Wildfires are increasingly burning California’s snowy landscapes and colliding with winter droughts to shrink California’s snowpack

A new study shows that midwinter dry spells lead to dramatic losses of winter snowpack in burned areas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

DESERT RESEARCH INSTITUTE

 

IMAGE: SNOW UNDER BURNED TREES FROM THE CALDOR FIRE. THE NEW STUDY SHOWS THAT SNOW MELTED MORE RAPIDLY DURING MIDWINTER DROUGHT CONDITIONS WITHIN THE FOOTPRINTS OF WILDFIRES. view more 

CREDIT: ANNE HEGGLI, DRI

Reno, Nev. (February 1, 2023) – The early pandemic years overlapped with some of California’s worst wildfires on record, creating haunting, orange-tinted skies and wide swathes of burned landscape. Some of the impacts of these fires are well known, including drastic declines in air quality, and now a new study shows how these wildfires combined with midwinter drought conditions to accelerate snowmelt.  

In a study published Jan. 20 in Geophysical Research Letters, a DRI-led research team examined what happens to mountain snowpacks when sunny, midwinter dry spells occur in forests impacted by severe wildfire. The researchers found a substantial increase in wildfires burning in California’s snowy landscapes throughout 2020 and 2021, when large blazes like the Dixie, Caldor, and Creek fires concentrated in snow zones. Using a 2013 midwinter dry spell as comparison, they found that similar weather in the winter of 2021-2022 led to 50% less snow cover. The compounding impacts of wildfire on snow melt include an increase in sun exposure due to loss of forest canopy, and a reduction in the snow’s ability to reflect sunlight.  

“It’s already established that wildfires are accelerating spring snow melt, but we wanted to know what happens when you add a long winter dry spell on top of that,” said Arielle Koshkin, M.S., a Ph.D. student now at the Colorado School of Mines who co-led the study as part of her master’s research at DRI and the University of Nevada, Reno. “The Caldor fire burned in our backyard, it was so close to where we live and work. So, the following winter, we wanted to investigate what it looked like.” 

Satellite data showed that compared to the 2001-2019 average, 2020 and 2021 saw a nearly ten-fold increase in wildfires burning in California’s seasonal snow zones. “What that implies is that there's this increasing overlap between the fire and snow and there's all these cascading and compounding impacts on the system and especially the hydrology,” said Ben Hatchett, Ph.D., a climatologist at DRI who co-led the study with Koshkin. “This huge increase of fire activity in California snowy regions is exactly what we expect to see more of going forward.”  

A strong winter drought followed during the winter of 2021-2022, when Tahoe City experienced a 46-day long midwinter dry spell (the second-longest since reliable records began in 1917; the long-term median is 22 days without precipitation). A comparable midwinter drought following a wet start to the winter occurred in 2013, giving the researchers the ability to compare and contrast the impacts under more typical conditions with those that occurred in a severely burnt landscape.  

“In 2013 and 2022, we had very similar weather patterns, but we didn't see notable melt in 2013. And in 2022, we also did not see melt in unburned areas,” Hatchett said. “So that gives two lines of evidence suggesting that it's the fire and not the meteorology that's driving this.” 

Forests where severe wildfires have burnt the tree canopy have more exposed snowpacks, which enhances the melting caused by sunny days and warm nights (another recent DRI study examined the snowmelt impacts of spring heatwaves). Snowmelt is further exacerbated by the loss of the snowpack’s albedo, or the natural power of white snow to reflect, rather than absorb, the sun’s radiation. Particularly in the winters immediately following a wildfire, snow is dusted with the black carbon of burnt vegetation, which can accelerate snowmelt rates by up to 57%.  

The enhanced snowmelt was so pronounced within the perimeter of the Caldor fire that the researchers found a total of 50 fewer days with snow cover in the winter of 2021-2022 – the lowest number of snow cover days on record.  

Following a wildfire, “there are two timescales of interest: right after the fire, the loss in albedo really dominates,” said Hatchett. “But impacts from the loss of canopy last for decades, maybe longer if the forest does not recover.” 

