Compass 2022-23 Vol. 8 Issue 2

EASTER 2023 | VOL. 8 ISSUE 02

NAVIGABLE RIVERS & WORLD ISLANDS | TREES, TEPHRA AND MICROPLASTIC | REFLECTIONS ON SOLO TRAVEL

Welcome to Compass, Vol.8 Issue 2!

EASTER 2023 | VOL. 8 ISSUE 02

THE COMPASS TEAM EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Matthew Harris

PHYSICAL EDITOR Bridget Atkin

HUMAN EDITORS Georgina Carbery Izzy Scott

TRAVEL EDITORS Harri Thomas Aidan Crowson

DESIGN OFFICER Bridget Atkin

PUBLICITY OFFICER Amelie Wilson

INTERVIEW EDITOR Zuhri James OUTREACH OFFICER Anaïs Bash-Taqi

CONTRIBUTORS Eden Keily-Thurstain Alice de Abaitua Grace Roche Pei Jiang Matthew Adeleye Alice Hughes Jasmine Knight Matt Osman Rob Barker Taybah Khan-Lodhi Roxanne Michael FRONT COVER Mount Elgon, Kenya, USGS, Unsplash

Our second publication of the year continues showcasing the diversity of geographic disciplines. As always, we are proud of the many high-quality pieces from students within (and outside of) the department. Additionally, we welcome the two new physical geography members of staff – Matthew Adeleye and Matt Osman – to the department, with two interviews highlighting their work.

With the third year students having submitted their dissertations, three of them provide insights into the variety of physical geography dissertations undertaken within the department – looking at tephra, trees and microplastics. Aidan and Taybah give an exciting insight into the second year's Cornwall Field trip, from beavers to trees, and carbon to discourse.

As summer vacation approaches, Robert and Harri tell us about experiences of travelling and working abroad: be inspired to travel solo and think about the ethics of teaching abroad. Eden brings us back to our personal statements, asking if we should move on from Prisoners of Geography. Alice analyses Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog in the context of wilderness and humanity. Learn about the population challenges facing Italy in the piece written

by Grace. Pei tells us about a forgotten crop and its ‘conservation-through-use’.

The annual winner of the Compass Sixth Form Essay competition is presented, writing about the compatibility of the UK’s economic and environmental goals.

As always, we thank CUGS and the Geography Department for their support that make this magazine possible. To all the contributors and the Compass team, thank you for all your work. Stay tuned for applications to become the next Editor-in-Chief or member of the Compass committee.

Matthew Editor-In-Chief

BACK COVER

Robinson Glacier, Antarctica, USGS, Unsplash

cambridgecompassmagazine.wordpress.com compass@cugs.org.uk cugscompass compass_cugs

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CONTENTS

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17

Is it time we moved on from Prisoner's of Geography?

A glimpse in physical geography dissertations

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21

39 Essay Navigable Rivers Trees, Tephra & World Islands and Microplastic Competition

Lost in the Grizzly Maze

Interview with Matt Osman

Deadly Anthropomorphism in Grizzly Man

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PresicceAcquarica

Solving Italy's Population Problem?

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25

Reflections on Solo Travel

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Forgotten Crop for the Future

'Teacher Trap' or Tourist Trap?

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Foxtail Millet

Interview with Matthew Adeleye

Navigating teaching English abroad

Cornwall Fieldtrip 2023

Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are those of the individual authors only and do not represent the views or opinions of Compass Magazine as a whole or the University of Cambridge Department of Geography.

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HUMAN

Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

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Navigable Rivers and World Islands: Is it time we moved on from Prisoner’s of Geography?

Eden Keily-Thurstain Did you mention Prisoners of Geography in your personal statement? Tim Marshall’s non-fiction hit has certainly had its airtime in many Geography personal statements since its publication in 2015.

Like many budding geographers, I devoured Prisoners of Geography when I first discovered it, fascinated by geopolitics and the way that Marshall attributed physical geography to the unfolding of political issues. Reading the book was the first time I was able to conceptualise space not as a backdrop to the events that occurred within it, but as an active participant in the reproduction of politics and power. However, as is the case for many geographers, my prolonged honeymoon period with Prisoners of Geography came to a sad conclusion when I began studying geography as an undergraduate.

My love of the book meant I was incredibly excited to delve into geopolitics again in my first year.

However, this was the time I first encountered classical geopoliticians such as Halford Mackinder and his heartland theory, where a ‘geographical pivot’ fell variously into the hands of competing states in a fight for dominance and control of the ‘world island’ (Nayak and Jeffrey, 2011). I learnt how these kinds of narratives, which presented themselves as natural, scientific observations about the inevitable (Agnew, 2002), were actually problematic with substantial imperialist agendas. While I am certainly not trying to directly compare Marshall to Mackinder, there is a similar ambition in their desire to explain the making of global geopolitics in the context of physical geography. There is a more than a whiff of classical geopolitics in Marshall’s assertion that “the geographic hand God has dealt Russia” meant that not invading Crimea “was never really an option” (Marshall, 2015: 19). The more I learnt about classical geopoliticians and their desire to discover a “grand theory” of geopolitics, I increasingly recognised Marshall’s desire to boil down an incredibly complicated world into a set of quite simple rules.

If your rivers are not navigable, then communication is difficult and technological advancement is not going to come your way. If you don’t have any warm water ports, then forget being a global player in trading. Obtain power another way. This isn’t to

say that the role of physical geography isn’t important, as geographers we know how fundamental space is. But space is a social creation as much as a geophysical one, which is something that Prisoners of Geography doesn’t give full credence to.

In chapter five, Marshall breaks down Africa. While it does lead one to wonder whether you can suitably explain the developmental and political trajectory of a whole continent in just a chapter, it also illuminates Prisoners of Geography’s avoidant relationship with history. The chapter contains some worrying Orientalist tropes (Said, 1978). Browning, amongst many others, is critical of the Orientalist eye regarding Africa, arguing that many dominant narratives “perpetuate images of Africa as a ‘dark continent’ full of emptiness, misery, wildness and readiness to receive Western salvation” (Browning and Ferraz de Oliveira, 2017: 15). Marshall seems to mirror some of these very narratives, describing the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a “giant black hole” that is “shrouded in the darkness of war” (Marshall, 2015: 127). Marshall does acknowledge the role of colonialism in the continent, arguing the resultant borders have meant that “[m]any Africans are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made” (ibid: 125). However, this is still set very much alongside its natural barriers, risking depoliticising Africa’s development trajectory and positioning it as natural rather than acutely socially created.

Perhaps this is an easier, more comfortable, narrative to grapple with than fully reckoning the continued socioeconomic and cultural impacts of colonialism.

It both negates responsibility and positions those located on the continent as passive actors. Perhaps the very notion of a ‘prisoner of geography’ reinforces passivity, positing that we are all helpless actors that respond apolitically to environmental constraints and advantages.

Prisoners of Geography dangerously reinforces the idea that the way the world is because of a static, preordained, geographical truth. For many geographers, the idea of Prisoners of Geography being problematic or an oversimplification is not revolutionary.

It’s generally agreed upon that for someone COMPASS | 4

studying geography for a degree, Marshall’s book is something you ‘grow out of ’. You might fairly argue that Prisoners of Geography has its place in the realm of popular non-fiction, and that it is a force for good in making geographical ideas more accessible. After all, most people will not have the time or will to explore things to a depth that a geography degree demands. However, I think this is exactly why we need to think more critically about Prisoners of Geography. For many people, the book is the only interaction they will have with geography outside of a classroom. Perhaps we are called to ask how we balance readability with having sufficient nuance and sensitivity to the complexity of our global geography. Arguably, it’s not a case of completely renouncing the book or running to Waterstones and pulling down all the copies from the shelves. For many of us, Prisoners of Geography inspired us to study geography in the first place, myself included. Instead, perhaps we should think more about the way geography as a discipline engages with the world outside of academia, and whose voices we illuminate. ■ Edited by Georgina Carbery.

References: Agnew, J. (2002) Making political geography. Routledge.

Browning, C.S. and Ferraz de Oliveira, A. (2017) ‘Reading brand Africa geopolitically: Nation branding, subaltern geopolitics and the persistence of politics’, Geopolitics, 22(3), pp. 640–664.

Marshall, T. (2015) Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know about Global Politics. Elliot and Thompson Limited. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/ books?id=QpEyrgEACAAJ. Nayak, A. and Jeffrey, A. (2011) ‘Geographical thought’, An introduction to ideas in Human Geography. Harlow: Pearson Education [Preprint].

Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. London [ua].

