McCabe Lecture at Springfield College

It was my pleasure this past week to deliver the McCabe lecture at Springfield College in Massachusetts. My invitation included, “I know you can talk about anything, but how about climate change?” I appreciated the tip of the hat to my wide-ranging interests, and I agreed that climate change would be an excellent topic to bring to first and second year college students.

As I faced several hundred students who were present for extra credit in various classes, I realized I hadn’t planned an opener. Fortunately inspiration struck and I began by complaining about how cold it had been that morning, which led to the distinction between weather and climate. I pointed out that there were many indicators beyond temperature that flagged a changing climate, which allowed me to present the requisite cute fuzzy mammal photo of the talk. Polar bears are often used to pluck the heartstrings of an audience, but I selected a shot of a white snowshoe hare who was fruitlessly trying to hide in a snow-free wooded environment. Snowshoe hares currently change over to their brown coats about one week after the snow has melted, which increases their chance of falling prey to a predator by 7% each week. As the timing mismatch increases, their continued existence will be threatened.

Although as a scientist I’m trained to lecture, I find that I need the interaction with the audience, so partway through I started asking questions to the group such as why atmospheric CO2 levels rise and fall on an annual cycle. The students did a good job of piecing together the role of plant photosynthesis, and I was amused that it was a faculty member who could not restrain himself from delivering the final answer that because the majority of the Earth’s landmass is in the northern hemisphere, it is the plant cycle on the top of the world that drives the oscillation in global CO2 levels.

Since sea level rise is such an important consequence of climate change, I had found several projections of what higher oceans would look like. I put up a picture of Florida with a meter of sea level rise, and the students took it all in. However, the next slide which showed the projected impact of a six meter sea level rise on the Mid-Atlantic and New England states, got a pronounced response. The conversation level rose abruptly as the students all evaluated the impact on their homes. I took an impromptu survey of the group, and about 20% of the students said that their homes would be under water with that level of sea level rise. Suddenly climate change had become personal.

One of the challenges of giving a talk on climate change is finding a way to send everyone home on a happy note rather than focusing on the doom and gloom. I found my way by focusing on the enormous variety of approaches that Massachusetts is taking to reduce their greenhouse emissions and to produce more resilient communities. As a member state of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, they are pledged to reduce their emissions, and the group has been extremely successful. It was a pleasure to point out that Massachusetts has maintained its participation in the program regardless of the party affiliation of their governor. In 2003, the state required all utility companies to produce 1% of their power from renewable resources, but that level would rise by 1% annually. So for 2018, the renewable power should constitute 15% of the electricity produced in the state. I put up a photo of cars whizzing by a field of solar panels, and the audience correctly identified it as the Mass Pike where the open land in highway ramp clover leafs or adjacent to the highway is being used for solar power.

Springfield itself has numerous initiatives as part of its resilient communities program including opportunities for residents to purchase rain barrels, a program to make it easier to install solar panels on houses, and a nascent bike share program for the Pioneer Valley.

The impacts and challenges of climate change remain extremely daunting, but it gives me hope to look at the bright spots of local, state, and regional efforts to do what we can. It was an honor and delight to share all of that with a group of students who seemed to surprise themselves with their engagement

The Senate and the President

My Beloved Husband and I have a penchant for contests in which we quiz each other on trivia.  We have exhausted the state capitals, made moderate headway on the country capitals, and I got my butt kicked by my BH on the international radio code (alpha, bravo, Charlie, etc.).  We also enjoy space esoterica such as naming the lunar landing sites of the Apollo missions or the naming the wives of the “New Nine” astronauts.  A few months ago, we ate at a diner where the placemats featured pictures of all of the American Presidents, and we immediately seized on a new contest.

My history and political reading of the past year and a half gave me a distinct advantage, but both of us floundered between Andrew Jackson, whose winning slogan was, “John Quincy Adams can write, but I can fight!” and approximately Woodrow Wilson.  It’s a vast wasteland in the middle with only Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt as familiar faces.  Even trying to regroup the Presidents by other characteristics such as the “cartoon” presidents: Millard (Mallard) Fillmore, (James) Garfield, and Grover (Cleveland) didn’t help much in reproducing the sequence.  (As I was writing that passage, I called in my BH to consult, and when he tried for “President Deputy Dog,” I knew that he was not going to be a big help.)  So why is this string of Presidents so unmemorable?  The answer is found in the balance of power between the President and the Senate

When our modern government was formed and George Washington was unanimously named as the first President, the players all rather gingerly explored their roles.  Laws originated largely from Congress, and predominantly from the House.  The first six Presidents used their veto power sparingly and then only in cases in which they felt that the new law violated the young Constitution.  George Washington however, submitting a slate of candidates for approval by the Senate for a variety of government positions, learned the hard way that the Senate did not see their role of “advise and consent” to mean automatic acceptance of Washington’s recommendations. One nomination was blocked by a senator who had a personal quarrel with the nominee, prompting Washington to appear before the Senate to question what the problem was.  Much as they respected this man who had been elected unanimously, the Senate felt no obligation to explain their actions.  Thus Washington learned to consult with the Senate before he submitted nominations, and he proceeded to conduct all of his subsequent business with Congress through written correspondence rather than by addressing the group on their own turf.  Both practices remain in place today.

The 1820’s began what came to be known as the Golden Age of the Senate.  It began following the term of Andrew Jackson, (President #7), who forcefully imposed his strong views about the primacy of the President upon Congress.  Thus after his term Congress pushed back hard to re-establish their own power.  The Senate in particular, flexed its authority by no longer deferring to the House to introduce legislation and began to originate its own bills.

As Alexis de Tocqueville described the Senate in 1835, “Scarcely an individual is to be seen in it who has not had an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose arguments would do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debates of Europe.” The great triumvirate of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun were but three of the senators whose fiery and passionate debates hammered out acts such as the Missouri Compromise of 1850, which for a time preserved the Union and delayed the Civil War for decades.