The enhanced snowmelt midwinter creates challenges for forecasting water availability from the natural snowpack reservoir. During the winter months, water managers need to leave room in reservoirs to prevent flooding; this means that earlier snowmelt may not be captured for later use in the dry season. Studies like this provide water managers with the tools to make more accurate predictions of the timing and magnitude of snowmelt.  

“The fires have made major landscape disturbance that we're not taking into account in our forecasting abilities,” Koshkin said. “I think this study is showing that wildfire impacts are huge, and we need to implement this into our ability to understand how water runs off the landscape. It's part of our world and it's increasing and it's going to affect more snowy places. So, it’s important to make sure that we understand the outcomes in our models and management plans.” 

Koshkin plans to expand on this research for her Ph.D. studies by examining regional variation of fire impacts on snow. She notes that how wildfire impacts snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada may look different in Colorado or Idaho, due to different weather and snowpack conditions.  

The researchers emphasize that the wildfire impacts seen in this study are the result of high-severity wildfires, and not lower-severity burns like prescribed fires. “This study really highlights the importance of bringing fire back onto our landscape in the sense that we need fire – good fire is the answer to our wildfire problem,” Hatchett says. “Bringing a more natural regime of fire, through prescribed and cultural fire, back onto our landscape will help reduce the likelihood of future severe fire.” 

“We can recognize that this could be our new normal,” Koshkin said, “but we also have the ability to adapt and manage and mitigate as much as possible.” 

 

More information:  

The full study, Midwinter dry spells amplify post-fire snowpack decline, is available from Geophysical Research Letters:   
https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL101235 

 

Study authors include: Benjamin Hatchett (DRI), Arielle Koshkin (DRI/UNR), Kristen Guirguis (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Karl Rittger (CU Boulder), Anne Nolin (UNR), Anne Heggli (DRI), Alan Rhoades (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), Amy East (USGS), Erica Siirila-Woodburn (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab), W. Tyler Brandt (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), Alexander Gershunov (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), and Kayden Haleakala (Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCLA).  

### 

About DRI  

The Desert Research Institute (DRI) is a recognized world leader in basic and applied environmental research. Committed to scientific excellence and integrity, DRI faculty, students who work alongside them, and staff have developed scientific knowledge and innovative technologies in research projects around the globe. Since 1959, DRI’s research has advanced scientific knowledge on topics ranging from humans’ impact on the environment to the environment’s impact on humans. DRI’s impactful science and inspiring solutions support Nevada’s diverse economy, provide science-based educational opportunities, and inform policymakers, business leaders, and community members. With campuses in Las Vegas and Reno, DRI serves as the non-profit research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education. For more information, please visit www.dri.edu. 

---

JOURNAL

Geophysical Research Letters

ARTICLE TITLE

Midwinter dry spells amplify post-fire snowpack decline

Despite concerns over antimicrobial resistance, global antimicrobial use in animals could increase by 8% by 2030 if stronger restrictions are not applied worldwide

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: CHICKEN view more 

CREDIT: THOMAS VAN BOECKEL, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Despite concerns over antimicrobial resistance, global antimicrobial use in animals could increase by 8% by 2030 if stronger restrictions are not applied worldwide.

####

Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001305

Article Title: Global trends in antimicrobial use in food-producing animals: 2020 to 2030

Author Countries: Belgium, India, Switzerland

Funding: RM was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 grant for MOOD (Monitoring Outbreaks for Disease surveillance in a data science context) (No 874850). MG was supported by the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique. TPVB and YW were supported by The Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza Fellowship (No 181248), and the Branco Weiss Foundation. The funders played no role in the design or interpretation of the study.

---

JOURNAL

PLOS Global Public Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pgph.0001305 

ARTICLE TITLE

Global trends in antimicrobial use in food-producing animals: 2020 to 2030

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Feb-2023

War tourists fighting on a virtual front, since Ukraine-Russia war

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, a new group of ‘war tourists’ has emerged - those who are fighting on a virtual front. 

A new study from the University of Portsmouth has found that war tourism, which typically used to be people travelling to past or present war zones, is now also an online phenomenon.  

