Harvard Alumni - Class of 1961

Our Ecosystems, Ourselves by John Harte

The Cons.

Despite recent improvements in process efficiency, the energy cost per liter is still substantial.

On balance, I believe that seawater desalination is a welcome major source of fresh water, if undertaken with care, and with engineering feed-forward of practical experience, good and bad, to enable continual improvement of the technology.

In particular, it would be well to monitor the ecosystem of the Persian/Arabian Gulf, a relatively small and shallow sea where large-scale desalination has been practiced for many years now.  I am not aware of major desal-induced adverse impacts there, but I nominate that Gulf as a mine canary to be closely observed.     ▼

The life of the Houses, those jewels of the Harvard structure, is nowhere near as engaging to our students as it should be, and in consequence it is losing out to life in other venues. What have we done in response? An all-too-familiar feature of American business behavior…is that when a firm’s product is losing out in competition, the firm’s response is not to improve its product but to seek to get the regulators to take its competitor’s product off the market. In effect, that’s what we have been doing here. Think of what we might have accomplished—think of what we still might accomplish—if we redirect the time and talent and energy that this faculty has put into this two-year-long discussion…to thinking about how best to re-invigorate life in Houses, rather than simply looking to shut down the alternative that too many of our students now prefer instead.

Our second Class Reunion discussion revolved around climate change and the University’s refusal to define an investment policy consistent with other goals related to the climate challenge.  Over the last three decades, the globe has slowly awakened, and begun to understand and deal with the rising concentration of greenhouse-forcing gasses – especially carbon dioxide – in our atmosphere.  In the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, 195 countries agreed to work to limit the global temperatures rise since the industrial revolution to well below 3.6⁰ F.  Urged on by an assertive Pope Francis, aided by surprising agreements between the world’s two largest emitters, China and the United States, facilitated by growing industry engagement and technological breakthroughs, and based throughout on sound science, the Paris Agreement marked the start of a long and difficult process. Nations agreed to transition toward greater energy efficiency and the substitution of renewable energy sources for traditional fossil fuels dependence.

Though still off course in meeting the ambitious Paris goals of stabilizing and then sharply reducing carbon emissions by 2050, countries have nevertheless started to internalize both the severity of the challenge and the institutional arrangements that will be required. The leadership failure of the Trump Administration has been damaging, but state and local governments, the private sector and civil society are beginning to reflect the urgency of holding down temperatures, lowering the risk of destabilizing ice sheets at the poles, drastic sea level rise and increasingly destructive weather disruptions, heatwaves and droughts.

At all levels, institutions must internalize and then act upon the climate challenge.  For the most part, Harvard has been an active and positive force, sharply limiting carbon emissions from the physical plant through much greater building, food service and other efficiencies.  As the faculty travels widely, and students come and go from throughout the world, carbon emissions from transportation remain a major problem, but Harvard is working the issue and hopes to have recommendations and policy changes soon.

But one major issue remains untouched: Harvard’s investment policy. While research, teaching and increased efficiencies reflect Harvard’s climate awareness, investment policy remains unchanged. The world now has nearly four times more fossil fuels reserves than can ever be burned – if we are serious about holding to the limits agreed in the Paris Accord.  So further investment in the exploration for or development of more fossil fuel resources is both a poor investment strategy and a frontal denial of responsibility to work to limit fossil fuels. Despite nearly four years of appeal, analysis, requests, discussions and advocacy from outside groups, Harvard has refused to establish a fossil fuel policy, or even respond to or even acknowledge appeals for change.  To date, Harvard’s policy has been to focus solely on maximum portfolio return, assuming that fossil fuels are a good investment, but even more remarkably, acting as if Harvard is somehow above the agreed requirements and progress of Paris.

Harvard’s investment policies remain a mystery, allegedly because experts know best and should not be reviewed by outsiders.  Maybe Harvard’s poor investment performance can be ascribed in part to the insularity and lack of transparency of its managers.  But leaving aside its worrisome financial performance, Harvard has a responsibility to conform its investment policy to the other University climate goals, and at minimum, to cease further investments in exploring for or developing further resources of fossil fuels.

Finally, what of Harvard’s leadership responsibilities?  Academic, government and other institutions look to Harvard’s policies for guidance and example. Imagine how much better off we would have been had the University rejected the obsession with safe speech, political correctness and “inclusivity.” The country would have taken notice, and Harvard would have been faithful to principles of free speech and academic freedom. And imagine the impact which Harvard could have had on other institutions, investment managers, and civil society if the University had adopted a modern fossil fuels investment policy. No longer would so many others be able to hide behind University’s recalcitrance.

Of course, Harvard can change and evolve, and assume its leadership role again. The change of command in Massachusetts Hall provides a welcome opportunity.   ▼

Nantaska Preface by Crocker Snow, Jr.  

We have to wonder whether a humpback whale with barnacles on its back or a right whale with an ice wound under a flipper or maybe even a mammoth blue whale with few blemishes at all once swam from the cold waters of the three “B’s”, Bristol Bay, Bering Strait, Beaufort Sea, into the Northwest Passage working krill all the way down through Baffin Bay near Greenland, entering the Gulf Stream waters and finally breaching in the whaling fields off Nantucket Island. 

For this pioneering whale was it a random, unicorn event, or was it something more instinctual, some homing beacon that prompted it to swim this troublesome way?

 Some 8000 miles through different seasons and ice flows one way or another. Ocean scientists say that it could well have happened. 

Similarly, which of the vast flocks of American eider that breed in the summer off Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island and The Yukon will undertake the arduous migration across Canada's western prairies to rest briefly in one of the Great Lakes before angling again for the hook of Cape Cod and Nantucket Sound or immediately off Madaket, Muskeget Island and Chappaquidick to feed for mussels and settle in?  

Upward of 30,000 eider winter in Nantucket Sound. Their average life span is six years, so it's an awful lot of flying for a brief time of life.

It's a saga that's been told - or much more not told - over the centuries, a story that connects the grand northern landmass of Alaska’s waters and lands, a veritable whale of a land, to the very tiny, flat, edge of the last Ice Age moraine of Nantucket Island with its moors and marshes and sand beaches and small stands of trees and only 48 square miles in all.  A very minnow by contrast.

Alaska boasts the highest mountain in northern Hemisphere, 20,000 feet plus of Denali or McKinley, whichever your prefer, compared to Nantucket's Altar Rock at 100 feet or its well managed recycling landfill topping out at 65 feet above sea level, its most prominent features.

Permafrost vs. cranberry bogs.  Seasonal migrations and matriculations.  On and on contrasts arise to test and tickle one's mind.

But there are almost the same number of similarities between these apparently opposite lands and inhabitants, natural and otherwise, as the contrasts.  In some strange ways Nantucket is not just a counter-balance but a mirror image of Alaska in its human and natural ecosystems. Or the other way around.

Having spent lots of time in both places, not as a tourist per se but with the opportunity of observing, experiencing, smelling, touching through friends and family well settled in each place, this book reflects the similarities of the life and times of both places, the moxie of their peoples and even the similar can-do spirits and social tensions that each represent.

One should avoid simplifying or shortening the characteristics of the two places to do them justice.  The spirit of both is in the eyes of their inhabitants and others from outside. It means moving along at a slow pace and carefully. No abbreviations please.

And yes, is it only coincidental that on aeronautical maps and abbreviations there's only one letter between them?  AK is Alaska. ACK is Nantucket. This book explores the “A” similarities I have experienced, with a little water coloring in of the “K” or the “C” as required by their defining waters and skys.

Preface of a book entitled “Nantaska - The Pilot Minnow and Prudent Whale” comparing the current life and times of Nantucket and Alaska, by Crocker Snow Jr., to be published in May 2018.   ▼  

Sally and Carl Gable (both ’61) bought a Palladian villa in 1989 and restored it.  Sally wrote a book about their experiences.  Palladian-Days

Remembering Gus Schumacher by Mark Jay Mirsky

Years ago I had a disagreement with our late classmate, Gus Schumacher, who taught me a lot about crops and the soil of Massachusetts when he spoke at class reunions.  I will come to it.

Thinking about ecology, an article that I intended to publish years ago comes to mind. I had written a long cover piece for The Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine on Fredrick Law Olmstead’s Franklin Park, my childhood playground, which was largely neglected in 1979; thought of mostly as a setting for its zoo (never really part of Olmstead’s plans).  Olmstead’s idea was a living landscape, a painting in grass and woods that one walked through with a view to the south.  The brow of Schoolmaster’s hill, where Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home as a schoolboy stood, even in 1959 overlooked the low roofs of Mattapan and Milton towards the haze of woods to the Great Blue Hill. Olmstead made the site of Emerson’s home the focal point of Franklin Park.  The Park is more endangered today than ever, as its Golf Course encroaches upon the slope of Schoolmaster’s and spreads like a contagion below it in all directions.