Because the Senate contained a considerable portion of the best political talent, and because of the tensions between North and South making it impossible for the best known candidates to be nominated, the Golden Age of the Senate from the 1820’s through the 1850’s accompanied great weakness in the Presidency.  Men like Zachary Taylor or James Polk were political compromises who did their best to stay out of the legislature’s way and did not make a significant impression upon history.  At least ten of the 62 senators who served in the 1849-1850 Congress had greater impact upon the country than did the Presidents of that era. They included Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, but also William Seward of New York, Salmon Chase of Ohio, and Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, who later became part of President Lincoln’s team of rivals cabinet as Secretaries of state, treasury, and war respectively.

It was Abraham Lincoln who temporarily shifted more power to the Presidency and away from the Senate.  For example, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued entirely without consulting Congress, who were less than pleased at being left out of the loop.  This power shift was transitory since Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after his assassination, holds the dubious honor of the first President to be impeached by the House.  On my visit to the National Archives last year, I saw the piece of paper with the hand-written resolution for impeachment; it was carried around for days by a representative who was looking for an opportunity to use it.  Although Johnson narrowly avoided conviction by the Senate, he left the Presidency again greatly weakened.

Thus began a second sequence of Presidents whose names are barely memorable.  Following Ulysses Grant, who was adept at winning a war, but had no idea how to run a country, were men such as Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester Arthur.  It was not until Vice President Teddy Roosevelt became President upon the assassination of William McKinley that Congress acquired another worthy opponent in the White House and the inexorable progression toward a strong President would begin.

Having learned this bit of history, I felt that my lack of knowledge of these Presidents was perfectly justified.  Besides, although my English BH knows a greater than average amount about American Presidents, I still knew enough to beat him at the game.

Transitions

 

The genesis of my blog project came from my previous sabbatical when I spent a year at the University of Tennessee.  I had recently learned about the tradition of hikers on the Appalachian Trail assuming nicknames during their journey, and separately I wanted a way to keep in touch with family and friends who I would no longer be seeing regularly.  Inspired by stories from my BFF (Best Friend Forever) who told me of a friend of hers who had spent a year in Spain and sent back stories of “Senor Barcelona,” I believe, I began a series of emails known as The Adventures of the Tennessee Yankee, which described my experiences and told stories of my life in the land of Rocky Top.

For my 2012-2013 sabbatical, I knew that I wanted to do a similar project, and a number of both personal and professional contacts suggested that a blog would be accessible to a larger audience who might be interested in an insider’s perspective on the government.  “Dr. Pence Goes to Washington” was the result.

When I first started blogging in the fall, I wondered how long it would be before I ran out of topics.  That turned out not to be a problem since at times I had half a dozen ideas noodling around in my mind waiting for me to have bandwidth to process them and write.  I set myself a vague goal of averaging two posts per week, and since this is the 116^th post, I more than met that benchmark.  At times the blog seemed to hang over my head as I felt self-imposed pressure to post somewhat regularly, and my workouts certainly suffered this year since mornings were my prime writing time, but I have found the process of writing about my lessons, experiences, and adventures to be incredibly rewarding.

I have particularly identified two traits instilled in me at an early age that influenced my writing this year.  The first is that I come from a family of storytellers.  Events and observations from a day, a walk, or a vacation have always become shaped into stories, and I have realized that I tell stories in my teaching as well.  This blog has largely been about telling stories of working in a Senate office, and living and exploring Washington DC.

The second habit was shaped even earlier.  I was about 18 months old when my father was writing his Ph.D. dissertation, and as was much commented-upon by my grandmothers, I didn’t talk until I was about two.  (Apparently I wasn’t going to amount to much.)  This combination, however, made me an excellent walking companion.  When my father hit a block on his writing, he would invite me to go for a walk with him.  As long as I maintained possession of my yellow blanket, I was perfectly happy, and my silence provided an ideal environment for Dad to organize his thoughts and be able to return to his writing.  I attribute that early influence to finding that the shape of many of my stories has emerged while I walked to the Metro and back.

Stephen King in his book, On Writing, talks about having an Ideal Reader, who becomes the audience for whom an author writes.  Stephen King writes for his wife, Tabby.  I found that my Ideal Reader often shifted as I became aware of different people who were reading my stories.  As I lived my life, I would encounter stories that made me laugh, details that intrigued me, and pictures that impressed me, and invariably, I would think of a person or persons who would enjoy the story, detail, or picture.  So my blogs have been written with a great many people in mind.  Thank you all for being my Ideal Readers.

It took a little while to find my voice as I started writing.  I don’t think I was ever going to write the cutting edge issue blog to which everyone would come to read the latest news.  Indeed, it was of primary importance to me that I not cause any embarrassment or difficulty for my Senator’s office, so I avoided controversial topics.  Because I was thus constrained, I likewise constrained two comments that were made on my blog that I did not allow to be posted.  One was effectively an advertisement for a place I had written about, and the other was a snarky comment about the efforts of an entity I had mentioned.  I’m still happy about adhering to a snark-free blog.

I have been highly amused that although I have avoided including names in my posts, there has been a certain cachet associated with getting mentioned in the blog.  For example, my BFF has kept track of my visitors based on who emerged in my stories.  I’ve been pleased that every person who came to see me shared some kind of unique experience or event that did indeed lead to a story to share with the rest of my audience.

What happens to the blog now that I’ve finished my year in Washington?  I’m still not sure, although I’m certainly open to suggestions.  The first priority has been to transition to living in a house rather than an apartment, to speaking my own mind as a professor instead of supporting and speaking the Senator’s perspective, and to dealing with recalcitrant students rather than recalcitrant Members of Congress.  I do hope that a new set of stories will emerge for me to tell as I explore the ongoing influence of my fellowship, and that I will continue to post.  Until then, I thank everyone for reading, for commenting, and for supporting my grand adventure.

Fellowship Year Booklist

Many years ago, my father overheard a conversation about how many books it might be possible to read in a single year.  Perhaps 52, one a week?  Intrigued, he began to keep track of the books that he read each year, and the practice spread to the entire family.  I certainly found that by keeping a list, I re-read fewer books, and I actually started reading nonfiction now and then.