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Image on left sourced from USGS, Unsplash; image on right sourced from John Thomas, Unsplash

Lost in the Grizzly Maze:

Deadly Anthropomorphism in Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man Alice de Abaitua Werner Herzog’s documentary, Grizzly Man (2005), investigates Timothy Treadwell’s infatuation with brown bears and his desire to cohabitate alongside them on an uninhabited Alaskan reserve. Treadwell is then killed by the bears that he dedicates his life to protect. The audio that captures his death is notably omitted from the film. Instead, Herzog foregrounds his own reaction to the brutality of an act that is deemed too shocking - too close to the reality of engaging with wild animals. Our imagined wilderness is often fatal: either to us or to the landscape itself. Herzog’s narration exposes the gap between Treadwell’s idealised view of the bears and the reality of the palpable threat that they pose. Treadwell’s delusional empathy for bears, alongside an intense desire to be recognised and understood by them, is an extreme example of animal idealisation that privileges the non-human above the human.

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John Berger (1980) writes on the stark disconnect between the predominance of an animal’s cultural mythologisation and the reality of their physical marginalisation. By mapping the progression of the cultural role of animals from their magical and sacrificial function to the spectacle of modern zoos, Berger argues that ‘the animals of the mind’ cannot be so ‘easily dispersed’ (1980:15). Treadwell’s imagined perception of his relationship with wild animals – in which he befriends and saves them – crosses a sacred boundary that gets him killed.

Herzog’s title gestures towards Treadwell as a zoomorphic figure but his determination to assimilate within the wild is an ironic delusion as the self-mythologisation is stripped away and - as Herzog’s subject - his brutal ending stresses his vulnerable humanity over all else.

Herzog notes that it was Treadwell’s ‘tragic misunderstanding’ of the wild which results in his extreme behaviour and consequent death. The documentary is structured by intercutting Treadwell’s self-shot footage with interviews. As Herzog traces Treadwell’s life back to the space of his family home, the striking symbol of the childhood stuffed bear resonates as the benign object that his family imbues with their association of him.

The background of the interview with Treadwell’s parents is disconcertingly cluttered: the striking red of the floral sofa, flowers and kitsch soft toys emphasise the theatrical framing of the encounter as Herzog draws deliberate attention to the infiltration of playful representations of the animal: the 7 | COMPASS

parent’s domestic space, although inexorably detached from the true wilderness that Treadwell occupied, yearns for a connection to their lost son.

The mother clutches ‘Timothy’s favourite bear’ as she gives the interview. The closeup of a stuffed bear, clothed in patriotic colours and brandishing a flag, allows Herzog to visually bridge the gap between the ‘animals of the mind’ with the footage of brown bears in the wild.

Herzog’s focus on nostalgia for the childhood animal echoes Treadwell’s playful interactions with the bears: a mode that they, crucially, will never reciprocate.

‘The indifferent gaze of nature’ is all Treadwell can hope to find in the animals so integral to his own sense of being.

The act of renaming is crucial for Treadwell’s creation of his theatrical persona. The connotations of ‘Treadwell’ – combining the notion of treading over landscape with a sense of good-will – explicitly marks out his intention of embarking on landscapes, motivated by a sense of the greater good. The transition into the ‘grizzly man’, the invented shamanic figure, signals Treadwell’s separation from society. He acknowledges the landscape’s influence on his body, asserting that he has lost significant weight and by gesturing to his ragged clothes as he attempts to assimilate within the reserve. Herzog’s narration acutely observes how Treadwell ‘saw himself as the guardian of this land and stylized himself as Prince Valient, fighting the bad guys’: he projected a clear dichotomy between good and evil onto the landscape which proves a delusion so strong that he fails to recognise his own intrusion on land that isn’t his.

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Image below is a sene from 'Grizzly Man'; image behind sourced from Wonderlane, Unsplash; image on left sourced from Daniel Diesenreit, Unsplash

Overwhelmingly, the sense of child-like enthusiasm runs throughout a film whose violent themes are otherwise inappropriate for a young audience.

Treadwell’s striking conception of the reserve as a ‘Grizzly Maze’ captures the challenging terrain in an evocative image.

The maze metaphor superimposes a mythological reality onto the terrain, evoking the confines of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Herzog’s frequent use of aerial shots provide a looming perspective and – unsurprisingly - the landscape is a cluttered array of trees as opposed to the rigid, child-like puzzle that ‘maze’ suggests. As long as the reserve remains the static maze, it is a challenge that Treadwell can solve. He reduces the wilderness into a game that he aims to ‘win’ while at once remaining its protector.

In one of Treadwell’s final close encounters with a brown bear, he goads it, touching its nose and playfully asking it to return to its ‘friend’, a few metres away.

By contrast, Herzog remains haunted by the animal gaze of ‘overwhelming indifference’ that he captures in the following shot and the explicit absence of Treadwell’s proclaimed ‘secret world of the bears’. Berger argues that the animal does not reserve ‘a special look for man’ as when the man ‘is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him’ (1980:15). These observations consider the dangerous assumption that our own mode of perception is universally shared in nature as a position that refuses to acknowledge the wilderness, favouring to construct a version of it that we can digest. Treadwell’s tragic ending is more than a cautionary tale in the context of one man’s misguided projections. Instead, Herzog’s brilliant insight instead reveals a deeper - and more alarming – aspect of the human mode of looking at the other that is in all of us: prioritising the wild as a state of mind rather than the area of marginalised land that it is.

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Presicce-Acquarica:

Solving Italy's Population Problem?

Grace Roche Within the heel of Italy’s boot, the Puglian municipality of Presicce-Acquarica is offering non-repayable grants of €30 000 – all they require in return is that you move there with the money.

The commune, a product of the merging of towns ‘Presicce’ and ‘Acquarica del Capo’ in 2019, is certainly not undesirable. It is charming, close to the coast, and rich in both culture and history. Yet, crucially, it suffers a major depopulation problem, experiencing 150 deaths compared to a mere 60 births in 2021 (Hughes, 2023). The threat to the town’s survival also risks the loss of its unique traditions and culture, and is a threat shared by many small towns, particularly in the Mezzogiorno, or southern Italy.

The situation in the town is only a microcosm of Italy’s wider afflictions. A dwindling birth rate is an issue felt not only in Presicce; in the Sicilian town of Acquaviva Platani, births are so rare that they warrant the ringing of village bells (Tondo, 2019).

However, it is also a national issue: the World Bank has highlighted decreasing birth rates in Italy since 1964, reducing from the peak of 20 births per thousand people to only 7 births per thousand people in 2020. This is largely the result of a changing Italian family model shaped by economic crisis, exacerbated by an ageing population and the associated high death rate.

Yet, it is about more than birth and death rates: migration is also a key factor in national and regionalised depopulation. The majority of Italian intranational migration occurs from the South to the North according to both historical and modern immigration patterns. Italy’s North has long been more advanced than its South, a divide resulting from opposing governing states prior to Unification. Industrialisation and the post-war economic ‘boom’ promoted mass migration to urban centres, such as those of the industrial triangle linking Turin, Milan and Genoa. The GDP of the Mezzogiorno declined to 50 percent of that of the Centre-North in the 1950s, and has stayed between 55 and 60 percent

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ever since (Musolino, 2018). Furthermore, the North-South divide is not simply an economic inequality, but is complicated further by Southern political corruption. The 1950’s national fund (the Cassa del Mezzogiorno), which intended to minimise or eliminate the divide entirely, had some of its funds syphoned by political corruption. Thus, it effectively failed to graze the surface of the issue. This has culminated into modern Italy’s malady of the “most pronounced North-South economic disparity in Europe'' (Righi, 2022).

The more contemporary discussion of “la fuga dei cervelli” – Italy’s ‘brain drain’ – adds another layer to the intricate puzzle of demographic problems faced by the country. The influx of young, trained, or educated professionals leaving Italy is indicative of the cyclical nature of the issue. Reduced access to public services in shrinking towns such as Presicce only acts as a further push factor for emigration. Young people seek employment opportunities elsewhere, in more economically advanced nations, whilst parents opt to move in pursuit of educational opportunities for their children (ESPON, 2020).

In this endeavour for repopulation, Presicce-Acquarica follows the path set by another southern Italian scheme in Calabria, which encompasses some of the region’s small towns, and offers €33 000 for people to migrate there (Bloom, 2021). In 2022 the Italian government also set aside in 2022 €45 million to fund 3,000 grants of €15 000 to encourage movement to Sardinian comunes counting less than 3,000 inhabitants (Bloom, 2022). Evidently, the approach utilised in Presicce-Acquarica, which provides economic incentives to combat depopulation and revitalise communities, is becoming increasingly popular throughout Italy’s Mezzogiorno region.

