[NHCOLL-L:3459] FW: NH Museums Face Extinction

[Roberta Faul-Zeitler]

June 4, 2007

Hi: I think you'll want to see this immediately. (Bobbie Faul-Zeitler)

Nature museums nearly relics themselves
By Mike Boehm, Times Staff Writer
June 3, 2007 

The great American natural history museum could be headed for the vulnerable
species list, alongside the polar bear and the redwood tree.

A national survey last year showed nature museums' annual bottom lines
sinking chronically into the red by $300,000 on average, while art museums
outperformed them by nearly half a million dollars. Some of the leading
institutions have winnowed their staffs since the decade began, among them
the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Science leaders worry that financial pressures and demands to boost
attendance could prompt natural history museums to self-lobotomize, cutting
away brain matter - the pure scientific research that's largely hidden from
the public - to save the exhibits and educational programs that are the
institutions' visible cash generators.

Research is what makes natural history museums special: the mandate to
venture into nature and bring back new finds and fresh questions, while
maintaining millions of specimens.

Some scientists say that amid global warming and a rapid die-off of species,
these collections encompassing the world's life forms, living and extinct,
have become especially valuable for the clues they might hold.

How have creatures through the eons adapted or failed as their environments
have changed? What's happening now? Biologists say those questions are vital
in coping with today's challenges, and they can't be answered fully without
museum collections.

"With some major exceptions, there's been a 20-year retraction" in
museum-based natural history research, said Leonard Krishtalka, who directs
the museum at the University of Kansas. "We're slowly witnessing, by the
whittling of curatorial positions, the extinction of incredible knowledge.
For many organisms there are only one or two world experts, and they retire
with no one to replace them."

Officials with the American Assn. of Museums, which conducted the 2006
survey that tags natural history as an underperforming sector, cautioned
against drawing strong statistical conclusions, because the report was based
on median results from 43 institutions over three years, compared with 197
art museums. But there's no shortage of anecdotal woe.

The Milwaukee Public Museum lies fiscally prostrate, its net assets having
fallen to minus-$14 million last year, according to its 2006 tax return. The
Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the deficit-ridden,
195-year-old granddaddy of American natural history museums, sold some of
the family jewels to prop up its finances last year, earning $1 million for
a chunk of its mineral collection.

The Smithsonian Institution's natural history museum in Washington, D.C.,
which draws more than 5 million visitors a year and has the nation's largest
collection, with more than 126 million specimens, is seen as deeply
troubled; the staff has shrunk almost a third since 2000.

"It's a real concern to see continued diminishing ranks of scientists
there," said Robert Gropp, director of public policy for the American
Institute of Biological Sciences. "We hear routinely from folks who work
there that morale is really down."

Even the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which stands with
the Smithsonian and the Field Museum in Chicago as the Big Three of natural
history exhibits and research, has had to economize. The museum has reduced
its staff about 11% this decade, although curators were untouched, spokesman
Steve Reichl said.

Universities aren't a strong alternative, scientists say, because many have
given up their expensive-to-maintain natural history collections and focused
their efforts elsewhere, including biomedical research, genetics and
technology.

The L.A. museum, which vies with San Francisco's California Academy of
Sciences for fourth place in national rankings, turned to shock therapy in
2003, laying off 7% of its staff to save $2 million and reverse a long
string of deficits. Most remaining employees endured a wage freeze that
ended this year.

The museum's scientists have been studying things like parasitical
bee-killing Peruvian flies, or attempting to sort out the evolution and
global distribution of gobioids, small ocean fish important to the diet of
the seafood humans eat. How can such research fit into what investment
company executive Paul Haaga Jr., president of the museum's board, calls
"the elevator speech" - the pithy hook, deliverable in the course of an
elevator ride, that's needed to recruit donors? And finding big donors is
more crucial than ever for an institution that's revving up a $115-million
fundraising campaign.

The museum's public face is simple enough to comprehend - the main building
in Exposition Park, with its dioramas, dinosaur fossils and a darkened gem
and mineral hall that glows like Aladdin's cave; and the George C. Page
Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, showcasing extinct prehistoric mammals whose
bones were dug from the ooze of the neighboring La Brea tar pits. Together,
they draw 800,000 to 900,000 visitors a year; about a third are groups of
children from public schools that get in free.

