The Minnesota farmers I used to talk to called it “farmin’ da Program” There are also various state programs that can top-up federal payments or have different qualifications
Geographer at UW-Madison. Political ecologist, policy nerd, plant noticer, union member, Iowan. Wetlands restoration, ecology and history are my jam. Also Australia and roller derby. USEPA HQ alum 2004-07.
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The Minnesota farmers I used to talk to called it “farmin’ da Program” There are also various state programs that can top-up federal payments or have different qualifications
I really want to know what @dieworkwear.bsky.social has to say about Mifune and Kurosawa here.
"And all the time he had lost during his life, frittering it away on nonsense, when he could have devoted himself, body and soul, to the intensive study of geography, a science whose utility he had only come to realize!" Jorge Amado, Home is the Sailor
... and valuable features, and you cannot address them by avoiding the work. You cannot learn while having someone else’s computer read and write for you any more than you can eat while having someone else chew and swallow your food for you. We will discuss this more in class. 8/8
Each instance will be the subject of individual discussion. College is a time for you to decide who you want to be, how you want to engage in the work, and to take some degree of control over the technology that surrounds us. The supposed imperfections in your voice are your most human ... 7/8
Furthermore, as a teacher, I am not interested in participating in a digital surveillance structure that claims to “detect” AI-produced material. This only increases our reliance on AI and potentially creates an untrusting or hostile dynamic between you and your instructor. 6/8
All of this exploitation for what UNC’s Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom calls “a mid technology”. Without question, the social and intellectual harms outweigh the positives. It is for these reasons that I have prohibited the use of AI in this class. 5/8
... risks severe environmental repercussions. Many AI platforms rely on the organized theft of intellectual labor, and some platforms are used to engage in sexual harassment and exploitation. Further, in many cases, generative AI provides incorrect and unreliable information and citations. 4/8
The use of AI will be determined through a discussion between instructor and student about the writing process concerning instances under review, and the instructor’s determination is final. There is strong evidence that the use of AI facilitates labor exploitation, 3/8
Any use of generative AI on any assignment or test for this class will result in an automatic zero for the assignment. The work is, by definition, not your own. A second use will result in a drop of one final letter grade. A third use will result in a final course grade of F. 2/8
I've really benefited from you all discussing your GenAI syllabus policies so I'm sharing the one I just drafted -- entirely based on what @drsubini.blacksky.app posted a few days back, itself adapted from Dr. Shantel Buggs. Text follows below. Is the line about learning and eating too harsh? 1/8
Every Wheaties box in history begs to disagree. Except that one with the ‘85 Bears.
yyyyyikes.
In the great green room There was a telephone And a red balloon
This definitely helped me with my course statement on AI and large language models!
This policy, and all the articles and news stories linked underneath it in the chain, are invaluable resources as you design your AI policy for your class this fall.
Pro tip from someone who's made signs for unions for almost 20 years: If you don't know what to write on your labor day sign simply make one that says "fuck the bosses"
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Important reading as you prepare for your semester
We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.
Here's a #GiftLink for those who want to read the full NYT obit of historian of science & gender, Margaret Rossiter. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/s... #histSTM 🧪🗃️
This is about when my 11-year-old grandpa living just up the road in Michigan City, Indiana, must have made up the elaborate story of how his mother — Wilhelmina Siegmund, mind you — was actually Irish. Took us years to unwind that one.
When I was an undergrad in the early ‘90s at Grinnell I inherited (from Ralph Nader’s niece Nadia!) the management of a Prof Quotes thing-of-the-day page that ran on the old campus VAX system. It was insanely popular — people would send in such great examples of exactly these kinds of moments.
New "How to Report ICE" zines up today for free printable download! California (by county/area) Chicago Colorado DC Metro Area (DMV) Massachusetts North Carolina Triangle Area NYC Philly Pittsburgh Portland, OR St. Louis Metro Area Washington State Please share! drive.google.com/drive/folder...
beautiful
(Currently AFT 223)
As an AFT 3220 member, organizer and shop steward across 27 years: Fuck you AFT for partnering with OpenAI. It’s anti-worker among all the other bad things.
Then why are you partnering with AI companies? Why are you taking their money to bring AI into classrooms? I’ve been a union member since I was five. AI companies have stolen my work. This is a workers’ rights issue.