Fortunately for Presicce-Acquarica, the merging of the two towns provided increased funds for reinjecting life back into the locale. The offering of €30 000 is not the sole economic stimulus employed: the

Image on right sourced from Massimo Virgilio, Unsplash

town also offers the provision of non-repayable grants to support new businesses, which only require the business’s headquarters to be located in the region for five years after receipt of the funding (Municipality of Presicce-Acquarica, 2023). However, such economic benefit is not entirely without terms and conditions: local councillor Alfredo Palese specified that the houses available in the scheme must be built before 1991 (Marchetti, 2022). Moreover, the majority of the area’s vacant houses within this scheme have been neglected by Italian ex-residents and are on the market at low costs, starting as low as €25 000. As well as this, the €30 000 grant available must be used to subsidise the cost of the property and potential renovations. Importantly, this is not an opportunity for the rich to add to personal property portfolios. Instead, the ambition is for the reconstruction of a community, and the revival of

the town labelled “the city of green gold” (Hughes, 2023).

Only time will reveal the level of success of Italy’s regionalised repopulation schemes. However, does the national scope of the issue render their failure somewhat inevitable? The forces generating rural depopulation – a low birth rate, ageing population, and the ‘brain drain’ – seem to be deepening, already stuck in the demography of Italy for years. There is more to the schemes than the seemingly straightforward offer of a bargain house in a quaint Italian town. In reality, these schemes, despite their efforts, might not even scratch the surface of the intricate web of problematic demographics they reveal.

Edited by Georgina Carbery

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Foxtail Millet: Forgotten Crop for the Future Pei Jiang

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Image sourced from Kristaps Ungurs, Unsplash

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets (IYM2023), at its headquarters on December 6th, 2022.

Over the last century, four crops (maize, rice, wheat, and soybean) dominated our global food system, with the first three accounting for more than half of all plant-based human diets. The majority of forgotten crop plants, also known as ‘underutilised’ or ‘orphan’ crops, have the potential to increase food and nutritional security, while also making subsistence farmers more resilient to external shocks caused by ecological and social uncertainties around the world. However, these forgotten crops are largely absent from scientific research, policy, and global food marketing.

Millets – one example of these forgotten crops – have received increasing attention in recent years since 2023 has been declared the International Year of Millets by the United Nations. Millets are a varied group of small-seeded grasses that include pearl, proso, foxtail, barnyard, small, kodo, browntop, finger, and Guinea millets, as well as fonio, sorghum (or great millet), and teff. My research focuses on foxtail millet (Setaria Italica), which originated in Aohan Banner, northeast China. A series of archaeological studies on the Xinglongwa site in Aohan provides evidence for the development of millet agriculture, revealing a c.7,700-year history of foxtail millet cultivation. This old crop is one of the Wugu1, which has been indispensable to Chinese culture since ancient times.

In 2012, the FAO designated the Aohan Dryland Farming System as a Global Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS). Since then, the local government has made a major push to develop a full industrial chain for foxtail millet, which has become the second-largest crop in Aohan, second only to maize. The foxtail millet agricultural area, which was 0.38 million mu2 in 2012, has expanded to and been maintained at one million mu since 2020, accounting for one-third of Aohan’s farmland.

The foxtail millet industry appears to have made a comeback. However, many agricultural industries prefer the purity, stability, and uniformity of alternative varieties that can be mass-produced, easily shipped around the world, and yield a high profit.

This kind of agricultural reductionism has led to the domination of markets by a few varieties, while

many others have been forgotten. What will be the fate of varieties that lack commercial value? The commercialisation of a single crop, for example maize, can have many consequences: the loss of genetic resources and the narrowing genetic basis of breeding, the weakened resilience of the agrarian system, the decline of traditional culture and agricultural techniques, the increasing overlap of diets, and homogenization of nutritional sources around the world. Hybrid seeds account for 99% of the maize grown in America today, while the centre of its origin, Mexico, lost 80% of its maize varieties.

Some forgotten crops have enormous potential for improving global nutrition and food security in the face of climate change. Foxtail millet, for example, is drought resistant, and certain traditional varieties are even more so. The ‘60tianhuancang’ was previously the most drought-resistant landrace – local or traditional variety adapted to the local region –in Aohan. Its name literally translates as ‘sixty-days return to the barn’ – after its 60-day growth period, compared to other varieties which can take around a hundred days to mature. As a result, this variety was referred to by farmers as ‘safety valves’. If there is no rain in the spring, farmers can still sow it during the summer and harvest it before the frost. “Even if it’s an unusually dry year, when other crops fail, millets may still produce thin and little ears, allowing people to survive”, said one farmer from Aohan. For years, unfortunately, the ‘60tianhuancang’ was unavailable in Aohan. The disappearance of this drought-resistance variety indicates farmers have one less option for growing if drought occurs; in other words, farmers’s drought resilience has decreased.

We need to go the extra mile to protect these ‘forgotten varieties’. Fortunately, a group of farmers in Aohan have committed themselves to prevent the loss of millet landraces. When I first visited Aohan in 2020 for my PhD pilot research, I was astonished by the diversity of foxtail millet varieties. Ruixiang, a local female farmer, grew over forty foxtail millet landraces for seed conservation on her field. These varieties differ in the shapes of ears, colours of leaves, husks, and grains. Ruixiang helped organise several farmers in Henggouzi Village to build a community seed bank in 2019, with the assistance of the Farmers’ Seed Network in China, which was funded by OXFAM Hong Kong. This collection includes seeds from 92 traditional varieties collected from households in Henggouzi and villages nearby, including beans, maize, foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, and COMPASS | 12

others. This seed bank and the seeds in Ruixiang’s farm serve as reserves for each other. “The establishment of this seed bank is meaningful”, said a villager from Henggouzi village. “Peasants were once at the bottom of society and were despised. But now I am proud of protecting traditional varieties”. Seed banks, however, are not a substitute for in-situ conservation, so Ruixiang and other farmers in this community grow each variety on a small scale on their own land, to refresh seeds reserved in the bank every two or three years.

Landraces also encapsulate collective memories and local culture, as seen by their vernacular names. For example, ‘Yazhuanian’, literally duck-claw like glutinous millet, "was the best variety for making caramel puffed millet, which used to be one of the desserts for the Spring Festival", said a farmer. "People now use sticky rice in place of millet, but the rice-made one does not taste as wonderful". Given that many people miss the old flavours of old varieties, Ruixaing

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and her friends saw an opportunity to link farmers who produce traditional varieties with marketplaces and consumers. They are exploring a ‘conservation-through-use’ approach that protects genetic resources and the culture associated with landraces, while expanding opportunities for the sustainability of farmers’ livelihoods and rural development. ■ [1] Wugu literally means Five Grains, which refers to a group of five farmed crops including rice, proso/broomcorn millet, foxtail millet, wheat, and soybeans. Chinese ancestors believed that the cultivation of Wugu was a sacred boon from a supernatural source.

[2] Mu , Chinese unit of land measurement. One mu equals to about 666.7 m2.

Edited by Bridget Atkin.

References: https://www.fao.org/millets-2023/en https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/international-year-of-millets-unleashing-the-potential-of-millets-for-the-well-being-of-people-and-the-environment/en https://chinadialogue.net/en/food/has-the-springsprung-for-chinas-crop-biodiversity/

Image sourced from Ali Kazal, Unsplash

PHYSICAL

Interview with Matthew Adeleye Matthew Harris To start, could you first tell me a bit about your work?

I am a palaeoecologist and I look at how the environment has changed in the past, how people have used it and how climate has driven changes in different landscapes. I am also interested in understanding the links between environment, climate and people. When I say people, I mean mostly indigenous communities. My main research regions include southeast Australia, western Africa, and the Pacific Northwest (Pacific Canada). I am currently working in southeast Australia, looking at how indigenous peoples first used the landscape in the areas following their arrival about 40,000 years ago.

It is believed that Indigenous Peoples in Australia used fire to manage open landscapes in the past which in turn promoted biodiversity and reduced the likelihood of large wildfires.

When Europeans arrived, the suppression of Aboriginal land management led to forest thickening across the landscape, and given the generally dry landscape of southeast Australia, this has resulted in major fires over the last 200 years. I am looking at the dynamics of Indigenous land use in the region over the last 40,000 years under different climatic regimes, to better inform the implementation of cultural management in present vegetation communities.

Are there particular palaeoecological proxies you study?

I look at pollen primarily to reconstruct past vegetation, and charcoal records to reconstruct fire activity. Then there are other non-pollen palynomorphs, such as algal and fungal remains to infer past changes in wetlands and human activity. Particularly one called Sporormiella, or the dung fungi (fungal spores associated with the poo of large herbivores). So when we look at those, we can infer past changes in large herbivore populations, including megafauna extinction and even grazing after European colonisation. To some extent, I also look at geochemical proxies (trace metals in sediment) to infer changes in climate, and of course local changes at a certain site. I also look at regional and continental ecological patterns, which I have done for the entire African continent and southeast Australia, where I looked at multiple palaeoecological records to understand much broader patterns of change at the biome and ecosystem levels.