Researchers analysed data from the Subreddit forum ‘volunteers for Ukraine’, which was started on 25 February, 2022, a day after Russia invaded Ukraine. Two weeks later, the forum had some 44,500 members. 

Lead author, Dr Nigel Williams, from the University’s Faculty of Business and Law, said: “War tourism has a long history, with travellers visiting battlefields, memorials, museums, prison camps or current war zones.

“In the past we’ve seen war tourists who want to go and fight in wars, those who want to volunteer as humanitarians and then those who are voyeuristic thrillseekers.

“But what we’re seeing now is an emerging trend for war tourists to be involved virtually, by countering misinformation, providing funding and raising awareness from the comfort of their own homes. 

“The presence of hybrid war activities, such as campaigning for sanctions’ enforcement on social media, has lowered the barrier to observation and participation.”

Dr Williams obtained over 20,000 posts from the dedicated Volunteers for Ukraine Reddit forum  from the first month of the conflict and found that participants in the forum were engaging in activities that can be seen as combating non-military hybrid warfare tactics, such as countering propaganda “fake news” and “Russian trolls and shills” to donating money and providing helpful information for Ukrainian refugees.

He said: “Social media, media activity, sanctions and fundraising are all part of modern warfare, which means wars are no longer about face-to-face contact or bound by geography.

“Our findings show that combating hybrid warfare has expanded to an online domain, where people can shape perceptions and mobilise resources.”

The paper, published in The Journal of Travel Research, highlights the complicated relationship between war tourism, volunteering and voyeurism in a new form of ‘hybrid war tourism’. 

Dr Williams added: “Public forums like Reddit can put people at risk of becoming radicalised. You don’t know who you’re really talking to online - could it be a Russian agent or a Ukrainian soldier? Future research should aim at a deeper understanding of these concepts and the complex links between them.”

ENDS 

---

JOURNAL

Journal of Travel Research

DOI

10.1177/00472875221146797 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Social Representations of War Tourism: A Case of Ukraine

Study underscores lack of diversity in stock photography sites

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

A new study finds the majority of images related to health topics on stock photography sites are of light-skinned people within a fairly narrow age range, making it more difficult – and expensive – for organizations to create health education materials aimed at reaching other groups.

The findings are significant because using images relevant to audiences is an important factor in successful communication and outreach efforts. If many populations are not well represented on stock photography sites, it’s more difficult to develop effective communication tools to reach those populations.

“Many organizations that produce health outreach materials rely on stock photography sites to produce those materials,” says Michelle Jewell, co-author of the study and a science communicator in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University. “In many cases, organizations that create outreach materials for minoritized groups or populations with lower socioeconomic status have limited resources, which exacerbates the challenges they face in producing effective materials that reflect the publics they serve.”

The researchers also found a significant difference between the diversity present on images available on free stock photography sites versus on sites that require users to pay for stock photos.

“Images on stock photo sites with paywalls were significantly more likely to depict a person of perceived minoritized racial/ethnic identity and darker skin tones,” says Catherine LePrevost, co-author of the study and an associate extension professor of applied ecology at NC State. “The pay sites were also less likely to contain markers of high socioeconomic status than images in databases that were free to use.”

“In other words, it is harder to find health-relevant photos of people who are not light-skinned and upper class,” Jewell says. “And when you do find them, they are more likely to come with a fee.”

The researchers launched the study after they struggled to find a stock image of a Latina pregnant woman for an unrelated science communication effort.

“Anecdotally, this lack of representation in stock photography is a widely known problem among professional communicators,” Jewell says. “We wanted to quantify the problem to get a better understanding of the scope of the problem.”

For the study, the researchers focused on five widely used stock image libraries, and searched each of those sites for five health-related terms: healthy eating, exercising, quitting smoking, vaccination, and pregnancy.

While about half of the images the researchers found included at least one person from a perceived minoritized group, there were stark differences when researchers accounted for skin tone.

For some search terms – healthy diet and quitting smoking – there were no images of people with dark skin tones at all. Only one search term – vaccination – included dark skin tones in 20% of its images.

