Plant hope for the future -- April 21, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Last fall, the city of Alexandria sponsored a sale of native trees, and I bought a flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) online.

A few Saturday mornings later, my partner Keith and I went to pick it up. We were early, but there was already a line to pick up trees before most of them had been unloaded from two large trucks.

The woman in front of us told us she plants trees in a park near her apartment complex. Before we knew it, the trees were ready to go. She swooped into the dogwood area and corralled at least half a dozen healthy-looking saplings.

The dogwood sapling we snagged was spindly with a few no-account reddish leaves. It did not inspire confidence about its stick-to-itiveness to survive the winter. But, with help, we planted it in the front yard, watered it and hoped and waited.

A few weeks ago, two large white blossoms appeared, as if to say, “Happy Spring, ye of little faith.”

Planting a single tree won’t save the planet, of course, but it does cheer me at a time when the international news is unrelentingly awful. I like to think someday its white-clad branches will dance gracefully and provide dappled shade.

When a Nebraska newspaper editor named J. Sterling Morton proposed Arbor Day 150 years ago, the state provided premiums and prizes, and more than a million trees were planted in one day in Nebraska.

“Other holidays repose upon the past; Arbor Day proposes for the future,” Morton wrote.

Today we’d say Arbor Day went viral. It spread nationwide, mainly in schools.

In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation urging America’s school children to “celebrate Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetimes the Nation’s need of trees will become serious. We of an elder generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship . . .”

But, you in the next generation, he wrote, “will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.”

Almost every aspect of American life has changed since then, but Morton and T.R. still have something we need to hear. We must look to and plant for the future.

The care and planting of trees has taken on new urgency in the 2020s as people realize our urban tree canopies are shrinking because of development, pollution and the longevity of trees. Many of our beautiful old neighborhood trees are reaching the end of their lifespans.

Our cities are disproportionately hot and unpleasant in neighborhoods with too few trees. Efforts are underway to plant more trees in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Nearly every president or first lady plants a tree on the White House grounds around Arbor Day, now officially the last Friday in April. Nearly every city and town has tree-planting events. Earth Day, celebrating its 52^th anniversary, has morphed into a month of events focusing attention on the environment.

The annual National Cherry Blossom Festival, returning after two years of hiatus due to COVID-19, returned to the National Mall last month. It drew an estimated 1.5 million visitors to its parade and other events over nearly a month before it concluded April 17.

Yet the cherry trees face their own problems. Along with foot traffic, they suffer from climate change, rising sea level and daily flooding around crumbling seawalls.

The mayor of Tokyo gave 3,000 flowering cherry trees to the United States in 1912. The average flowering cherry tree has a lifespan of 40 to 50 years, and every year about 90 trees must be replaced.

But because the federal government does not provide enough funding to care for the trees, the Trust for the National Mall and the National Cherry Blossom Festival have formed a partnership to start the Adopt a Cherry Tree campaign. There are now 3,700 cherry trees on the National Mall, and the campaign seeks to raise $3.7 million.

So, this Arbor Day, we can plant a native tree in our own yard or join a group that plants locally. Adopt an iconic cherry tree. Those are ways to propose for the future.

© 2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Make character a factor in 2020 vote -- Jan. 16, 2020 column

By MARSHA MERCER

On the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, you’ll likely hear people quote from King’s inspiring “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character,” King declared at the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. We aren’t there yet.

Today, King, who won the Nobel peace prize a year later and was assassinated in 1968, is revered for his leadership of the civil rights movement and his advocacy of nonviolence. He is an unalloyed American hero and a role model for children.

Role models are rare in public life, and, during the run-up to elections, character can become weaponized. In 2016, Hillary Clinton charged Donald Trump was morally unfit to be president, and he attacked her as “crooked Hillary.”

In 2020, “character is on the ballot,” Joe Biden said Tuesday at the Democratic presidential debate.

We may despair about the country’s direction, but character still counts. President Trump was impeached and faces a trial in the Senate starting Tuesday because integrity still matters.

The House voted last month along party lines to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, accusing him of attempting to force a foreign power to do his political dirty work, to investigate Biden and his son Hunter.

