“Oh, you’re a geographer. [PAUSE] Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“They still have that?”
“Yup.”
“So do you know all the state capitals?”
“Uhhh—”
“You must have a really good sense of direction.”

Fear not, my fellow geographers… Now you can really show off your geographic badassness by trying your luck at GeoGuessr, an online game in which you’re virtually plopped into a random spot in the street-view world of google maps and you’re supposed to guess where in the world you are. You get to poke around a little. The closer to the actual spot, the higher your score. And it shows you how far off the mark your guesses are. You get five “plops” per game.

“Confessions of a Troll…” about power on the Internets or as a friend put it: the Master-Slave Dialectic in the Age of Digital Reproduction.

Also about Internets: Stuart Elden pointed me to a piece on how a lone hacker gave us the most complete map of the Internet ever made (see above). S/he mentions wanting to work on an “Internet scale.”

Having a bad day? Would it help if I put it in (temporal) context for you?

Interesting review by Trevor Paglen of Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics.

New Left Review

At the root of this global sea-grab is the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty that took a nation’s territorial sea, which extends for 12 nautical miles, and added a 200-mile resource zone—a new territorial extension called an “Exclusive Economic Zone” (EEZ). Nolan does not get into this, but the EEZ is one of those awkward geographies that characterizes the sea as a political space: the EEZ at the same time couples and de-couples political and economic sovereignty. Now, the excerpts from Nolan’s NLR article:

The [Diaoyu/Senkaku island] territory in question is of historical and strategic significance, and it may well possess substantial natural resources, to which [China] would gain access if its claims were successful. However, the resources of the South China Sea need to be seen in comparative perspective with those obtained by the US and the former European colonial powers through the enactment of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

UNCLOS effected a revolutionary change in the law of the sea by allowing countries to establish a new resource zone called the ‘exclusive economic zone’ (EEZ) adjacent to their territorial sea, and which extends 200 nautical miles from the baselines from which the territorial sea is measured.

Yet while the complex contention between China and its neighbours over maritime resources has dominated Western discussions, the colossal resource grab by former colonial powers that UNCLOS facilitated has almost entirely escaped international attention.

A critically important part of UNCLOS is the provision that islands are entitled to the same maritime zones as land territory, with each allowed an EEZ of 200 nautical miles (370 kilometres).

Some of these islands are exotic tourist destinations, others are wildlife reserves, others still house scientific research stations; many are regarded as eccentric anachronisms. However, these ‘scattered remnants’ of the old colonial empires turned out to be far more significant than most people realize. These far-distant territories are often of immense strategic significance, with many of them containing American naval and air-force bases, as well as reconnaissance facilities. Under UNCLOS, they have also become important in the allocation of legally enforceable property rights over the world’s natural resources.

[He writes about the South Atlantic (Falklands et al), which is, by far, the Britain's largest EEZ.]

Britain also retains several exotic remnants of its eighteenth-century slave empire in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, including Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Their total land area is only 1,093 square kilometres, and their population around 201,000 people. But their EEZ is 903,000 square kilometres, about the same as China’s undisputed EEZ.

Though the UK’s total EEZ is enormous, it pales by comparison with that of France. The latter’s overseas EEZ, legacy of its colonial empire, is more than thirty times the size of that of metropolitan France (Table 3). Its former slave-based sugar colonies in the Caribbean and North Atlantic have a combined exclusive zone of 903,000 square kilometres; those in the Indian Ocean total 2.58 million, while France’s EEZ in the Pacific Ocean is no less than 6.9 million square kilometres.

A year after UNCLOS was enacted, [Ronald] Reagan duly proclaimed the EEZ of the United States [even though the U.S. is not a signatory]. It is the largest of any state by a wide margin, encompassing more than 12 million square kilometres, larger by a fifth than the land area of the United States; according to one legal scholar, ‘Reagan’s proclamation can be characterized as the largest territorial acquisition in the history of the United States’

An important justification for the UN’s establishment of the concept of the ‘exclusive economic zone’ was the desire to reduce damage to exhaustible natural resources. It was hoped that establishing clear national property rights over those resources would transform the areas in question from open-access ‘global commons’ into regions of conservation.