MEANWHILE IN IOWA... #FLIP!!! election-night.decisiondeskhq.com/date/2025-08... This is an R+11 district, I believe!!
Newsletter: My 16,000 word opus - How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...
Seppo/Septic really needs to escape solely Australian usage
the crisis in which the University of Chicago is now engulfed -- one entirely of its own making, and which has led to the (hopefully temporary) suspension of admissions into numerous PhD programs in the humanities -- represents I think a seismic event in the history of American higher education 1/
Reading bell hooks, 'Theory as Liberatory Practice," and came across this gem: “Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural," and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general /1
Ambrosia trifida in the sunset. Gesundheit.
A report by the US Government Accountability Office found that a smaller relocation of two USDA research agencies during the first Trump administration resulted in a wave of staff attrition. www.gao.gov/products/gao...
When they say the county is at a crossroads
I haven’t been this excited for a bubble to burst since I was a toddler.
Always makes me think about my East Asian History professor teaching us that the three clear signs of dynastic decline were 1) mismanaging night soil, 2) nepotistic corruption of the civil service exam, and 3) the emperor pursuing immortality
When you want to theorize Capitalism, Labor and Race at the same time, there's only one answer! Why am I like this.
Still finding monarch eggs on parking-strip milkweed!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_QD...
Just a Yank absolutely desperate to find any way to watch episodes of Rob Sitch's "Utopia" in the US. (before you say it, the ABC is vigilant about blocking VPNs) www.youtube.com/watch?v=8av3...
Brett Christophers is an absolute unit. 4 blockbuster books in 6 years analyzing global capitalism with a critical economic geography lens. The New Enclosure (2018); Rentier Capitalism (2020); Our Life in Their Portfolios (2023); The Price is Wrong (2024) buttondown.com/polycrisisdi...
Friendly Mt. Pleasant neighbor greets members of the Big Balls Goon Show loitering this evening, wondering if they knew anything about the ICE sex pests who left their sex toy in the park across the street. #freedc
AI is an essentially colonial technology. It does not exist to help doctors diagnose, teachers teach, or writers write. It exists to collect and extrapolate from large amounts of data. When you give it information, that's a donation to the billion dollar AI industry. That's you ceding territory.
Every time a geographer or political ecologist correctly identifies Kathy McAfee as the originator of the “neoliberal natures” literature, another environmental credits market collapses under its own contradictions.
Coming soon: medical experimentation on ICE detainees and political enemies.
Just one of my many attempts to convince the high priests of ecosystem services that multiscaled environmental regulation exists.
Years ago I told Ricardo Bayon that any attempt to create an offset market around any urban ecosystem amenity worth the candle will call forth an urban planning/regulatory effort to restrict its loss, through offsetting, from areas of high property value. Almost like a… double movement.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Home office and hatchery.
Heteropessimism is definitely a term that meets the need of the moment.
Modern AI tools emulate the classic con-man tricks of mentalism, tricking people into believing that they’re far more clever - and sapient - than they actually are. Fantastic piece by @baldurbjarnason.com : softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...
Because once you have paid him the Dane-geld/ You will totally be rid of the Dane and he will definitely not be back for more AI Kipling chatbot, probably
The more Black a city is the less I believe anything white people from there say about it.
First off this year’s monarchs making her J.
*stares in Geographer* Uhhh the Erie Canal was built to circumvent Niagara Falls and give NYC its “Empire” of control over Great Lakes shipping. It made Chicago possible. It was built to compete with New Orleans and St Louis.
It’s worse than that. They built the Erie Canal to circumvent Niagara Falls and provide NYC shipping access to the Great Lakes. The “Empire” of “Empire State”. The Erie Canal made Chicago possible, and made NYC rich. He’s such an idiot.
Fulgencio Sifuentes
I may be the last living person to use “Dr. Dentons” as the generic term for footie pajamas with a back flap.
It really does feel like a lot of formerly reasonable people have been infected by some sort of terrifying brain parasite when it comes to unthinking and total acceptance of using AI tools
This year’s monarchs are coming along — and because my daughter’s in charge of naming them: Jinx, Tiabeanie, Gojo, Mariner and Tanjiro. Iykyk.
Congrats to the AI boosters for facilitating the roll out of this racism machine.