Trump used the powers of the presidency to benefit his own political campaign. He tried to pressure the president of Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens by withholding nearly $400 million in military aid and denying him a White House meeting. Trump released the aid only after news outlets reported on the scheme.

Trump and his Republican supporters claim he did nothing wrong and have repeatedly slammed impeachment as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.”

Where people stand politically colors their view of impeachment, but nearly three in four Americans think Trump is not a good role model for children, a Quinnipiac University poll also reported last March. Almost all Democrats – 97% -- said he isn’t a good role model, and nearly 40% of Republicans agreed.

Telling the truth is a sign of character, but this is the president of “alternative facts.” As of Dec. 10, Trump had made more than 15,413 false or misleading claims since he took office, according to fact checkers at The Washington Post.

Democratic presidential candidates have generally avoided getting into the liar-calling business, until now. Elizabeth Warren claimed Bernie Sanders told her in a 2018 conversation a woman could not beat Trump. Asked about it in the last debate, Sanders denied he’d ever said such a thing. After the debate, a live mic onstage caught Warren telling Sanders twice, “I think you called me a liar on national TV.” She refused to shake his hand.

He replied, “You know, let’s not do it right now,” adding, “You called me a liar.”

What’s sad and mystifying is how Trump has normalized abnormal behavior. Many people no longer care if he tells the truth as long as he appoints conservative judges, cuts their taxes and unleashes business from regulations. If, as expected, the Republican-controlled Senate acquits Trump and leaves him in office, he will falsely claim he’s been exonerated, firing up his base for November.

But not all Republicans are sanguine. Sen. James Lankford, a conservative Republican of Oklahoma who directed the large Baptist youth camp there, looked for a role model candidate during the 2016 GOP presidential primaries – and Trump wasn’t, he said on “Face the Nation” last month. He wishes Trump “was more of a role model,” he said, explaining, “I don’t like the way he tweets, some of the things he says.”

But voters, not he, choose who he works with in Washington, Lankford said.

No candidate is perfect, of course, but we can make character decisive when we vote.

As Theodore Roosevelt wrote in 1900 when he was running for vice president on the Republican ticket: “Alike for the nation and the individual, the one indispensable requisite is character.”

©2020 All rights reserved.

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Conservation president's legacy ours to enjoy -- July 19, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

It’s hard to escape distrust of the nation’s capital -- even at a rodeo in a little town in South Dakota.

I was learning about calf roping and steer wrestling from a former rodeo prize-winner – he had the big, silver belt buckle to prove it -- until he asked where I was from. I told him I live in the Washington area.  

“You aren’t from the government, are you?” he asked.

No, I’m a journalist, I said. That was worse.  

He peppered me with questions about fake news, news organizations’ “agendas” and why the TV networks – except Fox -- won’t give President Donald Trump a chance.

I defended my media colleagues but knew we’d be better off talking about bull riding in the ring than about bull slinging in Washington.  

I wasn’t surprised on my trip around the Dakotas that Trump is popular, but I found it ironic he’s popular among people who also revere a very different president.

Theodore Roosevelt is close to being a native son of North Dakota. He was an intellectual, a voracious reader, prolific author and historian, a believer in physical activity and the great outdoors. He was our conservation president. And he loathed incivility.

Roosevelt was vice president when he first used the proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick” in a speech in 1901.

“If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power,” he said.

Four days later, President William McKinley was shot, and Roosevelt soon became president.

Long before that, though, Roosevelt, at age 24, made the long train trip to the Dakota Territory for the first time in 1883. He wanted to hunt bison before they became extinct.

Enchanted with the land and the life, he bought an interest in a ranch during the trip.

The next year, he returned to the wild, vast, silent country for solace after he suffered heartbreaking loss. His wife, who had given birth to their first child just two days earlier, and his mother died hours apart on Valentine’s Day in the same house in New York.

In his diary that day, he wrote a large X and only one sentence: “The light has gone out of my life.”

He raised cattle on the Little Missouri River, enjoying “the strenuous life” alongside cowboys he admired for their strength, work ethic and character. You can see the rugged North Dakota badlands much as he did by visiting Theodore Roosevelt National Park, established in 1947 to honor the 26^th president.

He used whatever spare time he had to sit in his rocking chair and read and write history. Then drought and a blizzard decimated his herd in 1886, and he went back East.

But his experiences in North Dakota changed him for good. His exposure to those cowboys led to an appreciation for the common man that would serve him well in politics and the White House.

“I have always said I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota,” Roosevelt wrote.

The New Yorker who went west to hunt bison before they vanished from the West also developed something else in those wild, open spaces. Long a student of animals, he became outspoken in his desire to save them.

“The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world,” he wrote.

He signed the American Antiquities Act of 1906 and protected about 230 million acres of public lands – establishing five national parks, 18 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, 51 bird reserves, four national game preserves and 150 national forests.

Since then, 16 presidents of both parties have used the act to enlarge the nation’s store of protected lands. Critics, however, say the presidential power to restrict land is too great. Trump is rolling back designations President Barrack Obama made under the act.

One can only wonder what the originator of the Bully Pulpit would think of that.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

A museum for `slow looking' reopens in nation's capital -- Oct. 19, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In a noisy, fast and often vulgar world, the Freer Gallery of Art on the National Mall is a refuge of quiet beauty.

Since it opened in 1923, the Italian Renaissance-style building with its lovely central courtyard and outstanding Asian and American art collections has invited visitors to slow down and look.  

That’s just what industrialist Charles Lang Freer intended.

“The interior of this building shall be arranged with special regard for the convenience of students and others desirous of an opportunity for uninterrupted study,” he wrote in his letter offering his art to America. “No charge shall ever be made for admission.”

Freer’s vision was extraordinary, especially because he had to leave school at 14 to work in a cement factory. He made his fortune in railroad cars and became a collector and a connoisseur of Asian art.

When the Freer Gallery closed in January 2016 for nearly two years of renovations, I worried the urge to modernize might ruin its timeless elegance.  

Happily, most of the $14 million in renovations were not visible when the Freer, and the Sackler Galley that adjoins it, reopened Oct. 14.

Such things as the heating, cooling and humidity control systems were replaced and the Freer’s auditorium updated for telecasting. Carpets were removed and floors returned to the original polished terrazzo. And, of course, there’s now an app.

The museum itself is a work of art “where we hope we’re encouraging slow looking,” Julian Raby, director of what’s now called the Freer/Sackler, told reporters earlier this month.

Not quite 400,000 people a year visit the Freer and fewer visit the Sackler, an underground trove of Asian art that opened in 1987. A visitor rarely feels jostled, though he or she may have to dodge selfie-takers in the Freer’s Peacock Room.

The lavishly painted and gilded room was once the London dining room of ship owner Frederick Leyland, who hired James McNeill Whistler to add a few decorative touches in 1876. Leyland then left town, thinking the work was nearly finished.

The artist painted the room to a fare-the-well, and the angry owner would pay only half the agreed-upon price. Whistler insisted on finishing the satirical mural on one wall -- a pair of fighting peacocks he called Art and Money that symbolized his rocky relationship with his patron.

Freer later bought the room and had it reassembled in his home in Detroit. At the museum, the Peacock Room looks as it did there, with Freer’s ceramics from China, Korea, Japan and the Muslim world on the shelves.

Freer wanted not just to show what he called the points of contact between art of the East and West but how they unite us in a universalist sense of beauty, Raby said.

“Art, in other words, as a vehicle for empathy.” he said.

Today we think of the Smithsonian and art as a natural combination, but when Freer offered thousands of art works to the Smithsonian in 1905, the Board of Regents balked. The Smithsonian was about science, not art.  

A committee of regents, including inventor Alexander Graham Bell, took the train to Detroit to see Freer’s collection. Bell brought along his daughter, Daisy, an art student. She was studying with Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who later carved Mount Rushmore.

“The four regents are men of broad education, wide experience, and of unquestioned judgment, but what they do not know about art would fill many volumes,” Freer wrote a friend, according to “Alexander Graham Bell,” a biography by Edwin S. Grosvenor, Bell’s great-grandson, and Morgan Wesson.

Daisy helped convince her father Freer’s holdings were worth having. Then President Theodore Roosevelt intervened.   

