Editorial Notes

Welcome to volume seventy-eight of the Yearbook of the Associaion 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-Eighth Annual Meeting, held October 21–24, 2015, at the Palm Springs Hyatt hotel in Palm Springs, California. We most humbly present the Presidential Address, the Meeting Report, the Student Paper Award winners, the Resolutions, the Abstracts, and our two Distinguished Service Award recipients. Thanks to all the hard-working group of faculty and students at California State University, Northridge, who made the meeting a tremendous success. It takes a lot of effort and resources to put together one of these conferences, and a special thanks goes to CSUN Department of Geography chair Ed Jackiewicz and front office folks Judi Gomez and Tommie Norris. We have a bunch of tote bags, notepads, and water bottles left over, so e-mail me and I’ll send you whatever you want! And an extra special thanks to APCG Treasurer Bob Richardson for all his help along the way.

There was a nice variety of field trips that included trips to the Salton Sea, Salvation Mountain and the community of East Jesus, an architectural tour of Palm Springs, and a tram ride to Mt. San Jacinto. Attendees enjoyed a wonderful banquet highlighted by the awards presentation and the recognition of our Distinguished Service awardees. Our special thanks go to Bill Bowen for his continued support of student presenters. The APCG will miss Bill’s lovely wife, Marilyn, and her years of friendship and service to the APCG and to California State University, Northridge.

This Yearbook is my final volume, and I believe we have assembled a very nice and wide-ranging collection of articles, including submissions that highlight the geography of our region plus an exploration of the political aspects of agriculture in Japan, by Yoshi Miyake; hydropolitics in Vietnam and Ethiopia, by Dianne Meredith and Elena Givental; and Ray Sumner’s study of the nineteenth-century German naturalist-collector Amalie Dietrich. We include a wonderful and thoughtful piece on the Mojave Desert by Nicholas Bauch, Jennifer Bernstein’s article on climate change in Joshua Tree, and Suzanne Walther’s study of environmental flow development from the McKenzie River in Oregon. We have Martha Henderson’s essay on her journey past the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, site of a militia takeover led by rancher Ammon Bundy; and Clark Akatiff’s recollection of Bill Bunge and the roots of radical geography. Kristine Hunt looks at the distribution of Craftsman bungalows in the American West, and Brenda Kayzar discusses redevelopment through community-based art in San Diego. Regan Maas’s article uses multi-level modeling to look at health outcomes in the Hispanic neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and Joy Wolf provides us with an interesting look into bird migration and bird songs in the Pacific Northwest. Ron Davidson reviews Alastair Bonnet’s Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies and Keith Meldahl’s Surf, Sand and Stone: How Waves, Earthquakes and Other Forces Shape the Southern California Coast. Both are wonderful books, and the Meldahl book is sure to find its way into the classrooms of California colleges and universities. Longtime contributor William Koelsch reviews Michael DeVito’s Leadership in American Academic Geography: The Twentieth Century and its thoughtful study of the role of various figures in the rise and fall (and rise again) of geography in the major departments of U.S. universities.

It is also our pleasure to include Chris Lukinbeal’s well-received Presidential Address, “Scale and Its Histories.” The address brings up the question of the meaning of scale and its importance to our discipline. Finally, congratulations are also in order to Vicki Drake and Dolly Freidel for their selection as recipients of the APCG’s Distinguished Service Award.

This is my tenth and last volume of the Yearbook and again I extend my gratitude to Dave Deis, the Yearbook graphics editor; and to Rick Cooper, the Yearbook...