#16 – Jenny Quillien – Semple

June 2nd, 2025

#16 – Jenny Quillien – Semple

Editor’s Note: Supplemental reading (6MB PDF): Anthropo-geography: A rediscovered voice in the study of place

Angus Stocking (00:04.162)
This is Everything is Somewhere, I’m Angus Stocking. I last interviewed author, independent scholar, and expert in geospatial matters, Jenny Quillien, in connection with our mutual admiration for the architect, genius of space, and, I think, spiritual figure, Christopher Alexander. Shortly after that episode was recorded, Jenny emailed me a copy of her fine essay, Anthropogeography: rediscovered voice in the study of place. Anthropogeography is a branch of geography that studies the spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the physical environment, examining how humans distribute themselves geographically and adapt to their surroundings. In our time, anthropogeography is an obscure academic discipline…

But if you’ve read books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel or Collapse, you’ve been exposed to anthropogeography. And I believe that this study is fundamental to understanding how culture and civilization work. The rediscovered voice to which Jenny refers is that of Ellen Churchill Semple, a giant of geography scholarship who is almost completely unknown today but of great interest, I think, to land surveyors and other members of the geospatial elite. But I’ll let Jenny tell you more about this remarkable woman. Jenny Quillien, welcome back to Everything is Somewhere.

Well, she is indeed a remarkable woman who I discovered through a friend and colleague. I mean, what are friends and colleagues for if not to pass on really good stuff? And a friend and colleague, David Seamon, who’s a geographer at Kansas State said, try this. And at that time, Ellen Churchill Semple was completely unknown. The book was totally out of print.

Jenny Quillien (02:16.014)
I got it through this really bizarre kind of inner library loan and this manuscript came in a wooden box, kind of like a coffin, and you kind of open this wooden box and this part, you know, very, it was from 1910.

This is a movie outline that you’re telling me about.

Well, it could be, it could be. mean, the sense of turning these pages written in 1910, were just an extraordinary way. And I suppose happily that’s no longer the case. So when Google did that big shebang of taking over all books that were out of print and republishing them sort of, it included this one. So now you can get the book.

In a way, it’s lost that charm of the wooden coffin and Google did it by scanning it and the scanning isn’t particularly good. So the letters aren’t necessarily really accurate. So it has its own difficulties, but it’s there. mean, someone who now wants this book does not have to join the Raider of the Lost

Just about to say Indiana Jones and hope you have a good hat. So as I started to this essay, one of the first things you say is that you would think this would be a dry topic. But in fact, it’s pretty exciting.

Jenny Quillien (03:50.038)
It’s fascinating. It’s very, it’s very juicy.

And tell us why. We’re stringing the listener along, but what does she write about and why is it so interesting?

All right, her subject matter is geography, the earth, where we are. think as modern people, we’ve really lost it. I mean, we’ve lost something so extraordinarily basic. mean, like an apple tree apples. That’s what apple trees do. They apple. Even if to apple isn’t a verb, we can recognize it as.

proper verb, an apple tree, apples. Sure. And the earth’s peoples, like two people, which is different than to populate. And so we’re, we’re from the earth. We are the apples of the apple tree. And somehow we have become arrogant and stupid and short-sighted and a real, like a real pain in the ass.

We forgot that we have been people like the apple tree apples, and this is where we are and where we’re from. And when we lose sight of that, I mean, we’re in bad shape. And so one of the things that we learn here, it puts us back in our place and it really points out why we do what we do.

Angus Stocking (05:22.892)
because of where we live.

because of where we live. And there’s a whole other side to it, because this book really disappeared. So in academia and intellectual life, there are fashions. We go from one fashion to the next. And sometimes a fashion really gets full of itself and becomes very bossy. And anything outside of that fashion is forbidden. And with that whole kind of deconstruction, postmodern…

You couldn’t do Ellen Churchill’s sample. It just wasn’t done. And so the book disappeared.