“It became glaringly evident while searching through the stock photo libraries that certain populations are underrepresented,” say Zachary Chichester, first author of the study and an undergraduate at East Carolina University at the time of the study. “It is imperative that we bring attention to this issue in order to ensure that creators of health education media are able to produce materials that are most effective.”

Another factor was whether the stock photos showed a person’s face.

“If you were looking for photos that included someone’s face, which is important for humanizing the subject matter, things became even more difficult,” LePrevost says. “Basically, if an image included a person’s face, it was much less likely to be someone who could be recognized as being part of a minoritized racial or ethnic group.”

Age presented another challenge, with the researchers finding very few images that included older adults of any racial or ethnic group.

And these disparities became more pronounced when looking only at free stock photo sites and images.

“Effective health communication is incredibly important, and our study outlines a systemic obstacle to developing health communication tools for many groups,” LePrevost says. “Communication is an important component in addressing health disparities, and this work highlights one of the challenges facing those communication efforts.”

“We also hope this work will help health communicators secure the time and financial resources they need in order to develop effective outreach tools,” Jewell says. “Organizations that support health communication and education efforts need to recognize that communicators don’t have access to free images that are relevant to many audiences. Moving forward, granting bodies and other revenue sources should include budgets for photographers and illustrators to create media that best represents relevant audiences.”

The paper, “The Cost of Diversity: An Analysis of Representation and Cost Barriers in Stock Photo Libraries for Health Education Materials, 2021,” is published open access in the journal Health Promotion Practice. The paper was co-authored by Joseph Lee, a professor of health education and promotion at ECU.

The work was supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, under grant number G08LM013198. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

---

JOURNAL

Health Promotion Practice

DOI

10.1177/15248399221150788 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

The Cost of Diversity: An Analysis of Representation and Cost Barriers in Stock Photo Libraries for Health Education Materials, 2021

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Feb-2023

New Mexico’s largest emitters overlooked in state climate policy

Well-designed climate policies could reduce climate- and health-damaging air pollution from large stationary sources responsible for 25 percent of state’s greenhouse gas emissions

Reports and Proceedings

PSE HEALTHY ENERGY

ALBUQUERQUE, NM — Many of New Mexico’s largest sources of climate and health-damaging air pollutants are not required to cut emissions at rates necessary to meet the state’s climate targets, according to a new analysis from researchers at the University of New Mexico and PSE Healthy Energy.

“We found that the state’s existing climate policies don’t require sufficient reductions from many of the large sources responsible for a quarter of the state’s emissions,” said Gabriel Pacyniak, associate professor of Law at University of New Mexico. “This puts climate goals at risk and has significant impacts for public health.”

The report analyzed emissions of health-damaging air pollutants and greenhouse gasses from 189 large stationary sources of pollution across New Mexico. Collectively, the sources reported 31.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MTCO2e) in 2019, or approximately 25 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2018. These same sources likely contribute the largest share of sulfur dioxide emissions in the state and a substantial share of nitrous oxides, both potent health-damaging air pollutants.

“As New Mexico retires its large coal plants, the relative share of emissions from the oil and gas sector continues to grow,” said Angélica Ruiz, environmental health analyst at PSE Healthy Energy. “By lowering emissions at facilities that pose the greatest risk to public health, we can dramatically increase the benefits of climate policies.”

The report also analyzed where large sources are located and suggested that there may be equity benefits to reducing emissions in those areas with a high percentage of people of color, lower-income people, or people with health vulnerabilities. Four regions—the San Juan Basin; Permian Basin; Albuquerque, Bernalillo, and Sandoval Counties; and Las Cruces and Dona Aña County—were identified as areas with particularly high concentrations of large stationary emissions sources.

“This report underscores that many Native, Latino, Black, and low-income communities bear substantial pollution burdens,” said Shannon Sanchez-Youngman, assistant professor at the UNM College of Population Health. “It’s crucial that these communities have a meaningful opportunity to participate in policy making processes.”

Climate policies that focus solely on achieving aggregate greenhouse gas emission reductions can allow health-damaging air pollution to persist. With New Mexico’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030, this report offers analysis and policy recommendations to maximize the public health and climate benefits of state policies.