It was not the Park (in which I set my last novel, Franklin Park Puddingstone) I meant to write about for the Globe in the 1990’s, but another landmark (or watermark) of my geography.  I have always been jealous of, Emerson and Thoreau, Harvard ecologists who preceded me, particularly the latter’s attachment to the Concord River, his career launched on that stream.  Mine started on an asphalt roadway, Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan.  Casting about for a river it occurred to me that since I was born in Mattapan and lived there with my family when I was ten, the Neponset River was only blocks away from our house.  I only saw the river crossing its bridge between Mattapan (“landing place,” its name in Algonquin binds it to the river) and Milton.  I saw it on my way to hike up Blue Hill with my mother, and when my father took me to the stables in Canton to ride a pony.  I should have been drawn to the banks of the Neponset, but when I grew up it was dangerous for a boy to leave his ethnic neighborhood.  The streets on the Mattapan side of the Neponset were unmistakably tough, working-class Irish, with no parkland along it.  A ten, eleven, twelve year old wandering from Jewish streets would find himself an unwelcome stranger.  It was safer to the west of Franklin Park where there was a feeble brook, more of a sewer drain, not a stream that one could launch a raft or canoe.  

In my forties, however, still holding on to our summer cottage in Hull, forty-five minutes from the Neponset on a motorcycle, I thought I would try to discover the Neponset I had neglected.  I began to trace its course from where it emptied into Boston Bay just past the old Baker Chocolate Factory and the landfill now Pope John Paul II Park, from Dorchester Lower Mills up through Mattapan.  At just about the same point the Neponset Watershed Association was forming, so the cause of the river and insisting on its importance soon had powerful advocates.  The Globe in the 1990’s agreed to look at an article on the Neponset but I was warned not to dwell too much on its history.  I collected stories of the families in Walpole that had pioneered the Yankee industries in the south of Massachusetts; Plimpton, Ames, Bird, the first water mills (for gunpowder), on the decline of both the river, and the Algonquins whose traces are still to be found.  Instead, it was the story of Neponset’s water that the Globe editors thought newsworthy.  Visiting Boston city agencies; venturing out to Walpole to meet the town officials there who were concerned with the Neponset’s flow, I learned about the critical problems of water supply in Eastern Massachusetts.  Walpole in the 1980’s depended on wells that drew from the Neponset.  When the Neponset was low, the water supply was low and the town had to worry. That was tied into an issue that seemed at first the very opposite of what would attract a novelist in love with romance and the landscape—sewers.  Several Boston administrators quietly let me know they were at odds with the prevailing wisdom that a central sewage plant emptying into Boston Bay would solve storm drainage. Dumping the water into a Boston Bay after treatment (and evidently a truly heavy storm would overwhelm the treatment facilities) depleted all the local rivers of water.  This in turn affected the rivers’ ability to clean themselves or support a population of fish.  It would have been far wiser to build many smaller plants in the towns around Boston that drained the Neponset or Charles or Mystic, clean the waters where the rain fell, and return the rainwater to those rivers.  Barring that I asked, was there anything that could be done to help the Neponset—the river I was focused on?

Yes, one advisor on water quality in Boston told me. If you could replace all the asphalt of the parking lots and streets in the towns with cobblestones, rainwater could drain through the soil back into the rivers as it had through woods and farmland, and be partly cleansed by the earth, That seemed to me logical and should have been part of the ecological awareness that has led public policy in the last few administrations to stress solar solutions to our need for electricity, and anti-pollution measures to return a degree of health to our air and waters.  This sort of requirement seems to have eluded new paving and resurfacing.

One of Gus Schumacher’s talks to us was on the power of American agriculture.  Bumper crops of wheat and corn had reversed the nature of import and export commodities, since we were now sending what we grew in the United States out to developing countries but importing from them the goods of their cheap factory labor. What I had learned about water and paving kicked in.  I asked Gus if he didn’t think we should start taking back the farmland that the burgeoning malls had been built on, and planting there?  I asked that back in the Nineties when malls still seemed the future of American retail, and Gus shook his head.  I wish I could ask him now.  Retail has been re-defined by the Internet and Amazon. The malls lots seem ready not just for resurfacing but a return to farm and pastures. If we want to recycle water however, perhaps we should consider a better resource--the forest Thoreau thought every American town should set aside.  ▼

Climate change-driven flooding threat to Boston and to Harvard - Revisited by Art Boright

An update to our climate change session at our 55^th reunion (and my personal input to our 55^th Reunion Report, pp 30-33) is particularly required in light of continuing evidence of a warmer, harsher climate, coincident with a deliberately misdirected approach taken by the Trump administration, seeking to continue “business as usual,” fossil-fuel-centric energy policies while ignoring the severe consequences of that approach to climate, Earth’s ecosystems, human health, and international economic and political stability. 

