Polar Disasters

A couple days ago, I posted the story of Anthony Fiala's failed polar expedition. I initially wrote that Fiala and his men suffered "extraordinary hardships," but I took this out because, upon reflection, I realized their hardships were really quite ordinary. The annals of exploration are filled with cautionary tales, and polar expeditions frequently ended in disaster. Fiala should probably have been commended for the fact that only one member of his team died during their two year ordeal. It could have been far worse.

Everyone knows of Ernest Shackleton's failed attempt to cross Antarctica. Less well known is Salomon Andrée's attempt to reach the North Pole by hot-air balloon, in which all three members of the expeditionary party perished. But perhaps the most tragic of the many polar disasters was the crash of the Airship Italia. The leader of that particular expedition, Umberto Nobile, lived. But his rival, the beloved Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, died when his plane crashed en route to rescue the hapless Nobile. Bad enough to be remembered as a failed explorer; much worse to be the guy whose incompetence cost the life of a national hero.

You can read a gripping account of the Italia disaster here. Or you can watch the movie.

Fighting the Ice

Anthony Fiala was an explorer with a passion for photography. Or perhaps he was a photographer with a passion for exploration. Either way, it is fair to say he was a far better photographer than explorer. His 1903 expedition to the North Pole was a disaster. His ship, the America, struck ice and sank. Once on land, half his supplies of food and coal fell through the ice. The expedition's horses fell prey to disease and had to be euthanized. And when the following summer he and his men returned to rendezvous with a rescue ship, they found the sea blocked by ice, condemning them to a second Arctic winter.

On October 26, 1904, the party was traversing a glacier when the snow suddenly fell out from under Fiala and he disappeared into a hidden crevasse. The narrowing of the ice walls broke his fall, and when he came to a rest he found himself in a black tomb, a thin point of blue light from the hole he had fallen through seventy feet above him and only inky blackness below. Pieces of ice began to dislodge and fall from the higher points, threatening a fatal blow at any moment. He shouted to his men above for a rope, and at last they lowered one. He grabbed hold and slowly, carefully, they pulled him free. The expedition doctor examined him and, pleasantly surprised, found nothing but a few minor cuts and bruises; he didn't need so much as a stitch. Later, Fiala learned one of the men had just that morning found a cut in the rope and repaired it. If he hadn't, Fiala would have fallen to his death.

When Fiala returned home, his fellow explorers subjected him to scorn and ridicule. But his 1906 account of the voyage, Fighting the Ice, gave no hint of regret nor resentment. In fact, he seems to have regarded himself as extremely fortunate. After all, he lived to tell the tale. And he had some pretty epic shots, to boot.

You can find many more in Fiala's book.

Fun With Cartography

Jacket Copy pointed me to the online map room at the Library of Congress, where I found this great map of Portland circa 1890:

You'll find the Hotel Portland along the crease, listed as #102 on map hotel legend. Curiously, Pioneer Courthouse, which is just slightly to the right rear of the Hotel, is not labeled.

The Tragedy of our Forest Commons

Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot

Yesterday Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced a new plan for Oregon forests controlled by the Bureau of Land Management. The plan includes a schedule of 62 proposed timber sales and closer cooperation between BLM and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to expedite the process of reviewing the impact of timber sales on endangered species. In response, Oregon Wild expressed cautious optimism, but criticized proposed clear-cuts. The conservation group suggested Salazar look at the Siuslaw National Forest as a model for BLM forest management.

The problem, of course, is that Siuslaw National Forest is part of the National Forest Service, which falls under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture. And Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced his own plans for our nation's forests two months ago. Vilsack's plan calls for closer cooperation between the United States Forest Service and the National Resource Conservation Service.

So... we'll have closer cooperation between the BLM and FWS at the DOI. And we'll have closer cooperation between the USFS and USCS at the USDA. But what about closer cooperation between the DOI and USDA? Did Vilsack and Salazar even discuss their plans with one another? If so, why didn't they announce them together?

What I find especially frustrating about this is that the BLM should not be administering forests at all. In February of 1905, Theodore Roosevelt won a hard-fought legislative battle to transfer control of the National Forests from the corrupt General Land Office (predecessor of the BLM) to Gifford Pinchot's Forest Service in the USDA. Lands remaining with the GLO were intended to be surveyed and distributed for private development. But over the past century, the DOI has managed to grow its own forest bureaucracy, leaving us the two-headed monster of byzantium we have today.

How fortuitous, then, that Elinor Ostrom just won the Nobel(-ish) prize in Economics (even though she's not an economist). Her work demonstrates that the best resource management often comes through local control.