“Climate policies designed in parallel with air pollution policies can simultaneously reduce climate pollution and improve public health,” said Dr. Elena Krieger, director of research at PSE Healthy Energy. “But addressing climate emissions alone will likely not achieve the greatest public health benefits.”

The Center for Civic Policy served as the fiscal sponsor and advisor of the report, and the report was funded by the Environmental Defense Fund.

###

About PSE Healthy Energy
PSE Healthy Energy is a nonprofit research institute dedicated to supplying evidence-based scientific and technical information on the public health, environmental, and climate dimensions of energy production and use. We are the only interdisciplinary collaboration focused specifically on health and sustainability at the intersection of energy science and policy. Visit us at psehealthyenergy.org and follow us on Twitter @PhySciEng.

About The University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico serves as the state’s premier institution of higher learning and provider of health care by promoting discovery, generating intellectual and cultural contributions, honoring academic values, and serving our community by building an educated, healthy, and economically vigorous New Mexico. This report is a collaboration between faculty in the UNM School of Law Clinical Law Program, the College of Population Health, and the Center for Social Policy and also supports UNM’s Just Transition Grand Challenge.

---

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Feb-2023

SITUATIONIST PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY REALISED

Joy at the café: Tweets reveal where in cities people express different emotions

Study in London, San Francisco uses social media and geographic data to link emotions to detailed locations

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: CITYWIDE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA. view more 

CREDIT: BUFFIK, PIXABAY, CC0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/PUBLICDOMAIN/ZERO/1.0/)

An analysis of nearly 2 million Tweets made by people in London and San Francisco explores specific events and types of locations that are associated with different emotions. Panote Siriaraya of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 1, 2023.

A growing body of research examines social media posts and location data to explore human behavior and emotions; for instance, to compare levels of happiness between geographic regions. However, much of that work has been limited to larger geographic scales and is focused on just one emotion at a time, or on a general assessment of positive versus negative emotion.

Siriaraya and colleagues now demonstrate how human emotional expression can be explored at a finer-grained level using Tweets and information on specific buildings, businesses, and other locations of interest from the public platform Open Street Map. They used computational tools known as neural networks to analyze nearly 2 million Tweets made by more than 200,000 people in London and San Francisco, identifying when and where people expressed anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, or trust.

The analysis showed that different location types were associated with expression of different emotions. For instance, in both cities, tweets made in train stations, bridges, and other transportation sites tended to express less joy and more disgust. Tweets from hotels and restaurants showed higher levels of joy. Additionally, proximity to certain sites—and not just being within the sites—was associated with a difference in expressed emotions.

Specific events appeared associated with higher levels of specific emotions; for instance, San Francisco users displayed their highest levels of anger, disgust, and sadness on the day of the 2017 Women’s March, and London users showed high levels of fear and sadness during two local terrorism attacks. New Year’s Eve coincided with high levels of joy in both cities.

The researchers caution against overgeneralizing their results; for instance, the study only included Tweets in English. Nonetheless, they could help pave the way to additional fine-grained research to inform such fields as urban planning and tourism.

The authors add: “Our study highlights how it is possible to portray the characteristics of fine-grained emotions at a detailed spatial and temporal level throughout the whole city, using publicly available data sources.”

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0279749

Citation: Siriaraya P, Zhang Y, Kawai Y, Jeszenszky P, Jatowt A (2023) A city-wide examination of fine-grained human emotions through social media analysis. PLoS ONE 18(2): e0279749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279749

Author Countries: Japan, Switzerland, Austria

Funding: This work was partially supported by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication, Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Program (MIC/SCOPE) #171507010 (https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_sosiki/joho_tsusin/scope/) and the Japan society for the promotion of science KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16H01722, 17H01822, 22K12274 and 22K19837 (https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/index.html). Apart from these, there was no additional external funding received for this study.

---

JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0279749 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

A city-wide examination of fine-grained human emotions through social media analysis

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

1-Feb-2023

How we navigate through crowds

Our brain has its own GPS and it helps us navigate by detecting the movements of the people around us.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA

Grid cells not only help us navigate our own paths in a complex environment, but also help us analyse the movements of other people, scientists from the University of Vienna have now shown for the first time. Their new study in Nature Communications also suggests an explanation for a mechanism that could lead to disorientation in dementia patients.