My Fellowship year has been strongly influenced by the libraries to which I have had access.  I fell in love with the Senate Library early on, and since their strength is politics in general and the Senate in particular, my reading began to lean in that direction.  Having a minimum of 10 minutes each way on the Metro also encouraged me to read nonfiction, which I find easier to start and stop.  I’ve always been a bit addicted to my fiction, so I learned years ago not to bring those books to work.

I do not necessarily recommend all of these books, and I omitted any re-reads, but for whatever it is worth, below are the 74 books I read during my Fellowship year.  The ones in bold type are nonfiction.  I also keep an annual annotated list, which includes more commentary on recommendations, available on request.

 

Title	Author
Ill Wind	Rachel Caine
Widow’s Web	Jennifer Estep
Heat Stroke	Rachel Caine
Equations of Life	Simon Morten
Chill Factor	Rachel Caine
The Hallowed Hunt	Lois McMaster Bujold
Theories of Flight	Simon Morten
Straight from the Heart	Ann Richards
Winterfair Gifts	Lois McMaster Bujold
A Cold Day for Murder	Dana Stabenow
Game Change	John Heilemann and Mark Halpern
Discount Armageddon	Seanan McGuire
The Girl Who Chased the Moon	Sarah Addison Allen
Outliers	Malcolm Gladwell
A Relentless Hope	Gary E. Nelson
The Mysterious Benedict Society	Trenton Lee Stewart
The Big Burn	Timothy Egan
Home Safe	Elizabeth Berg
Side Jobs	Jim Butcher
Shadow Magic	Patricia Wrede
Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar   Children	Ransom Riggs
Cool Days	Jim Butcher
Water Follies	Robert Glennon
The Rook	Daniel O’Malley
Joy for Beginners	Erica Bauemeister
Red-Headed Stepchild	Jaye Wells
Ladies of Liberty	Cokie Roberts
A Veiled Deception	Annette Blair
Larceny and Lace	Annette Blair
Spellman Files	Lisa Lutz
The Gathering	Kelley Armstrong
The Calling	Kelley Armstrong
The Capitol Inside and Out	Jim Berard
Magic Burns	Ilona Andrews
Magic Strikes	Ilona Andrews
Born to Run	Christopher McDougall
Magic Bleeds	Ilona Andrews
Frost Burned	Patricia Briggs
In Fury Born	David Weber
The Road to Cardinal Valley	Earlene Fowler
Nine and Counting	w/Catherine Whitney
The First Love Cookie Book	Lori Wilde
Trading in Danger	Elizabeth Moon
Beyond the 100th Meridian	Wallace Stegner
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	Rebecca Skloot
True Compass	Edward Kennedy
Lean In	Sheryl Sandberg
The Widow of Larkspur Inn	Lawanna Blackwell
First Along the River	Benjamin Kline
Miracle Under the Oaks	William K. Stevens
Guardians of Stone	Anita Clenney
The Last Great Senator	David A. Corbin
The Sustainability Revolution	Andres R. Edwards
Marque and Reprisal	Elizabeth Moon
What Would Google Do?	Jeff Jarvis
Engaging the Enemy	Elizabeth Moon
Command Decision	Elizabeth Moon
Victory Conditions	Elizabeth Moon
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking	Susan Cain
Deadly Sting	Jennifer Estep
Deadly Descendant	Jenna Black
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power	Jon Meacham
Cradle to Cradle	Michael Braungart and William McDonough
Falling Free	Lois McMaster Bujold
Queen of Shadows	Dianne Sylvan
Death’s Rival	Faith Hunter
Nature/Walking	Emerson/Thoreau
Magic Slays	Ilona Andrews
Libriomancer	Jim. C. Hines
Women in the Club	Michelle Swers
Mandela’s Way	Richard Stengel
Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader	Francis R. Valeo
Best Staged Plans	Claire Cook
Second Nature	Michael Pollan

 

Best Stories of the Fellowship Year

There have been a number of stories that didn’t find a home in my various blog posts but that were too good not to share, so I’ve been collecting them.  It’s apparent that I’ve been influenced by a lifetime of reading Reader’s Digest because I do find that this post reads like a collection of those stories.  Enjoy!

 

Introductions.  Two Fellows learned the importance of being well-introduced to a Senator back in October when they started on their assignments.  The Senator, given no clue other than the Fellows names cheerfully welcomed them, “So are you both interns?”  One fellow calmly but assertively set the record straight, holding out her hand and saying, “Hello Senator.  My name is …, I’m one of your new AAAS fellows, and I have a Ph.D. from MIT.”  Have I mentioned that the Fellows are generally not a shy lot?

 

Forest Fires.  My favorite fire story from the Incident Commander’s Blog of the Royal Gorge Fire in July:

Well, the predicted wind blew and the fire held. And as I promised we raised the containment to 50%. Remember this morning I said that Brenda, our Fire Behavior Specialist said, “today will be a good day to be a fire”. At the end of the day Craig Beckner, Operations Section Chief said, “it might have been a good day to be a fire, but we were better.”

 

Too Much Information? Our scheduler was having a conversation with one of the other fellows and apparently questions whether or not Walgreens had a presence in DC.  Three of us immediately responded, “There’s one in Cleveland Park,” “There’s one by my house,” and “There’s one by my metro stop.”  She just looked at us and announced that being in our office was like being in the middle of Google.

 

Terminology.  One morning, the staff in the DC office of one of the Fellows were uncertain if the staff in the state office would be able to call in to the regularly scheduled staff meeting teleconference.  The Chief of Staff explained that there was a protest going on at the state office.  When he asked about the subject of the protest, he was informed the people were pro-immigration.  The saavy DC staffers informed their boss that when you have a pro-issue protest, it’s called a rally.

 

Only in DC.  One of the LA’s in my office reported being in the midst of a crowd recently and from one side, he heard a voice call out, “Marco!”  There was promptly a reply volunteered from the other side of the group, “Rubio!”  When I told this story to my fellow Fellows, they all went for that response as well.

