Rising from the Ashes

Posted on October 8, 2021 by admin

Wall art at the Peshtigo Fire Museum

Back on August 11, during a family vacation that involved circumnavigating the shores of Lake Michigan, my wife and I and two grandsons visited the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and spent an afternoon at the Peshtigo Fire Museum. It is housed in a former church that the museum acquired in 1963. While there, I decided to purchase some items from the small gift shop near the front; the museum sells a handful of books and mementoes. One was a reprint of a special edition of a local newspaper that commemorated the 1871 fire that destroyed the town. The other was a small book by the Rev. Peter Pernin, a Roman Catholic priest who wrote about surviving the fire.

I may have acquired another item or two, but if I did, I have no proof. Planning to write this blog post on the 150^th anniversary of the Peshtigo wildfire and the Great Chicago Fire, which both occurred on October 8, 1871, I wanted to read the items and discuss them here. Hours of searching my home office and the rest of our home turned up nothing. This is excessively unusual because I tend to be meticulous about keeping track of such acquisitions, but the anniversary approached and a maddening sense of futility took hold.

In frustration, I wrote to the museum through its online contact form and asked whether they could send me a new copy, and I have sent a $100 donation for their trouble. When I finally get a chance to read the material, sometime in coming weeks, I will supplement this post with a discussion of the historical materials. But before going on with the story, I want to commend the museum for a quick response from Wendy Kahl, who promised to send me replacements and expressed appreciation for the donation. I don’t remember the price of the items, paid in cash, but it was a fraction of my offering. The point, however, is that this small museum, in a small town in a rural area, is staffed by volunteers and operated on a shoestring by the Peshtigo Historical Society. They are, however, helping to preserve a vital piece of American history. Although I don’t often appeal for donations on this website, I will now. Those willing to help this humble enterprise can send donations to the Society at 400 Oconto Avenue, Peshtigo, Wisconsin 54157.

Most of us can gain only the tiniest inkling of the scale of loss suffered by a town like Peshtigo, which was a thriving lumber company town along the Peshtigo River near the shores of Green Bay, an arm of Lake Michigan, after the Civil War when catastrophe struck. I was about to write “when disaster struck,” but I quickly realized that the word “disaster” does not begin to do justice to the deadliest wildfire in American history. The extent of the devastation was so severe that no one really knows how many people died, but 1,500 or more seems to have become a reasonable estimate. The best narrative of the event I have read is Firestorm at Peshtigo by Denise Gess and William Lutz, published in 2002, but the museum website lists a few other resources.

Those resources in total can do far more justice to the story than I can hope to do in a blog post. However, the point that I can make here is one that, curiously, seldom occurs, although it is clear enough in the book by Gess and Lutz: the organic connection between the two fires in Peshtigo and Chicago. Separated by more than 250 miles, it is not that their fires shared a proximate cause. That would clearly be impossible. Recently, syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page mused about theories propagated by Chicago-area writer Mel Waskin that meteors delivered the ignition while recognizing how far-fetched that sounds and confessing to his own belief in pure coincidence.

But one can rely on science while saying that the two fires on the same day were more than pure coincidence. The reality is that a hot, dry summer plagued the entire upper Midwest from Chicago to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Minnesota. Such conditions are the natural breeding grounds for wildfire, as fire experts in California and Colorado have long known. During the long summer of 1871, note Gess and Lutz, various fires peppered the landscape from Lake Michigan to the Dakota Territory. Storms in Texas drove winds northeast to Michigan and Wisconsin. But, as we now understand, the conditions were ripe throughout the entire region for a much larger conflagration.

Photo of a burning building at the Peshtigo Fire Museum

And it came, a raging inferno that swept through more than 2,400 square miles of northern Wisconsin, literally destroying the small town of Peshtigo. One reason the Peshtigo Fire Museum struggles in some ways to tell the story is that so few of the town’s structures and valuables were left in any recognizable condition when the fire subsided: a pile of metal spoons forever fused together by heat, a badly charred Bible. Small wonder that much of the museum consists of other artifacts from the rebuilt town that are not really part of the fire story. It’s hard to populate a museum with what no longer exists and could never have been saved. But they can tell the story with what they know and with the paintings in which people reimagined the horrors they had faced.

There is another point, however, that is often ignored: Chicago and Peshtigo, economically and environmentally, were in those days joined at the hip. Peshtigo was essentially a company town, largely under the control of Chicago magnate William Butler Ogden, who owned a steam boat company, built the first railroad in Chicago, and served as the city’s first mayor. Ogden Avenue and a few other things in Chicago bear his name to this day. He was a legendary presence during the city’s first half-century.

In 1856, he also bought a sawmill in Peshtigo. The lumber industry was in high dudgeon in the upper Midwest in those days, shipping logs down rivers to Lake Michigan and down the lake to mills and yards in Chicago, where the new railroads could ship it to markets in the East and elsewhere. Chicago was a boom town with a dense downtown of largely wooden buildings, but the same milieu of sawdust and bone-dry lumber created the same conditions for a wildfire that existed in the northeastern corner of Wisconsin, just miles from the Michigan border. It is not clear that anyone knows definitively what actual sparks triggered the fires in each community, but the common ingredients of fuel, heat, and oxygen that power wildfires were clearly readily available in both cities at the same time, largely driven by commerce.

It is hard to imagine today how dangerous it all was. Even without a fire, logging was an inherently dangerous occupation, with many men maimed or felled by attempts to control rolling logs as they were corralled downriver to lake ports, or by trees that fell as they were being hewn (known ominously as “widow makers”) in a time that knew neither worker’s compensation funds nor work safety regulations. Expecting the owners of logging mills and lumber yards to understand the dangers of wildfire any more than they cared about reducing workplace injuries would have been unrealistic at the time, although a dawning awareness of the need for such regulation led to Wisconsin leading the progressive era with state-level reforms by the turn of the 20^th century.

Aftermath of the fire, corner of Dearborn and Monroe Streets, 1871. Reproduced from Wikipedia.

But for the many people who fled or succumbed to the fire on the fateful day of October 8, 1871, that was all in the distant future. The immediate reality is that many were burned alive, some died after jumping into the Peshtigo River to escape the flames, and thousands lost homes and all they owned in a matter of hours as the fire spread. Meanwhile, the same happened in Chicago, where 17,450 structures fell to flames that swept through a three-mile area in just three hours, including the supposedly fire-proof new headquarters of the Chicago Tribune. More than 100,000 people, one third of the city’s population at the time, were displaced from their homes. For weeks, the city lay in ruins as community leaders sought ways to finance and rebuild a city from the ashes. Chicago, of course, even then had far better access to capital and media attention than lowly Peshtigo, which remains a town with a population of just 3,500, some fifty miles north of Green Bay, the nearest city of even modest size.

Chicago’s media dominance, and its ability to retell its own story, continues. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, produced a commemorative special insert magazine, “The Great Rebuilding,” with a great deal of useful documentation. The Chicago History Museum opened its special exhibit on the fire today. But at long last, Chicago media outlets are also paying attention to their sister in tragedy with articles like the one in the Tribune describing at length “the fire you’ve never heard of.”

Chicago also had the resilience, although the term was not in common use, to conceive of rebuilding in a way that would avert future disaster. If you notice a lot of masonry construction on your next visit, you are seeing the legacy of the Great Chicago Fire, which altered local thinking about building codes and fire resistance. Similar shifts of thinking about structural fire safety, of course, occurred throughout urban America over the next half-century because structural fire was strikingly common at the time, and insurance companies and firefighters alike realized something had to change. But that may be a longer story for a future blog post.

The fires also fed our nascent understanding of the dynamics of wildfires and how they are influenced by weather, in the short term, and climate over longer periods. As Gess and Lutz note, the Peshtigo fire gave us the word “firestorm” as the result of a growing scientific recognition that the intense heat of a large wildfire can create its own weather within the conflagration, including tornado-like winds up to 90 miles per hour, caused by the differential between the heat of the fire and the cooler temperatures of the surrounding atmosphere. Tornadoes, of course, are born of such meteorological conflicts, an endemic condition of the vast interior of North America where colder northwestern winds meet in mortal combat with warmer winds from the Gulf of Mexico throughout the summer and into autumn. In commemorating the two fires, we can also recognize that they came at the dawn of an entire science of wildfires that is working against time today to catch up with the deleterious impacts of climate change.

History matters. And I hope that I have sparked more than a smidgeon of interest among readers in what I consider a deeply intriguing and intellectually challenging topic.

Jim Schwab

Acting in Good Faith

Posted on April 13, 2021 by admin

How does one portray the life of a man whose ultimate fate was a hanging at the hands of the Gestapo, with just four weeks left until the German surrender in World War II? Even an experienced professional actor might find that role daunting. I played that role last Friday evening in what amounted to my amateur acting debut, complicated by a Zoom platform in what we all hope are the latter stages of a pandemic. I’m certainly accustomed to being on a stage in front of an audience as a public speaker, but in those situations, I am speaking for myself. Portraying a historical figure of the magnitude of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a very different matter.

