Another Cool Map

Thanks to a story on NPR, I have discovered yet another great blog. Neil Freeman is an artist and urban planner living in New York City. Like me, Freeman is somewhat obsessed with maps. The subject of the NPR piece was one of the coolest maps I have seen in a long time: a solution to the fact that the electoral college creates disproportionate representation.

Freeman divides the country along county lines into 50 areas of equal population. Each area has approximately 6,175,000 residents. The variance in population is far less than currently allowed in congressional districts. Under this scheme, votes of individual citizens would carry equal weight across the country.

Freeman stresses that this is an art project, not a serious proposal. What fascinates me most about the map is the naming of the districts. Many use state capital names, but some use rivers, mountain ranges, or historical regions. The NPR story remarks that Freeman has named his new units "in ways guaranteed to irritated pretty much everybody." Maybe so. Without the Tombigbee Waterway as a reference, I can't tell if my town of Starkville, Mississippi would wind up in "Ozark" or "Mammoth," but I would be fine with either one. But in my home region of the North Carolina piedmont, I can assure you that many residents would be peeved to suddenly wake up in "Shenandoah," a region that, while beautiful, is very much associated with the state of Virginia. I would have named it "Doc Watson." The blog post features clickable links that explain the names. Don't you wonder why the region south of Lake Erie is called "Firelands"? You can click through to Wikipedia and read all about it.

Unlike most blogs, Freeman's is not formatted in a chronological pattern. To get to the electoral college refrom post, click here.

Good Things Happening at MSU Wildlife and Fisheries

Here is a cool story from the Mississippi State University Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. Why is an assistant professor of aquatic sciences interested in native grasses? This vision, seeing the connections between wildlife habitat, native grasses as forage and hay, and cattle farming, this is the sort of thing that Landscape Architecture needs to continue to follow as a profession.

From the article:
"We were looking for something that we could use to interject some wildlife habitat in small places on a production livestock operation," Gruchy said. "This would distribute the habitat through the farm and the landscape so we can get maximum benefit for wildlife."


In the past, this was the exclusive domain of wildlife biologists. I read Landscape Architecture, the official magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and their focus seems to expand every month. In November they had a cover story on the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, but instead of showing us the Gulf, the image was of a midwestern farm, with the title "The Gulf Starts (and Stops) Here." Just this past month they published on the "bonanza in harbor dredging." I applaud this expansion of the discipline. Practitioners should continue to pay close attention to what other managers and stakeholders are doing with the land. I see the above quote as the basis for a great project in a Landscape Architecture class.