 

Never underestimate a Fellow! One of my fellow Fellows had a run in with a staffer in another Senator’s office, who was rather rude to her.  She mentioned the incident to her supervisor, who then mentioned it to the Senator.  The Senator, who is very close to his staff, felt that this behavior was unacceptable, so he made a point of having a conversation with his Senate colleague when they were on the Floor for a vote and explaining that he felt this behavior was unacceptable.  The offending staffer called the Fellow and said, “My boss and your boss seem to think that I hung up on you.”  The Fellow replied, “That’s because you did!”

 

Elevators, round 1. As an ultra-cool Senate Fellow, I grew accustomed to seeing Senators regularly in the hallway.  I was, however, challenged when I encountered them on elevators.  In the middle of a vote, some of the elevators become Senators-only service, and I was strongly warned about getting on to those elevators during those times.  At one point, I was ready to follow Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas onto an elevator, and at the last moment I realized that it was Senators only service.  I stopped short, and I’m sure that my eyes were like dinner plates as I looked guilty for what I had almost done.  Senator Moran was very kind, smiled, and gestured me to join him on the elevator, and I was most grateful.

 

Elevators, round 2. My complete failure at being an ultra-cool Senate Fellow happened when I was on an elevator, and it stopped to let on Senator McCain.  I have no idea why I got so flustered, but in my effort to try to keep my cool Fellow persona, I got confused, decided this must be my door, and I got off.  Of course, in the absence of Senator McCain, I realized I had gotten off a floor too early.  So I jogged down the steps to the next floor, only to meet Senator McCain getting off the elevator!  Complete fail on coolness for that day!

 

When Worlds Collide.  I will emphasize that the following story came to me at least third-hand, so I vouch only for its entertainment value, not for its veracity.  It seems that Jennifer Lopez (also known as J. Lo) decided that she wanted to talk to Senator Reid about immigration.  She proceeded to keep the Senate Majority Leader waiting for 30 minutes, which is rather beyond the pale in the Senate.  Meanwhile, I’m told that Senator Schumer was very interested in meeting the diva and he lurked in Senator Reid’s outer office until the star showed up.  Unfortunately, it became obvious that Senator Schumer was under the impression that he was meeting Beyonce rather than J. Lo and the error was apparent to the observers.  As the balancing side of “when worlds collide,” Ms. Lopez spied a photograph of former Majority Leader Tom Daschle and asked, “Why do you have a picture of Dick Clark in your office?

 

Interns.  If you choose to ask your Senator or Member of Congress for a tour of the Capitol instead of going through the Capitol Visitors Center, there are advantages and disadvantages.  On the bright side, you don’t end up on a tour with 74 of your closest friends and all of you wearing headsets so you can hear your guide.  On the other hand, your tour is given by interns from the office, and some are definitely better than others.  Here are a few intern gems from other offices that I’ve heard about:

“The mural around the Rotunda was painted by a guy named Constantidi.”  (The correct answer is Constantino Brumidi.)

“This white marble star set into the floor of the Crypt marks the center of DC and divides the city into quadrants.  I think there are four or five of them.”

How many quadrants?

Corpse Flower

The message lit up the Fellows’ email: a corpse flower was expected to bloom at the Botanical Garden.  This news indicated an unprecedented opportunity to nerd out, and we were up to the challenge!

I first became aware of the Titan arum, or more specifically, the Amorphophallus titanum, when one bloomed a few years back at the University of Connecticut.  Judging by the amount of press the plant received, it was obviously a horticultural rock star, but since I wasn’t willing to make the 45 minute drive to see it, I remained unmoved.  The United States Botanical Garden, however, is at the foot of Capital Hill, which put me in much closer proximity to the event.  The unbounded enthusiasm for all things nerdy shared by my fellow Fellows added to my incentive to go visit.

The first reason that the blooming of a Titan arum is a major event is that it is not an annual occurrence. The timing is rather unpredictable and can range from a few years to a few decades.  Cultivating these natives of Sumatra is also not trivial since they require high humidity, stable temperatures, and quite a bit of space. Thus they are usually only found in large botanical gardening facilities.  The U.S. Botanical Garden has fourteen accessions of the titan arum, which I assume means they’ve got 14 plants.

When the plant gets ready to bloom, it starts shooting up from its underground stem called a corm, and it can grow six inches a day.  In technical terms, the Titan arum has the “largest known unbranched inflorescence in the plant kingdom,” which when translated means, “That’s one big honking flower!”  The whole structure is probably over six feet tall, so it’s a very striking plant.

I’m sure you’ve read this far to find out about the corpse reference of the flower.  After it blooms, it does indeed smell of rotting flesh, although the smell is the strongest at night and is almost nonexistent during the day.  I read that the night that our titan arum bloomed, one of the horticulture staff members working during that time said that the smell was so pungent and affected him so much that he wasn’t able to eat dinner until hours after he got home.

Obviously this novel biological event pinged the nerd radars of all the Fellows, even though our group is sorely lacking in biologists.  Our first notice arrived when the Architect of the Capitol, who oversees the Botanical Garden, sent out an email to the folks on that listserve that the titan arum was ready to bloom.  Timing is critical because the flower only lasts about 48 hours and then the whole structure collapses.  There followed considerable email chatter among the fellows about sending forth an expedition to gather data for the group.  A party composed of a veterinarian, a toxicologist, and a fluvial geomorphologist made the pilgrimage over at lunch and brought back the word that although the stalk was shooting up, it was not yet blooming.  Several days passed, and we continued to send Fellows over to scout the progress. Alas the reports all came back the same; it was not yet time.  As the Washington Post and NPR picked up the story, the crowds started increasing as well.  There was a webcam set up that we could watch, but it was not the same as viewing the plant in person.

Finally our agronomist Fellow sent back word that although the plant was not yet blooming, it was displaying a significant baby bump.  Indeed as the world eagerly anticipated the arrival of the new British prince in London, the residents of DC and especially the Fellows equally eagerly anticipated the blooming of our own bright blossom.  The two events coincided almost exactly.