The collective performance of volunteers mostly from Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park in Chicago occurred on the anniversary of Bonhoeffer’s execution in 1945, at the Flossenburg concentration camp near the German border with Czechosolvakia. One suspects the SS, whose Judge Otto Thorbeck condemned him to die the day before the hanging, must have been in a hurry. Just two weeks later, American troops liberated the camp.

Script cover for “The Beams Are Creaking”

My intent in discussing this in a blog post is not to review the play, The Beams Are Creaking, by Douglas Anderson, but to reflect on what I learned from taking on this role in the first place. It is also the case that several rehearsals—and rereading the script a few times—occupied enough of my time to explain my hiatus from blog writing in recent weeks. It was only as we practiced our parts that I began to realize what I was trying to accomplish, but I was hooked. The play begins in 1933, with Bonhoeffer returning from the United States to Germany at the dawn of the Nazi rise to power. There are several biographies of Bonhoeffer, the most notable probably being that written by his close associate, Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, originally published in Germany in 1967, and later translated into English.

The necessary brevity of a play, if done well (and this is), condenses essential points and makes them more visible not only to the audience, but to the actors as well. I quickly realized from the full scope of the script that Bonhoeffer was not entirely the same man in 1945 that he was at the outset of the drama, when a streak of naivete about the German future still shaped his outlook. Born in 1906 in what is now Poland, Bonhoeffer returned from America with decided impressions about the injustice perpetrated on the American Negro, but not disposed to compare their situation with the plight of Jews in Germany, in part because he simply did not believe that Germany could succumb to the appeal of Adolf Hitler. Confronted early in the first act by Hans von Dohnanyi with the possibility of the Nazis gaining power, Bonhoeffer simply replies, “It couldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen in Germany.” By now, of course, the most observant among us are aware of a few too many historical developments that “could not happen” but did.

Photo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, reproduced from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer was soon disabused of his initial perspective, particularly when he dares to give a radio speech implicitly criticizing the Fuhrer. The Nazis silenced the radio station before he could finish. And that is the first of many steps that lead him steadily, inexorably, into a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler—a conspiracy that failed with dire consequences for those involved. When the play ends, he is sitting in Tegel prison, but Gestapo agents have come to transfer him to Flossenburg, which all around him know to be a death sentence.

The challenge for me in playing Bonhoeffer was to transfer to a Zoom screen that sense of the gradual but inevitable shift from a 27-year-old idealist, steeped in faith as a trained theologian and pastor, to a 39-year-old man who has come to terms with the deepest meaning of faith at the darkest moments in anyone’s life.

This struggle for almost anyone involves a powerful mixture of personal circumstances and challenges and some sort of deep faith that undergirds the transition that his life undergoes. One key turning point, midway through the play, involves the planned emigration of his sister, Sabine, and her Jewish husband Gerhard, to escape the coming Holocaust. In the play, this is the point when, having been approached by others who are involved in the plot against Hitler, he decides, “I will be a conspirator.” This is not a line that I shouted from the rooftop; it was one that I delivered with a heavy heart, realizing what will likely be demanded of Bonhoeffer in the coming years.

The second and final act opens later with Bonhoeffer in prison, chatting with a friendly guard, musing over his role as a thorn in the side of the Gestapo. The middle of the act consists of a monologue, Bonhoeffer with a mop talking to the floor, articulating his frustration with the official church in Germany, its betrayal of principles and purpose, ultimately concluding that it has driven the thinking man from the church because, “It honesty doesn’t know what to say to him.” One might call it a sense of despair, but it is also a lonely note of defiance.

One cannot gainsay the role of faith in Bonhoeffer’s life and how it affected his decisions. For a 39-year-old man facing death, he left behind some of the most meaningful spiritual writings of the 20^th century, including his letters from prison, but also the classic The Cost of Discipleship, which begins with the theologically famous line, “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Bonhoeffer was not about to lie to anyone about the high cost of confronting evil power.

That is the background. What did I learn from this volunteer dramatic effort? First, there was the challenge of presenting this on Zoom, as pandemic restrictions made a live stage presentation problematic. We practiced on Zoom, which was never designed for presenting plays, and learned to work with its limitations. These included the need for all of us to wait at strategic points to deliver our lines until Nancy Goede, pastor of Augustana, who conceived of this operation in the first place, secured the licensing rights to present it, and acquired the scripts for all of us, could produce sound effects (such as knocking on a door or a phone ringing) at points where that otherwise would have been a background stage noise. On Zoom, however, our talking would have filtered out such sounds, so we had to master the timing to allow those sounds to occur. There are scenes where the historical context emerges from radio announcements, and certain people had to provide those, speaking into makeshift microphones of the era, and so forth. In many ways, despite the visual presence on Zoom, our production resembled an old theater of the radio, and with a story set in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps that aided the dramatic impact. But taking all the emotional impact of the story I mention above, and framing it within Zoom, was an interesting challenge and ate up a significant amount of time in rehearsals.

Given that almost no one had the spare time to learn every line by heart, this was “Readers Theater,” in which people used the script during the performance. However, to increase the impact of Bonhoeffer’s presence, I mastered the art of essentially hiding the script below the screen, that is, out of sight of the webcam, while also anticipating lines that I could deliver without even looking at it. On stage, all of this would have been impossible, but then Zoom made other things impossible, such as Bonhoeffer hugging or kissing his fiancée, Maria von Wedemeyer, when she visits him in prison. Live theater online involves its own fair share of compromises.

I would love to provide some photos here of the performance, but licensing rights prohibited recording. I have chosen to make do with other approaches to make this more visually interesting.

Me, as Bonhoeffer, in “studio” in clerical garb for scene with Hermann Goering and Bishop Ludwig Muller

In addition to the invisible but important influence of people like the pastor, I must mention that no performance like this operates without serious teamwork. Much of what I did gained from the adroit counterplay of other actors. Dan Friedrich, who played multiple roles, was a remarkably cynical Hermann Goering, making very effective use of Goering’s perverse sense of humor, as in a meeting between himself, Bonhoeffer, and Bishop Muller of the German national church. When Bonhoeffer offers to show that his opposition movement has some 6,000 pastors objecting to some new Nazi policy declarations, Goering laughs it off by noting ominously that “we already know who they are.” Both my role and Dan’s demanded an effective foil on the other side. I learned how to use such foils to the benefit of the portrayal of my own character. On

Theresa Fuchs in downtown Chicago

the other hand, Theresa Fuchs, a visitor from Germany working at the Goethe-Institut, played a very convincing and sincere Maria. Her soft German-accented English lent an air of linguistic reality to the play, but more importantly, she also schooled the rest of the cast on the proper pronunciation of German names (though it didn’t always take, as one might expect).

Andrea Holliday

Dan Friedrich played both sides: General Hermann Goering and the anti-Nazi conspirator Schlabrendorff. That is, when not also playing an American correspondent at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

As for Dan, a software developer who has a serious sideline hobby in comedy improv, he can take credit for introducing us to Andrea Holliday, who provided the narration where Zoom made certain stage effects either difficult or impossible.

In the end, this experience taught me a deeper respect than I already had for what professional and even community theater actors attempt to do all the time. It involves investing some of your own emotional energy in the portrayal of the character, and in the case of a character like Bonhoeffer, some significant willingness to try to achieve an understanding of that person’s world view and faith. Frankly, after this 2 ½-hour online presentation was over, I felt a significant need to unwind and recover from what I had just done. Acting is a unique artistic enterprise in the way it demands that you embrace another person’s perspective, especially when that person is a historic figure, rather than the product of a creative author’s mind. It stretches one’s mind and heart in special ways.

Jim Schwab

P.S.: For a blog perspective on the presentation by Pastor Nancy Goede’s husband, Jim Vondracek, click here.

Our Collective COVID Cabin Fever

Posted on February 28, 2021 by admin

I am not a doubter when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines. All I want to do is sign up and let them put a sharp needle in my arm and inoculate me. Do it twice if the vaccine demands it. Even my experience in early February with the shingles vaccine cannot deter me. On a Tuesday afternoon, a pharmacist at the local Walgreen’s provided a shot that I requested at my doctor’s suggestion. It has been two decades since I experienced my second episode of shingles, but I vividly recollected the piercing pains in my shoulders and arms that made it nearly impossible to exercise my fingers on a keyboard, one of the most basic things I have long done to earn a living. I told the pharmacist that I “noticed it but did not feel it.” He put a bandage over the location on my upper left arm, and I left, thanking him.

It was that evening that I noticed my reaction as muscle aches spread from that left arm across my upper chest. Then the chills set in, and I pulled the covers over me in bed. I repeatedly felt my forehead, testing for a fever. Nothing happening. The next day, the muscle aches diminished, but the chills persisted, and I sat in a leather chair with a blanket pulled over me, doing little but reading a newspaper and then falling asleep. I had slept all night, but it mattered not; the fatigue overpowered me. Late that afternoon, I struggled through two online meetings, and my energy again failed me. I spent the next day feeling slightly more energetic until about 3 p.m., when I fell into a deep sleep, again with blankets covering me as I accomplished nothing. My wife says I turned white, but I wouldn’t know. I lacked the energy to look into the mirror.