Then again...

Unicorn Choice

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has a great op-ed in the New York Times. My favorite part:

Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns.

I, for one, fully support a wider range of unicorn options.

If you're curious about the timing of Brin's op-ed, read this.

The Nobel Peace Prize

On February 8, 1904, Japanese Imperial forces launched a surprise attack on Russian naval forces at Port Arthur (present-day Lushunkou in China), inaugurating the second Russo-Japanese War. It was an especially brutal conflict, and, as he watched from the sidelines, President Theodore Roosevelt grew increasingly concerned.

During the early part of the year 1905, the strain on the civilized world caused by the Russo-Japanese War became serious. The losses of life and of treasure were frightful. From all the sources of information at hand, I grew most strongly to believe/that a further continuation of the struggle would be a very bad thing for Japan, and an even worse thing for Russia. Japan was already suffering terribly from the drain upon her men, and especially upon her resources, and had nothing further to gain from continuance of the struggle; its continuance meant to her more loss than gain, even if she were victorious. Russia, in spite of her gigantic strength, was, in my judgment, apt to lose even more than she had already lost if the struggle continued. I deemed it probable that she would no more be able successfully to defend Eastern Siberia and Northern Manchuria than she had been able to defend Southern Manchuria and Korea. If the war went on, I thought it, on the whole, likely that Russia would be driven west of Lake Baikal. But it was very far from certain. There is no certainty in such a war. Japan might have met defeat, and defeat to her would have spelt overwhelming disaster; and even if she had continued to win, what she thus won would have been of no value to her, and the cost in blood and money would have left her drained white. I believed, therefore, that the time had come when it was greatly to the interest of both combatants to have peace, and when; therefore it was possible to get both to agree to peace.

I first satisfied myself that each side wished me to act, but that, naturally and properly, each side was exceedingly anxious that the other should not believe that the action was taken on its initiative. I then sent an identical note to the two powers proposing that they should meet, through their, representatives, to see if peace could not be made directly between them, and offered to act as an intermediary in bringing about such a meeting, but not for any other purpose. Each assented to my proposal in principle. There was difficulty in getting them to agree on a common meeting place; but each finally abandoned its original contention in the matter, and the representatives of the two nations finally met at Portsmouth, in New Hampshire.

On September 5, 1905, emissaries of Japan and Russia signed the Treaty of Portsmouth, officially ending the war. It was only by the tireless efforts of the American President that peace was made, and three months later the Nobel Committee in Norway recognized his achievement by awarding him its Prize for Peace.

Now comes news that the Nobel Committee has seen fit to bestow the Prize on another American President. While I am proud that the leader of my country has been recognized by an esteemed international body, I can't help but feel the award is, at the very least, premature. President Obama has said a great deal about peace, but we have not yet withdrawn from Iraq, nor have we closed Guantanamo Bay. The Atlantic Magazine's Marc Ambinder offers some astute, off-the-cuff observations on the politics of the Prize, which I tend to largely agree with. I would only add my own suspicion that this may be a preemptive strike aimed at influencing the debate over whether to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan.

(By the way, Ambinder's use of the word "orthogonal" refers to the Orthogonians, a club founded by Richard Nixon as an undergraduate at Whittier University. It has come to stand for "angry white voters." I know this only because I am currently reading Rick Perlstein's excellent book, Nixonland.)

NARA's Digital Evolution

The National Archives and Records Administration has significant problems. Some of these are not of its doing. For instance, the filing systems are ridiculously byzantine, but these systems were put into place by the individual departments that created the records in the first place. And NARA has a ridiculous volume of documents to manage.

But many of NARA's problems are of its own creation. Take the policy of only retrieving records at set times throughout the day. A researcher has to make an educated guess as to where his desired records may be, fill out a bunch of paperwork, and wait hours for it to be retrieved, only to then wait hours more if it turns out the records aren't what they appeared to be in the vague catalog description. Or consider that the NARA buildings in D.C. and College Park, the NARA regional archives, and the Library of Congress each require a separate identification card. These policies are a colossal waste of time and resources - resources better spent on helping researchers find the records they need.

Fortunately, NARA is taking incremental steps toward improvement. For instance, it's working to digitize records and make them easily searchable through footnote.com (h/t AHA). There you can now find obscure documents such as this 1918 memorandum from the Bureau of Investigation files on a nefarious vaudeville midget troupe. And NARA has been steadily making documents available on its own website (h/t Microkhan), such as this photograph from the Modoc War: