Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan (review)

Abstract

teaching environmental history, ancient cultures, historical cartography, environmental GIS mapping, conflict and security, and disaster preparedness. There is much to learn about these threedimensional worlds and migrating aquatic communities through geomapping and photographing ocean terrains and life. Our knowledge base about oceans’ surfaces and depths will expand with more discoveries and explorations, research grants, museum displays, scholarly journals, and courses and multidisciplinary degree programs with marine foci. Each discovery piques one’s curiosity and appetite. Adventurous and creative members of the local, regional, and global geography communities need to seize on this “expanding research frontier” to come up with some new projections, mapping images using GIS, and satellite imagery to study historical, contemporary, and future ocean topics. Maps will help in understanding some of the early transocean migrations, the resource bases, ocean tourism (surface and subsurface), and ocean environments meriting international protection. We also need atlases showing more than dead zones, shipping routes, dangerous passages, and ocean currents. Roorda’s volume will assist present and future geographers and others in providing teaching materials and launching some new interdisciplinary research programs.