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It's a good one today, pardon the number of articles...
How Green Was My Wedding
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, February 11, 2007
Kate Harrison’s idea of a fairy tale wedding goes something like this:
Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours.
Calculate the mileage guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests.
Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again.
“It’s well worth it to start your life together in a way that’s in line with your values and beliefs,” said Ms. Harrison, 28, a graduate student at Yale, who is to marry in October. “You don’t want this event that is supposed to start your life together to come at the expense of the environment or workers in another country.”
Call Ms. Harrison the anti-Bridezilla, whose wedding is all about the planet, rather than “all about me.” People in the wedding business say the eco-friendly or “green” wedding has arrived, its appeal having expanded to spur a mini-industry of stores and Web sites offering couples biodegradable plates made of sugar cane fiber and flowers grown according to sustainable farming practices.
The quality and choice of products has so steadily improved that the green concept is spreading to other kinds of parties, allowing hosts to embrace the earth without sacrificing style, party planners and others say.
“People are making purchasing decisions based on environmental concerns,” said Gerald Prolman, the founder of OrganicBouquet.com, an online organic florist. Mr. Prolman, who said his Web site has doubled its sales yearly since it began in 2001, added a wholesale business last August to meet growing demand.
“Whether it’s food or cotton or flowers,” Mr. Prolman said, “people are asking questions: How are farmworkers treated? Who produced the product? How is the environment affected in that process?”
Eric Fenster, an owner of Back to Earth, an organic catering company in Berkeley, said that when he started his business in 2001, his clients consisted almost exclusively of social justice and environmental nonprofit groups. But that market has expanded to make weddings a third of his business.
And few events offer as many opportunities to say “I care” than a wedding, whose average cost is $25,000 to $30,000. Bridal magazines, too, have recognized the trend, and a new online site, Portovert.com, made its appearance last month, catering to “eco-savvy brides and grooms.”
Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine, said that over the last five years the interest in green weddings has blossomed from a desire to incorporate a few green elements, like a vegan menu, to making sure the entire celebration won’t contribute to the depletion of natural resources. This may include finding halls that recycle, hiring caterers who use locally grown ingredients, decorating with potted plants that can be transplanted and using soy-based candles, rather than those of petroleum-based wax.
“If anything, it makes the wedding even more meaningful,” said Ms. Martini Bratten, whose magazine’s February-March issue features a planning guide for a green wedding.
Today, some in the eco-business note, even the honeymoon can be green without roughing it. “You used to have to go camping,” said Ted Ning, the executive director of the Lohas Journal, a resource guide for businesses that serve the environmentally conscious market. “Now you have these amazing luxurious spas in Africa or Fiji. You can look at different animals while getting a massage in a tree.”
But can weddings really make a dent in global warming, particularly if the couple then set out on an emission-spewing trans-Atlantic flight for the honeymoon?
Janet Larsen, the director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research group in Washington, said that every little bit helps. “All the actions add up,” she said. “Anything individuals can do to reduce their overall environmental footprint can make a difference.” Joshua Houdek, 32, and Kristi Papenfuss, 35, are planning a “zero waste” wedding for 250 guests in August. It will take place on a farm and include compostable plates and utensils, organic and fair trade-certified food, locally brewed beer and organic wine and wedding rings that are “100 percent reclaimed, recycled, ecologically responsible gold,” said Mr. Houdek, who works as a Sierra Club organizer in Minneapolis.
In lieu of traditional gifts, Mr. Houdek and Ms. Papenfuss, an elementary school teacher, plan to ask guests to sign up for renewable energy and reforestation projects to counteract their energy consumption or to donate to the Sierra Club or other environmental groups.
The couple doesn’t think it’s too much to ask. “We’re not forcing them,” Mr. Houdek stressed, though Ms. Papenfuss said that some people have been surprised at the elements that are making an appearance at their wedding.
“We’ve had a few people say ‘What?’ when we talk about biodegradable forks that are potato-based,” she said. ‘What do you mean forks made out of potato?’ ”
For her wedding, Ms. Harrison, who is working on a law degree and a master’s in environmental management, and her fiancé, Barry Muchnick, 33, also a graduate student at Yale, plan to treat guests to a rehearsal barbecue dinner at an organic farm in Garrison, N.Y. The next day’s ceremony is to take place at Castle Rock, a state-owned 19th-century castle in a scenic trail area, followed by the reception at a golf club, whose restaurant serves organic food.