So what she really writes about in this essay is what she calls anthropogeography. I’ll sum it up as the study of determining how the geographic features of a region or country determine the nature and culture of the people who live in that region. Is that reasonable?

Yeah, it’s too abstract. Let me, let’s go concrete. So let me think a second. Let me give a European example. It’s the first one on top of my mind. Then let’s find an American one. So if you’re in Europe, it’s clear if you travel around Europe, that the least European part of Europe is the Iberian peninsula with Spain and Portugal. It’s very simply because the Pyrenees, mountains block, anybody can see that. If you hit a mountain.

Jenny Quillien (06:53.612)
You stop the mountains block and that the Pyrenees, although they’re not all that high as mountains go, they are without a single pass. You can’t get through the damn things. So that whole Iberian peninsula is really cut from the rest of Europe. And the only way for centuries, what you did is you took a boat from the south of France and you.

sailed around either on the Mediterranean or on the Atlantic because you couldn’t get through. There’s a well-known quote, which is Africa begins with the Pyrenees, which is, which is true. If anyone comes into the Spain or Portugal, it’s from the South. It’s from the Arab countries. You don’t come in from the North. so you can just immediately get a, an important sense of Southern Europe just by understanding that the Pyrenees have no pass through.

It’s a physical boundary that has.

It’s a physical barrier.

Angus Stocking (08:01.922)
Sure, it’s a wall, if you will.

It’s a wall. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a wall. So, and a wall will protect you and a wall will block you. So just understanding things like walls and passageways. I mean, the whole history of Poland is a history of a passageway. They don’t have walls. You just walk across it.

They don’t have walls.

Interesting. And so the culture of Pas de Pyrenees, is it more unique? It’s more African than European? What are the results?

Well, the results are it was opened from the South end. So, I mean, if you had to pick one, you’d pick the Arab conquest and the Arabs took most of that peninsula and were there for a few centuries. So it’s deeply imbued with that part of its history and the rest of Europe hasn’t got it. It makes them totally distinct.

Angus Stocking (09:07.992)
Just to switch topics just a bit, when I started reading the essay, it reminded me quite a bit of Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. And I was kind of gratified that you brought that up early. And when I looked online, his contention that the reason European countries seem to have a leg up in some ways is because they had geographic regional advantages.

And that was essentially anthropogeography. Did he read Ellen Churchill’s Semple, do you think?

I don’t know. mean, that’s an interesting question. I haven’t got a clue, but what they both did is wave off the secondary and go down to basic. mean, just basic. it’s been a while since I read the germs, guns, and steel thing, but what I remember, I think it’s in that book, in the North American continent, they did not, the only domestic…

Yeah, first sources.

Jenny Quillien (10:13.282)
…domesticated animals, the only animals that could be domesticated were what? mean, the turkey, dogs. So you take the horse, which interestingly did exist in the U.S., became extinct and the branch of the horse that went, I suppose, over the Bering Strait. So you have the history of the horse and you can get on a horse.

There was horses.

Angus Stocking (10:37.356)
compared to a zebra. There was such a fascinating section in there. The reason zebras don’t work is because they will not cooperate. They’re like cats.

But that’s right. You can’t hurt a zebra and you can’t ride a zebra. So that’s really basic. If you don’t have that kind of animal on a whole continent, the history of that continent will be different. And if you look at the history of Europe and you look at the Mongolian invasion, it basically stops around Hungary simply because that’s where the big pasture lands stop.

So if you’re going to really be a horse culture, I mean, of you can take horses into all, you know, England, France, wherever, but these huge pasture lands that go on forever, you haven’t got, they stop around Hungary. So the Mongol invasion stops around where the horses stop. It’s just coming to terms with basic stuff. Yeah.

Interesting.

Angus Stocking (11:37.132)
Yeah, it seems like the first thing you should learn in school, and it seems like it should be a very big part of college. Introductory course that teaches us why peoples are the way they are because of where they live. It’s fundamental.

