Natura Italiana

Ana Paula Giorgi, Italian-Brazilian scholar of island biogeography, gives me a ride at our informal department wine party last weekend. The cart was retrieved from Wilshire Blvd by yours truly and grad student Emmanuele who is visiting for the year from one of my previous homes...Bologna, Italy. The UCLA geography department is well-known for its specialization in Italian studies, so for Italianophiles like myself it's a great place to be. For other pictures from the night, including Tristan with no pants on, thank our killer IT man Brian Won.




Lee's Sandwiches is a Korean sandwich shop in Irvine where I ate on Friday. Irvine is at the southeastern most tip of Orange County, which is the county south of L.A. county. Irvine is the generic boring suburb par excellance. It is all new, all the same, and it all looks like a movie set that you could knock over with a puff of air. Even the food here tasted fake...they had pink prosciutto...yucky. I was at Irvine to visit a professor with whom I might spend the spring academic quarter at UC-Santa Cruz. Her name is Julie Guthman, and she is one of the leaders in the geography of food and agriculture studies. We got along swimmingly, so it looks like it will be a go - exciting! Julie is currently on sabbatical at UC-Irvine, so it worked out well for me to drive down and visit her.




The sabbatical that Guthman is doing at UC-Irvine is the same program that one of my previous advisors Bill Cronon did in the mid-1990s. It's a program that brings together scholars to think about a certain topic then publish something. In Cronon's case the sabbatical ended in the book Uncommon Ground, now a famous must-read for philosophers of nature. In the book's introduction Cronon talks about how nature can't be held down even in overly-constructed and manicured landscapes like Irvine. One of the examples he uses is that in this exact university park (above) there are still snails that inch their way across the paved walkways, despite efforts by workers to control every living thing.