Concordia 2025

more equatorial Kuala Lumpur area. There was, however, another significant difference: as the capital of a newly independent and rapidly developing nation, Kuala Lumpur was expanding on to the deeply weathered forested slopes of the surrounding hills. The soil erosion on construction sites was dramatic. The river channels through the city became choked with sediment and flooding often occurred. To the urban ecology I had seen in London, I added the urban geomorphology I saw in Kuala Lumpur. Another change arose in 1971, when I took up a professorship at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, 480km from Sydney. My 1973 presidential address on ‘Pressures on Australian Rainforests’ to an Australian science congress attracted wide attention and resulted in a research grant to map wilderness area in southeastern Australia. Many of the areas mapped by my colleagues in this study later became National Parks. At the end of 1978 my wife and I returned to the UK and I became Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Manchester. The city still had critical environmental issues related to derelict industrial and mining areas

and local flooding in extreme storms. I taught courses on the humid tropics, sustainability and the urban environment. However, professional calls to chair the then British Geomorphological Research Group led to my organising the local arrangements for the First International Conferences on Geomorphology in Manchester in 1985. This event, attended by 750 delegates, saw 33 participants come from China and reconnected me to some of my Strasbourg friends. Subsequently I was asked to visit China in 1986 and to work with one of leading French geomorphological teams in Paris. My research activities then followed two main threads: the urban environment and Malaysian rainforest hydrology. In 1984 the latter was made possible through the Royal Society’s South-East Asian Rainforest Research Programme. A new field station in eastern Sabah, in the north east of Borneo, had been set up to examine the impact of selective logging on rainforest ecosystems and to promote environmental education for the people of Sabah. We employed local graduates as research assistants and school-leavers as research technicians and kept Sabah state officers informed of progress.

Concordia Winter 2024

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View of Armidale, NSW, in 1978: the city centre is in the middle distance

Part of the Danum Valley Field Centre, Sabah, with the meteorological station and the Segama River and undisturbed rainforest beyond

Ian at a dinner at Chongqing University in 1988