By Friday, I at least posed a question to my primary physician on the patient portal: Is this normal? He wrote back to say that about 20 to 25 percent of people getting the shingles virus experience such a reaction, which mostly proved that the vaccine was beneficial. My immune system was relearning how to fight the shingles virus. That was vaguely reassuring, and I knew he knew whereof he spoke, but it took one last development to convince me.

Late that Friday afternoon, with the better part of a week lost to malaise, I suddenly felt the fog lift and the fever break, though it was not really a fever. All within an hour. It just stopped. My immune system had learned what it needed to know, and it ceased fighting what was not there. And I was fine. That’s part of how vaccines work, but I could not recall ever experiencing such a reaction to any previous vaccine.

Our backyard after the Presidents Day blizzard.

Amid this experience, however, the snow piled up in Chicago. First came a snowstorm that covered our yards and streets in blinding whiteness. Often, in Chicago winters, these snows come, sit around for a few days until the sun comes out, and they melt away as the temperatures rise.

But not this time. Until February in this season, we had seen little more than timid flurries of pixie dust that barely covered the ground, with green shoots of grass still poking out from below. Now it came to stay, as temperatures soon plunged to zero and slightly below, solidifying the growing accumulation of snow even as we struggled daily to clear a path down our gangway and along the sidewalk in front of our home. I shoveled in front of a neighbor’s home as well, knowing he had recently had hernia surgery. And the very next day, we had to do it again.

Jean wanted her turn at shoveling as a way to get some exercise. She got her wish.

The three weeks of persistent snow culminated in a 17-inch overnight debauchery on Presidents Day that left us staggering and feeling quarantined by virtue of a simple inability to move a car down the alley, or the challenge of climbing over hip-high snow piles at intersections. During those three weeks, our cumulative snowfall mounted to 40 inches.

Our somewhat metaphorical confinement by way of extensive pandemic restrictions now took on major physical dimensions, leaving us feeling imprisoned. Not only was there nowhere to go because the restaurants were closed, but there was no way to get out, either. In place of my brief fatigue in reaction to a shingles virus, I now felt a very real spiritual and emotional fatigue at the mere thought of needing boots and a heavy coat just to step outside. Staying at home felt more like incarceration than refuge. Even the mail, which provides some tangible connection to the outside world, was no longer arriving. The carrier on our route, and probably on many others, was not braving the snow piles and frigid weather, and the mail piled up at the post office until, one day, I simply walked the mile to get it, standing in line for more than half an hour for a pile of paper surrounded by a rubber band, partly containing bills to pay. The process took long enough that, by the time it was over, I needed to use a bathroom and home was too far away. I opted for the nearby Cozy Corner diner, and showed my gratitude by staying for lunch. It’s a very decent eatery, actually, and I enjoyed my California melt with fries. And then I walked home again, through the very snow piles that had impeded its delivery. Watch where you walk when you cross the street.

After weeks of erratic service, the mail came all at once, and not again so far.

By the following Sunday, temperatures rose and stayed above freezing. The snow began to melt, removing the impediments to delivery. Nonetheless, in the past week, delivery occurred only on Tuesday, when the mailbox was suddenly full, but it was an aberration rather than real change. No mail arrived for the rest of the week. This has been an ongoing problem across Chicago, for systemic rather than purely weather-driven reasons, and even more so in some South Side ZIP codes than ours, which is itself bad enough. The Chicago Tribune ran an article about the Trumpian mess in which U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush expressed his impatience on behalf of his constituents about the staffing excuses, saying there were plenty of unemployed people in the city, so “if you have a job, do it.”

The as yet uncollected recyclables in a bin filled to the brim.

That comment formed an interesting backdrop to the other event the same day all mail arrived. The city recycling pickup occurs on our block on alternate Tuesdays, and our bins were full, if somewhat piled around with snow. The trucks seemed to be very selective, leaving our stuff uncollected, so that we are now storing recyclables in paper bags in the garage. I complained to the city Streets and Sanitation Department in an online forum that left little room for comment, then forwarded the complaint and further explanation to our 1^st Ward alderman, Daniel La Spata. I noted that the previous week, the regular garbage pickup occurred without a problem under worse circumstances. He informed me that a private company had been hired for the recycling, similar problems had emerged elsewhere, and added, “Honestly, that’s the difference between public employees and privatized ones, and why we’re pushing back on the latter.” Some might question that comparison in light of the post office problems, but I would suggest that the U.S. Postal Service, to a significant degree, has been the target of efforts to undermine it as a means of justifying privatization and subverting the integrity of mail ballots. In any case, I still want them to empty those blue recycling bins.

During all this, I nonetheless wanted to access the COVID vaccine so that I could move beyond the sense of limitation that nearly a year of closed stores and restaurants, and mask wearing and social distancing, has instilled in all of us. For compulsive extroverts like me, the compounded effect of long-term pandemic restrictions followed by a month of being buried in frozen precipitation is producing a profound restlessness. Put simply, I want out.

I have not yet mentioned that five grandchildren have been studying remotely in our home since September. We are guardians for one, and the others are here as their mother engineers a major change in her life, and besides, my wife is a retired public schools teacher who can mentor them. Throughout February, the Chicago Teachers Union engaged in a vociferous public debate with the Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Lori Lightfoot about reopening schools, arguing over the adequacy of the preparations for protecting teachers and staff from coronavirus exposure. This took place against the backdrop of the larger national debate over online versus in-person education, but I know what I see. The kids are noticeably glazing over and tuning out, and listening to a teacher on a screen is getting old. Students, particularly students of color (most of our grandchildren) and those with working parents, are falling behind, and the schools will have a major challenge in coming years of reversing the impacts of online education. Students in the early grades need human contact to remain fully engaged. None of this is to deny the necessity that drove the schools to close, but the national failure to manage the pandemic has greatly exacerbated the consequences.

We need to get our national act together, and moving millions of doses of vaccines to sites where people can get some sense of relief is the most important step right now. Instead, I’ve found myself checking online daily, sometimes multiple times daily, only to find no availability for vaccine appointments. But my wife finally got her call for March 2, so I remain hopeful. I have no other choice.

That expression of patience is at the heart of our dilemma. I could live with the snow, however impatiently and with some humor, because I knew that warmer days lay ahead, and snow cannot outlast St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. Unlike Texas, our infrastructure is designed to handle winter. A slow, steady rise in temperature would allow snow to turn to water at a steady pace without triggering floods. We will be fine.

What has been less certain has been the ability of our national public health infrastructure, as disheveled as political neglect has allowed it to become, to respond to the pandemic. But I can also feel a steady warming trend since January 20, however halting it has seemed at times. The big snowstorm, which jostled its way through Kentucky and Tennessee and Arkansas all the way down to Texas and Louisiana, slowed distribution of vaccines, but maybe for a week. My wife learned that she got her appointment because PrimeCare, a local health care provider, had just received a big shipment.

Snow recedes to a manageable level as the weather has warmed.

My turn will come, and so will yours if you’re smart enough to get vaccinated. My outlook will change with the warm breezes of spring, and I will start to think about where I can go and what I can do. We will end this year-long cabin fever that has been induced by a tiny virus with protein spikes that latch onto receptor target cells in a microbiological process most of us do not understand.

But it may be a long time before we stop talking about it. Our collective COVID cabin fever does that. Let’s all talk about what we as a nation can do better next time. Do it over beer or coffee or tea, but make it a productive, meaningful conversation. I’m tired of gripes. I prefer solutions.

Jim Schwab

When Narcissism Trumps All

Posted on January 31, 2021 by admin

Within the last week, I finished reading a nearly 800-page biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, which may raise the question of why I took the trouble. I started only after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to concede and persisted in disseminating the fiction that the election had somehow been stolen. It struck me that there might be some noteworthy parallels in personality traits, or psychology, with one of the great monsters of European history. There are. Not that I am a psychologist or even play one on television. But as voters, we all judge presidential character to one degree or another. It is often a significant factor in the public debate in election years.

In his detailed but highly readable 1998 biography, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alan Schom notes that, in the end, after numerous avoidable wars, Bonaparte, aka Emperor Napoleon, left behind nearly three million dead Europeans. Most were soldiers, but hundreds of thousands of civilians were also killed. Equally large numbers were displaced as hundreds of towns and villages were burned to the ground, amid other rapine and destruction.

I want to note here that, for comparison, I have read several volumes of recent vintage exploring the Trump psyche, family background, and political behavior, including:

Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump
Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch
A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston

In addition, in comparing Trump with previous U.S. presidents, I am aided by the serendipitous circumstance that, in 1997, I undertook what became a 15-year quest to read at least one biography of every U.S. president, starting sequentially with George Washington. (The sequential aspect ceased as I read second and even third biographies of some presidents, such as Lincoln, Madison, Wilson, and others.) Thus, I do not speak loosely in saying that Trump is decidedly unique in certain respects.

But back to Napoleon.