Exactly. Let me give you, it’s fundamental. Let me give you another example, so quite late in life, I went back to school for the hell of it. And I went to St. John’s college, which is here, which is in Santa Fe. And I decided I would take a master’s in Eastern classics, which are the great books of India, China, and Japan. That’s, that’s the curriculum.

So we sometimes had these extra lectures. You didn’t have to go to them. They weren’t mandatory. They were just, if they were the passing scholar, they’d invite them to give a talk. So this guy comes and he’d been in China for decades and he puts up a map of China, know, centuries old up to modern, and you see that China’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger as the silt is being run by the rivers out into the sea. So it just keeps growing. And then he says that 70 % of every year’s rainfall falls within six weeks.

Hm.

Jenny Quillien (13:07.608)
So you stop, say, what? And then this whole history of China, which is all China, Chinese government, Chinese empires, it’s all about flood control. Once you understand that, Chinese history just quickly falls into place. That’s what you need to know. But it wasn’t part of the curriculum.

And it’s an interesting thing to know today. Something as simple as trade and competition between superpowers, there’s probably a big strain of flight control being important in that area.

That’s right. That’s right. Just so basic to what’s really going on.

You mentioned fashions in academia and culture and politics. One of the issues here is that does globalism kind of maintain that region doesn’t matter? Whereas Ellen Churchill’s sample points out very clearly that regions do matter and that people are different depending on where they live. Is there a desire in the modern world for people to be interchangeable?

to be picked up from one place and put down in another and be the same people. And anthropogeography states clearly that that’s impossible. People are different because of where they are.

Jenny Quillien (14:33.998)
It does, but I mean, there’s a big but here. What Semple also points out is, mean, this is all, it’s also a moving target. Things change. So one of the factors that you always have to include is, that of technology. So let me give you, all right, here. So I’m talking to you from Amsterdam. Have you been to Amsterdam? Several times. All right. When you were here, did you ever investigate?

Several times.

Jenny Quillien (15:03.886)
In English it would be the water line.

No, I walked around quite a bit, that term in particular doesn’t ring a bell.

Okay, so I’ve got a lot of respect for the Dutch. I mean, they’re not a belligerent people. They’ll fight the sea before they’ll fight their neighbors. So for a number of centuries, the main defense of Amsterdam was in a wide kind of semicircle around Amsterdam to the sea is a line of, they’re kind of like forts, little round forts. But what the forts do is they control the water level. So if there was an invasion, what the Dutch did was flood themselves. They would simply flood the land up to exactly 18 inches. 18 inches is a magic number because 18 inches is really too much.

That causes problems.

Jenny Quillien (16:07.918)
for a foot soldier to mess with. And it’s too much for a horse to mess with. And it’s not enough for boats. So if there’s an invasion, the Dutch just stocked up on food and flooded themselves. And when the invaders gave up, because it just was too much trouble, they drained everything and went back to life.

It’s like the turtles strategy.

But it was brilliant, it was simple, it was very Dutch, and it worked great until those nasty Germans figured out the airplane would be really useful, and then the gig is up. So all this geopolitical human geography stuff, you do have to factor in the

Interesting.

Jenny Quillien (17:01.289)
the technology of the times.

So I have an interesting example of that from my own writing and work. You’re aware of the sectional survey system in the United States that establishes a square 40-mile townships across most of the United States, especially in the West. And that’s unique in the history of the world because it was the first time that a land had been surveyed prior to occupation and then of course transferred according to square parcels.

And what I think happened there is that by establishing an invisible grid of ownership across much of the United States, roads were built and buildings were allotted and ownership lines created a line of force that was respected landscape and made the United States much different in terms of its gridded square appearance.

And so when you fly over Wisconsin or wherever and compare that to flying over say southern England you see a much different physical landscape because of this technological grid that was overlaid and so the the earth becomes different because of the new technology the new idea

Well, okay. let me query you on that. Sure. Was that, and I enjoyed flying over the West and it’s, I mean, it’s a quilt. I mean, it’s quite lovely. And flying over England is quite lovely. I love to fly. And was it a good idea?