The full bloom-picture from the Botanical Garden’s website

I learned the hard way that visiting the new arrival after work was not a good strategy.  By the time I arrived about 6:30 on the peak bloom day, the line wrapped around the block, and I was not willing to stand in line for more than an hour.  Happily, the next day I joined an excursion party of the four Fellows in my building, (a chemist, a toxicologist, a nutritionist, and yet another veterinarian) and we expertly navigated under the Capitol and through the House office buildings to minimize our time in the humidity outside.

She’s a beauty

Pictures don’t do justice to the size of the plant; I hadn’t realized just how impressive a six or seven foot plant could be. The bloom had closed by the time we arrived, but it had not yet begun to collapse.  I was also just as happy that there was no corpsified smell when we visited.  I was fine with looking at the gigantic flower, but I didn’t feel the need to embrace the experience with all of my senses.  Overall, the flower was really interesting, but I was also enchanted to watch how any scientific event could capture the imagination of my fellow Fellows.  Turning loose the collective curiosity, creativity, and strategic energies of the group was highly entertaining and almost more impressive than the actual titan arum.

 

National Archives: Behind the Scenes

At some point in the not-too-distant past, the staff at the National Archives became aware that Congress, the entity who provides the money to fund the Archives, had absolutely no idea what the Archives did.  Thus began a program to educate the Members of Congress and their staffs.  I was fortunate recently to go to a staff tour as the guest of a fellow Fellow who has been on several tours I’ve arranged, thus demonstrating that one good turn deserves another.

The National Archives was created by law in 1934 as the official record keepers of the government.  They hold records for both the legislative and executive branches, including committees.  They have long enjoyed a rivalry with their older sibling, the Library of Congress, which developed more of a copyright function rather than archives.  The Library of Congress no longer accepts the personal papers of Members of Congress with only a few exceptions, the most recent being Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.  The Archives holds both paper and electronic records. There are half a billion paper items and electronic records currently occupy about 77 terrabytes of space.  As an illustration, there were 20 million emails archived from the Clinton White House years.  From the George W. Bush years, that number grew to 200 million.

We started our tour before the tourists were allowed to enter the building, so we got a little time to view the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights without a crowd.  The Declaration is faded so much that it is all but unreadable, and we learned that it was a result of 70 years of being hung in a window in the State Department before being transferred to the Library of Congress and eventually to the Archives. The Constitution, which was stored at Fort Knox, fared much better.  We were told that other than fire, light is the worst enemy of old documents.  Even papers that have been through a flood may be freeze-dried and salvaged more easily than those damaged by light.

As it came time for the Archives to open to the public, we were taken to an upper floor to the Legislative Archives Vault.  We all sat around a table, and our two hosts took turns showing us documents and telling us stories.  Each document was contained in a plastic sleeve that was then stored in a sturdy folder.  We were not allowed to touch anything, but the proximity was still inspiring.

We started with the document signed by George Washington nominating the first Supreme Court justices as well as a number of other justices.  All of the nominees were confirmed except for one, who was the subject of a long term grudge by one of the senators.  Washington himself came to the Senate to find out what the problem was, and the senator who had the issue announced something like, “I’ll be damned if I’ll let him be confirmed.”  Thus began the tradition of senatorial courtesy whereby the President runs the nominees by the Senate before it is all made official.

Next we saw the legislative mark-up of the Bill of Rights.  A formal typewritten copy of the language that was passed by the House was sent forward to the Senate, and that document shows the inked changes made when the bill passed the upper chamber, often involving the deletion or rearrangement of amendments.  For example, there was one amendment that stated that there would be one House member for every 50,000 residents.  If that had not been deleted, the House of Representatives would currently have over 6,000 members.   It was fascinating to see how the final document was shaped through the process of moving through Congress.

Bill of Rights Mark-up

We next saw the 1804 Presidential proclamation to Congress in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand of the Louisiana Purchase.  Someone apparently challenged Jefferson’s authority to purchase that much land in his role as President and said that it was unconstitutional.  Jefferson calmly replied that no, it was extra-constitutional, or outside of the Constitution.  As a related document, we saw a petition from Daniel Boone who held land in Missouri as a grant from the Spanish crown.  With the Louisiana Purchase, Boone lost title to his land, so he petitioned to have it restored.  Boone was apparently one of many people who were hedging their bets by playing both sides of the land sovereignty issue, but Boone was indeed allowed to keep his land.

As you may recall, in 1814, the British arrived in Washington and burned both the White House and the Capitol.  Dolly Madison gets great credit for saving so many of the records from the White House as well as the portrait of George Washington.  Over on Capitol Hill, the Senate got a bit of a jump on the situation, gathered some wagons, and they were able to move many of their documents out of the Capitol before the British arrived.  The House waited a little too long, were unable to find many wagons, and thus they lost more records in the fire.

Because I was with a group of committee staff, we were shown the 1816 resolution creating a set of standing committees for the Senate.  The government had been functioning for long enough that it was becoming clear what committees were important for ongoing business.  In addition to the Committee on Public Lands, now the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, there were also committees on Military Affairs and on Post Roads.  A Committee on Ways and Means was also created in this resolution, but it was quickly renamed the Finance Committee to distinguish it from the House committee.

A larger box contained a giant rolled petition that was about 12” in diameter.  It was kept rolled with a ribbon that had long-since faded to pink, but it was the original governmental red tape; one had to cut through it to get to the actual information.

On stationery from the Executive Mansion (it wasn’t called the White House until much later), we saw the note from President Lincoln appointing Ulysses S. Grant to be Lieutenant General of the Union Army.  Apparently this was a somewhat controversial appointment since Grant was considered to be a bit of a drunk.  When this complaint was aired to President Lincoln, he suggested, “Buy a case of whatever Grant drinks and give it to the rest of my generals!”

The impeachment resolution of President Andrew Johnson for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” (also known as, “we’ll figure out what to charge you with later”) was hand-written on a half sheet of paper.  The Congressman who offered the resolution apparently kept the paper in his pocket for some time just waiting for the President to provide an opportunity for the resolution’s use.