The destruction I noted above is bad enough, but what became supremely clear to me was how little Napoleon seemed to care. I was reminded of a scene early in Leo Tolstoy’s classic, War and Peace, in which Napoleon, dressed in a Polish peasant soldier’s uniform to escape notice from the Russians, surveys the landscape on the other side of the Niemen River as he prepares for his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. As he does so, some cavalry soldiers plunge into the river to demonstrate their courage to the great leader but end up drowning. Tolstoy drily observes that their demise attracted little notice from the emperor.

Not like he really cared, Tolstoy seems to be telling us. Somewhat like Donald Trump slipping away to the White House to view the mayhem on television while his followers, incited by his outlandish rhetoric, ransack the Capitol and some people are killed. Zealots can pay an extraordinarily high price for failing to realize that their self-centered messiah in fact has a heart of stone.

But Napoleon was far worse than that, I learned from Schom. Throughout a decade and a half of senseless wars, in which hundreds of thousands of young French men were conscripted into his army, Napoleon never bothered to authorize a fully operational military medical service to take care of the sick and wounded. Tens of thousands died from appalling field hospital conditions, if they were in any hospital at all. It was just not one of the emperor’s priorities. As Schom notes, “With the same cold, calculating ruthlessness, Napoleon ignored the dead and wounded, and despite the pleas of the army’s chief surgeon, Dr. Dominique Larrey, year after year refused to create a permanent army medical corps.”

Medical supplies tended to be skimpy or nonexistent, and at the Battle of Wagram, Schom notes, “9,000 or so casualties were all but abandoned by Napoleon.” By the time he fled from Russia, having started with an army of more than 600,000, he left behind 400,000 dead soldiers and perhaps 100,000 prisoners in the hands of the Russian empire. Little more than a rump force made it back to Paris with him. His downfall came little more than a year later, leading to his exile in Elba, followed by his return, final defeat, and exile to St. Helena, where he died of arsenic poisoning, most likely at the hands of a trusted associate.

Beware how you choose your champions.

Americans, until recently, have seldom had to confront the consequences of such narcissistic leadership devoid of any capacity for empathy. Presidents of both parties have typically been humbled by the responsibilities they have assumed, and despite mistakes and bad judgment in many cases, have been aware at some level of the cost their decisions have imposed on American soldiers and civilians alike. Remorse has often driven them to seek to remedy the situation. But we have just outlived the experience of a president capable of separating children from their parents at the border without even the most fundamental understanding of the causes of migration from poor nations in Latin America, nor any plan for how someday to reunite them. We have witnessed a presidency in which, as I write, almost 440,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 (exceeding American deaths in World War II) while the nation’s leader ridiculed people for wearing masks and suggested drinking cleaning fluids, all while suppressing the input of capable scientists, but has yet to express any serious regrets for the sorrowful outcome. After all, someone else caused the problem—Obama, the Chinese, Democratic governors, whoever. Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte, from start to finish, is replete with examples of the French leader blaming everyone around him for every catastrophe while failing to accept responsibility. The routine is drearily familiar.

Both men have also exhibited an outsized capacity for surrounding themselves with sycophants and turning at least part of the state apparatus into a family enterprise. We are familiar these days with the coterie of Ivanka Trump, Eric, Donald Jr., and Jared Kushner all playing prominent roles in the White House for which they were profoundly unqualified. Napoleon made kings and princes of his family members, but unlike Trump, often found them incompetent after having installed them. He was also infamous not only for looting the treasure of conquered nations but also of France itself. In his quest to blockade British commerce, he virtually impoverished an entire continent with the “Continental System,” while forcing subordinate states to support the costs of his wars.

The key difference between the two men in this respect is not their cupidity, but their timing. Napoleon rose to power within a nascent French republic that was struggling to establish stable institutions following the insanity of the French Revolution and its wild swings of the political pendulum. He was able to install himself as First Consul through a coup d’etat. He then installed his brother Lucien as Minister of the Interior, a post that put him in charge of the election machinery for a plebiscite to affirm Napoleon’s reorganization of the government. Schom reports that some five million French citizens voted, only 1.5 million for the new constitution, but Lucien remedied the problem by simply stealing the election, reporting more than 3 million positive votes and only 1,562 opposed. Napoleon made this possible by shutting down critical press outlets. He repeated this feat in a later plebiscite that established him as emperor in 1804.

Storming of the Capitol. Image from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol.

If Trump had any serious knowledge of history, he might have envied this Napoleonic sleight of hand, but it is certainly clear that he kept his followers on a short leash of credulity by ranting endlessly about “fake news.” The dangers of this credulity, including the impact of the Q Anon conspiracy phenomenon, became perilously apparent on January 6. Fortunately, the inherent stability of the federal government of the United States after nearly two and a half centuries of tradition and loyalty to democratic principles made the American state far less vulnerable than the French state at the end of the eighteenth century. We were able to move Donald Trump out of the White House, but a cost we have never before experienced with the singular exception of the Civil War.

The single huge difference between the two men is the one that is probably most significant. Napoleon was especially dangerous because, unlike Trump, who was born in the lap of luxury and escaped military service during the Vietnam war because of deferments, he rose from obscurity in Corsica when his father procured a royal scholarship for his education at the Royal Military School, followed by strict military training at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Napoleon was nothing if not a military leader, sometimes a reckless one, with artillery training and a solid knowledge of mathematics. Trump was largely an indifferent student and one who later lacked an understanding of military culture and operations. Pentagon professionals, aware that their oath prohibited them from following unlawful orders, often took umbrage at Trump’s attempts to override their judgment and concerns. Many retired and former officers spoke out, their numbers growing as time wore on. This standoff between authoritarianism and patriotic tradition may have spared us much further tragedy.

I would prefer not to have found a need to produce this short essay. Trump is at least out of office, though what further mischief he may foment remains to be seen. The critical lesson is for the American people to think much harder about the nature of democratic leadership. We need to become much more discerning of the character traits of the people we elevate as leaders. With many Republicans still clinging to a virulent defense of Trump, and Senators and others clearly prepared to assume his mantle and claim his base for their own, this issue remains volatile. The fate of the world’s most powerful democratic republic hangs in the balance.

Jim Schwab

Digital Coast Act Becomes Real

Posted on December 6, 2020 by admin

Last Wednesday, December 2, the U.S. Senate passed the Digital Coast Act in a final vote that sent the legislation to President Trump for his signature. If that happens, it may provide a very useful gift to thousands of coastal communities wrestling with a wide variety of coastal zone management challenges.

For more than a decade, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has sponsored through its Office of Coastal Management a program that has racked up stellar achievements while awaiting congressional blessing of its existence. Digital Coast began as an effort, in collaboration with five nongovernmental partners, to share federal geospatial data and tools with communities in ways that did not require a Ph.D. scientist to interpret them for local government uses.

Geospatial technology, not a familiar term for the average American, refers to “modern tools contributing to the geographic mapping and analysis of the Earth and human societies,” according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In a coastal context, that includes tools for measuring, projecting, and visualizing sea level rise, as well as monitoring land uses and land cover in coastal areas, and mapping offshore areas as well. The mission of Digital Coast was to make these tools ever more useful for local government planners, resource managers, economic development agencies, and others with some sort of meaningful engagement with coastal issues and data.

Why is that important? For starters, because more than half of the U.S. population now lives in counties along either an oceanic or Great Lakes coast, and that percentage is growing. It matters greatly where these counties, and their cities, allow new development, how they court economic growth, and how they manage coastal resources, including marine life, tidal wetlands, and offshore resources, as well as ports and near-shore transportation. These coastal areas are huge drivers of the overall U.S. economy, and better data, and better access to data, will deeply affect the American future.

Digital Coast partners and staff at a 2015 meeting. I am at front row, right.

Improving that access and making tools easier to use, and data more understandable, has been the mission of the Digital Coast Partnership that was assembled from 2008 on, initially with five organizations: Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM); The Nature Conservancy (TNC); National Association of Counties (NACo); National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC); and Coastal States Organization (CSO). In the summer of 2010, the American Planning Association joined the partnership, an initiative I led as manager of APA’s Hazards Planning Center. Allison Hardin, a planner for the city of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and immediate past chair of APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division (which I now chair), reports that in 2009, she vigorously advocated for the addition of APA. At the time, Allison, a certified floodplain manager, was helping to represent ASFPM in the partnership. Today, there are eight nongovernmental partners, all of which serve as links to professional user communities to ensure widespread uptake of the data, tools, and resources available from Digital Coast. The two additions have been the Urban Land Institute and National Estuarine Research Reserve Association.

Allison Hardin speaking at Capitol briefing.

So, what difference does statutory authorization of Digital Coast make? According to John Palatiello, president of John M. Palatiello & Associates, Inc., a government relations and association management firm representing the surveying, mapping, GIS, and geospatial community, which helped lead the effort to get the act passed: “The Digital Coast Act will enable NOAA to partner with other government entities and the private sector to help protect and promote America’s coasts and shorelines. This legislation creates a program to utilize the extensive capabilities, competence, and qualifications of private sector geospatial professionals to provide the surveying, charting, remote sensing, and geospatial data of America’s coasts, harbors, ports, shorelines and ocean resources for economic growth, recreational activities, conservation, and resilience of our fragile coastal environment.” Put more simply, the new law stabilizes the authorization and budgetary support for Digital Coast within NOAA. There were times in the past when this was less than a sure thing. Now, its codification makes its program status official.

