Geography Concepts: A Personal View

  Why I keep writing in different “styles” You might have noticed that some of my posts sound different from others. That’s on purpose. I’m not changing personalities — I’m using different ways of seeing the world. In geography (and honestly in life), there’s never just one correct lens. Complex problems need multiple perspectives. So I’ve been writing through four different viewpoints to help practice that: The Networked View looks at how everything connects — how decisions in one place ripple through supply chains, ecosystems, economies, and communities. The Moral View asks what responsibility comes with knowledge and power. It focuses on people, consequences, and what we owe one another. The Inspiring View zooms out. It looks at humanity as one species on one planet, shaped by climate, resources, and long timelines. The Critical Lens asks harder questions: Who benefits? Who loses? Who controls the story? It examines power, inequality, and the systems beneath everyday...

  Rollover Neoliberalism: Extending Market Rule Beyond the Roll-Back/Roll-Out State in the Trump Era David McKay Abstract This paper revisits the well-known “roll-back/roll-out” framework of neoliberalization and proposes a related extension: rollover neoliberalism . If roll-back describes the dismantling of Keynesian/social-democratic protections and roll-out describes the building of new market-conforming institutions, rollover names a later tendency: neoliberal logics spilling into domains that were not previously central battlegrounds of market rule —a kind of “map rolling” beyond its old edges. Rollover neoliberalism is not merely privatization or deregulation; it is the proliferation of market metrics, contracting, quasi-markets, risk scoring, and managerial discipline into spheres such as immigration detention, platform-mediated work, digital information ecosystems, and administrative governance itself. The paper argues that Trump-era governance—across the first term (20...

You are standing in a parking lot in Minnesota in January, which is basically nature’s way of saying, “Sure, humans invented civilization, but I still own the thermostat.” A delivery truck idles nearby, exhaling little clouds like a bored dragon. A driver in a neon vest tosses a cardboard box onto a dolly. The box is ordinary. Brown. Anonymous. It could contain socks, a blender, a book about the fall of empires, or—because we live in the strangest timeline—an inflatable T. rex costume. It doesn’t matter what’s inside. Because the box itself is the story. Not the cardboard box—the other one. The box you never see. A steel rectangle, the size of a small room, that has quietly rearranged the planet. And to see how, you have to follow the box backwards. So: the truck. Why does the truck exist as an organism in North America’s ecosystem? Because the highway exists. And the highway exists because, in the mid-20th century, a bunch of governments decided to pour money into roads the w...

There are forces in nature whose scale and quiet simplicity defy the terminology of power and politics. The Sun is one such force — a furnace four and a half billion years old, not governed by desire or empire, but by the unceasing rhythm of hydrogen fusing into light. Every hour that light bathes the Earth, it delivers more energy than all the fossil fuels ever buried beneath our feet could produce in centuries. Only in the last few years has human ingenuity learned to catch that light with technology so inexpensive, so robust, that the old arguments about energy poverty begin to evaporate like dew under the morning sun. Solar panels — once a rare and costly curiosity — have tumbled in price until they are now, in many regions, the cheapest form of electricity on Earth. Costs have fallen roughly 90 % over the past decade as global capacity has expanded, following a predictable learning curve : each doubling of installed panels brings roughly a 20 % drop in price. That’s not just ec...