For the last President’s Column of my term, I sat down to interview incoming President Rebecca Lave about her experiences within the discipline and her aspirations for her upcoming leadership at AAG.
This was a report on the 2023 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Denver. More than 6,000 AAG members converged on Denver ready to re-engage with their geography family after the COVID pandemic.
The theme of the meeting, Toward More Just Geographies, sprang from the ideas espoused in my nomination statement, back in 2020 when I talked about what we needed to do to create a stronger, more just AAG and discipline, and in the process, make Geography a force for positive social change.
Scientists are trained to cultivate intellectual distance from their topics. Physical geographers and climate scientists, like myself, are no exception. We have historically treated the climate as if it were a complex phenomenon that functions on its own—largely beyond human control—and with a variability that we can objectively measure, describe, and analyze.
The end of the calendar year can be a time to take stock, to renew one’s vision for the future and to make plans. For me, making plans implies hope, hope for a better, happier year.
I asked what members of the AAG would like to hear about, and was offered a number of different but related topics including “anything related to the future of geography and the role of the AAG.
“Climate justice demands that climate scientists no longer ignore what is right in front of our eyes but recognize and redress the ways in which our practice of science contributes to this injustice.
Ultimately, in order to reduce our environmental impact, we have to reduce our dependence on energy. Here is where the triplet — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — becomes relevant. We pay a lot of attention to Recycle, and we should.
When we look back 20 years from now, what do we want to say we have done to mitigate climate change? We have the chance to write that script now.
This segment explores the unexpected positive outcomes that can emerge within an intense mesoscale convective complex (MCC)— a large, long‑lived thunderstorm system. Drawing on recent field observations and satellite analyses, the discussion highlights community resilience measures and scientific advances that help mitigate MCC impacts.