Digital Coast Act briefing, with NOAA Digital Coast staff Miki Schmidt (left) and Josh Murphy (right), standing near door.

But Digital Coast, I can attest from personal experience, has a remarkably astute and dedicated professional staff in love with public service. The Act itself begins with this finding: “The Digital Coast is a model approach for effective Federal partnership with State and local government, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector.” It goes on to note, a few paragraphs later, some of the needs that Digital Coast can help address, including flood and coastal storm surge prediction, hazard risk and vulnerability assessment, and community resilience, as well as ecosystem health. I applauded the program more than six years ago on this blog.

Briefing at the Capitol: APA Policy Director Jason Jordan at the mike; ASFPM Executive Director Chad Berginnis to his right.

It is important to note that this legislation is not the product of some recent brainstorm, but of a slow, steady process of building support, starting with a handful of legislators from both parties who saw its value. Perhaps most notable was Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), accompanied in the House by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), who noted in a press release that he had been advocating such action for nearly a decade. But Republican support came from Rep. Don Young (R-AK) and Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both of Alaska, the state with by far the longest coastline. All of them, along with the Digital Coast partners, plus the indefatigable John Byrd of MAPPS, pushed relentlessly, year after year, to find the support necessary to move the bill across the legislative goal line. They have at last succeeded.

Jim Schwab

Charting a Path to Sustainability

Posted on November 23, 2020 by admin

A presidential transition has always been a time to look forward in American history, anticipating change, contemplating new directions. Sometimes we like the new direction, sometimes we don’t; sometimes we think it just doesn’t go far enough to remedy the problems we face. But never have we faced the narcissistic spectacle of a president unwilling to release his grip on power. Every president before Donald Trump has been enough of a patriot to cooperate with a new president of the opposite party, and losing candidates who never ascended to the White House have been willing to concede. It is extremely unfortunate that some Americans are trying to deny others the right to focus on defining a more positive future.

But they are only trying because the right to map out an alternative future is still ours. The capacity to imagine a different future is one of the defining characteristics of a society that is capable of renewal, resilience, and sustainability. It is vitally important that civic leaders, academics, and authors help us clarify the truth of our past and map out paths to a better future. And, presidential transitions notwithstanding, it can and should happen below the national level, to help states and communities explore their unique history and their opportunities.

It is in that context that I wish to introduce readers to Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a Sustainable Iowa, the work of Charles E. Connerly, who by next summer will be retiring as professor and the director of the University of Iowa School of Urban and Regional Planning, recently renamed the School of Planning and Public Affairs after Connerly’s successful push to incorporate a Master’s in Public Affairs to the program’s offerings. Connerly has been at Iowa since 2008 since migrating back to his Midwestern roots after a long tenure at Florida State University in Tallahassee. As a matter of full disclosure, he was also responsible for hiring me as an adjunct assistant professor to teach one course each fall that has come to be known as Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery. His many years at Florida State, working alongside Robert Deyle, a colleague who worked with me on disaster issues as far back as the 1990s, made him supremely aware of the importance of addressing hazards in the planning process. I was hired in the immediate aftermath of the massive 2008 floods in Iowa.

Connerly (in gray jacket) during a 2014 field trip of post-flood redevelopment in Cedar Rapids.

Connerly is truly a comprehensive thinker in the best planning tradition, and this book shows it. While I am certain, because of publishing schedules, that he had completed his manuscript before the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over the Memorial Day weekend, his book is incredibly timely in the fall of 2020 because of his focus on the history of racial and ethnic disparities in Iowa. In fact, Chapter 4 is simply titled, “Why Is Iowa So White?”

Indeed, that is a very good question. It is not just a matter of Iowa being farm country. After growing up in the Cleveland metro area in Ohio, then moving to Iowa in January 1979 before ultimately enrolling in graduate school at the University of Iowa, I remember being struck by the apparent lack of diversity, especially outside the handful of cities above, say, 50,000 people. There is, after all, industry in these cities, and industry has often attracted multiracial work forces. Unless, that is, political and social forces intervene to prevent such an outcome. Most people, however, never notice such forces at work and never learn about them in school. History can be very silent about such matters unless diligent researchers insist on exposing that legacy to sunshine, aka “the best disinfectant.”

Connerly digs deep on this topic, all the way back to antebellum Iowa politics. Sitting just north of Missouri, a slave-holding border state, Iowa was both a frontier of the Underground Railroad and a harbor of typical northern mixed feelings about African Americans. In 1850, Iowa was no less than 99.8 percent white, and did not dip below 99 percent, Connerly notes, until 1970. Since then, there has been a substantial growth in minority populations. But African Americans have historically been concentrated in just four urban counties. All that said, it was also the Iowa Democratic caucuses in 2008 that launched Barack Obama on a streaking path to the presidency. What accounts for this paradoxical history?

From the early days of statehood, Iowa suffered from a typical northern moral conflict between supporting emancipation and not particularly wanting too many blacks in the neighborhood. That is not putting too fine a point on the matter. Connerly notes that before the Civil War, Iowa had enacted laws banning blacks from the state. The territory avoided enacting such black codes to win statehood, but once that was achieved, Iowa legislators had no problem backtracking on the issue. The bottom line was that Iowans, overall, opposed slavery but did not necessarily favor civil rights for freed slaves.

That changed somewhat after the Civil War, with Radical Republicans pushing through changes that liberalized matters considerably, but it was only following World War II and through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s that serious, permanent change began to occur. By that time, however, previous history had done its work in making African Americans largely feel unwelcome. Iowa stayed overwhelmingly white, but not entirely by accident. At the same time, the state has been receptive to refugees, for example, after the Vietnam war, and remarkably progressive on some other issues. Northwest Iowa elected the remarkably ignorant Steve King to Congress, but Republicans themselves dethroned him in this year’s June primary.

Prior to white settlement and the rise of modern agriculture, much of the Iowa landscape enjoyed by Indians consisted of prairie. Photo by Suzan Erem

Connerly writes that African Americans were not the only minorities to feel the impact of 19^th-century American racism. Before European settlement, which took place in earnest only after Iowa became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase, fourteen Native American nations had, over millennia, occupied some part of what became Iowa. Before the 1800s, their interaction with Europeans was largely through trade, but eventually their land ended up in the hands of white settlers. The short answer as to how that happened is simple: “We took it from them.” Today, only the Mesquaki settlement in Tama remains as a reminder of the formerly dominant Native American presence.

The Hispanic presence, and that of various Asian minorities, is a product of more recent history, some of it involving the evolution of labor relations, particularly in agriculture and meat processing plants, but today there is a distinct, but distinctly disadvantaged, Hispanic presence. It is no accident that earlier this year, some of the most intense controversy over coronavirus spread in states like Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota involved minority workers in the meat-packing industry and deficiencies in safety protocols among the companies involved. In a whole chapter dealing with labor issues over time in both the food and agricultural equipment industries, one can see the steady decline of leverage among white-dominated labor unions and the rise of cheap labor and mass production within the industry as it is today. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that these social and economic changes have had profound impacts on, and implications for, the future of Iowa’s economy and society. Iowa did not shift from supporting Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 and 2020 without some massive strains within the body politic. How those tensions are resolved will go a long way toward determining whether Iowa can chart a successful path to a sustainable future, as Connerly’s book suggests. Iowans will have serious work ahead in improving social equity while adjusting to a changing demographic makeup across the state.

But I do not wish to create the impression that the book is strictly focused on such demographic issues, as important and critical as they are. It is important to notice that Connerly has tied together the issues of environmental health, fairness, and prosperity in his title. His larger point is that all these questions are inextricably related. To quote some planners I have known, “Everything is connected to everything else.”

Connerly takes us on a detailed, well-documented tour not only of Iowa’s demographic history, but of its environmental and economic history as well. Iowa clearly entered statehood as a predominantly rural, agricultural state, though not necessarily producing the corn and soybeans that predominate now. Originally, in fact, it grew more wheat, but trends shifted to corn and hogs. But the state is still heavily dependent on agriculture, with 43 percent of its 2015 manufacturing centered on either food processing or machinery used in agricultural production. These two gave rise in the twentieth century to some powerful unions representing workers who were largely able to achieve a blue-collar version of middle-class prosperity. Hogs, supported by state laws exempting agriculture from county zoning laws, gave rise to the growth of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the past 40 years, and the meat-packing industry itself became more concentrated and able to mechanize increasingly and replace high-wage jobs with lower-wage mass production and weaker unions. The people working in the newer factories are definitely more racially diverse but definitely not more empowered and definitely paid less. The growing inequities have resulted in a shrinking middle class.

One factor that distinguished the Iowa packing plants prior to the major, union-busting shifts of the 1970s and 1980s was that the plants were closer to the farms, and thus, unlike larger plants in Chicago and Kansas City, bought animals directly from farmers. Connerly maps out the consequences in urban development for Iowa, namely, that Iowa never developed the metropolitan magnets of neighboring states like Minnesota, Missouri, and Illinois because of the dominance of the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City, and instead has a number of smaller cities, the largest being Des Moines, which has about 215,000 people, though the entire metro area is about three times that size. Smaller cities have mostly grown around agriculture-related industries.

