Editorial Notes

Abstract

Editorial Notes Jim Craine As all APCG members know , the Yearbook is the publication of record for all things related to our annual meetings. As such, this issue of the Yearbook contains all of the material related to the Seventieth Annual Meeting: the Presidential Address, the Meeting Report, the Student Paper Award winners, the Resolutions, the Abstracts, and our two Distinguished Service Award recipients. What I cannot possibly begin to provide is any worthwhile description of all that transpired at the Long Beach meeting. Not one, but two weddings shared the same space as our sessions and, I have to admit, having musical accompaniment to some of the PowerPoint presentations (especially in the subsonic bass frequencies) was an interesting juxtaposition and, planned or unplanned, was certainly a fun deviation from past conferences. Stuart Aitken, the new department chair at San Diego State (and next APCG president), was my dissertation advisor, and I think I will suggest to him that the San Diego meeting be a geographically themed rave. As I stated in last year’s introduction, the Yearbook thrives on articles that contain significant visual support in the form of illustrations, maps, tables, and other graphics. This issue continues to highlight articles of that nature, and I encourage prospective authors to consider work outside normative academic submissions: given the number of our members who work in the field, we encourage photographic essays that highlight the physical and cultural diversity of our region. Also, continuing the tradition began last year, our cover is an image of the current year’s meeting site—Alaska. This year, we offer a wide range of subject matter from all four corners of our region. I am very pleased to include David Nemeth’s piece on Carl Sauer, the Berkeley tradition, and feng-shui. I have always been an admirer of David’s “outsider” approach to geography (especially his Route 666 presentation) and am glad to provide a venue for this thoughtful (and thought-provoking) piece. Although a resident of Ohio, David has for many years been an active participant in the APCG, and I think it speaks well of our intellectual diversity (and our reputation for entertaining geography) that he chose to submit the article. As a (retired) musician, I am also quite pleased to include Aaron Kingsbury’s article on hole hole bushi, the music of Japanese plantation workers in late 19th-century Hawai‘i. I was present at Aaron’s talk at the Long Beach meeting, and I wish we had the capability to include the audio content he used to complement his oral presentation. [End Page 9] I would certainly encourage anyone who, after reading the article, finds him- or herself interested in this music to contact Aaron about how to obtain the recordings. For those of us living in southern California, the conclusions reached by Steve LaDochy come as no surprise. Seeing the information quantified is, however, quite sobering and should help to bring to the forefront the role the APCG should take in the discourse surrounding global climate change. Gabe Judkins discusses the mechanisms contributing to the decline in cotton cultivation in Arizona, a topic that crosses into a number of different geography subfields and highlights the importance of empirical fieldwork in our discipline. Although the confluence is unintentional, this issue offers three different views into the Pacific Northwest: Gina Bloodworth and James White take us through the 75-year history of the Columbia Basin project, while James Lowry, Mark Patterson, and William Forbes provide an interesting look at how the “Northwest” is perceived by college students from a variety of other regional universities (the results are quite enlightening and entertaining). It is also a pleasure to offer a piece from one of our esteemed emeritus colleagues. We have always encouraged retired faculty to submit work that draws upon their many years of geographical insight, and Richard L. Nostrand has done just that. Taking us back to his high school days in Seattle, Dr. Nostrand follows the dispersal of his 1957 graduating class and offers his own explanations as to the resulting spatial pattern. I hope other retired and emeritus faculty will follow Dr. Nostrand’s example and contribute something...