This disconnect is illuminated by the recent US Climate Science Special Report (CSSR),¹ NCA4 Volume I, further clarifying the growing reality of the climate change threat, while the Trump administration simultaneously abandons Obama-era green energy and efficiency initiatives and contemplates taking a pitch to this month’s annual UN-sponsored (COP23) climate meeting advocating increased use of fossil fuel energy as a means of accelerating business development and improving living conditions in the developing world.  To the contrary, recall that less than 25%²  of currently known fossil fuel global reserves can be burned and the world remain on track to meet the Paris Accord goal of 1.5 to 2 deg C of global average surface warming, the threshold of “dangerous” climate change.  Far better that the US again take a leading role in initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate transition to renewables, with view to reaching the Paris Agreement goal.

Strengthening tropical storms, coastal flooding, and accelerating sea level rise are among the more worrisome effects of climate change, as the storms Harvey, Irma, and Maria demonstrated this year.  Among new CSSR findings (due to better modeling of polar ice sheet collapse and application of Earth gravitational field corrections) is an increase in the sea level rise along the US NE coast in a “high emissions” scenario to over ten feet.  Of course, a high emissions scenario may still be avoided, but international efforts have not yet succeeded in reducing total emissions significantly and reductions will be difficult, while meeting demands of the developing world. ³    Additionally, because of the uncertainties and the non-linear systems involved, catastrophic “right hand tail” (“Black Swan”) climate change results such as monster tropical storms and accelerated sea level rise, are more likely (IMO), even if we succeed in blunting global GHG emissions, than it is likely that this is just a bad dream of the science community (as some deniers suggest). ^{4, 5, 6}     

Recall from my 55^th Reunion talk that Harvard facilities along the Charles in Cambridge and Allston lie at elevations between 8 and 12 ft (MSL), while almost all of the campus is well below 30 ft (msl).  In the case of currently possible 10+ ft sea level rise, without protection from regional flood control structures, both the Charles River Dam and Logan Airport (both at 12 ft msl) would be covered with about three feet of water during nominal high tides every day, making practical utility of developments near and below that elevation questionable.  Should this happen, the sea would only continue to rise thereafter until vulnerable Antarctica and Greenland ice flows were exhausted.

While greater Boston and Harvard are making significant efforts toward facility resilience, it is proving difficult for the region to settle upon an agreed approach to regional flood protection systems.  Each proposal has pros and cons, and Massachusetts may lack a regional level of government with authority to effectively address the problem.⁷   Resilience measures by themselves can be immediately useful, but their useful lifetime may be relatively short.  Unfortunately, it will probably be impossible and/or unaffordable to build facilities resilient enough or barriers high enough to withstand the credible ~30 ft combined sea level rise and storm surge threat well into the coming century.  Retreat to higher ground will probably eventually be necessary: the transition to accepting and accomplishing retreat will be very painful (and more expensive) if planning and preparation are not timely and effective. ⁸    

An unprecendented amount of regional coordination, foresight, planning, and investment will be needed to accomplish incremental, orderly retreat of a metropolitan area such as greataer boston (or a private entity such as Harvard) to higher ground, while continuing to support a vibrant local economy (or enterprise). ⁹ 

Emotional, ideological, political, and organizational challenges must be confronted and overcome,¹⁰ in a charged atmosphere where major climate change impacts lie some years in the future, where there will be economic losers and winners, and the end game apt to play out against a backdrop of international and national turmoil and hardship.^{11, 12}  It will be a defining test of our democracy and free market (and of Harvard’s system of governance) to muster the necessary farsighted, broadly coordinated action in time to get functionally intact developments off the beach, still functionally intact, before they are overcome by the rising sea and occasional major storms.

In fact, the potential consequences of unmitigated/unaccommodated climate changes are so dire as to fully justify erring on the side of caution in preparing to weather future climate change:  Quadrant 3 scenarios (graphic at right) should be much preferred to Quadrant 2 scenarios – spending a bit more may be necessary (Q3) to address  the threat should be much preferable to the risk of losing a viable future for our heirs (Q2).

 In conclusion:  Harvard should more openly discuss its options, plans, and programs to address the long-range climate change mitigation and climate change-driven flooding problems:  A phased transition to a higher elevation campus seems essential if, indeed, Harvard considers a brick and mortar campus relevant and/or essential to her survival in the coming century.  Harvard representatives should be able to present a viable University position on handling of climate and flooding risks when seeking funds for risky developments along the Charles (my future donations are contingent thereon!)

 Art Boright, HC 1961 
Harsine Island, WA and Vail, AZ

(PS:  We hope that Harvard’s involvement with the fossil fuel industry and its captive (dis)information industry doesn’t prevent Harvard from escaping “business as usual” practices until it is too late.  In fact, what is this Ted Wells Exxon lawyer doing as a Harvard Corporation Fellow?  We hope he recuses himself from climate – and facility-planning-related issues before the Fellows!  A “purveyor of doubt” could not help Harvard leadership decisively handle the daunting challenges it now faces.)^{13, 14, 15}▼