All this has had significant consequences not only for quality of life but the quality of the environment, with water quality problems arising from rural land use issues such as CAFOs, soil erosion, and nitrate concentrations in groundwater. Connerly’s final chapter asks whether Iowa truly is the “best state in the nation,” a title bestowed in 2018 by U.S. News and World Report. As a former Iowan, I do not offer this review as a way of trashing the state, nor does Connerly offer his book in that spirit, but the question is an opportunity to explore the complexity of a state that too many elsewhere see as simply white and rural. Iowa, with the right policies, the right incentives, and the right opportunities, has the potential to create a healthy environment and economy, but it must examine current trends and determine how to reverse those that are moving the state in the wrong direction. The last chapter is a succinct compendium of recommendations for moving Iowa toward a growing middle class, a healthier environment with better recreational opportunities, and a progressive approach toward making agriculture more ecologically sound and resilient in the face of natural hazards, most notably, floods.

Testing facility of the Iowa Flood Center, 2019.

The state has created some interesting mechanisms for doing this, but has a stubborn habit in recent years of shooting itself in the foot. In 1987, the legislature wisely passed the Groundwater Protection Act, which created the Aldo Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, which has done remarkable research on establishing a balance between economic and environmental needs in agricultural practices. Yet, in recent years, the legislature has significantly limited state funding for the center at the behest of corporate agricultural interests. In 2010, following the devastating floods in 2008, the legislature funded creation of the Iowa Flood Center at the University of Iowa, which has become a model in advancing flood prediction and mitigation that other states are considering copying, yet some question the need for continued funding. It is almost as if Iowa wants to replicate the larger national battle between science and an increasingly poisonous distrust of “experts.” Would it not be better to marshal and support the best intellectual resources Iowa can muster for an assessment of the opportunities that lie ahead?

Connerly points out, in contrast, how Iowa could take the lead in solving problems like climate change and excessive nutrient runoff in the Mississippi River basin that leads to both groundwater contamination locally and hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico. This last chapter is the biggest single reason to read the book, but its logic is only fully clear after reading the thorough research that precedes it.

My final comment is that it may seem that this is a book that is primarily or perhaps solely relevant to Iowans. I think that conclusion, however, would be short-sighted. While I am profoundly aware of the many books others have produced about other states, regions, and metropolitan areas across the U.S., I think it is vitally important that other scholars across the nation undertake similar efforts to assess the path to sustainability for their own states, regions, and cities. We could sorely use such a book in Illinois, and the same is probably true for every neighboring state. As I suggested at the outset, it is not enough to chart a new national path. We need these serious explorations at subnational levels as well. In that sense, I believe Connerly has done a major service for the Hawkeye state. I’d like to see more such books.

Jim Schwab

2020 Vision

Posted on November 1, 2020 by admin

In two days, those who have not yet voted by mail or in person at an early voting site will have their last chance to express their views on America’s future. It is by far the starkest choice in my lifetime, and I will add that Harry Truman was in the White House when I was born. I have participated in presidential and other elections since 1972. The Twenty-sixth Amendment, which prohibited age discrimination in voting for those 18 and older, was ratified in 1971, while I was a junior in college. I have never taken that right for granted In five decades since then.

But I find it a curious coincidence that we face this choice in a year that can be pronounced Twenty-Twenty, the optometric formula for perfect vision. I first experienced the joy of 20/20 vision without glasses after my cataract surgery last year, so it has special meaning for me after growing up attached all day long to serious eyewear. But as I noted in my introductory blog post more than eight years ago, as a writer, scholar, parent, and student of life, I have also learned that 20/20 vision can be a metaphor for simply seeing the world clearly by sorting facts from fiction. It may thus be little surprise that, in a poetic post a few weeks ago, I used a hall of mirrors as the lens for viewing a current popular addiction to conspiratorial world views that have led many into the snare of our current U.S. president.

This is, first and foremost, an election about decency, honesty, and democratic norms. Simply put, one side observes them, and one side does not. I have never said that before about major party presidential candidates. Both sides have typically understood that a functioning democracy requires that standards exist that are not controverted, lines that are not crossed. Even Richard Nixon eventually acceded to such norms when he resigned the presidency in August 1974, following the Watergate scandal. Perhaps reluctantly, he acknowledged his own mistakes and shortcomings, and for the sake of the country left us all in the hands of Gerald Ford, a conservative but mainstream Republican who thoroughly embraced the need to respect institutional norms. When he, in turn, facing the headwinds of the era, lost a close election to Jimmy Carter, he conceded and moved on, as did Carter four years later. And so it has been throughout the vast majority of American history. Running for any office inherently entails the possibility of losing and accepting the verdict of the voters. I faced the same verdict myself In a city council election in Iowa City in 1983. Looking back, I can honestly say that, while raising some serious issues, I headlined a campaign that was less vigorous and convincing than it might have been. It was definitely a learning experience. Within two years, I was married in Omaha and found a job in Chicago. In a legitimate democracy, holding public office is a privilege, not an entitlement. Life moves on.

But apparently not for Donald Trump, for whom wealth and power seem an entitlement, and truth and honesty merely convenient fictions in a transactional lifestyle. Books exploring this megalomania, including one by his own niece, Mary L. Trump, have virtually become a cottage industry. I cannot think of another U.S. president whose own psyche has been the subject of so much close examination, hand-wringing, and concern about his grip on power—and I have read at least one biography of every single president in U.S. history. The problem is that Donald Trump is one of the least introspective presidents we have ever seen, and his obsessions are a legitimate source of concern.

Those fixations and projections have introduced elements into the present election that leadership skills alone, on the part of previous candidates, have suppressed for the public good. In 2008, John McCain notably rejected the efforts of some supporters to make race an issue against President Barack Obama. In 2000, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that many regarded as blatantly partisan and unfair, Vice President Al Gore, who had won the popular vote by about 500,000 votes, nonetheless sought to tamp down partisan anger for the sake of constitutional and institutional stability. Trump appears ready to do no one such favors. It is all about his ego.

Take, for example, his campaign’s ridiculous demand that a winner be declared on election night, viewed against a backdrop of baseless complaints about massive fraud in voting by mail (which I myself did this year, without a problem, to avoid being in a crowd amid a pandemic). This demand has absolutely no basis in American history, which is replete with instances in which it has taken well past midnight, and in 2000, several weeks, before a decision was clear. Even a modicum of reading in U.S. presidential history reveals, for instance, that in 1948, it was the morning after the election when the Chicago Tribune printed the famous headline, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” which Truman subsequently waved as a badge of honor when the final tally proved otherwise. In 1960, when John F. Kennedy won the popular vote by a razor-thin margin of 0.17 percent, Nixon did not concede until the following afternoon. These are hardly the only such cases.

However, before the era of television, the public rarely expected to learn the results on election night. This quick determination is a result not only of modern communications, but of the willingness of broadcasters to lure viewers with even the hint of making the first announcement of the apparent victor. What is different in 2020? Obviously, in a year of pandemic, early voting and mail-in ballots have far exceeded numbers seen in past elections; in Texas, such votes have already topped the entire voter turnout of 2016, perhaps because Texas is finally seen as competitive. Clearly, this high voter turnout is an indication that many more Americans have decided that the stakes are very high this year. But the false claims about fraud resonate with conspiracy-minded followers of the President, and combined with notable voter suppression tactics by several state Republican parties, they serve to undermine public confidence in the system to the advantage of no one but the incumbent. As I said, for Trump, it is all about Trump.

But it gets worse, as we have seen. By winking and laughing and refusing to insist that his own supporters observe at least the most basic democratic norms, Trump has enabled behavior that would be outrageous under any circumstances. For example, the Biden campaign was forced to cancel an event in Austin, Texas, when the campaign bus was surrounded on the highway by a caravan of dozens of cars of Trump supporters who slowed down in front of it, blocked its path, and in one case, rammed into an SUV belonging to a Biden staff member. Historian Eric Cervini, driving nearby, noted that the cars “outnumbered police 50-1.” This type of intimidation would have been both totally unacceptable as well as inconceivable in any campaign of the past. But not for Trump, who is probably amused. Where is his urgent call for law and order when his own supporters are the violators? Apparently, it is as ephemeral as it was after 14 men associated with a Michigan militia group were indicted on state and federal charges for plotting to kidnap the Michigan governor and put her on “trial” for what they imagined to be crimes related to protecting the public against the spread of COVID-19. Truly, we are operating in a funhouse reality when public health measures intended to save lives are viewed as crimes worthy of kidnapping and possible execution by vigilantes.