Impeachment resolution for Andrew Johnson

Two documents about women’s suffrage offered an interesting contrast.  The first was from the National Women’s Suffrage Association and was signed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, advocating giving women the vote.  A second document, also signed entirely by women, was from the National Association Opposed to Women’s Suffrage.  Among their other objections to the concept was that this path forward would serve as “an official endorsement of nagging as a national policy.”

D-Day was a theme that linked two completely different documents.  The first document was a de-classified map made as Americans were just starting to experiment with the newly developed radar technology.  Two young servicemen on one of the Hawaiian Islands turned on their machine around 7 AM on December 7^th, 1941.  They got a huge blip on their map, so they turned off the machine, recalibrated it, and turned it back on.  The blip remained.  They called the base on Oahu, although it took a while to get anyone on the phone.  They were assured that their blip was the American bombers out of San Francisco who were expected to arrive any day, and they were told that they didn’t need to continue the radar tracking.  The two chose to use the blip as a training exercise, and they tracked what turned out to be the Japanese planes until they were lost in the mountains of Oahu en route to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The next document was the speech that President Roosevelt gave to Congress the following day announcing the “Day that will live in infamy,” and requesting that Congress declare war on Japan.  As an interesting piece of trivia, John Dingell was on the floor that day as a page for his father, who was a Member of Congress.  We were reminded that this was the last time that Congress has declared war; all other military engagements have lacked this important part of the process.

“A day that will live in infamy”

The radar map brought up interesting questions of handling information that is sealed for a specified period of time as well as information that is classified.  The computer systems at the Archives have no network access, and electronic documents are transferred via hard drive and sneaker-net rather than electronically.  Archivists are challenged by hardware compatibility and the sheer volume of information.  They also are always concerned about how to store electronic records safely and securely.  As the staff say wistfully, “We’ll always have paper.”  I shared their sense of wonder to see a piece of paper handled by Washington or written by Jefferson.  It was a wonderful experience, and I would certainly be happy to support their budget.

Dinosaurs!

As a last flexing of my Congressional Fellow’s muscles, I arranged for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Paleobiology Department at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum.  Translated, that means Dinosaurs!  I timed the tour to coincide with the visit from my Beloved Husband and Darling Daughters (DDs), and I intend to include this outing on my “Stepmom of the Year” application.

For all the exhibit space available at the Natural History Museum, the laboratory and collection space is twice as expansive.  Our guide told us how many total items and objects are owned by the Smithsonian, and my memory is that out of some 135 million items, 123 million are part of the natural history collection.  Of course the Hope Diamond and the Wright flyer each count as one item, but that’s still a lot of storage space required.  There are a number of satellite facilities for conservation and research, but there is still a need for large amounts of storage space.

Shrine to a white elephant?

Inside the paleobiology department, we paused by an alcove that formerly held a telephone booth.  After the booth was removed, the alcove remained, and it became a display for items left over from the annual holiday Yankee swap or White elephant exchange.  The collection has been embellished over time, creating a truly eclectic mix of objects, and I could tell that yet again, I had found a group of nerds who loved their jobs and shared a great spirit of fun.

Triceratops

We spent quite a bit of time hanging out with some Triceratops skulls.  Our guide pointed out that paleontologists almost never find complete skeletons and even the collection of five skulls that we saw were all partial in one way or another.  It often requires multiple specimens to get a complete picture of an animal.  The Triceratops, itself, is an interesting example of the difficulties caused by multiple incomplete fossil sets.  The earliest skeletons that were assembled eventually turned out to be a mixture of bones from more than one different species, so several of the earliest Triceratops species names are no longer valid.  The DD’s nodded wisely while the responses of the Ph.D.’s ranged from a questing look as we dredged up hearing rumors of such a thing to surprise as we were told that perhaps we hadn’t learned the whole dinosaur story when we were young.

Not a problem I have to solve every day

Paleobiologists are particularly challenged by the constantly evolving naming system in their field.  An ongoing challenge is to differentiate between samples of different species vs. samples that display the normal variation that appears within a single species.  As a result, species names are regularly added or retired when it is determined that what had been original designated as a unique species is really a variant on an existing species.  This was the fate of the Brontosaurus, one of the other dinosaurs I learned as a child.  I believe it was determined to actually be the same species as an Apatosaurus, and the earlier species name is always kept.  When a new species is determined, a single physical sample is designated as a holotype, which is the ideal or reference fossil for the species.  It is virtually always the best sample available, but once it is designated, the holotype remains that same sample, regardless of later finds of better quality samples.

Paleobiology storage

Within the paleobiology department’s storage area, the open shelves held a bewildering array of casts and fossils interspersed with a generous collection of “clam-shells.”  These padded cases are constructed to cushion fragile bones for transportation or even for just turning the bone upside down.  As part of this information, I encountered a new occupation of “preparator.”  Apparently specific to science, a preparator gets samples for study, and this work is extensive for fossils.  Part of the preparator’s work is the construction of the clamshells.  A bone is placed in a sand box to cushion it evenly, and then the top is padded, followed by the application of fiberglass strips and high quality dental enamel.  For the bigger structures, rods are added to use as handles.  Then the process is repeated on the other side.  The two sides of the clamshell are bolted together to secure the fossil, and from that point on even when the sample is simply flipped upside down, it is first bolted into the clamshell.  Apparently little bits still fall off the fossil sometimes, but the damage is minimized.

clam shells

Sand box. They use garnet sand because it is less dusty.

Because our guide specializes in ancient whales, we spent quite a bit of time talking about the skull of an early baleen whale.  I was very grateful and proud to have the DD’s with us since the Ph.D.’s in the group ran strongly to chemistry and fluvial geomorphology (rivers) rather than biology.  The DD’s displayed a far greater mastery of fossils, dinosaurs, and biology than the more highly degreed members of the group.  When asked, one of the DD’s was able to speak knowledgably about baleen whales filtering water through their baleen, and it was agreed that modern baleen whales lack teeth.  Thus the fossil we examined was an important link in the evolution of the whales since the bone structure clearly identified it as a baleen whale, but there were equally obvious holes in the skull for teeth.  I was proud that one of the DD’s and not one of the Ph.D.’s was chosen to flip the skull over in its clamshell, and she performed like a pro.