In South East Australia, if you’re looking 40,000 years ago, how are you dating material? Isn’t this close to the limit of radiocarbon dating?

Luckily at sites I’ve been working on, we have been able to date sediments up to about 40,000 [yrs BP] and optical luminescence dating can be used to get a more precise date beyond that. The sites I am working on are really nice, with direct radiocarbon dates up to at least 38,000 yrs BP. The core I’m

Image sourced from Pat Whelen, Unsplash

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working on now dates back to 55,000 years. If the age-depth model suggests a core length of 100,000 years, then we would have applied optical luminescence dating or wiggle matching to everything after 50,000 years.

understand present-day environmental changes. ___

What kind of cores are you working with?

Matthew told me about the new method he had been using in Australia – functional palaeoecology – that brings together ecologists and palaeoecologists. Fewer than 20 studies have used this method in the whole world, and none in Australia. Functional palaeoecology allows the reconstruction of past plant traits (e.g., plant height, and seed and leaf physiology) from the pollen record.

Plant traits can be indicative of plant responses to climate.

Traits identified in contemporary plants can be matched to the pollen record to reconstruct changes in functional traits through time in response to past climate.This method has been used to identify ecosystems that may be at most risk of future climate impact in southeast Australia.

In Australia, peatland isn’t common, because it is typically a generally dry landscape. When I say lake in Australia, it is not necessarily a lake with water. It can be a dry, waterless lake.

Why is it then called a lake?

Because It was a lake in the past and can be again in the future. One of the oldest lakes in the world is in Australia, Lake George, and dates back to about 5 million years. Last summer it had no water, but presently it does. It is very shallow. Generally in Australia, if you take a sediment core [points to water bottle] that depth could be the last 1000 years, whereas in the UK, it could be the last 30 years.

Are you working with archaeologists and using archaeological data?

Yes, because I am not only interested in the climate side of things, how climate drives change in the environment.

I am also interested in how people interacted with environments in the past. Because in the current day, climate is changing things, but humans are also a major driver of climate-driven changes and other direct non-climate related changes. So it makes sense to learn from past human-environment interactions to better 15 | COMPASS

After this, unbeknownst to me, the recording stopped (we love technology!), but the conversation continued.

Matthew highlighted the multiple ways in which his research is conducted in partnership with Indigenous peoples, involving them throughout the project, including field work and result interpretation. He said that the process also facilitates knowledge exchange: Indigenous knowledge can help fill in the gaps found in the palaeo records and aid interpretation, whilst Matthew’s research and data helps to fill in some gaps in Indigenous knowledge of historical land-use as well.

To me, this felt very relevant in the context of the present day

focus on decolonising geography (and science in general).

When asked about how he associated his work with decolonisation, he said that there was a need to deconstruct dominant meanings of ‘science’. The term often exclusively refers to ‘western science’, ignoring alternative meanings of science which have existed within other cultures for a long time.

For example, he recalled seeing bridges in Africa similar to Cambridge’s mathematical bridge, which have been standing for hundreds of years.

Our discussion around Indigenous people and decolonisation moved on to current and historical conservation practices.

He talked of the use of armed guards to prevent local communities from accessing tropical rainforests for food and medicine, as they have been doing for hundreds of years. To prevent the resulting increase in poverty, western conservation strategies should not be striving for the exclusion of local/ indigenous communities from the forest, and instead draw on alternative epistemologies for its sustainable use. Another example is from Australia, where European colonisation has suppressed Indigenous cultural burning practices and land management that have maintained open landscapes for millennia, resulting in forest biomass fuel accumulation and catastrophic wildfires over the last century. It is high time we started considering long-term Indigenous land stewardship and knowledge in biodiversity/ ecosystem management frameworks and actions.

the multi-millenia Indigenous land management in Australia, I asked for Matthew’s views on defining land as ‘natural’.

He said that the landscapes in southeast Australia are not natural landscapes – they are cultural landscapes – and trying to shape conservation around the concept of ‘natural’ landscapes is not helpful. He argued that species have gone extinct and evolved throughout the Earth’s history, and trying to define a ‘natural landscape’ may be ambiguous. A good place to start will be to recognise landscapes as cultural systems where appropriate, which will help to better set conservation and management goals with the assistance of local/traditional/ Indigenous knowledge and expertise. ■ Edited by Bridget Atkin and Matthew Harris.

Image on left sourced from Heiko Otto, Unsplash; image on right sourced from USGS, Unsplash.

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Trees, Tephra and Microplastic: A glimpse into physical geography dissertations Edited by Matthew Harris Stubborn trees, scientific struggles (Alice Hughes) When I started my dissertation, my task was obvious and supposedly simple. Take pre-collected samples of larch tree radii from the alps, cut them into very thin slices (about as thick as tissue paper) and use chemical stains to reveal an anatomical anomaly known as a blue ring. A blue ring is an area of weakness in a tree ring though to be caused by cold temp-

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eratures which results in lignification not occuring.

It can only be revealed through chemical staining, which turns it blue. My goal was to form a possible hypothesis on the exact temperature that could cause one of these rings to form. The blue ring is new to the literature, which while exciting, opened my project up to a lot of unknowns.

Image sourced from Tyler Nix, Unsplash; images on right (from top) sourced from Alice Hughes; Joel Jasmin Forestbird, Unsplash

Image sourced from Ales Krivec, Unsplash

In early September I moved back to Cambridge, the department bizarrely quiet, and I set to work creating my thin slices of samples. This is where I hit my first issue. The samples I had been given to use were not taken with the goal of creating thin sections.

While some sections would have multiple intact sections taken in less than 15 minutes, there are others I would slave over for hours only to have the section snap in two, requiring me to discard any other sections from the tree in question. Finally, I had created the required 5 samples from each of my study sites (barring one particularly stubborn set which despite the best efforts of me and two lab-techs, no more than 2 could be made). I headed to the department’s Environmental Chemistry Lab, where I donned a lab coat, spent hours staring down a microscope and played with chemicals – living my mad-scientist dream! As my collection of stained samples grew, I realised I had not found a single blue ring. I called in reinforcements to check my samples, and it became very clear that there were no blue rings. After a few panic meetings my project was refocused to general wood anatomy in my samples, but my dreams of finding a blue ring had come to an end. However, I have created some gorgeous sections and found some incredible anomalies caused by volcanism and insect outbreaks, alongside being well and truly reminded that science never works.

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Finding ash, improving models (Jasmine Knight) I am investigating the 1875 eruption of Askja, examining the cryptotephra record to determine how ash was dispersed across the globe. After a volcanic eruption, airborne ash is hazardous to aviation, human health, and the environment. By attempting to model the dispersal of ash, we can better understand eruption dynamics and prepare for the risks posed by volcanic ash. However, very few eruption styles have been studied with modern satellite technology, which means historical eruptions are key for expanding our knowledge base on atmospheric dispersal patterns. The 1875 eruption of Askja is a classic example, and while models have been produced in attempts to determine the dispersal of ash, the models need to be validated with direct measurements. I am therefore attempting to identify ash from the 1875 eruption of Askja at three sites in Europe, all within the footprint of advanced models. This is possible using the cryptotephra record – microscopic grains of ash preserved in peatland and lake sediments. If ash is present, this not only extends the known boundary for Askja’s dispersal, but also validates existing atmospheric dispersal models, aiding their development and application to other historical and contemporary eruptions.

To get my project started, I travelled to Denmark in September to collect peat samples from pre-selected sites. The majority of peatlands in Europe are protected due to extensive peat cutting, so finding a suitable site that we had permission to take samples from was a challenge. However, we managed to find a great location in Denmark where some previous pollen research was conducted, so we knew there was material from the late 19th century. To collect the cores, we dug a deep hole and cut a monolith out of the side, which we bagged up into 1 cm chunks.

Back in the lab, I spent a few weeks processing the material and eventually got everything onto slides to start looking for tephra!

Images on left (from top) sourced from Ronan Furuta, Unsplash; Christian Buehner, Unsplash; Yoad Shejtman, Unsplash; images on right all sourced from Bridget Atkin

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The Scottish Peat Heist (Bridget Atkin) In September I visited Scotland to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation, with two fellow Corpuscles who had naively volunteered to be my assistants. Choosing to investigate the impact proximity to urban areas has on atmospheric microplastic deposition in ombrotrophic peatlands, I quickly regretted my decision to attempt a peat heist* in Scotland without a car. We visited four sites I’d chosen along a transect from Glasgow: Blawhorn Moss, Flanders Moss, Strath Nethy in the RSPB Abernethy Nature Reserve (NR), and Forsinard Flows RSPB NR. Travelling by train to Blawhorn Moss, east of Glasgow, the trip got off to a rough start as I’d failed to fully comprehend the weight of saturated peat. Despite successfully obtaining the samples required for my project, it was a slow retreat back to our Youth Hostel in Glasgow. The following day was spent exploring Glasgow before dragging ourselves, the peat and sampling equipment, further north towards the second location along the transect. Flanders Moss (west of Stirling) was the next site to be sampled, by which point we had become very efficient at excavating bogs.