Whether you are making your way through a crowded pedestrian zone or striving towards the goal in a team game, in both situations it is important to think not only about your own movements but also those of others. These navigation and orientation processes are carried out by brain cells that register our current position, where we are coming from, where we are moving towards and in which direction we are looking. Through their joint activity, they create a "map" of our surroundings. A special type of these cells are the so-called grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, a small brain region in the middle temporal lobe. They function like the brain's own GPS, because they not only represent our position in space, but can also put it in relation to other points in the same space.

Whether these grid cells are also involved in mapping the movements of other individuals on this map was the question that the scientists led by Isabella Wagner and Claus Lamm from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Vienna addressed. For this purpose, the scientists tested participants that either navigated themselves in a virtual environment, or observed the movements of another person while their brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

They found that the brain activity recorded while watching others was comparable to the activity of grid cells. In addition, the team was able to show that this activity was part of a larger network of brain regions that are associated with navigation processes. Interestingly, however, it turned out that the better a subject was at following the path of others, the less active this network was. "We interpret this as greater efficiency of the grid cells, which might make it less necessary to engage the larger brain network," Wagner explains.

The results of the study thus suggest that grid cells belong to a larger network of brain regions that, among other aspects, coordinates navigation processes. However, this network is particularly affected by ageing processes and especially by dementia. Wagner explains: "The function of grid cells decreases with age and dementia. As a result, people can no longer find their way around and their orientation is impaired." The group's further research is now dedicated to the question of whether grid cells are also involved in recognising other people - an aspect that is often impaired in advanced dementia. 
 

JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-023-35819-3 

ARTICLE TITLE

Entorhinal grid-like codes and time-locked network dynamics track others navigating through space

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

31-Jan-2023

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of individuals



Tristram Hillier
La Route des Alpes (1937)

How do different places make us feel and behave? The term psychogeography was invented by the Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1955 in order to explore this. Inspired by the French nineteenth century poet and writer Charles Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur – an urban wanderer – Debord suggested playful and inventive ways of navigating the urban environment in order to examine its architecture and spaces.

As a founding member of the avant-garde movement Situationist International, an international movement of artists, writers and poets who aimed to break down the barriers between culture and everyday life, Debord wanted a revolutionary approach to architecture that was less functional and more open to exploration.

The reimagining of the city proposed by psychogeography has its roots in dadaism and surrealism, art movements which explored ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination. Tristam Hillier’s paintings such as La Route des Alpes 1937 could be described as an early example of the concept.

Psychogeography gained popularity in the 1990s when artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller began using the idea to create works based on exploring locations by walking. 

© Tate

Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift

Through the City

If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth, 

psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking

 earth, mind and foot.

Cover of Guy Debord's 1957 “Psychogeographic guide of Paris." The territory is fragmented and depicts only the emotional connections of different places.

By: Karen O'Rourke

“Psychogeography is the fact that you have an opinion about a space the moment you step into it,” says the writer and psychogeographer Wilfried Hou Je Bek. “This has as much to do with the space as with our hardwired instincts to determine if it is safe.”

Graphy comes from the Greek graphein (to write), a decidedly polysemic word. If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth (geos), what about psychogeographers? The Latin prefix psyche (breath) adds a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot. Psychogeographic writing can be thought of as an alternative way of reading the city. Wilfried Hou Je Bek calls it “the city-space cut-up.” Just as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin cut and reorganized newspaper texts to reveal their implicit content, so too psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways.

This article is adapted from Karen O’Rourke’s book

 “Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers.”

Although the various practices gathered under the umbrella of psychogeography are ancient, the term itself was first used by members of the Lettrist International, a Paris-based collective of radical artists and cultural theorists that was active in the early 1950s. They described it as “a science of relations and ambiances” they were developing “to give play in the society of others [le jeu de société; literally, “the parlor game”] its true meaning: a society founded upon play. Nothing is more serious. Amusement is the royal privilege that must be made available to everyone.”