Serving the statehood argument up on a platter.
there are so many great things about generative AI! here are some of my favorites <3
Any one of these uses is an automatic F without appeal in any class I teach. This is a travesty of policy.
Any one of these uses is an automatic F without appeal in any class I teach. It’s catching them at it that’s the hard part.
Since avant la lettre.
idk, i've managed to not use chatgpt or whatever a single time and still am somehow getting things done and doing well at my job bc i use things like: having conversations with other people! reading! my own brain to think of things!
Unless you’re telling me that all systems (including this one) regularly insert an em-space after a period that ends a sentence (as opposed to other lists of period-based punctuation marks), I will have to disagree. And since an em-space is two standard spaces, my point stands.
Except that they *are* necessary to communicate the meaning of the punctuation mark, and this is not a misconception on my part. Merely pedantry, as suggested.
Rein/reign/rain. Less/Fewer. We appear to have lost both of these battles even in major news outlets and academic publications.
Two spaces after a period. They are an integral part of the punctuation mark, necessary to communicate the fullness of the full stop.
Two spaces after a period. They are an integral part of the punctuation mark, communication the fullness of the full stop.
Hell I’ve reffed roller derby bouts in 17 of them.
Geographers! New book out today on the demise of Geography at Harvard (and tf Geography's 20th cen. troubles in general and the Ivies in particular). With a US mailing address, 30% off today with code MITP30, and after today 20% off with code READMIT20. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777571...
How Vaccines Work 🧬🧫🧪🔬💉🥽
@teawithtolkein.com, @digitaltolkein.com ⬆️
Hey @prancingponypod.bsky.social ⬆️
I grew up on these maps and love them wholeheartedly — a large part of the reason I became a geographer. The wildest part of the story here is that her atlas convinced Christopher Tolkien that there might be an audience for The History of Middle Earth! So e have a geographer to thank for that.
These are the hand-drawn proofs — she was geography faculty at UW’s Oshkosh campus, and her son Mark Fonstad is a geographer at Oregon. He is donating the materials to the UW Milwaukee map library after this exhibit.
Hey all Tolkien folks, the beautiful Robinson Map Library in the Department of Geography at the Univ. of Wisconsin is having an exhibit of the materials behind Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle Earth! Hurry on down!
Was actually in Australia for Northridge and back in Iowa for Loma Prieta — got lucky! For all my time in LA, the biggest earthquake I ever felt was in Iowa. www.nytimes.com/1987/06/11/u...
Watch the seismic waves from the magnitude 8.8 earthquake off the coast of Russia sweep beneath seismic stations in North America. By the time the waves reached North America, they are far too small to be felt by people, but can still be detected by seismic instruments. 🧪
I remember the same in LA in the 80s, mainly in the context of my friends winding me up b/c I was from Iowa. Much like Australians and their drop bears.
There’s a lot of competition for the worst kind of environmental misinformation, but this is a strong contender. And we get to blame Aristotle.
I regret to inform you etc en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthqu...
I described it to a friend as "dubble-bubble flavored orange crush", but that friend then invented a cocktail called the "Irn Brexit" by adding Malört and fenugreek-cardamom bitters, so I regret everything.
@olyaoliker.bsky.social 😢
I asked ChatGPT what will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich? Here's what it said to me: Que sera, sera Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que sera, sera STICK YOUR HAND IN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL
Wolf uses the term only in his title, "Ownership and Political Ecology". It does not occur in the body of the text -- a text which is clearly cultural ecology if it is anything, citing Bob Netting and Derwent Whittlesey. Whatever Dick Walker was reading, it led him to the enduring formulation! 3/3
Walker is referring to it as if "the political ecology literature" is something that already exists, but it clearly didn't. WoS only records 12 occurrences prior to 1974 in all of their texts, and none of them match Walker's or today's sense of the term. Certainly not the oft-cited Wolf (1972) 2/3
I do get a kick out of the fact that the very first use of the term "political ecology" in today's sense came in 1974 when a 24-year-old Dick Walker was arguing with the Odum boys about wetlands value in the now-defunct Coastal Zone Management Journal! 1/3
One of my enduring impressions as an American driving around the English Midlands for several weeks with the radio on.
I’m ok with throwing ampersands at nonprofits.
