<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">Hello,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">If folks are writing letters, another important point to make is that when institutions lose collections, students/staff/community members lose the potential to interact with collections and learn their value. I've argued that the many small collections held at colleges and universities are invaluable for increasing the visibility of the value of natural history collections, if the collections are used in courses/education/outreach coupled with stories about what we can learn from specimens. <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">Best,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">Peter Wimberger<br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Feb 16, 2024 at 9:17 AM Douglas Yanega <<a href="mailto:dyanega@gmail.com">dyanega@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
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<p>If I might make a suggestion:</p>
<p>I have to confess that I'm not entirely convinced regarding the
effectiveness of petitions and e-mail campaigns. Call me a cynic,
but it seems too easy for the people on the receiving end to not
even read the e-mails, and not even care who has signed on to the
petitions.</p>
<p>Over the last few decades, if I've noticed any pattern among the
failures versus successes in getting administrative decisions like
this reversed, it's that the more visible and public the outcry,
the better - newspaper stories, op-eds, radio interviews, and so
forth - where the story is exposed to the light of day, and an
entirely different level of pressure is applied. People act
differently when they know that everyone is watching.</p>
<p>In that vein, I'd like to suggest that those of us who work in
natural history collections can - in addition to the emails and
petitions - also act more directly by producing a well-researched
opinion piece, hitting as many "talking points" as possible, made
public as quickly as possible, and made as broadly visible as
possible.</p>
<p>Consider the following, for example:</p>
<p>The admins are thinking to move everything in the Duke Herbarium
to other institutions. Do we know whether there are enough other
institutions<b> capable of assimilating</b> that much material?
How close to capacity are the other regional herbaria? How
well-staffed and well-funded are those other herbaria? In other
words, if the premise that the Duke admins are acting from is that
they can find "good foster homes" for all these specimens, where
they will be taken care of better than they could at Duke, can we
provide them with evidence that this is NOT a viable plan, and
that the other places the specimens could be sent <b>don't</b>
have enough room, <b>don't</b> have enough staff, and <b>don't</b>
have enough funding to take care of the material? I would suspect,
myself, that even in the <b>best</b> case scenario, it's likely
to be decades before that many fostered specimens could possibly
all be integrated into their new homes, and made fully accessible
to the research community again. Show that their basic premise is
flawed, and why, in <b>practical</b> terms that they can
understand.<br>
</p>
<p>I'm skeptical that career admins are going to find arguments
about the biodiversity crisis compelling, but if we can give some
stark and definitive statistics about collections, that might get
their attention. Things like (1) the number of herbaria that have
closed down in the last 50 years compared to the number that have
been newly-created (2) trends in the number of grants going to
herbaria over time, and the adjusted total dollar amounts OF those
grants (3) trends in staffing over time. I'm betting that those
figures won't look too good, and the worse they look, the more
compelling the argument becomes, to not only keep the Duke
herbarium open, but to invest MORE money into the facility. If
they're truly concerned about making sure those specimens are well
taken care of, then the best way to accomplish that is to make
their <b>present</b> home the best home they could have. At the
risk of a clumsy analogy, if parents are on the verge of divorce,
the best thing for their kids is not to ship them all off to
foster care, but to <b>fix the marriage</b>.</p>
<p>Bear in mind also that the more compelling the evidence that
herbaria are struggling, and the situation getting worse, then by
making the information very public, we can draw more attention to
the general problem that we are ALL facing - and I doubt that it's
going to reflect well on the Duke admins if they're perceived as
kicking someone when they're down. Bad PR is compelling in its own
special way.<br>
</p>
<p>I suspect that I am, in large part, preaching to the proverbial
choir here, but grant me my moment of ranting.</p>
<p>All that said, I do <b>not</b> know the answers to the questions
I've raised - I don't know what the relevant figures are, or how
to obtain this information. Maybe there are list subscribers
affiliated with SPNHC or AIBS, etc., who DO have these statistics
at their fingertips, and would be willing to share them. For all I
know, someone here has published a recent paper or given a talk
about the state of US herbaria, and we can just cite that. Maybe
someone here has a good idea of a venue and a format for composing
a collective online document that a bunch of us can write
interactively, and distribute widely once it's completed. Even if
all that gets created is a list of "talking points", then as long
as that list is shared, if any of us are interviewed, we have a
resource we can turn to, and we can present a coherent and
consistent message. I'm certainly not the one who can do all this,
but if I can even get things <b>started</b>, I'll feel like I've
done something constructive. Call me a cynic, but I'm thinking we
might even need to build a playbook-style resource called "What to
do in case someone threatens to shut down a collection" that we
can refer to the next time this happens. And, sadly, we all KNOW
it will happen again.<br>
</p>
<p>Peace,<br>
</p>
<pre cols="72">--
Doug Yanega Dept. of Entomology Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314 skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
<a href="https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html" target="_blank">https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html</a>
"There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82</pre>
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