The tried and tested method was to cut a square into the peat using a plastic-free knife looted from my grandma’s kitchen, and insert a square baking frame to help maintain the integrity of the sample. A block of peat was then retrieved using a shovel and wrapped numerous times in tin foil and parcel tape to bar contact with plastic. To prevent contamination of the samples we had reduced synthetic clothing to a minimum, which in Freddy’s case translated to a leather jacket and bucket hat on a rainy day in the Cairngorms (he studies philosophy). In addition to our creative clothing choices, control samples were taken from pre-plastic depths using an auger, frequently mistaken for a pogo stick. By the time we reached our final destination, a small village called Helmsdale on the east coast, I had been lured into a false sense of security as logistically, everything had so far gone as planned. This rapidly changed when we realised that our envisaged excursion to Forsinard Flows the following day was limited by a lack of trains. However, my dissertation was single-handedly saved by the hostel owner, who offered to drive us to the reserve. Weary from spending nine days together stomping across peat bogs, the three of us went our separate ways, peat in tow. The samples are now being analysed in the Geography Department using a novel laboratory methodology. I gratefully acknowledge the help of Freddy and James! *I did in fact have permission from landowners. ■ COMPASS | 20

Interview with Matt Osman Matthew Harris Can you tell me about your research?

Have you been writing models, using models, or both?

I’m a climate scientist, broadly defined. I am interested in climate dynamics of the deep and recent past, as well as what might happen in the future. A lot of what my work does is to condense down vast volumes of information available from geological archives, known as climate proxies, and pair them with modelling tools to try and reconstruct the past in a physically plausible way. I pair these two realms of understanding to refine our knowledge of the climate system, so that we can have a better understanding of what the future might hold. I’ve done this very far into the past, in recent decades, and I have worked a little bit on applying these models to the future.

Mostly, I synthesise large data outputs using global climate models that others have written. But I also do a lot of work on writing smaller models.

‘Model’ is an umbrella term – we can have statistical models and algorithms that are quite simple, or those that are quite complex. Similarly, we can have physical models that are quite simple or quite complex, like global climate models. I have written many simple to intermediate complexity models, but these larger-scale global climate model simulations are typically not something just one person can create. rect radiocarbon dates up to at least 38,000 yrs BP. The core I’m working on now dates back to

Image sourced from Matt Osman

55,000 years. If the age-depth model suggests a core length of 100,000 years, then we would have applied optical luminescence dating or wiggle matching to everything after 50,000 years.

How do you navigate using climate models in the current social and political climate?

I think that a lot of us, myself included, are motivated to do this science because there is a high degree of social relevance.

Given the current social and political climate, it’s obvious the science we put forward is going to have broader, and hopefully beneficial, impacts on decisions moving forward.

But the Earth’s climate system is also remarkably fascinating and complex, so there’s incentive to study it from a curiosity-driven standpoint alone. At the end of day, my goal is mainly to conduct interesting, careful, and useful science, and to share it in a way that is as objective and transparent as possible.

You have data that is spatially inconsistent because of the histories of dominant epistemologies.

Can you say your climate model is an objective representation if it is coming from data that is not representative?

That gets into a very specific realm of research that I am currently working in: how we go about synthesising climate measurements from regions that tend to be spatially biased.

You might have a lot of meas-

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urements from one location and very few from another, which in turn might fit into a broader historical context of underrepresentation in some areas of the world. So, if we can develop statistical methods for pairing measurements, for example with models or observations that are globally complete, we might be able to fill in the gaps and remove that sampling bias.

I remember a recent paper of yours about a global reconstruction of the past climate going back thousands of years.

Yeah, a paper that I put out developed a reconstruction of global climate spanning back to the last ice age, about 2024 thousand years ago. That is one example of where I was comparing a global compilation of proxy-based measurements with a model. From that we could reconstruct global climates. But what we had to overcome was a sampling bias. Because of existing power structures from where academics and climate scientists are situated, we’ve accrued a lot more measurements from the Northern Hemisphere. The approach I took to reconstruct past climate in that study – that is, by combining these measurements with the climate information we get from the models – provided a means of overcoming the sampling bias in a physically plausible way.

tion of institutions and scientists that is also equal across the world. I think we’re aiming for that, and we should continue to have that at the forefront of our minds as we push the science forward. But we also have to contend with the reality that we inhabit a world where there is this unequal distribution of measurements and where science is produced. So, in the interim, the next best step is to develop novel techniques to overcome this bias.

Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

Is there a way of bringing together different information and knowledge, such as regional knowledge on environmental change, into climate reconstructions?

I think we definitely can and we definitely should be striving for that. There are lots of climate measurements, and many different climate proxies we’re only just discovering . Each proxy has its own uncertainties and nuances that are specific to that domain. My stance is scientists coming from different locations, backgrounds, identities, and areas of expertise are needed to produce and better understand these data. Having such diverse specialisation is important to synthesise our research into a cohesive framework.

How does that fit into decolonising geography and science?

How can we ensure that lots of people with completely different skills can still understand and work with complex datasets such as those we get from climate models?

In a perfect world, we’d have measurements that are equally distributed around the globe.

And we’d have an underlying power structure or distribu

There are two ways we can look at it. Looking at the nuts and bolts of the model’s mechanics, and the complex ‘big data’ they produce, that’s one way. The COMPASS | 22

other concerns the ability to intuit model “trustworthiness”.

This one’s perhaps more approachable, but as interesting.

Model projections often exist within much larger socio-economic, ecologic, and political frameworks, meaning every student of geography should be invested in understanding the various types of uncertainties they entail. For example, what decisions go into running them? What are the limits to which we can use model outputs to make informed decisions? Or, where, how, and why are they being produced? If we care about the interconnectedness of our climate system with humans and ecosystems – if we care about our future – then we should care about these types of questions.

Do you think that there is a particular aspect of the Earth System that needs more focussed knowledge production?

Image sourced from Patrick Hendry, Unsplash

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If you asked this to one hundred different climate scientists, you will get one hundred different answers, I promise you that. So, my answer will be biased, but I’ll give you a twofold view. First, the largest uncertainty when you look at intermodel spread – how models differ from each other – is due to how clouds and cloud microphysics are being parameterized. A major emphasis should be on understanding cloud physics and reconciling this type of disagreement across our models. Once we are able to do that confidently, we will have a lot more confidence in what this intermodal spread actually means. Another aspect that sits a little closer to my own research interests right now is refining uncertainties related to

the global cryosphere. Projecting into the future, we know that the cryosphere is going to deplete regardless of emissions scenario: sea ice is declining, ice sheets are decaying, and snow cover is continuing to dwindle.

These changes will exacerbate climate change. But we have very little confidence in terms of the rate and eventual magnitude of these changes. As we continue to couple these icy systems into ever-more-complicated models, my stance is we should have a focus on refining long-term rates of change. The past offers a way to do that.

You have a PhD project around this. A lot of geographers feel they do not have the technical expertise for this type of research. Are geographers still well-placed for this type of research, and how can we feel more comfortable in this field?

Yes. What you gain from a geography degree is perspective: a broader systems-scale understanding of the world around you. When I go about doing climate research, I think first and foremost about how different aspects of the climate system interconnect. That, to me, is the value of a geography degree, and why geographic thinking is so important. Technical specialisation is also important, but it can mean very little if you can’t see the forest for the trees. I’ll also say this: I think when we endeavour towards increasingly niche research, we all initially tend to feel like we are a bit of an outsider. On a personal level, I started out my undergraduate career thinking I would be a music major! So I’ve always felt that I am in a continual transition away from where I started. A geography

Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

degree well places you to go in myriad directions. Whether you have focused on the human or the physical geographical side, you have had exposure to both. You’ve explored the complex nuances of how humans interact with the world, and have had exposure to the nitty gritty details of complicated data analysis and coding. To me, that is a powerful combination.

Could you tell me more about why you started with music?

I picked up music at a pretty late age growing up. I grabbed a bass guitar in my pre-teen years at the behest of some friends who were starting a garage punk band. Soon after I discovered that my secondary school needed a bassist for their jazz and concert band. So, after vigorously teaching myself to read music over a few weeks, I auditioned for the band and made it. I fell in love with the physical and intellectual challenges that music offered and devoted myself to it, to the extent that I was ultimately able to pay my way through college on a music scholarship. Later, in college, I fell backwards into a love of geosciences after scaring myself out of taking a compulsory introductory maths class. Ironically enough, I would go on to also get a maths degree, after realising the necessity of maths to address interesting earth-related questions. So, the lesson in all this, I guess, is to stay curious and confident in trying new things! It’s never too late to learn new tricks to answer questions about the world around you. ■ Edited by Bridget Atkin, Matthew Harris and Matt Osman.