Angus Stocking (18:43.01)
Well, in the article I wrote about it, I think it was a great idea in some ways if you’re trying to create. I came down to the idea of Apollonian, the ordered, disciplined way of seeing things. If you’re trying to instill order and discipline and capitalist endeavor into a people, it’s sort of nice if they’re growing up in a gridded, regimented environment that imposes order from without.

And since I love my country and I’m glad that America has turned out the way it did, I think it’s a good thing. But it would have been different had it been all meets and bounds with rivers and forest edges and neighbors working out lines along contours. We would be a much different people had we not grown up over 200 years now within the gridded rectangular survey system.

Well, I agree with you, but let’s have an argument. So I don’t know if you’ve ever, I’m a student of James Scott. I don’t know if you’ve read a lot of his, oh, you’ll like it. I don’t know you very well, but I know you well enough to know that you’d like it. So James Scott, and one of the things he says is when you get government and when you get bureaucracy, what you want is legibility.

If you’re going to manage something, you want it to be legible. And so the grid system, I mean, par excellence is legible and you can sell the parcels off to the returning soldiers or all these things they did with it. It’s easy. It’s legible. I would argue. So the downside of it that I can see is you take the land surveyor, John Wesley Powell, who…

Jenny Quillien (20:40.404)
…walked the West. And his suggestion was that the Western states be basically, he said, because water is a scarce resource, make each state basically in accord with a watershed. And then that state will, by the nature of its boundaries, feel an interest in stewarding that watershed.

And he thought that would lead to better water management. That absolutely did not happen. So let’s follow it through. Cause one of your, when we were preparing this, one of your questions said, you know, what difference does it make now? So, so you’re in Colorado and there’s the Colorado river. So I’m listening to the politics of today. So the, we drain, take off the Colorado river.

Didn’t quite happen.

Jenny Quillien (21:36.928)
And the Rio Grande, so by the time the Rio Grande gets to the Mexican border, there is not a drop of water left. We, we grow alfalfa, which we shouldn’t be growing in a, in a dry area. We flush our toilets with it. I mean, so the Colorado river is dry when it gets, the Rio Grande is dry when it gets to the boundary. Now, as you know,

My home home is Santa Fe. So I’m in Santa Fe and I’ve got, I’m fixing up an old adobe. I need help. I go down to a place in the middle of town where you can pick up day workers. Sure. Who will come to your house and then dig your ditch or whatever. So on one of these occasions, I pick up this Mexican guy and he’s coming to help me. He had been.

right on the border of Mexico. It’s an area where they used to grow pecan trees, but they’d pecan orchards were deader in a doornail because there was no water in the Rio Grande. So now this guy, he’s lost his farm. He’s come up to Santa Fe to be a day laborer. And now we’re going to kick him in the butt and spit on him and put him on a bus and throw him out of the country. I mean, if I had…

If I were that guy, I would be so damn mad at the double, triple, quadruple treatment that he has encountered by the way we handle water.

It’s certainly a puzzle, aggravating. I have a close friend who lives on the southern border, and I don’t feel we can get into that right now. It’s a gigantic topic, and it’s so bedeviling on all sides.

Jenny Quillien (23:35.182)
It is.

But to return to my original point, the watersheds versus the rectangular survey system, you consider the four corners where four straight lines come together, four corners, that has nothing to do with watersheds. So that’s one obvious difference between Powell’s watershed system and the rectangular survey system is you end up with these arbitrarily, unnaturally straight lines, which certainly affect every aspect of the states that live there.

Absolutely. And in all kinds of… Where is your town? I know you’re in Colorado.

I’m in Paena, Colorado, which is not far from Grand Junction or Delta. It’s a tiny town and we’re not close to anything.

