The Geography Department is located at the Lakewood campus. For more information about this program, please contact:

Blake L. Mayberry blake.mayberry@rrcc.edu Discipline Lead Instructor Office: WB 2615 Phone: 303.914.6207

My path to become a geographer has been appropriately circuitous, but I could start in the beginning: as a child I slept with a globe instead of a teddy bear! At times I wanted to be Indiana Jones, and at other times, Leonardo DaVinci. I found that geography was the best way to satisfy the scientific, analytical side of my brain, while also indulging my more romantic, artistic side. As a career, I also found geography to be extremely rewarding. I have worked as an urban planner in the Omaha metropolitan area, and with environmental groups conducting ecological restoration and advocating for the protection of native ecosystems. I have done research on topics ranging from urbanization and water resources in the southwestern United States, to the Indian Removal Period during the nineteenth century. However, my real passion is for grasslands. My master’s thesis at the University of Nebraska-Omaha focused on the effort to create a national park in western Iowa’s Loess Hills in the aftermath of the Farm Crisis, specifically, the role that media play in natural resource conservation policy. Expanding on that theme, my dissertation research at the University of Kansas involved an ethnographic study of environmentalists working to restore prairies on the Great Plains and how cultural identity and sense of place influence people’s actions to remake the landscape. In my spare time I enjoy reading maps, drawing maps, and exploring places real-life places that I find on maps.