Clarence Glacken

Clarence James Glacken (1909-1989) was Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He was known for a 1967 magnus opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, that demonstrated how perceptions of the natural environment shaped the course of human events over millennia. He is recognised as a key contributor to the field of environmental history.

Background

Glacken was born and raised in Sacramento, California. He studies history and interdisciplinary studies at Berkeley in the late 1920s. In the 1930s and 1940s, as America faced the Great Depression, he held several government jobs including assistance in the Central Valley of California to refugees fleeing the Mid West Dust Bowl and unemployment. In 1937, he travelled alone for a year through Europe and Asia, sparking his interest in the relationship between human ideas and the natural world.

In 1941, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, becoming an analyst and expert in Japanese language and culture. Discharged at the end of the war he took a job in Korea at the military government's Bureau of Health and Welfare, and found time for some geographical study of land cover change.

These experiences experience led to a desire to pursue scholarship. He finished a PhD in Geography at Johns Hopkins University when in his forties, called “The Idea of the Habitable World.” Later he undertook an ethnography of three villages in Okinawa, using his language skills, working for the Pacific Science Board from 1951-2. The study was later published as a book (Glacken, 1955).

In 1952, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Geography at Berkeley, later becoming Professor. He pursued varied research interests and attended the landmark conference, Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in 1955, led by colleague Carl Sauer. Glacken was Chair of the Berkeley Geography Department in the late 1960s, at a time of upheaval. He suffered a severe severe nervous breakdown in 1970, followed by a heart attack.^[1] In his last decade, as interest in his environmental ideas grew, he remained severely depressed, and was unable to complete a sequel to Traces on the Rhodian Shore dealing with human-environment relationships in the 20th century.

He died in Sacramento at the age of 80, pre-deceased by his wife Mildred. He had a daughter, the novelist Karen Kijewski, and a son Michael.

Scholarship

Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967) examined nature and culture in western thought from ancient times to the end of the 19th century. The book was hailed as monumental in its scope, "bringing together ideas on this vast and universal topic as they never had been before, transcending geography as a discipline but also being recognized as one of the truly great books written by a geographer in this century"..^[1]

In this and in other volumes, Glacken showed how past generations contemplated and interpreted the mutual relations between nature and human cultures.

Key Works

• Glacken, C.J. 1955. The Great Loochoo: A Study of Okinawan Village Life ^[2]. University of California Press.
• Glacken, C.J. 1960. Count Buffon on cultural changes of the physical environment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 50: 1–22.
• Glacken, C. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

References

• Hooson, D. 1991. Clarence Glacken 1909–1989. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81: 152–158.
• Tuan, Y.1968. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of he Eighteenth Century” [Book Review]. Geographical Review 58:308-309.

1. ^ ^{a b} "University of California: In Memoriam, 1990". Texts.cdlib.org. http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb5f59n9gs&brand=calisphere&chunk.id=meta. Retrieved 2011-10-22. 
2. ^ "The Great Loochoo: a study of ... - Clarence J. Glacken - Google Books". Books.google.com. http://books.google.com/books?id=JZkwcbecu8AC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Kochinda,+Okinawa&as_brr=3&ie=ISO-8859-1&cd=8&source=gbs_gdata#v=onepage&q=Kochinda%2C%20Okinawa&f=false. Retrieved 2011-10-22.