Publications
Bloodworth, G., & White, J. (2008). The Columbia Basin Project: Seventy-Five Years Later. Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 70, 96-111. 
Presentations
REM 502 – NEPA Presentation – 26 Feb 2007
These are the slides from a presentation given on 26 February 2007, at Central Washington University, in REM 502 Resource Policy and Law, on the subject of the National Environmental Policy Act. I will post my talking points here when I have cleaned them up for general use (they are very rough right now).
This presentation attempts to approach the NEPA topics with questions of “why,” and “why at that time,” rather than as a discussion of the bare mechanics of the law. A title slide in the presentation reads: “Environmental Disaster.” For that slide, and the illustrating slides after it, I read a list I compiled of environmental disasters that occurred both in the U.S. and internationally, from 1890 to the passing of NEPA in 1969. I tried to read the list quickly to give a sense of motion through disaster similar to the sense of motion that is experienced when watching pictures displayed in a film at the rate of 29 frames per second. A common explanation for NEPA is that it came about because the environment had finally gotten so bad that something had to be done. The question I asked was: if things getting so bad really is the primary cause of NEPA, why didn’t it happen earlier? Plenty of very, very bad environmental catastrophes happened in the decades before 1969. Why didn’t a NEPA happen after them? The answer I suggested was that environmental disaster is not the primary cause of NEPA, but rather it was enabled by a turning in the values and sentiments of the nation.
Although not include explicitly in the slides, a discussion of the evolution of democratic thought from Aristotle through Seneca and Cicero to Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and Bentham, and up through Marx and Gramsci to the freedom-enabling forces of the electronic media of the radio and television. I attempted to connect the world-spanning imagery and ideas spread by the global media as an impetus for an attempt at a return towards original democracy and the wholesale abandonment of the political baggage of almost 2000 years. In the last 40 years we have rejected many of the ideas that have acted as a filter on our perception of human people and the environment we live in. I suggested that the passing of NEPA was, instead of some great turning point in our history, or a great victory for environmentalists, a signpost of the general rejection of slavery and racism, environmental exploitation and sexual discrimination. I attempted to put NEPA into the context of the civil rights movement and feminism, and into a context of growing discontent leading into a massive environmental movement.
Free and Open-Source GIS Software Presentation – Nov 2006
This presentation includes slides from a presentation I gave on free and open-source options for GIS software in REM 515 GIS for Resource Managers, in November 2006. The idea for the presentation came out of a discussion in the class about the expense of commercial GIS software, and the effect of that expense on the use of GIS by small non-profit and volunteer groups. I offered in the discussion that there were a number of good open-source options.To make the presentation, I set a task, and then evaluated the usefulness of each open-source application in accomplishing that task. The task I set was building a raster elevation layer from a DEM, and performing a number of spatial analyses on that raster (functions that are simple in, for example, ArcGIS). The result at the time was that among the application I had chosen, although many of them were very useful for things other than the raster test-task that I had set, none of them could do what I had set out to do. I evaluated each of the applications in a number of different areas and presented my results in the form of a matrix with happy face, stern face, and frown face scores.
Since creating and giving this presentation I have had a chance to use the newest version of Quantum GIS as an interface for Grass GIS. I found the experience to be much better than any that I had while doing evaluations for the presentation, and have found myself actually recomending that people try QGIS.
Presentation of Modeling and its use in GIS – Oct 2006
I gave this presentation in Oct 2006 to the REM 515 GIS for Resource Managers about a chapter in one of our course textbooks. Topics in the presentation include the definition of models as ideas about our world, and distinctly seperate from mathematical or graphical representations of them, different types of models, the use of models in GIS, the types of models to use in GIS, and a brief discussion of computer requirements and cluster computing.Other than just being fun to put together and give, this presentation was important because it became the seed for my thesis idea. Before giving this presentation, I was working on a comprehensive literature review of Columbia River science, and had intended to write on something related to that. However, I have always loved models and modeling, and preparing this presentation gave me the idea to build a Columbia River model based on a deep literature review. An exploration of possible methods led me to qualitative models.
Whitepapers
I will have stuff to put here soon (2008-09-23).
Manuscripts
I will have stuff to put here soon (2008-09-23).