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TRAVEL

Reflections on Solo Travel Rob Barker

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Image sourced from Federico Bottos, Unsplash

In my day-to-day life, I’m not someone who is hugely great at self-reflection or going slow. From really ignoring how I feel within, to not acknowledging the glaringly obvious fact that not doing anything is in fact, healthy, they are things which I really don’t tend to do – at all. Born out of my arguable need to escape Cambridge during the vacations, and with the opportunity afforded to me by my college's travel grants, going it solo when it comes to travel has offered me insightful opportunities to work on this.

I was first plunged into the scary world of solo travel when I received an email from my college's Tutorial Office, notifying me I had been accepted for funding for a trip to Paris in the Easter Vacation of 2022.

The need to organise the entire logistical operation of transport, housing and occupying myself for one week straight – on my own – was an interesting task.

However, despite bickering inner monologues and an Excel spreadsheet that could put any geography coursework dataset to shame, I made it, arriving fresh-faced and intrigued at Gare De Nord on a sunny Sunday in April. What awaited me was a glorious week of self-discovery. My naïve mistake of only packing my chunkiest pair of Doc Marten Boots was the first in many flaws, as my inability to navigate the Paris metro led me to trace up and down, arrondissement to arrondissement, across the city by foot – resulting in painful and persistent blisters. But Below: Mastering the art of self timer, avec baguette.

ultimately, none of that mattered – the freedom to wander a grand city alone, to decide when to wake up, when enough is enough of the hordes of crowds at the Jardin Des Plantes, and not having to answer to anyone but yourself triumphed above any form of Doc-Marten-induced injury. The idea of travelling alone, once so foreign and intimidating, was now slowly shifting like a second skin – I was becoming a natural. And that spreadsheet? Faded into the distance. It’s in these beautiful moments of absolute chaos, such as missing my train back to the UK because I was preoccupied with a Tinder date … in a graveyard … and losing my glasses in the process due to a mad dash through customs, that I wouldn’t change for the world. It's here where I learn the most about myself and genuinely feel alive.

Next came Berlin, Vienna and Bratislava at the end of Summer, where my rave reviews of the different vegetarian delights on offer at each country’s McDonalds took my Instagram close-friends story by storm. It was, however, my most recent journey to Slovenia in January which was the most impactful.

With the intention of going to a place immersed in nature, I arranged a long journey to Triglav National Park via Zagreb (Croatia), Ljubljana and Bled. I chose very consciously for this trip not to plan much in advance and therefore was faced with an awkward eight days punctuated by the prepaid buses which would ferry me from location to location. It’s in this solitude which I allowed myself the time and the ability to thrive. In reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) as I waited at bus terminals and trundled along through the Slovenian and Croatian countryside, I was enlightened by something Odell highlights as ‘bioregionalism’ – a fitting term to dissect as a geographer.

In her extended essay on the state of the attention economy and its detrimental effects, she provides bioregionalism as a solution rooted in nature. This is the idea of seeking to bridge the growing divide between humanity and nature, created by the unsustainable and increasing pace of human lives, of which an increased awareness and understanding of your surroundings is one approach (do read her book for more!). This for me is something which I believe captures the joys of solo travel. Left with nothing but your thoughts and the world around you, it really is an expansive place for growth – the burden and metaphorical ‘luggage’ of commitment not holding you back. In doing so, you can begin to appreciate the surroundings and the awe of nature, which has been around for many epochs before you.

The intersection between man and nature is a fasciCOMPASS | 26

nating and intricate one, and for me, solo travel affords the space to be able to really focus on just that – the little things. Where a monolithic landscape can be broken down, understood and dissected for what it is. The notion of a palimpsest stuck out to me in first-year geography, and now I understand why, as I was able to picture a landscape and appreciate its intricate historic makeup from a distant yet immersed perspective for the first time.

That’s one of the ways in which solo travel really has been affirmative for me. All the mentions of self-confidence aside, it really has allowed me to reflect and be honest within. My personal relationship with the world around me is daunting and overwhelming. If you’re any bit of an overthinker like me, you might find that relatable. But where overwhelm may have once been drowning, I can now bask in the sense of grounded awe, wonder and curiosity about the world around me. It’s the raw sense of responsibility for looking after yourself and the ability to indulge in some of the purest forms of quality time that characterises solo travel. My introspective trip to Slovenia and Croatia was intensified by the off-season, with my walks around Lake Bled and the wider national park being done in complete solitude. From the low fog hugging the mountains around Lake Bled when I arrived, to the neon orange mushrooms the mycology Subreddit helped me identify, to the crystal-clear water flowing through deep crevasses, the pastel pink clouds looking deliciously edible at 3pm and to the immense solitude affording me space to be able to reflect on knowledge old and new, solo travel really is something I would recommend for everyone. That introspection and being able to be comfortable with that internal silence is something which my experiences have allowed me to learn. So, if my Spotify Wrapped has a significantly lower level of minutes listened to this year, well, you now know why! ■ Edited by Aidan Crowson Pictures on the left (from the top): reading on the shores of Lake Bohinj, Slovenia; a cold Robert selfie at Lake Bled, Slovenia; and Triglav National Park, Slovenia.

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Image sourced from Banjamin Voros, Unsplash

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'Teacher Trap' or Tourist Trap?

Navigating Teaching English Abroad Harri Thomas A staple of the gap-year plan, teaching English abroad as a second language (ESL), has grown massively in popularity amongst 20-somethings seeking employment, travel, and the chance to fully immerse themselves in a new place and culture. Carefully separating themselves from more notably controversial and widely discredited schemes of extractive ‘voluntourism’, teaching agencies and organisations have supported a blossoming industry of opportunities, promising those interested unforgettable experiences in far-flung locations, with specific emphasis on particularly remote or ‘exotic’ environments across the Global South. Opportunities increasingly ditch requirements for any formal qualifications, previous

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experience or even any funding contributions from participants, instead framing these unmissable experiences as ones of cultural exchange, mutual benefit, and a chance for those interested to pick up cross-cultural skills while – crucially – ‘finding themselves’. As opportunities for teaching abroad become more readily available to a pool of graduates and young people markedly dissatisfied with the conventional 9-to-5, it might help to ask: are these schemes really the win-win they are made out to be?

Or rather do they fall victim to the same problematic and neo-colonial tropes of other, similar opportunities inviting young westerners to the global South?

Image sourced from Hiep Nguyen, Unsplash

Images sourced from Iestyn Jenkins

To get to the heart of why ESL schemes have gained such popularity, it might be productive to take a look behind why those involved chose to take the leap towards teaching abroad in the first place, and how industry leaders encourage certain images of teaching to, inevitably, draw applicants. For Iestyn Jenkins, a recent TESOL-trained (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) participant on an ESL programme in Thailand, the move was tied to a post-COVID desire to “see more of the world” without the associated hefty price tag, pitching the move primarily as one rooted in an eagerness to travel. Indeed, teaching abroad in such settings does resemble a sort of half-way point between emigration and tourism, where the impacts to local economies and communities differ from more overtly extractive processes of conventional mass tourism.

Speaking to me from his placement almost a year to the day of his arrival, Iestyn enthusiastically discussed preparing for the move through working as a teaching assistant in the UK for six months beforehand, resulting in him having more teaching experience than the vast majority of his colleagues. Iestyn spoke of feelings of familiarity and routine within his role in a secondary school, as he’d remained there for the majority of his time in the country and felt that the experience was truly two-way in its benefit. Searching online for similar accounts however revealed that this more positive account was not the case across the board, as a slew of confessional videos on platforms like Youtube and Tiktok reveal persistent frustrations with the unexpected difficulty and nature of the job – which appears to consistently conflict with preconceived ideas of what the job involves in terms of pay, conditions, and career progression. Several established expats warned younger people against the ‘trap’ of teaching abroad, as they took aim at perhaps overly idealistic or picturesque marketing strategies which failed wholeheartedly to reflect the difficulty and reality of the vocation.