Baleen whale skull with teeth

The clam shell

The successful flip!

The fossilized sample of a whirl of teeth was presented as another challenge.  Since a fish did not randomly decide to arrange its teeth in an attractive and extremely regular spiral pattern to make a fossil after it died, this spiral pattern must have been part of the fish’s anatomy.  We were shown half a dozen pictures of ideas generated by various scientists, but there has been no firm conclusion at this point.

Designer fish teeth?

When asked how he went into paleobiology, our guide pointed out that virtually all children are into dinosaurs at some point.  Indeed, our behind-the-scenes tour was a wonderful combination of nerding out and channeling our inner five-year-olds.  A magnificent time was had by the Ph.D.’s and DD’s alike.

Fossilized dung- couldn’t leave this picture out!

 

 

 

 

 

The Old Senate Chamber

The Old Senate Chamber

There are several rooms in the Capitol that are currently used as museums but periodically see a bit of modern action.  I love that the Old Supreme Court Chamber is such an appropriate space for the justices to gather prior to the Inauguration or the State of the Union Address.  The Old Senate Chamber likewise is normally a stop on the regular Capitol tour, but on a few rare occasions over the years, it has gone back to being a meeting space to bring all the senators together to deal with thorny problems.

The Senate began meeting in what is now known as the Old Senate Chamber in 1810.  That tenure was interrupted in 1814 when the British burned the Capitol (using the books belonging to the Library of Congress as fuel as you might remember).   Meetings were held in a building across the street until the Capitol was rebuilt, bigger and better, and the Senate could reoccupy the space in 1819.  Every time a state was added to the Union, two more desks needed to be squeezed in to the room, so by 1859, the body had outgrown their old quarters and moved to the current Senate Chamber.  The room was reconfigured for the Supreme Court, who met in this space until they got their own building in 1935, and eventually the room was restored to its original look in time for the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations.

You may actually have seen photographs of the Old Senate Chamber if you see pictures of senators being sworn in.  Because there are no photographs allowed in the current Senate Chamber, after the official swearing in of new senators, the ceremony is re-enacted in the Old Senate Chamber for official photographs.  Senator-elect Markey from Massachusetts is to be sworn in this morning, so if there is a photograph in the newspaper, you will actually be seeing the Old Senate Chamber.

Senator Michael Bennet’s swearing-in photo in the Old Senate Chamber

The two chambers have largely the same arrangement of functions, with the desk for the Vice President in the center, although in the 1800’s senators did not sit by party affiliation.  As in the new chamber, there is a second floor gallery above for visitors.  A curtain was quickly added across the front railing to prevent the men on the floor from looking up the ladies’ dresses, and male visitors were under strict orders not to put their feet on the railing lest they drop mud onto the senators below.  Apparently Sen. Sam Bowie whiled away his time on the Senate floor by whittling, and when a piece was completed, he would send it up to the gallery as a gift to one of the visiting ladies.

The Vice President’s Desk in the Well

When I’ve asked the staff who monitor that room for their favorite story, they inevitably choose to tell the tale of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.  In the lead up to the Civil War, Sumner, a fiery and extremist abolitionist, gave a five hour speech on the Senate floor known as “The Crime Against Kansas,” and denounced a number of Southern leaders in somewhat graphic terms, speculating about the intimate relations between some of the individuals and their slaves.  During the speech, Stephen Douglas of Illinois predicted, “This damn fool is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.”  It didn’t quite work out that way, but several days later, Rep. Preston Brooks, the cousin of one of the men derided in Sumner’s speech, entered the Senate chamber with several like-minded Congressmen and proceeded to beat Sumner viciously with his cane.  At that point in time, the Senate desks were all bolted to the floor, which prevented Sumner from escaping, and Brooks’ companions prevented any of the other senators from coming to Sumner’s aid.  The cane eventually broke, and Brooks finally left the chamber.  Sumner spent three years convalescing from severe head injuries and suffered from chronic pain for the rest of his life.  As a sign of how high tensions were running at the time, numerous South Carolinians expressed their support for Brooks’ actions by sending him replacement canes for the one that had been broken. A subsequent motion to remove Brooks from the House was unsuccessful, but he resigned anyway a short time later, eventually to be re-elected to his post.  After Brooks passed away from croup at a relatively young age, Sumner seemed to blame slavery for his injuries more than the man who wielded the cane.

The Sumner-Brooks story makes for good telling, but the Old Senate Chamber actually has a much stronger history of housing the Senate during its “Golden Age,” when the Senate gained its reputation as the greatest deliberative body in the world.  Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun famously debated the issue of slavery in this room, and the Missouri Compromise, bringing in Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state was hammered out here as well.  Looking back, the Civil War was almost inevitable.  The amazing part is that Union held together for four decades before the war, in large part because of the debates and compromises in the Senate.

In modern times, the Senate has periodically sought to re-capture that spirit of tradition and compromise by meeting in the Old Senate Chamber, where they may convene in the absence of the press, the public, or even the staff.  It was to this space that the Senate retreated to have frank discussions about the procedures for the impeachment of President Clinton, and as a result of those conversations, impeachment was avoided.

This week, the Senate has again retreated to have a joint caucus meeting in the Old Senate Chamber in an attempt to come to some agreement about the progress of Presidential nominees moving through the approval process.  I hope that the chamber may again work its magic and that the senators may find a way to continue navigating a path forward together.  (Yes, after a year on Capitol Hill, I can still be an optimist.)

 

“Burning Down the House” or How have Forest Fires Gotten so Bad?

I’m certainly more aware of forest fires this year than I have been in the past, but it’s not my imagination that the fires have been getting worse over time.  Forest fires were not as bad when I was younger, and it was not only because of the extremely effective campaign with Smokey the Bear telling us, “Only you can prevent forest fires.”