The University of Arizona has launched the Public Political Ecology Lab with an accompanying blog.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) released a massive investigative report based on a trove of leaked documents (larger than Wikileaks’ Cablegate) on global money laundering and tax havens: “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze.”

A New Yorker piece profiling the work of Neil Freemen, an urban planner, artist, and urban geography provocateur: “The Alternative Geography of Neil Freemen.”

Looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues at the Association of American Geographers’ meeting next week in LA!

Legislation for Zonas de Reserva Campesina (ZRC) has been on the books since 1994. Colombia currently has six separate ZRCs comprising a total of 831,000 hectares—an area almost as big as Cyprus. (Colombia is not the only Latin American country to have experimented with campesino reserves.) But the FARC’s vision for the ZRCs is that they gain a degree of administrative autonomy—something indigenous and Afro-Colombian collective titles already have. This would essentially give the ZRCs more political, administrative, and fiscal power—the latter, through government budget transfers. In simple terms, think of it like the creation of a new municipal government, but just spread over a bigger swath of land—land which would be legally inalienable from its collective owners. The FARC has backed calls for the creation of 50 new ZRCs comprising a total of nine million hectares.

This has immediately drawn condemnation from landowners, right-wingers, and the current Minister of Agriculture Juan Camilo Restrepo (who is not at the table in Havana). Restrepo has repeatedly said the FARC’s proposal is tantamount to the balkanization of the country through the creation of “Repúblicas Independientes” or “republiquetas” (mini-republics). The terms are extremely loaded with a tremendous amount of historical baggage. During Colombia’s civil war in the 1950s, Colombian Senator Álvaro Gómez Hurtado claimed that campesino communities were establishing Repúblicas Independientes that “do not recognize the sovereignty of the state” with the help of communist rebels (not yet the FARC). The FARC’s “founding moment” came when the government began bombing those autonomous peasant communities stigmatized as Repúblicas Independientes.

Nine million hectares may sound like a lot and it might appear to give Restrepo’s assertions some weight, but sociologist Alfredo Molano helps put things into perspective. He notes campesinos have been violently forced off of six million hectares of land through the course of the war. And cattle ranching, which is dominated by large landowners, currently takes up 34.5 million hectares—a highly unproductive industry that creates little rural employment. Molano also adds that the country still has 1.5 million hectares of untitled land (called baldíos). The FARC proposes that the nine million hectares for the ZRCs come from government buyouts of unproductive land and baldíos.

The FARC’s demand for the ZRC opens like this: “Recognition and demarcation of campesino territories and territorialities, including the rights of campesino communities along with the valorization and political recognition of the peasantry.” The ZRC would be the material basis for the FARC’s demand for the “re-establishment of the dignity and recognition of peasants as political subjects, with guarantees and full enjoyment of their political, economic, social, and cultural rights as well as the corresponding provision of budgetary resources and infrastructure.” This is actually not far from the current ZRC legislation on the books.

Opponents fear that the ZRC will become territories beyond state control. But leaders in already existing ZRCs say that the zones themselves are a product of “state absence” created out of “pure necessity” in order to gain some recognition from the state. Peasant communities can band together and petition the government for the creation of a ZRC. Upon approval of the communities’ petition, which is required to include a development plan, the size of land holdings are limited within the ZRC and the government is required to provide the zone with state assistance (which it rarely has).

The FARC’s plan would essentially create 50 of these zones by fiat. Besides the number and size of the ZRCs proposed by the FARC, the main sticking point in Havana is likely to be how their political administration would fit within the country’s decentralized territorial ordering.

I see no reason why they couldn’t borrow from the legislation regulating indigenous and Afro-Colombian territories and adapt it to the law on the ZRCs. This would be a major development: a non-racialized/ethnicized recognition of autonomous territorial rights.

[Correction: The post originally credited the term "Repúblicas Independientes" to a "government minister," but Álvaro Gómez Hurtado was in fact a Senator. Thanks to @RAKarl for pointing out the error.]