Jenny Quillien (24:22.286)
I do remember, I think it’s Cortez, maybe? Anyway, there’s a museum with all the archaeological remains and they have a museum which follows the state line, but the state line has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter of the museum. So, like, okay. So what’s going to dominate? I mean, if you’re doing a museum,

Sure, yeah.

Jenny Quillien (24:51.922)
on the native peoples of the area, the state line, which is your four corners like a kid with a ruler, I mean, that has nothing to do with your subject matter. But we organize museums accordingly.

Yeah, then, you know, my trade in particular and land surveying in the United States is a bit different than land surveying elsewhere because it is the maintenance of the grid in large part for maintaining corners and lines that are largely invisible, but need to stay exactly where they are. It’s an intellectual puzzle to be spending so much of one’s life maintaining something that’s intangible.

It’s like religion in a way. Before we get too far afield here, I wonder if we could go back to Ellen Churchill’s sample for a moment. And that’s because we sort of glossed over this, but the book that you read was first published in, what was it, 1910? So this is a woman scholar.

hahahaha

Angus Stocking (26:03.784)
in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. She had quite a story. Could you tell us a little bit about how she came to be working in such a male, still male dominated field? But at that time, that was extraordinary, right?

Well, she must’ve been a tough cookie. And I really don’t know that much about it. I don’t know that anyone knows that much about it. She liked the subject matter. She was from Kentucky, went to Europe to study. Apparently she had a mother who said, you know, you just go and do whatever it is your little heart really wants to do. And so she did. I know that the university system treated her quite shabbily.

She could do the work, but she couldn’t have the position or the pay. mean, that kind of stuff.

because she was only allowed to monitor classes for what I…

But that was of the times.

Angus Stocking (27:03.596)
Yeah, fascinating figure. There would be a, you should write that biography, Jenny. So part two of your wonderful essay was about the Southwest in particular and the Anasazi. Could you give us an overview of your case study applying Ellen Churchill’s simple principles to your particular area, a place you love?

Well, basically, I mean, the essay was really a book review. I mean, here’s a book that very few people read. So one contribution I could make was a book review. But then the question when you read a book is, okay, can I do anything else with it? We can read a book and then put it down, or we can read a book and then say, hmm, what can I do with this?

So I took that option and said, well, here’s New Mexico, here’s the four corners with their four straight lines, you know, all that. It’s just an area I’m deeply attached to. find magical, fabulously beautiful, unusual. So the question is, all right, I really love this area. What does this book help me to see?

And it’s an area that she had nothing to say about. It’s not in the book at all. But the main line is that the Colorado Plateau, that Four Corners area is in terms of Semple, it’s a land of refuge. I mean, there’s no reason to be there unless you’re hiding.

And by that you mean there’s not obvious food or water sources or…

Jenny Quillien (28:51.238)
…man. No, it’s when you’ve lost wars, when you’ve been pushed back, you just go back and back and back to places to where you could hide out. And when you look at the peoples, the early Native Americans who went there, they come from different directions, they’re from different language groups. These are remnants, people who lost out.

and just go, have got to go find digs where they can hide. I mean, there are other, if you come to Europe, I mean, the Basque country, if we go back to the Pyrenees. So the Basques are early peoples who lost out when other people started invading the territory and they just retreated and retreated and retreated to parts of the Pyrenees.

So it’s the same kind of of mechanism. And then what you find, and this is Semple’s point, is you have all these different language groups, different peoples, but what determines the lifestyle is the land. That’s what tells you what to do. Here’s how you can live here and survive. And so all these different people from different directions, they ended up living in similar ways because what would those ways be like? Specifically, what are we talking about? Did they have different religions or different agriculture? What made them different?

Well, you could survive on some pretty thin hunting of, I mean, you could domesticate turkeys. They did that. You could grow what’s called, I mean, the three sisters, beans, corn, and squash, which gives you a basic diet. They all ended up with what’s called waffle gardens. So you have a square.

Jenny Quillien (30:56.674)
which is dug down a little bit so you can put water in it and it will hold the water. I mean, this is really labor intensive, living on the edge. It’s all dicey. You make mud buildings, some stone buildings. It’s pretty thin living. I mean, you’ve been out there.