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, a number of major fires devastated the West including the “Big Burn,” in 1910 which scorched a large swath of Montana and Idaho in the Yellowstone region.  The Forest Service was in its infancy at that point, and those large fires substantially shaped the resulting mission of the agency.  The two significant take-home messages of the Big Burn were, “Fire is Bad,” and “Humanity can control its environment.”  Thus began a program of ruthless suppression (putting out) of all wildfire ignitions.

There’s only one problem with this philosophy.  Fire is a natural part of the forest environment, particularly in the dry West where fallen vegetation does not decompose as rapidly as in the wetter East.  Fire sweeps through an area every 10-30 years and burns off all the small fuels low down toward the forest floor.  With regular burning, the fuels don’t build up, which means that the fires burn with low intensity on the surface.  Larger older trees can withstand these low intensity surface fires and survive with ease.  Indeed, Lodgepole pines have cones that only open to release seeds under the high temperatures of fire.

Decades of suppression took their toll on the forest.  Fuels built up in the absence of fire, and trees became much more densely packed.  In the Rocky Mountains, we look at lush forests of evergreens with admiration, but those wonderful expanses of green actually represent an unhealthy forest.  Where there should be 10 trees per acre, there are instead 100.  When forests with high fuel loads burn, the fires are much hotter and the damage is more intense.  Trees that have fallen but have not dropped all the way to the ground act as ladders to convey fire from the surface to the canopy creating crown fires.  Even the most resilient trees can’t survive these high intensity crown fires, and everything burns in what is known as a “stand replacement fire.”  The entire forest must come back from seed.  That’s if it comes back at all.  As climate is changing, the edges of forest ecosystems may no longer be ideally adapted to the new climate zone, so without intervention, some forests come back with a different mix of species, and some may be permanently converted to grassland.

I had the opportunity to ask a researcher in the Forest Service why we hear so much more about forest fires in the West than in the East.  I asked if part of it is that there simply are not the acres to burn in the East, and she said that’s part of it, but in the East, there somehow evolved a culture of understanding the need for forests to burn with some regularity.  So we can still get fires in the East, but they don’t have the expanse or the intensity of fires in the West.  Much more of the land in the East is also owned privately and is cut periodically when a landowner needs to send a child to college or to retire.  The West, with its wealth of National Forests and wilderness areas, includes preservation as one of its missions which makes management much more complex.

 

Oddly enough, improving the forest fuel issue through prescribed burns in the West is accomplished at the temporary expense of other environmental factors.  Forest fires create smoke, which is a source of Particulate Matter (PM), one of the metrics for air quality.  Smoke isn’t fun to breathe for anyone, so prescribed fires are unpopular because of the respiratory problems they may cause.  I can think of two prescribed fires in the past 10 years or so that escaped and burned far more than was intended.  That’s only two out of a large number of prescribed fires that went off without a hitch, but those incidents make people resist all prescribed burning.

The big Yellowstone fire of 1987 marked a turning point in the history of fires in the US.  Everyone thought that it was a once in a lifetime incident, but it turned out to be an indicator of a new era in forest fires.  Since then, fires have been getting bigger, more intense, and more expensive to fight.  In the rugged terrain of the West, especially in Colorado, fires are still contained through “boots on the ground.”  Air tankers carrying fire suppressant and helicopters carrying water in “bambi buckets,” are vital support elements and are critical for cooling off hot spots and protecting structures, but sometimes weather conditions and even smoke from the fires prevent the air support from flying.  Containment is achieved through cutting fire breaks, removing fuel, and sometimes through creating back-fires, which deprive the fires of anything to burn.  If the high fuel loads and steep terrain haven’t been enough challenge for firefighters, several other additional challenges have emerged in the past decade to make fires even more difficult to fight.

Bark Beetle kill in Rocky Mountain National Park

Outbreaks of various bark beetles have added to the fire risk.  Lodgepole pines and Mountain Pine Beetles have co-evolved to have mutual defenses.  The pines have chemical defenses to throw off small attacks, but the beetles respond with massive attacks on a tree to overwhelm the defenses.  In the first years after a beetle attack, the trees remain standing, and the dry brown needles that have yet to fall serve as very effective tinder to fuel a fire.  Eventually the needles and the trees fall, which reduces the fuel load and the fire risk, but in areas of recent beetle kill where there may be up to 80% tree mortality, humans don’t stand much of a chance against fire.

Fire in the WUI

In the past ten years, the development of the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI, pronounced woo-ey), has made fighting forest fires additionally challenging.  I certainly understand the draw of a cabin in the woods, but when building codes allow wooden roofs and wooden decks, and when trees and brush come right up to the structure, the house doesn’t stand much of a chance from flying embers.  When fighting fires, the priorities are protecting people, structures, and infrastructure (roads, dams, bridges, etc.).  If a fire is burning entirely in a forest, then the goal is to contain it and then let it burn itself out.  If, however, a fire is burning near a neighborhood, then far greater effort is expended to try to protect the houses.  My guess is that the 100,000 acre West Fork fire in the Rio Grande and San Juan National Forests in Colorado will ultimately have a lower damage assessment than the 15,000 acre Black Forest fire in the Colorado Springs suburbs.  No structures were lost in the West Fork fire, whereas over 500 houses burned in the Black Forest fire.

Where the major damage occurs

On top of all these factors, climate change is also contributing to the problem.  Does climate change cause any particular fire?  No, of course not.  It does however contribute to a longer fire season, up to a month longer on either end.  Higher temperatures mean that the last snow falls early in the spring and later in the fall, so the trees have even longer to try out and fires have longer to burn.  The ongoing drought in the West is also not necessarily directly caused by climate change, but those weather conditions also contribute to much hire fire risks.

The prevention and treatment of forest fires has been a frequent topic on Capitol Hill lately, but unfortunately there are no easy answers.  The combination of so many different factors, each of which is feeding larger and hotter fires that are more challenging to fight in the WUI mean that we will be seeing active and extensive fire seasons for the foreseeable future.

2012 Waldo Canyon Fire burn scar