I could go on, but the point is already clear. Patriotic Republicans who still believe in democratic principles and in the value of American institutions of governance have already supported efforts like the Lincoln Project, which is backing Biden as the only means to return this nation to a semblance of sanity, in which presidents no longer mock science but listen carefully to experts and make reasoned decisions based on realistic perceptions of the threats to our nation’s health and security. One can be well-informed and skeptical of specific scientific findings, in part because science functions through a constant questioning and reanalysis to determine if inherited wisdom is sound or merits reexamination. As with everything from Joseph Lister’s development of sterility guidelines for surgery in the late 1800s to Albert Einstein’s theories concerning relativity to modern knowledge of the workings of DNA, that does not make science false. It is simply a process of making it better—far better than the silly ramblings of someone who would speculate about injecting disinfectants into the human body as a means of curing a coronavirus infection. We have huge challenges ahead in regaining our bearings on all these matters, and the fact is that the only viable alternative to Trump is former Vice President Joseph Biden, who benefits from long experience in the public sector and a healthy dose of humility, compassion, and empathy for his fellow human beings.

But I want to close on a special note for my friends and readers who may be independents or Republicans, or even Greens and Libertarians, or whatever other options may exist. I am not speaking here as a Democrat, although I will confess to that leaning. Throughout my life, especially in races below the presidency, I have been willing to cast aside partisan arguments to make independent judgments in cases where I felt specific public officials simply did not deserve my vote. This happened most often in cases of corruption, though ineptitude could also be a factor. I have, on occasion, voted for Republican and even third-party candidates when I felt the need to do so.

The most prominent example occurred in the 2006 gubernatorial election in Illinois. The tally would indicate that most Democrats supported Gov. Rob Blagojevich for re-election that year against Judy Baar Topinka, a Republican and former state treasurer. I had already begun to form a jaundiced view of Blagojevich’s infatuation with power and his own public image, and his frequent posing as a populist savior of the common man and woman. Something struck me as just plain wrong. In the end, I opted to vote for the Green Party candidate, but in retrospect, I should have just crossed the aisle to support Topinka, who was an honorable public servant. Disagreements on some issues were less important than a commitment to decency and honesty.

Subsequently, Blagojevich, following Obama’s ascent to the presidency, was charged and convicted on various charges of corruption, including an attempt to sell Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate. He was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature, and convicted by a federal jury and sent to prison. He is now out of prison because President Trump commuted his sentence, and as an act of gratitude, this Democrat who once appeared on The Apprentice is campaigning for Trump. Surprised? Not me. They are two peas in a pod. This year’s election is ultimately not about partisan affiliations but about public standards of behavior and decency in the White House. Which side are you on?

Harking back to my theme, this year is about viewing the options with 20/20 clarity. We can afford nothing less.

Jim Schwab

Disaster Mitigation Act at Twenty

Posted on October 21, 2020 by admin

When a law makes a powerful impact over time, it is sometimes hard to remember what life was like before it was enacted. In U.S. history, for example, both Social Security and, later, Medicare, created a new reality for the elderly that makes it almost impossible for most people to imagine what old age meant before they took effect. They are so much a part of the fabric of American life that some people even forget (or never learn) the social and political debates that produced them. That sort of obtuse amnesia was in evidence as Tea Party protests materialized in response to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in which some carried signs that read, “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” Ponder that conundrum for a while.

Few laws match the scale of impact of those two examples, but many have significant impacts that receive less attention, at least among the general public. One that is reaching its twentieth anniversary is the Disaster Mitigation Act (DMA), signed into law by President Clinton on October 30, 2000. After a decade of expensive disasters in the 1990s—Hurricane Andrew (1992), the Midwest floods (1993), the Northridge earthquake (1994), and Hurricanes Fran (1996) and Floyd (1997)—Congress realized that the nation needed greater accountability from states and local governments in addressing hazard mitigation challenges before disasters occurred. The carrot and the stick were combined in this instance in a requirement that states (including territories and the District of Columbia) and local and tribal governments prepare and adopt hazard mitigation plans that won the approval of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as meeting the standards of the act and its accompanying regulations as a condition of eligibility for FEMA hazard mitigation grants. Put simply, no plan, no money. Few state and local officials wish to find themselves in that position after a major disaster.

Congress went one step further. Previously, most such grants came through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), created under the Stafford Act in 1988, the basic law structuring the federal disaster response system, under which every state has some sort of parallel emergency management agency. The problem with HMGP has always been that the money is made available as part of a presidential disaster declaration, using a percentage of overall disaster assistance to determine the amount available. That money goes to the affected states, which are responsible for local allocations. But that means that a state must experience a natural disaster to be eligible for such money. Admittedly, it then becomes useful for mitigating future disasters, but it did nothing to avert the most recent event. In fact, communities that had become adept at mitigating hazards with their own resources often complained that they got no federal assistance because they were doing too good a job of preventing losses. Davenport, Iowa, for example, long ago refused Army Corps offers to build levees along the Mississippi River and opted for a riverfront park that allowed the water to flow without damaging buildings in its downtown. Davenport has not always avoided flood impacts, but it has certainly minimized them.

In DMA, Congress added a new Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) grant program. Instead of being triggered by disaster declarations, it was an annual grant competition, in which state and local governments submitted proposals for projects that would reduce losses of life and property in future events. Its major flaw was that PDM relied on annual congressional appropriations, which predictably ebbed and flowed and often was grossly underfunded. In 2018, in the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, Congress finally opted to stabilize funding by creating a formula by which six percent of total annual disaster relief outlays would be swept into a single pot by FEMA for grants under a new program that FEMA has labeled Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC), which I discussed in a post here in early August. The resulting 2020 grant funds total roughly $500 million, a far cry from years past when the total congressional allocation was often as little as $25 million, which barely put a dent in the mitigation needs of a nation as vast as the U.S.

But the real question after two decades is, How has DMA changed the landscape of American planning and disaster management? Clearly, we have not solved all problems. For one thing, climate change has accelerated and complicated matters significantly. While Congress unquestionably has dithered a great deal on climate issues, DMA was never aimed directly at climate change. Instead, it aimed to create a climate of state, tribal and local responsibility and accountability for planning for hazard mitigation while making federal funding available to support such planning. In fact, federal assistance for such planning is built into the law. Have governments responded?

DMA timeline produced by FEMA, reused from FEMA website. To expand, click here.

The unequivocal answer is yes. By 2002, once FEMA had finalized its guidance for the mitigation planning process, Clackamas County, Oregon, became the first local jurisdiction to win approval for its plan. Within a few years, every state and territory had an approved plan in place. Winning compliance from most local jurisdictions understandably took longer, but today FEMA can claim that more than 23,000 local units of government have approved plans, as do 239 tribal governments, which together cover more than 84 percent of the U.S. population. The gaps in coverage are primarily in rural areas, many of which suffer from low governmental capacity—a subject that can still be addressed in future outreach by FEMA—and some of which simply choose not to plan, presumably not seeing the consequences as outweighing the burden of the work involved.

In the meantime, many professional and intergovernmental associations have done considerable outreach to their own members to explain the benefits of hazard mitigation planning beyond simple eligibility for grants. For example, during my tenure at the American Planning Association, we used a FEMA contract to produce a Planning Advisory Service Report on the benefits of integrating such planning throughout the local planning process, including comprehensive plans, capital improvements programming, and the land-use regulations that implement mitigation intentions, such as zoning, floodplain management, and subdivision ordinances. We published Hazard Mitigation: Integrating Best Practices into Planning in 2010. The concept of integrated planning has enjoyed significant increased attention throughout the second decade of DMA and has become a staple of FEMA guidance for local hazard mitigation planning.

There are many ways to review this history, which may even be worth an entire book. As for what we have achieved, the Natural Hazards Center, based at the University of Colorado, asked me to moderate a webinar on October 13. “The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000: Twenty Years of Promise, Pitfalls, and Progress from a Planning Perspective,” in which I was joined by three experienced and insightful panelists from state, county, and federal government, provides a fast-paced, one-hour summary of the successes, shortcomings, and future challenges of DMA as part of the Center’s Making Mitigation Work webinar series, and the recorded version is available at the link above. I thank NHC Director Lori Peek for having invited me to lead this discussion.

Make it your DMA anniversary experience. Trust me, it will be worth your time.

Jim Schwab

The Eyes Have It

Posted on September 20, 2020 by admin

I might have thought by now

you would have found the exit

from the hall of mirrors.

But no. You are mesmerized

by its dreamy distortions,

imprisoned by its illusions.

Perception arises from wave

lengths and shadows, reflections

against a shifting surface.

Tall becomes short, wide

becomes narrow. Eyes bulge,

then shrink into shocked sockets.

You must linger to feed the hunger.

Within the funhouse walls,

where the insecure, the paranoid,

the narcissistic control the asylum,

the Great Sphincter,

sustained by his Ras Putin coterie,

emits his daily surprises

to the surprise of no one

but the angry, the gleeful gullible,

the sheep led to COVID slaughter

while wildfires consume the hallways.

Is the funhouse aflame?

Now that changes the climate

amid the melting glass

of the deteriorating mirrors.

Alas.

Jim Schwab

Truly Hard Wind

Posted on August 30, 2020 by admin

What in the U.S. Midwest would spur comparisons to a hurricane? What could spread damage over an equally wide area? It is a good bet that most people are unfamiliar with the word “derecho,” which comes from Spanish, meaning “straight,” but such a storm made itself felt just three weeks ago in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, as well as parts of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Spanish word with an adopted meaning in English refers to such a storm’s powerful straight-line winds, as opposed to another adapted Spanish word, “tornado,” literally meaning “turned,” which, of course, refers to a cyclonic, or spinning, meteorological phenomenon.