“It is impossible to speak in too high terms of the munificence shown by Mr. Freer in this offer,” Roosevelt wrote the board. “The offer is one of the most generous that ever has been made to this government, and the gift is literally beyond price.”

After a year, Bell made the motion that the regents accept Freer’s gift, and, fortunately for us, it passed unanimously. The Smithsonian would have its first art museum.

There’s never been a better time for slow looking, and the renovations have only enhanced the experience. See you at the Freer.

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Not too late for Obama's conservation legacy -- May 29, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

From the maddeningly crammed streets and vulgar displays along the Virginia Beach oceanfront, it’s only a 40-minute drive to the peaceful and scenic Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Back Bay -- a 9,100-acre barrier island preserve of island marshes, maritime forests and pristine beaches – was established by President Franklin Roosevelt by proclamation in 1938 as a haven and breeding ground for migratory birds and other wildlife.

More than 120,000 people visit the refuge every year, most to watch the 10,000 snow geese and ducks that fly over Back Bay during the peak of the winter migration. Even in the off season, though, there’s plenty to see. Herons and snowy egrets pose majestically. Turtles sun themselves on log rivieras and snakes, naturally, slither. 

On the Blue Goose Express, an open air tram, local history buff Bob Baxter leads visitors back in time. A century ago, the area was dotted with duck hunting lodges, visited by wealthy industrialists. Life-saving stations every seven miles along the coast plucked unfortunate mariners from the sea.

We take a short hike to historic Wash Woods in False Cape State Park, which adjoins Back Bay. All that remains of the remote community of farmers, fishermen and hunters and a church that seated 300 worshippers are the steeple and about a dozen tombstones under whispering live oaks.  

About 47 million people will flee urban noise and stress for the tranquility of national refuges this year. 

Visitors will savor birdsong and unspoiled scenery; they’ll take pictures, swim and camp.

Few may think about how important presidents have been in keeping our wild spaces in citizens’ hands.

Since Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872, presidents have played a crucial role in conservation. 

“I will do everything in my power to protect . . . great natural beauties of this country,” vowed Theodore Roosevelt, who enjoyed being president because he liked having “my hand on the lever.”

The 26^th president set aside 230 million acres in public land and created 150 national forests, 51 bird reserves, four national game preserves, five national parks and 18 national monuments.

He left his successors the 1906 Antiquities Act, which gives the president or Congress the power to designate national monuments. The president can act unilaterally. 

He’s no TR, but Obama still could leave a conservation legacy.

“I’ve preserved more than 3 million acres of public lands for future generations. And I am not finished,” 

Obama said May 21 when he used the Antiquities Act to create the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, protecting half a million acres in New Mexico.

But the congressional resistance Obama faces extends even to conservation. Dozens of bills that would protect lands and wildlife are stalled in Congress.

In February, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed rules to regulate oil and gas production on the national refuge system.  Yes, more than 200 wildlife refuges have existing oil and gas infrastructure and 100 have active oil and gas wells.

The government owns the land but not the oil and gas mineral rights beneath the ground, and the government lacks the authority to regulate private oil and gas development on the refuges. That’s why it has proposed rules.

Noah Matson, vice president of Lands Conservation for Defenders of Wildlife, warned a House panel May 20 of instances on wildlife refuges of oil drums oozing toxic chemicals, oil-topped open waste ponds, abandoned storage tanks and rusted, leaking oil pipes “fixed” with plastic bags and duct tape.

Two Louisiana Republicans on the committee blasted Matson for his “emotional” testimony and for failing to credit the “innovative” fixes.

Republicans also want to curb presidential power under the Antiquities Act, which presidents of both parties have used. Obama has used the act 11 times, starting in November 2011 with the Fort Monroe National Monument in Hampton, Va.  

The House voted in March to limit the president’s power to designate monuments, requiring reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The bill has little chance in the current Senate because the Democratic majority is opposed.

When signing the order designating Organ Mountains a national monument, Obama said he understands “our obligation to be good stewards to the next generation – to make sure that our children’s children get the same chance to experience all of these natural wonders.”

He needs to follow TR’s lead, keep his hand on the lever and follow through on his conservation promises.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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