Editorial Notes

Welcome to volume seventy-nine of the Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. Besides a full slate of articles and reviews, the Yearbook is of course the publication of record for all things related to our annual meetings. This issue of the Yearbook contains all of the material related to the Seventy-Ninth Annual Meeting, held October 5–8, 2016, on the campus of Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. We most humbly present the Presidential Address, the Meeting Report, the Student Paper Award winners, the Resolutions, the Abstracts, and our Distinguished Service Award recipient. Thanks to Hunter Shobe and David Banis and their hard-working group of faculty and students at Portland State who made the meeting a tremendous success. There were four very interesting field trips, including excursions to Mount Hood and the Columbia River Gorge, a walking and public-transportation tour of Portland, and, perhaps the most fun, a “Landscapes of Wine in Oregon” tour. Attendees enjoyed a wonderful banquet highlighted by President Stephen Cunha’s talk on “Geographic Variation Across the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan.” Our special thanks go out to Bill Bowen for his continued support of student presenters.

The Yearbook presents a wide-ranging collection of articles this year, including submissions highlighting the geography of our region, plus a wonderful photo essay on indigenous peoples living in the Amazon forests of the Guyana Shield, plus a review section with book, movie, music, and game reviews. Jeff Baldwin presents his research on the political and institutional obstacles associated with beaver recolonization and their adaptation to climate change in Oregon. Suzanne Dallman’s article compares California’s prolonged drought situation and the related conservation efforts with those in Queensland, Australia. Aquila Flower and her group present their research on conifer encroachment in the subalpine meadows of Mount Rainier, and how that relates to yearly changes in the amount of snowfall. Continuing on from his previous Yearbook submissions, Jeffrey P. Schaffer recounts his exploits as a geomorphologist exploring the Sierras. Jeff closes by saying his days in the mountains may be coming to a close, but that, of course, remains to be seen!

We have the opportunity to present two beautiful photo essays in this volume. Elisa Bignante, from Italy’s University of Torino, traveled to the Rupununi River region in Guyana as part of her work with COBRA (Community Owned Best practice for sustainable Resource Adaptive management). She presents her research on how the indigenous peoples of the region are adapting to the encroachment of the industrialized world into their traditional homelands. I had the opportunity to meet Elisa when she visited CSUN, and found her work quite compelling and thought the images and the story would fit nicely into this volume. Zia Salim’s work in East Los Angeles perhaps goes beyond the traditional photo essay as he presents an in-depth analysis of the wall murals that populate the commercial and residential buildings in the area. While we can only present these wonderful murals in black-and-white, I encourage our readers to visit Project MUSE for the online version of this edition of the Yearbook, where one may see the murals in all their glorious colors.

Martha L. Henderson uses her experience as a world regional geography instructor at Evergreen College to share her system of teaching this foundational course. She encourages us to devote more time to this under-discussed region, and, using her instructional system, shows us how a larger discussion of Antarctica can contribute to a greater student understanding of world regional geography. Ray Sumner engages the “Whither Geography” discussion that has occupied a place in our discipline since EGR Taylor’s 1937 article in The Geographical Review. It’s a timely piece with a particular relevance in today’s world, as geography searches for its place.

Steven M. Graves delves into the history of the convenience store and explores how it serves as an artifact of the postmodern landscape—and how its construction as a space of temporal efficiency serves our consumerist culture. Benjamin Schrager uses Bakhtin’s dialogic theory to explore the portrayal of aliens in cinematic landscapes, focusing specifically...