And you’re seeing many different peoples or tribes moved in and became the same way.

became the same way. And when you look at the Spanish who come in, and they’re not living that much differently when you give them a few decades, and they start figuring out the same thing.

In the midst of all this, which can seem pretty barren, even squalid to an outsider, you had this marvelous megalithic construction of Chaco, which was profound in some ways and beautiful and the archios, the astronomy alignment seems to be profound and interesting and that was an actual culture with travel. It was a city center. What happened there, do you think?

People argue about it. let me just say where I side or where I land on it, but I don’t want to call it the truth because there are arguments about it. It fell into the classic human mistake of eating yourself out of house and home.

Angus Stocking (32:32.856)
So boom and bust, the population goes up and then collapse.

And we’ve done it a million times. The population goes up. get a, my understanding of the archaeological remains at Chaco is that you did have a class structure. So you have the haves and the have-nots. And this is born out with careful archaeology. You’ve got people who are living farther out from the center who are physically smaller.

many more signs of malnutrition, a population that cannot be sustained. And then they get hit with drought. It’s like a 10 year drought and they just can’t make it. They’ve, they’ve cut down all the timbers. They’ve out hunted all the forests. They can’t make it. the place collapses. So you’re back to Jared Diamond, who you like and his other book called collapse. It’s one of those examples of collapse.

Another great example of civilization in the area is the Ho’okam culture. Was that as simple as collapse or there was a great technological prowess there of the sort you’ve been talking about?

Jenny Quillien (33:49.998)
I don’t know enough about them to really answer. It’s because geographically they’re, or they’re much farther south. I’ll stay away from that because I don’t really know enough to answer.

Now, having read Semple’s work and tried to apply it, has this become like an academic habit for you now to apply the answer of, answer for geography? Is that my thing? right. The Semple lens to the peoples you study or today’s world, how do you go about that? You did it in this case study and go ahead, I’m sorry.

has. No, it has. It really, really has. It’s like being gifted with another pair of glasses that brings some things into focus that you would have otherwise kind of glossed over. I find it marvelous that you just say, ah. So I was recently in Cairo in Egypt. The group I work with was present. There was a UN, a conference on the global south and cities and all that. So we were in Cairo.

And because of this pair of glasses, you could just see so clearly that, you know, the, Nile, which, when they dammed it up was, came with huge consequences because before the dam, would flood every year. And then that flooding would bring in this fresh silt. And that was the new fertilizer for the new crop. And when they damned it for understandable reasons, they lost that.

And so now you have the, you know, the chemicals and the blah, blah, blah that come with having altered the geography without thinking it through. But you see that Nile, then you see it just fans out into a fan-shaped area where all the food is grown. And then what you see.

Jenny Quillien (35:56.3)
because the Middle East is in every paper every day, what you realize is that from Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast in that fan area to Tel Aviv, all you do is walk. That’s all you have to do. It’s flat, there are no walls, there are no mountains, there are no swamps, it’s a long walk, that’s all it is, a walk.

And so my geopolitical understanding of the Middle East and all the mess we’re reading about every day is just heightened by the clarity of the geography.

blank slate in some ways. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. no, it’s a marvelous gift of a pair of glasses.

That’s how I felt when I was reading Guns, Germs and Steel. It seems extraordinarily important to me and I sort of wanted to run around grabbing people and saying, read this book. And I had that sense again as I was reading your paper. Just out of curiosity, where has that been published? How did you, how have you been getting this message out to the world?

Jenny Quillien (37:23.15)
Well, it was published in, what is it called, the EAP, let me think of what the letters stand for, environmental phenomenology. Anyway, it’s published by this friend and colleague who was the one who told me about it to begin with. So it’s published by Kansas State and it’s a magazine that comes out three times a year, I think.

So that’s where it is, and now I’m talking to you, and maybe people listening to you will go read the book, and now you can, the Google thing.