Teaching abroad also brings up some difficult conversations around the ethics of involvement and how potentially problematic practices or dynamics might emerge. In any conversation around volunteering/ working abroad – particularly in the context of the global South – ethical concerns about paternalism and the white saviour complex rightly surface. Approaches concerning education and community outreach should engage with this in a particularly robust way, seeking to approach any work with cultural sensitivity, the acknowledgement of privilege, and an enthusiasm COMPASS | 30

towards practices that prioritise cultural and linguistic exchange over imposition. Although inserting largely unqualified young westerners into classroom environments abroad might appear a slightly blunt or ineffective way to engage with this process, it appears that some across the sector have taken the message on board. In Iestyn’s experience, concerns about the impact of the work, and the harmful relationships it might sustain, appeared of great personal importance. Opting to remain in one location for most of his stay, Iestyn linked greater embeddedness in the community to a deeper apprehension of his particular positionality. Iestyn contrasted his own experiences with more extractive schemes which involve “a kind of swooping in that’s done by some people, where they just pop in, take what they can from the experience and leave without making much of a lasting difference”. Adapting to the needs of local individuals and groups appears, then, a start in ameliorating issues of power imbalance and

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Image sourced from Warren, Unsplash

problematic relations. Comparing this experience though with the wealth of literature on the value of decolonial pedagogies in ESL settings (and a frustrating lack of adoption of such principles), it’s evident that many organisations have a long way to go in adapting practices towards greater cultural humility, particularly in terms of sensitivity to local uses and engagements with English, as well as the navigation of certain cultural tensions.

It’s clear that problems persist within the growing industry surrounding ESL schemes. Idealistic visions of ‘too-good-to-be-true’ escapes widely contrast the reality of laborious projects and repeated “trial by fire” moments, where the lack of experience or qualifications amongst participants can come into tension with the very pressing needs of young people and communities. ESL schemes certainly stand apart from more flagrantly performative and redundant ‘voluntourism’ schemes, but the two camps

share many issues in their navigation of cultural difference, and the prevalence of relationships and power imbalances that could be deemed problematic or extractive. Other, undiscussed issues of pay disparity between local and foreign teachers and teaching job shortages for locals also contribute to the sense that introducing largely well-intentioned but inexperienced teachers into communities – particularly more remote and rural communities – might yield counterintuitive results. Still, it feels crucial to acknowledge nuance here: the sector, and the organisations which comprise it, differ wildly in their practices and priorities. It seems valuable too to mention that experiences of communities with ESL teachers rely as much on individuals as the organisations that represent them. ESL schemes truly aren’t going anywhere, but it might be time for us to imagine how they can be better configured to serve the needs of communities. ■

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Image sourced from Jack Young, Unsplash

Cornwall Fieldtrip 2023: A joyous occasion!

Aiden Crowson and Taybah Khan-Lodhi This March we were part of the lucky group of 20 geographers who went on a field trip to the beautiful county of Cornwall. Accompanied by Dr Harriet Allen, Neil Arnold and Gareth Rees, we voyaged to the quaint Woodland Valley Farm near St Austell.

We had a wonderful week exploring the farm’s pioneering beaver sanctuary, the Eden Project, the Cornish Alps, and crafting our own research projects!

Saturday 18th March was an early start, beginning our seven-hour coach journey at 8am. Upon arrival in Cornwall, we were greeted by the charming farm owner Chris Jones and given an introductory talk about the farm. Woodland Valley Farm is a small organic farm of 170 acres, home to one of the UK’s first beaver reintroduction projects – the Cornwall Beaver Project – which was established in 2017. It hosts an educational centre, where we stayed in bunkrooms and were treated to delicious home-cooked meals every night by Chris’s daughter Felicity. We had some time to frolic in the farm’s daffodil fields and meet some friendly lambs, before a steaming lasagne dinner and session at the farm’s ‘Boozy Beaver Bar’. Then, off to bed for a fun-packed week!

On the second day we were awoken by the soothing sounds of rooks circling above the farmhouse and enjoyed a rousing breakfast of muesli, yoghurt, and toast. Our first excursion, led by Chris, was a tour of the Cornwall Beaver Project, which consists of a 200m section of stream, trees and beaver ponds inside an enclosure. We learned about beaver ecology and Chris stressed the importance of beavers in this area as they bring many benefits through their work as “natural engineers” including flood reduction, drought prevention, and even carbon capture.

Gareth Rees introduced methods for measuring carbon storage in trees, using a clinometer and a comically long tape measure. We explored the woodlands whilst learning about the importance of trees for carbon sequestration. One aspect of the trip which made those of us with attachment issues to our phone start shaking was the lack of WiFi and good service. So instead of mindlessly scrolling before dinner was served, we kicked a rock around in the carpark.

After a long day being out in the cold, a Sunday roast was much appreciated and re-energised us for our evening beaver walk. As beavers are nocturnal and shy we had to wait for the cover of darkness to spot one of the cuddly creatures. Those of us brave enough to face the baltic temperature and creepy darkness ventured back to the beaver enclosure with two incredibly bright torches. Walking single file through the enclosure, we surveyed the ponds looking for any sign of a beaver. Waiting in silence in the dark and the rain with minimal light source had a rather spooky feel to it but the anticipation of spotting a beaver helped us to keep our spirits up. Just as we were about to give up and return to the farm in defeat, we saw the joyous sight of a beaver’s cheeky nose (the haters say it might have been a large water vole) swimming across the pond. After the rousing success, we skipped back to the farmhouse and enjoyed a celebratory game of cards and bananagrams (We spent many many hours on the farm playing cards and bananagrams) before retiring to bed to dream about the excitement day 3 would bring us.

Day 3 was a very exciting one, as we travelled to the Eden Project to explore its two biomes! Jamie, our dishy guide, started the day off with a talk exploring the project’s founding as a national leader in conservation education and sustainable business practice, and an important hub for the Cornish economy.

Jamie then toured us through the mediterranean and tropical rainforest biomes in turn, where we were immersed in the sights, smells, warmth, and humidity and learned many cool ecological facts, including getting to hold one Australian fire-resistant pinecone which looked a bit like a grenade. We enjoyed a lunch in the Eden Project Cafe and then had some free time before leaving during which we gallivanted up a wobbly viewing platform in the rainforest biome and found some lovely postcards in the gift shop to write to our friends on the trip to Morocco about all the fun we were having.

On Tuesday morning, for reasons unknown, Aidan and I decided to wake up at 6am for the promise of another beaver sighting. Sadly, we did not manage COMPASS | 34

to see even a slither of a beaver. But we were not disillusioned and were determined to return. After breakfast, Driver Darren took us to the Wheal Martyn Clay Works, the UK’s only china clay mining museum! Our very Cornish tour guide informed us about how important mining was for Cornwall.

We had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the grounds of the Victorian clay works and learn about how the Cornish people’s lives were shaped by the “white gold”. The grounds were full of lovely mossy woodland and streams stained white by the clay, and our inner child was very content as we lived our fairytale dreams. After solving a particularly tricky sliding puzzle in the museum and exiting through the gift shop, we had our lunch in the dinky museum cafe. Before setting off we took a minute to further connect with our inner child and constructed a Brio rail network comparable to the London Underground.

Next on our adventure was a trip to the Cornish Alps.

The journey was treacherous up some very steep inclines. Luckily, Darren handled the altitude change like a champ and the scenery was stunning. Unlike the actual Alps, the Cornish Alps were made out of clay waste rather than snow. The sheer size of the Alps showed the large impact they had on both the landscape and the people who worked in the mines.

Next we visited a wind farm. Unsurprisingly, it was incredibly windy and Harriet had to shout over the sound of the spinning turbines and whistling winds.

We learned about the landscapes of energy and how, despite being a source of green energy, there are many who oppose their prevalence in Cornwall.

This was our final stop and we returned back to the farm. Wednesday was our final full day in Cornwall, and a big one - project day! Splitting into groups of 3-5, we were given the freedom to investigate an issue of our choice on either the farm or back at the Eden Project. As we both did very different projects, here’s a bit from each of us.

Taybah: My group decided to stay on the farm more so we based our project on tree biomass. After a slow start accidentally following the groups interested in measuring water quality we got to assessing the trees. The aim of our study was to​​investigate how much beavers change above ground biomass and variation in carbon storage along the river inside and outside the beaver enclosure. Our methods included sampling every 20m down a transect that took us through the beaver enclosure and through the woods, we used an angle measurement 35 | COMPASS

technique to measure the base area fraction and a clinometer to estimate tree height. Despite some dodgy counting from some members of our group and getting slightly stuck in the mud, I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the farm. After lunch we were tasked with collating our data and we used our measurements to calculate the growing stock volume. With our results we were able to graph how growing stock volume changed along our transect and we established that beaver flooding does decrease above ground biomass and carbon storage.

However we concluded that land use is more important than beavers for variations in biomass.

Aidan: meanwhile, my group decided to return to the Eden Project to conduct the only human project of the trip; critically investigating how the project represents its two biomes as emblematic of the global North and South. It was relatively chilled fieldwork, consisting of walking around the two biomes and taking notes and photographs of their structure, design and information boards. After lunch, we had a group discussion and carried out a discourse analysis of our notes. We found that the Project did a great job at portraying the global South’s agency, but observed some binaries between the mediterranean biome as one of rich Eurocentric culture and history, which contrasted to sights of exotic tribes and emotional deforestation in the rainforest biome.

