mining sector are classified as transient. They typically reside in the Perth area, the metropolitan core of Western Australia, and fly up to the mining country for working stints of a week or two.

The government of Western Australia, however, has recently decided that the “fly in; fly out” model of Pilbara employment is inefficient, and that more workers should reside permanently in the region. In mid-February, as noted by Perth Now, “Planning Minister John Day released the Pilbara Planning and Infrastructure Framework…, which will support the State Government’s lofty ambitions to attract 140,000 permanent residents to the region in just over two decades…”

The climate of the Pilbara is rigorous. This semi-arid region is brutally hot for half of the year; the town of Marble Bar holds the world’s records for the most consecutive days—160—in which the high temperature exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius). Much of the precipitation that does fall comes in the form of drenching tropical cyclones, which strike on average in seven out of ten years.

Complaints about settling in the Pilbara, however, seem to focus more on urban amenities than climate. As commentator John Smith noted in regard to the article cited above:

I have been flying in and out for 2 years and I would agree that it is not a particularly nice place to live. Scenery is nothing compared to the East Coast or many other places, and infrastructure is only to support the miners. No movie theatres, no decent restaurant, can’t get a decent coffee even if paying $5 minimum. And housing costs are absolutely ridiculous. Someone needs to fix that if anything is to change, it will take the government to force them to release a million acres of land from the 400 million available. Give it away for free. Otherwise Australia will price itself out of the market for minerals—it is already starting to happen.

Bio-Tech Farming in Brazil and the Global Potash Boom

2012-02-19T02:06:57Z

A recent article in Physorg.com claims that Brazil will soon surpass the United States to become the word’s leading producer of genetically modified crops. Currently, the author contends, the U.S. is the top location for bio-tech agriculture, with 69 million hectares under cultivation, as opposed to Brazil’s 30.3 million; Argentina (23.7 million hectares) and India (10.6 million hectares) occupy third and fourth place respectively. But as acreage under genetically modified crops is expanding more rapidly in Brazil than in the United States, the positions of the two countries are expected to reverse within a few years.

The Brazilian techno-farming boom is related to the recent agricultural colonization of the Cerrado, a vast savannah zone with a tropical wet and dry climate located to the south of the Amazonian rainforest. Until the late twentieth century, the Cerrado was a zone of low-intensity cattle ranching, as its soils were too impoverished to support widespread agriculture. Brazilian research programs, however, figured out how to transform the Cerrado into the country’s new bread-basket— although “soy basket” might be the better term. Farming in the Cerrado is highly mechanized and chemically intensive, and most local growers are enthusiastic proponents of the genetic manipulation of crops.

To make the potassium-poor Cerrado soils productive, vast quantities of potash are required. Canada is currently the “Saudi Arabia of potash,” with production concentrated in Saskatchewan. The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc. (“PotashCorp”) is not only the world’s largest potash producer, but is also the third largest producer of nitrogen and phosphate, and thus occupies a pivotal role in the global fertilizer trade. PotashCorp is currently thriving. As Oakshire Financial recently reported, “Major potash stocks are beginning to raise eyebrows with impressive profit margins.” The same article goes on to warn, however, that, “industry giants will face competition from greenfield and brownfield projects in the works.” As it so happens, Brazil has recently discovered sizable potash deposits of its own in the Amazon and in the states of Bahia and Espirito Santo. Brazil now imports more than 90 percent of its potash needs, a figure that will probably decline in the coming years. As Bloomberg recently reported, “The issue of fertilizer is strategic for Brazil. … The government is preparing a self-sufficiency plan.”

Brazil’s Cerrado is rich in wildlife and endemic species, yet has seen relatively few conservation initiatives. Only an estimated 1.5 percent of the Cerrado habitat has been protected in federal reserves. Run-off from farms in the region is also threatening the Pantanal, often regarded as the world’s largest wetland. Unlike the environmental degradation of the Amazon, that of the Cerrado and the Pantanal often escapes global notice.

The role of potash in world history is greater than is commonly realized. The potash market, for example, was crucial in the colonization of the eastern United States. As the farming frontier pushed west of the Appalachian Mountains in the early 1800s, settlers faced the twin challenges of clearing thick hardwood forests and obtaining enough cash to see them through the rough early years. By burning trees for potash, most of which was exported to Britain, both obstacles could be surmounted. The mining of subterranean potash salts began in Germany in the mid-1800s, vastly increasing the global supply.

Mapping Locust Swarms

2012-02-19T23:41:24Z

The recent GeoCurrents post on California cuisine ended on the odd note of insect eating. Of all insects across the world, locusts are probably the most widely consumed. They are the only six-legged creatures considered halal by Muslims and kosher by Jews. Allowing the consumption of locusts may have had an ecological rationale; when they swarm, crops can be devastated, yet hunger can be partially assuaged by eating the nutritious agents of destruction.

Many mysteries surround the locust, as swarms come and go in baffling patterns. As outbreaks are costly, considerable funds are devoted to understanding and predicting their formation and movement. As with hazardous weather prediction, cartography plays a major role. Maps typically show areas in which non-flying nymphs are aggregating, as well as incipient and actual swarms. Australia’s extensive locust control program relies heavily on crowd-sourced maps. The U.N.’s “Locust Watch Program” (part of the FAO) also does an admirable job. Its February 2012 map of the Libyan-Algerian border region, posted here, shows the potential for later swarming later this year.

The locust is not a single kind of insect but rather a general name for several grasshopper species whose bodies and behaviors change when they become so numerous on the ground that they start bumping into each other. In normal conditions, locusts act like typical grasshoppers. Most are found, when not swarming, in arid and often sandy environments. Unusually heavy rains in such areas can generate unusually lush vegetation, resulting in unusually large numbers of grasshoppers—which then transform into locusts and fly off en masse. They can make gargantuan formations, the largest of which in recent years have been estimated at 40 billion strong.

The most widespread species, the migratory locust, has declined in recent years, its last major African “plague” occurring in 1942. The reasons for its waning do not seem to be fully understood. The desert locust, however, remains a major threat over a broad swatch of territory extending from North Africa to South Asia, and several other species can be locally destructive. In both Africa and Australia, the spraying of the dried spores of entomopathogenic (“insect harming”) fungi has had some success in controlling outbreaks.

The biggest locust mystery surrounds the species that was responsible for the largest swarms, the Rocky Mountain locust of North America. One outbreak in 1875 was estimated to have contained 12.5 trillion grasshoppers, which together would have weighed some 27.5 million tons. Yet within thirty years, the species was extinct, and since then North America has been virtually locust-free.* The cause of its extirpation has never been determined, although it has been argued that “the plowing and irrigation by settlers disrupted the natural life cycle of the insects in the very small areas they existed in between swarms.” Yet vast areas of the Great Plains, the core habitat, were never plowed, and irrigation was rare here in the late 1800s. Nor was overgrazing the likely cause. Recent research conducted jointly by scientists at the University of Arizona and the Chinese Academy of Sciences determined that extant locusts thrive on “low-protein, high-carbohydrate diets, typically found in overgrazed areas.”

* The American bird grasshopper, Schistocerca americana, is occasionally regarded as a kind of locust, but it is usually classified an ordinary grasshopper.