The Event

On August 10, a derecho took shape in eastern Nebraska and the southeastern corner of South Dakota early in the morning. The city of Omaha suffered some of the initial damage, with an estimated 57,000 people losing power. But as it roared across the center of Iowa, the storm, as derechos often do, rapidly gained wind speed until estimated winds of 140 miles per hour struck Cedar Rapids and surrounding Linn County in eastern Iowa. Nearby Iowa City, home of the University of Iowa, also suffered extensive damage. Derechos can and typically do strike with little warning, unlike hurricanes, but even at speeds of 90 to 100 mph, in this case, it still takes hours to cross Iowa from west to east, and even longer to reach Illinois and Indiana.

Thus, my first warning of what was to come, sitting here in Chicago, was a telephone alert from the University of Iowa around noon that day. I get such alerts because I am on the faculty, although I now teach remotely as an adjunct. But our landline and my cell phone are on the system, so the alerts come automatically. Fortunately, that gave me most of the afternoon to prepare for what was coming, which arrived in our area around 3:45 p.m. Winds and rain pounded on our skylights for nearly 45 minutes, leaving numerous branches and twigs on the ground from our stately American elm, which towers above our house and garage and has probably withstood other storms for at least a century. It was already huge when we built our house in 1994, and we chose to make it sure it remained. Even this storm caused it only minor damage.

The same could not be said of many street trees in parts of Chicago. Trees often collapsed on top of parked cars, leaving many owners to bemoan what became of their vehicles—or, in some cases, the roofs of their homes.

Even the repose of the dead was not left undisturbed. Graceland Cemetery, one of the more famous in Chicago, faces months of repairs and replanting and is closed for six weeks. The storm uprooted about 40 trees and damaged numerous gravestones and monuments. It had become a popular place for peaceful strolls and contemplation during the months of coronavirus-induced shutdown. After the storm, it was a visual mess that will cost about $250,000 to repair.

Removing damaged trees in Chicago’s Rogers Park.

One lesser-known by-product of derechos is tornadoes, which can be spun off from the shelf cloud as it moves through an area. In Chicago, two tornadoes, one EF-1 in the Rogers Park neighborhood along Lake Michigan near the city line with Evanston, literally buzzsawed trees in an area of densely built multifamily housing and small

Insurance claims agents inspect building damage in Rogers Park.

businesses. A few days later, I visited the area to shoot photos that appear here. At first, driving up Greenwood Avenue, I wondered where the damage was. But as I drove further north and approached W. Jarvis Ave., the answer became starkly obvious. I could not drive beyond that corner because the street was blocked; Jarvis was one way going east, but Jarvis east of Greenwood was also blocked. City trucks were removing damaged trees. After finding a way to park without impeding traffic, I encountered insurance agents on the ground shooting outside photos of nearby buildings, presumably for damaged masonry. Any damaged cars had already been removed.

That tornado, and another that reportedly skipped across the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) on the West Side, dramatically demolished for some an old urban myth that tornadoes don’t strike urban areas. People believe this for various reasons, including how they think tall buildings disrupt wind circulation, but trust me: I’ve been involved in disaster recovery long enough to know that tornadoes do not discriminate against smaller towns. Rogers Park is very urban. Tornadoes go where they please. This specific tornado eventually skipped out over the lake, becoming a waterspout. But it left its mark.

The storm, by the way, ultimately spun off at least 17 documented tornadoes, mostly in northern Illinois, but a few in Wisconsin and Indiana. All were either EF-1 or EF-0 on the Enhanced Fujita scale. But by far, most of the damage resulted from the straight-line winds themselves, which were often in the range of 90 to 100 mph, with a top measured speed of 126 mph in Atkins, Iowa, making them basically of tornado or hurricane strength. And they sped, over the course of a single afternoon, across all or parts of several states.

By 4:30, the storm had continued its march into northwest Indiana, where it finally petered out. But what happened along the way?

Iowans can attest that it functioned across much of their state like a Category 2, maybe even Category 3, hurricane. Lyz Lenz, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette, noted in a guest column for the Washington Post four days later that the winds had damaged “more than 10 million acres, or 43 percent, of the state’s corn and soybean crop.” The reduction in harvest in Iowa is likely to be between one-fourth and one-half. The heading on her column referred to the storm as an “inland hurricane” that most people had not heard about. The damage was massive enough to be visible in satellite images.

The damage was not just to crops on the ground, but to hundreds of millions of bushels in storage bins on farms and in commercial storage facilities, according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture. Toppled grain bins were a common site.

Damage to Chinese House roof in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Despite those staggering figures, that was only the beginning. Between Indiana and Iowa, four people died from either falling trees or electrocution, and, in one case, a mobile home tipped over by high winds. Losses of electric power affected approximately 585,000 Iowans, or roughly 20 percent, while 1.9 million lost power in neighboring Illinois. Tree damage in Linn County totaled in the hundreds of thousands, and most buildings suffered anywhere from mild to catastrophic damage. In small towns, like Grinnell, building damage and tree damage to cars was also extensive. Here, I wish to thank Rachel Bly, director of Conference Operations and Events for Grinnell College, for sending me dozens of photographs she shot after the event. Bly, I might note, has a certificate in emergency management from Park University in addition to her MPA from Drake University. The images she shared help convey some reality to the trauma that occurred. Hundreds of other small communities suffered similar impacts. Not surprisingly, Gov. Kim Reynolds issued a state disaster declaration by August 14 for 25 counties, and has sought a federal declaration from President Trump, citing an estimated $4 billion in damages. By August 19, Trump had signed a declaration for Public Assistance (PA) but not Individual Assistance (IA) for Iowa. PA provides aid for restoring public infrastructure, such as roads and bridges and community facilities, while IA provides direct aid to individuals for reasons such as loss of housing.

Power line damage in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Photo by Rachel Bly

Roof seen through the window. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Inside a damaged salon in Grinnell. Photo by Rachel Bly.

Derechos as a Natural Hazard

All this raises the question of what we know about derechos as a wind-related hazard. I will confess that I spent most of my life never having heard the word, let alone understanding what it meant. It is not the most common occurrence, but it certainly ranks among the most destructive. To my surprise, I learned from Wikipedia that the term was coined in 1888 by a German-American scientist, Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs, who had emigrated to St. Louis just before the Civil War. He wrote in the American Meteorological Journal about a storm that struck Iowa in 1877 and described its unique characteristics. Nonetheless, even in the Midwest today, many people are unfamiliar with the term—until they hear it on the news, as they did on August 10 amid storm warnings.

The gust front “arcus” cloud on the leading edge of a derecho-producing storm system. The photo was taken on the evening of July 10, 2008 in Hampshire, Illinois. Credit: Brittney Misialek. From National Weather Service website.

There are several types of derechos, but the National Weather Service describes a derecho as a “widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers as thunderstorms.” More specifically, it defines the phenomenon as a swath of damage that “extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length.” In plain English, this is a huge, regional storm, not some localized thunderstorm. It exhibits straight-line winds that can be at least double the minimum in the definition, and the August 10 event involved winds far above 58 mph in most locations. Like all such storms, it is a product of unstable atmospheric systems, in this case typically involving a bow-shaped front in a large squall line.

The storms are typically a mid-latitude phenomenon, making North America and the Midwestern U.S. particularly susceptible, but they occur elsewhere in the world as well, including southern latitudes (southeastern Brazil and Argentina), South Africa, China, and even eastern Europe, where a derecho struck parts of Estonia in August 2010, and near Berlin in Germany in 2002. The August 10 event was not the first one I have witnessed in Chicago—another struck in July 2011 and disabled electric power for nearly a million people—but it was certainly the largest in a long time.

70% of all derechos occur between the months of May-August (the warm season). The other 30% occur during the cool season. From National Weather Service website.

As a mitigation planning response, almost no hazard mitigation plan (produced for FEMA approval as a condition of eligibility for federal hazard mitigation grants) for any state or community east of the Rockies (with the possible exception of Florida) should fail to identify derechos as a potential hazard. Moreover, especially in the Midwest, it may be time for states and communities to reexamine their building codes for wind resistance as a means of limiting future damages from derechos. Finally, it may also be time for many communities to examine more closely their urban forestry programs for adequate attention to hazardous tree management. That does not mean refusing to plant trees or removing them unnecessarily as a mindless precaution. It does mean engaging professional urban foresters in an assessment of the urban tree canopy with an eye to ensuring forest health and removing those trees that are most likely to fail under severe wind pressure. Already, the call has arisen for such reforms in Chicago. It is time for planners, environmentalists, disaster professionals, open space advocates, and concerned citizens to seize the moment while they have the public’s attention.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Category Archives: History

Rising from the Ashes

When Narcissism Trumps All

Digital Coast Act Becomes Real

Charting a Path to Sustainability

2020 Vision

Disaster Mitigation Act at Twenty

Make it your DMA anniversary experience. Trust me, it will be worth your time.

Jim Schwab

The Eyes Have It

Truly Hard Wind