We think we did Emma Mawdsley proud, and felt envious of our pals spending a whole week with her in Morocco. We had a bit of time to run back into the rainforest biome and get sprayed with mist in the cloud forest and meet the friendly roul-roul birds (pest controllers) that looked a bit like feathery mangoes, and evoke Mamma Mia with a brief photoshoot in the mediterranean biome, before being whisked back by Darren to the farm.

On our final evening, we all polished up and then delivered our presentations outlining our project findings. Much interesting knowledge was shared that evening, as we munched a rich sausage (veggie for the veggies) and beans stew with rice, followed by syrup sponge that really added to the inner child experience of the trip. After the talks a big group of us ventured out on a final beaver walk. It had been a week of many hours spent in the beaver enclosure, and many disappointments, so we had all our fingers crossed for the beavers to put on a display we’d never forget… We spent almost 2 hours that night traversing the banks of the main beaver pond with our eyes COMPASS | 36

wide, our torches bright and our mouths silent.

Just as we were about to give up hope and return to the farm, there it was!!! A beautiful beaver, elegantly gliding through the water on the other side of the pond and browsing through the vegetation.

It stayed above-water for close to 3 minutes and we all stood completely fixated, a mixture of awe and elation, trying to keep our yelps of excitement silent.

Alain, our designated beaver photographer, was able to capture some incredible shots of the beaver using a long lens, which we were all ecstatic to be able to use as proof of our epic sighting. We pranced back to the barn in jubilation, and played a final round of cards and bananagrams before heading off to sleep.

A perfect night.

We woke up woefully on Thursday morning after realising it was our final morning on Woodland Valley Farm. Aidan arose early for a final swing on the famous rope swing. Lazy Taybah chose to stay in bed.

We piled our breakfast plates high with baked beans in preparation for the long coach journey home. After making doubly sure we packed all belongings, we kissed the farm goodbye and trundled onto the coach for the last time. We were racing down the motorway before what we now refer to as laptopgate, when one of the group members realised he had left his laptop on the farm. Luckily for him, we were only 20 minutes into the journey and good-natured Darren took us back to rescue the laptop. Then we returned to the open road. The coach journey back was very quiet as everyone was absolutely exhausted from the week of fun and learning.

All in all, the Cornwall trip was one of wondrous fun.

It was a week of reconnection with our inner child, from meeting farmyard animals to playing on rope swings and Brio train sets. We learned lots about ecology and conservation issues, gained some useful practical skills which many of us will go on to use in our dissertations, and loved spending time with the warm and welcoming Chris and Felicity on the farm. And above all, we made new friends! Thanks to our geographical peers for such great company and giggles - it’s a week we’ll treasure forever. ■ All images sourced from Aidan Crowson and Taybah Khan-Lodhi

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Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

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Sixth Form Essay Competition Winner: Roxanne Michael, Woodhouse College

'The United Kingdom's economic goals are incompatible with global environmental goals.' Discuss.

The mediation between the drive to improve the economy as well as preserve the environment has been an everlasting and prevalent battle. As Greta Thunberg addressed; ‘Our current economics is still totally dependent on burning fossil fuels,’ indicating environmental damage in necessary for the United Kingdom's economic development. Is it ethically right to improve a country's economy at the expense of global environmental deprivation? The United Kingdom's primary economic goals: economic growth, price stability, low unemployment, a reduction of national debt and a balance of payments stive to produce a more stable and healthy national economy. While this may ensure the UK as influential and leading global force it is incompatible with the global environmental goals established. These goals: mitigation, adaptation, finance and collaboration, are time sensitive with a worldwide impact, their importance emphasised by 7 of the 17 global goals being environmental based and being the topic of high-profile meetings such as the United Nations Assembly in 2017. The global aims in this essay will be primarily based of COP26 excluding the most recent COP27 where the goals are too recent to see significant development and where the participation of the UK was questioned. While the United Kingdom has been influential in global preservation, like hosting COP26, it is contradictory to its own aims by pushing their own economic goals while reducing any advancements made globally for preservation of the environment.

Economic growth is a fundamental goal for many countries as it is expected to improve standards of living within the country as well as increase its exposure to the world through an increase in trade and importance. Like many countries this is one of the UK’s primary economic goals. The Uk stives for a better and improved economy which is essentially a steady increase in national output. It is defined as an increase in the productive capacity of an economy. One way this can be achieved is an increase in capital goods.

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The primary impact of the production of capital goods is the release of toxic air pollutes such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide which contribute to the greenhouse effect, accelerating global warming, and causing the production of other toxic materials such as asbestos. In addition, it also creates a secondary effect due to its production purpose to build further products to supply consumers, which will continue to release these same emissions. This contradicts the global environmental goal of mitigation- reducing emissions. 153 countries in the assembly of COP26 put forward new 2030 emission targets. The Glasgow Climate Pact puts in place the underpinning rules and systems which warranted countries agreeing to reconvene the next year with new strengthened commitments, a new UN climate programme on mitigation ambition, and to finalise the Paris Rulebook. While the Uk supported these aims in assembly, including the aims of mitigation, its Captial goods continued to increase with the average annual growth rate of net capital stock by 1.2% despite the environmental impacts. Which also contradicts the aim of collaboration, the agreement to work together to deliver these goals. The UK reduces its use of mitigation strategies to increase its GPD which demonstrates how the UK’s economy is dependent on unsustainable use of the environment's commodities which is incompatible with global environmental goals.

The UK’s balance of payments is arguably incompatible with global environmental goals labelled ‘adaptation & loss and Damage’ and ‘finance’. Balance of payments is the value of exports being equalised to the value of imports This means the government attempts to spend a similar amount of money importing goods as exporting goods. This reduces the leakages lost from the UK’s economy ensuring a heathier economy. In 2022 the value of exports was $501.1 billion compared with the value of imports being $137.16 billion according to ‘world's top exports’.

The difference of $363.94 exemplifies the imbalance of payments present in the UK’s economy.

Image on right sourced from Alev Takil, Unsplash

For the UK’s economy to balance imports to exports they must increase their exports. This would require initial investment which is an increase in government spending increasing opportunity costs.

However, the environmental goals of both finance and adaptation requires government spending too.

The global environmental goal labelled ‘Finance’ requires delivering a $100 billion climate finance goal by 2023. This must be pioneered by developed countries like the UK which have more available money in their economy. ‘Adaptation & Loss and Damage’ also requires a substantial amount of funding too.

In COP26 record amounts of adaptation finance has been pledged, doubling 2019 levels of adaptation finance by 2025. This was the first time an adaptation specific financing goal has ever been agreed to globally. This makes it vital that the United Kingdom contribute to achieve these goals having one of the top economies in the world. While the UK may have a large economy and an impressive GDP when compared globally, there is still limited resources and money to spend. The UK is unable to fund both its own economic goal of balance of payments and global environmental goals. If the UK government decided to invest in both endeavours this will be borrowed money, which will further increase National debt which goes against yet another economic goal. Therefore, the global environmental goals are incompatible with the United Kingdom's personal goals.

Some people may oppose this stance and argue that the United Kingdom's economic goals are compatible with global economics goals. This could perhaps be argued for the goal; ‘low unemployment’. Reducing unemployment brings production closer to edge of the production possibility curve and therefore the optimum a country can produce when there is full employment. Not only does this have numerous social benefits like ensuring more households have stable incomes, but it also is extremally valuable in

mproving a country's economy. Full employment makes a country not only more efficient and productive but can possibly create sustainable economic growth. This, at first glance, does not coincide with any of the global environmental goals as it is predominately localized within the UK and has potentially has few external impacts. Full employment can happen while mitigation, adaptation, financial goals and collaboration are achieved. Perhaps it could even accelerate the speed at which these goals are achieved as more people working in the country means more economically active individuals are able to pay tax which then provides the government with more disposable income which could be used to invest in various environmental goals.

However, with more disposable income, more individuals can buy more luxury goods increasing unnecessary production causing a negative multiplier effect leading to detrimental damage to our environment. Employment is also likely to increase the risk of commuting. An increase in business related flights and an increased use of cars releases these toxic fumes which reduces the effectiveness of the mitigation strategies used for the environmental goals. This reiterates my previously argued ideas that the United Kingdom's goals are incompatible with global environmental goals.

To summarise, while it is accepted that not all the United Kingdom's economic goals directly prevent or reduce the effect of global environmental goals, it is naive to only look at local and first-hand impacts and view them as compatible. All of the United Kingdom's primary economic goals interfere with the global environmental goals in some way whether directly- like the balance of payments- or indirectly- like reducing unemployment- which causes the UK’s economic goals to be overall incompatible with global environmental goals. ■

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Image sourced from USGS, Unsplash

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