The harder part to explain happens on the third floor of the Exposition Park
building. It's where most of the curators are - PhD scientists trained to go
out in the world, find critters, critter remains and anthropological
artifacts and bring them back as specimens. The 33-million-piece collection
is not shelved and forgotten but requires ongoing care.

"Collections are expensive to keep and are not revenue-generating," said the
museum's Regina Wetzer, who studies tiny, bug-like crustaceans.

Joel Martin, the crustaceans curator, who has been at the museum nearly 20
years, worries that with every cutback, the chances to win grants worsen.
Ambitious research often depends on scientists being able to win highly
competitive grants from outside sources.

"They're not likely to put a lot of money into an institution that itself is
not funding it," he said.

In the three years before 2003, the L.A. museum landed $2.4 million from the
National Science Foundation. In the three years since, L.A.'s share dropped
to $1.6 million.

The austerity measures also snuffed what some saw as a promising youth
movement that had begun in 2001, when four young biologists and three
researchers specializing in the history, anthropology and archeology of the
American West and Mexico were hired as curators. "It created a lot of
energy," recalled one former curator, who asked not to be named for fear of
alienating colleagues. "Research and collections was on the upswing, and the
sky was the limit."

Now, just one of the seven remains. Kenneth Johnson, who studies coral
reefs, went to the Natural History Museum in London; he noted dryly that it
becomes easier to find opportunities when wages have been frozen.

The L.A. museum has 20 budgeted curatorial positions, down from 24 in 2000,
and only 16 are occupied or being filled. The American Museum in New York
has 42 curators, up from 39 in 2000.

Cutting curators was "like 'Sophie's Choice,' " said President Jane Pisano,
but the museum couldn't keep outspending its income. This year's budget is
about $26 million, with the county providing 45% of the funds.

Even with the cuts, about 24% of the natural history museum's spending goes
to research and collections. Pisano noted that exhibits, education and other
public programs got 23% combined. "Clearly, we need research," she said. "It
lets us say, 'We create knowledge here.' It grounds our work."

There's nothing specifically for research, however, in the $115-million
construction campaign. It addresses what the public sees: refurbishing the
1913 rotunda building and creating six galleries, including a near-doubling
of the space for dinosaurs.

Experts even worry that the very name "natural history museum" has a
Victorian tinge that makes it harder to compete for audiences and funding.

"It harks back 300 years and doesn't resonate anymore," said Krishtalka, the
University of Kansas museum director who reclassified his venue as a
"biodiversity institute." The challenge and potential salvation, he
believes, lie in making visitors and donors understand the connection
between the fate of the Earth and all those seemingly inert specimens tucked
into drawers or arrayed on back-room shelves in jars of alcohol.

"Our collections and knowledge help inform solutions to the problems the
planet's facing," Krishtalka said. "Our time is now, and museums that reach
out and grab that mission strongly will be the ones who survive."

A completely rebuilt California Academy of Sciences is due to open next year
in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. The museum, which will have a "living
roof" of greenery designed by Renzo Piano, could be the canary in the coal
mine. If a leading institution that has had a chance to reinvent itself with
almost half a billion dollars can't score a hit, the future for all natural
history museums could be a real dodo.

Driving the project, for which about $385 million in mostly private
donations has been raised, was the realization that people had become bored
with natural history museums, said curator John Patrick Kociolek, the former
executive director who spearheaded the rebuilding. "Before you'd go, you
could write down what you were going to see. The same stories were being
told."

The new museum, he said, aims to stay fresh by uniting its public face with
its hidden brain, clearly linking research to what visitors see by basing
exhibits on the work of the museum's scientists.

For that to succeed, Kociolek said, there has to be a better exchange of
ideas within the museum.

That's why Piano was asked to design hallways, office wings and other staff
areas so that formerly "siloed" scientists would mingle routinely with
colleagues in other departments.

Terry Yates, president of the National Science Collections Alliance, hopes
environmental consciousness and civic competitiveness will light a spark
among L.A.'s philanthropists, who never have supported the city's museum of
natural history on a scale approaching their counterparts in New York,
Chicago and San Francisco.

The museum, Yates said, "continues to be a vital force on the West Coast,
but it's facing problems. Do you want New York to continue to show up L.A.?
Come on, guys, get going."

mike.boehm at latimes.com


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Roberta Faul-Zeitler
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Email: faulzeitler at starpower.net