Writing in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues, Guy-Ernest Debord attributes the term to an “illiterate Kabyle.” Its vagueness appealed to the loosely organized group that adopted it to describe its various activities. Because geography deals with the impact of natural forces (such as climate and soil composition) “on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world,” wrote Debord, psychogeography should examine the “specific effects of the geographical environment . . . on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” To accomplish this ambitious investigation, he and his friends recommended drifting:

The practice of de-familiarization and the choice of encounters, the sense of incompleteness and ephemerality, the love of speed transposed onto the plane of the mind, together with inventiveness and forgetting are among the elements of an ethics of drifting we have already begun to test in the poverty of the cities of our time.

Contemporary practitioners take their cue from Debord, who proposed one of psychogeography’s first genealogies. It began with Giovanni Piranesi’s labyrinthine stairways and gathered Claude Lorrain, Jack the Ripper (“probably psycho-geographical in love”), Edgar Allan Poe, and André Breton (deemed “naively psycho-geographical in encounters”), among others.

Each psychogeographer has his own list: Ralph Rumney’s included “Renaissance architect Serlio, French garden designer Le Nôtre, and all builders of grottoes, follies and mazes”; Iain Sinclair turns to William Blake, “the Godfather of Psychogeography”; Rebecca Solnit makes a case for satirist John Gay, the author of “Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London” (1716); Wilfried Hou Je Bek singles out Horace Walpole, who, over a period of 30 years, transformed his Tudor mansion into a Gothic castle “meticulously designed to provoke a vast array of sensations in its visitors”; Merlin Coverly cites Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for the way it depicts the seamy underside of the city as reflecting dark corners of the human psyche.

“On Saturday evenings,” wrote opium-eater and peripatetic Thomas de Quincey, “I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance.”

Among the precursors found on nearly every list is opium-eater and peripatetic Thomas de Quincey: “On Saturday evenings,” wrote de Quincey, “I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance” in search of an occult “Northwest Passage” allowing one to cross London unhampered.
The Figure of the Flâneur

Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur is often cited as a model for today’s run of psychogeographer. Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd” and epitomized by Baudelaire’s painter friend Constantin Guys, the flâneur was something of a dandy who ambled through the Paris arcades while ordinary people scurried to work all around him. Free from the pressures of the workaday world, he sought the random encounters that the city streets were always ready to offer.

Guys, “the painter of modern life,” was a man of the world whose domain was the crowd, “just as the air is the bird’s and water that of the fish.” He desired nothing more than to merge with the throng and to dwell in “the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite,” Baudelaire wrote in an essay on the painter. The crowd was “[a]n enormous reservoir of electricity” that gave him the opportunity “to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen by the world” to the extent that the man himself has become a mirror, “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness,” “an ego thirsting for the nonego and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.” Baudelaire completes this portrait in “The Crowds,” one of the prose poems that comprise “Le Spleen de Paris” (“Paris Spleen”): “It is not given to everyone to be able to bathe in the multitude: enjoyment of the crowd is an art” that requires “a taste for dressing up and masque, a hatred for domesticity and a passion for travel. The solitary and thoughtful stroller derives a singular intoxication from this universal communion.”

RELATED Paris Sportif: The Contagious Attraction of Parkour

In the 1930s, Walter Benjamin reappropriated Baudelaire’s dandy for his own purposes, contrasting “the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd” with “the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of the gentleman of leisure.” He claimed that “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them” as a way of protesting against “the division of labor which makes people into specialists.”

In the tradition of Restif de la Bretonne, who wandered through Paris on the eve of the French Revolution (“Les nuits de Paris,” 1788–1794), Benjamin’s contemporaries Louis Aragon (“Paris Peasant,” 1925), André Breton (“Nadja,” 1928), and Philippe Soupault (“Last Nights of Paris,” 1928) put to paper their citywide ramblings. Like Baudelaire, they celebrated the inadvertent poetry of shop window displays, fleeting glances, elusive women, chance encounters, and mysterious pursuits.

Drifting for members of the Lettrist International did not mean only walking. The adventure began during a transportation strike in the summer of 1953 on the platform at the Gare de Lyon, where the group was trying agit-prop. Failing to rally any of the stranded passengers to the strikers’ cause, Guy Debord, Jean-Michel Mension, and their friends sauntered out of the station (or were they chased out?) and began flagging down cars. Hitchhiking nonstop through Paris, they changed their destinations to fit that of the drivers. Their goal, as Debord noted facetiously, was to add to the confusion.

Later, this “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” was accomplished on foot and by taxi, “depending on whether the goal [was] to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself.” In “Dérive by the Mile,” Michèle Bernstein, a novelist and a founding member of the Situationist International, argued in favor of replacing private transport in Paris with large numbers of low-cost taxis, which would be more conducive to recreational drifting. As they travel varying distances in a set time and follow an essentially random itinerary, taxis combine freedom of movement with automatic disorientation.

The situationists prided themselves on detecting the “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.”

Conversely, walking was better for close-up views that focus on the environment at hand. The situationists prided themselves on detecting the “sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres,” as Debord wrote in “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” It is a subjective science. When Guy Debord describes the urban ambiances that he and fellow lettrist Gil J. Wolman gathered while drifting through the north of Paris, his judgments are peremptory: Here he sees a “repulsive petit-bourgeois landscape”; there he deems a staircase leading to a network of alleys to be “annoyingly picturesque”; farther on, he consecrates “the impressive rotunda by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux” as the center of an “important psycho-geographic hub” because it is “a virtual ruin left in an incredible state of abandonment, whose charm is singularly enhanced by the curve of the elevated subway line that passes by at close distance.”

A drift could last as long as the drifters wanted it to — a whole day or, as Debord suggests in his “Theory of the Drift,” the time between two periods of sleep:

The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-drift of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).

It comprised both restless movement and alcohol-fueled talk. Speaking in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo in September 2003, Jean-Michel Mension described those early drifts as leading frequently from one neighborhood bar to another. It was not usually a solitary pursuit. Debord’s and Wolman’s drift began at 10 a.m. and finished at an unspecified time in the evening when the two drifters abruptly decided to put an end to it. On the way, they made a number of “stops — sometimes long, sometimes brief — at various bars patronized by the bargemen” on the right bank of the canal Saint-Denis, before arriving in a Spanish bar known as the Tavern of the Rebels.

In recent decades, for poachers and protesters, artists, activists and drifters, walking has emerged as a means of reclaiming public space. From the Paris suburbs to London’s ring road, pedestrians are reappearing (or springing up) in spaces dedicated to automobile traffic. For many of them walking is a process of self-education.

Remaking the World?

What is psychogeography’s legacy? In its diverse forms, it embodies the desire to renew language, social life, and oneself. For contemporary psychogeographers, the drift is purposeful; it can reveal the city’s underlying structure. Iain Sinclair aims for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “alert reverie,” a kind of double presence that is both in the here and now and in the imagination:

Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, trampling asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to assert itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin de siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy — but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything.

In “Theory of the Drift,” Debord proposed the idea of a “possible rendezvous” as a means of “behavioral disorientation.” Here, a person is given an appointment at a particular time and place but has no idea if someone will be there to meet him or who that person is. Not knowing what to expect, he will study his surroundings and start conversations with passers-by: “He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the ‘possible rendezvous.’ In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn.”

Courting the unexpected is often combined with the unabashed apology of subjectivity. Stewart Home, the English artist and writer who in 1992 revived the London Psychogeographical Association, states: “For me photography is most alluring when both the person behind the lens and what is being photographed self-consciously manifest their subjectivity. Traveling across ‘Britain’ to discover ‘America’ is only one of the many ways in which such subjectivity might remake the world in both photographic and material form. . . . The psychogeographer . . . knows that the world cannot be recorded, it can only be remade.” “Remaking the world” is usually done in smoke-filled cafés. If these debates rarely lead to concrete action, what about walking?

Karen O’Rourke is an artist and emeritus professor at Jean Monnet University Saint-Etienne, France, and the author of “Walking and Mapping,” from which this article is adapted. Her work explores the relationship between art practice and the concepts of network, archive and territory.