We’ll have the PDF available on the show notes for this episode. I have been appreciating the opportunity to talk about it. It’s a beautiful paper. And let’s talk about that a bit. We talked about the scholarship and the academia, but you’re quite a lyrical writer in places, reminding me of John McPhee or Craig Childs, other people who write poems of science and poetry about the world.

And this is obviously a very personal topic for you. How has Ellen Churchill simple, a name I love saying for some reason, have you had a sense of sort of resurrecting her as a person and scholar affecting the world and bringing her voice back for a modern man?

That would be marvelous if that were indeed the case.

Angus Stocking (38:54.764)
I hope to accomplish a little bit of that here. I think there’s a lot of people I know that would enjoy and benefit from learning more about this field of study.

And she’s a great writer.

In I’ll quote, yeah, I’m going back to your essay. Nothing less than a page-turner was this rather weighty slab of a book. No pictures and 600 pages. It seems like it would be dull, but you get into it and it’s fascinating.

It’s absolutely fascinating. It puts words on what you sort of knew, but didn’t know that you really knew, which I find very helpful. And on other parts, it requires you to say, my God, how could I be this old and not have realized that? That basic thing. So.

Right.

Angus Stocking (39:45.464)
Basic thing, yeah.

Give an example of that. I know you have a lot at hand.

So I was, I had no idea. So you take the Atlantic ocean, which is much, much smaller than the Pacific ocean by far. And she points out that the Atlantic ocean because it is far more influential as an ocean, because you take the whole North American, the Eastern seaboard, which is kind of a gentle slope.

down to the ocean front. It’s a gentle land. A lot of, you know, England and France, a lot of Europe, and it’s a gentle slope down to the Atlantic ocean. And you’ve got rivers, be it North America or Europe, you’ve got rivers that you can navigate pretty far inland. the Pacific has none of that.

There’s one river in China that you can navigate. One.

Angus Stocking (40:55.63)
Interesting.

by Shanghai. and the Pacific Ocean, either have terrible cliffs or raging torrents, but you do not have a landscape of gentle sloping navigable rivers. So she points out how much more important the Atlantic is compared to the Pacific in spite of the fact that it’s what, a third the size or something. Sure.

Well, how could I have reached adulthood and not known that?

Yeah, I… Well, and as you talk about that, one of my favorite series of books is Master and Commander, which depicts the Age of Sail. And now that you mentioned the influence of the Atlantic, I think about how Britain became such a powerful empire. Indeed. And it was because they mastered the Atlantic. Anyways, it’s fascinating.

Indeed.

Angus Stocking (42:01.678)
Jenny, this has been amazing. Thank you for making an hour or so to speak with us again. And thank you for being a friend of Everything is Somewhere. Is there any concluding statements you’d like to make?

Yeah, thank you for jumping in and promoting Miss Ellen, who’s really quite a cookie and really deserves to be known.

Well, you know, was interesting. We opened the last conversation about Christopher Alexander. We both had had this book angel experience. And it sounds like you had an amazing book angel experience with the libraries and getting the cedar box of the manuscript.

Right, right, right.

Good on you. And congratulations for bringing her back. I think with that, I’ll say goodbye for now. But thanks again, and maybe we’ll see each other a couple of months when you come out to Santa Fe.

Jenny Quillien (42:52.876)
I think we should. That would be great fun.

Angus Stocking (43:05.454)
Thanks for listening to this 16th published episode of Everything is Somewhere. I hope that you found it as interesting as me to look closely at the intellectual side of our trade. We live in a big world and geospatial expertise is needed to get a handle on it. As always, I really appreciate feedback. Please drop me a line. You can email me directly at angusstocking at gmail.com.

Angus Like the Cow, Stocking Like a Christmas Stocking at gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn, there is only one Angus Stocking. The essay that Jenny and I talked about, incidentally, is available for download at amerisurv.com/podcast. That’s amerisurv.com/podcast.