The couple are looking for shuttle buses that run on biodiesel fuel to move guests between sites, and Ms. Harrison is making pottery for her guests to take home as party favors. It all sounds like more work and expense than the traditional wedding. While Mr. Ning of Lohas Journal noted that going organic often means paying up to 20 percent more because many products come from small farms that receive no government subsidies, some brides noted that a wedding at a farm is more economical than at a hotel or hall.
“It doesn’t have to be any more or any less expensive,” Ms. Papenfuss said.
Some couples make tradeoffs so they can afford to go green. Sarah Minick, 29, an environmental planner in the Bay Area, and Siddhartha Mitra, 27, a doctoral student at the University of California at San Francisco, kept their wedding last July on the small side, about 75 guests, so they could offer an organic menu, which they said cost about 10 percent more than traditional food. The couple had their ceremony and reception in a natural setting that required few decorations, the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. They went less green on the favors, though: they gave non-native tropical plants because they thought them more beautiful than locally grown varieties and felt their guests would enjoy them more, Mr. Mitra said.
“We’re really happy with how it turned out,” the bridegroom said. “It reflected us.”
The environmentally conscious party concept is spreading. Marriott International will soon announce deals with organicbouquet.com and other vendors to make organic flowers available to customers for events, starting in the spring, said Laurie Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the hotel chain. Ms. Goldstein, who said the demand was driven by corporate meeting planners seeking to be more socially responsible, called organic flowers “the first step” to offering all-green events, including organic food and organic cotton tablecloths.
Even Hollywood is jumping on the bandwagon. For the Golden Globes last month, E! Entertainment partnered with the Environmental Media Association as hosts to a Golden Green after-party, including napkins printed with energy-saving tips. The organizers also committed themselves to planting a tree for each of the 800-plus guests.
For private parties, as for weddings, Ms. Martini Bratten advises couples that no matter how well intentioned, they should not appear to be coercing guests into contributing to a cause. Asking them to buy a certain gift or donate to a specific group is fine as long as that is conveyed as just one choice, she said. “It shouldn’t be a requirement,” she said. “Imposing your wishes on someone else is crossing the line.”
What about the host who wants to send guests home with energy-efficient light bulbs?
Many couples said that more often than not their friends and families want to make a difference, too. “I have a couple of relatives who think some of it is unnecessary, but they appreciate the mind-set behind it,” Ms. Harrison said. “It’s a huge opportunity for people to make choices that can effect change. It’s one of the biggest contributions you can make as a young adult.”
Tires Meant to Foster Sea Life Choke It Instead
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condominiums and spring-break bars lie as many as two million old tires, strewn across the ocean floor, a monument to good intentions gone awry.
The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.
Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.
“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area; it just didn’t work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”
Similar problems have been reported at tire reefs worldwide.
“They’re a constantly killing coral-destruction machine,” said William Nuckols, coordinator for Coastal America, a federal group involved in organizing a cleanup effort that includes Broward County biologists, state scientists and Army and Navy salvage divers.
Gov. Charlie Crist’s budget includes $2 million to help remove the tires. The military divers would work at no cost to the state by making it part of their training.
A monthlong pilot project is set for June. The full-scale salvage operation is expected to run through 2010 at a cost to the state of about $3.4 million.
Mr. McAllister helped put together the ill-fated reef project with the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers. He helped raise several thousand dollars (the county also chipped in), organized hundreds of volunteers with boats and barges, and got tires from Goodyear.
Goodyear also donated equipment to bind and compress the tires, and the Goodyear blimp dropped a gold-painted tire into the ocean in a ceremonial start to the project.
It was a disappointment, like other tire reefs created around the world in recent decades.
“We’ve literally dumped millions of tires in our oceans,” said Jack Sobel, an Ocean Conservancy scientist. “I believe that people who were behind the artificial tire reef promotions actually were well-intentioned and thought they were doing the right thing. In hindsight, we now realize that we made a mistake.”
No one can say with certainty why the idea does not work, but one problem is that unlike large ships that have been sunk for reefs, tires are too light. They can be swept away by the tides and powerful storms before marine life has a chance to attach. Some scientists also believe the rubber leaches toxins.
Virginia tried it several decades ago. But Hurricane Bonnie in 1998 ripped the tires loose, and they washed up in North Carolina.
Most states have stopped using tires to create reefs, but they continue to wash up worldwide. In 2005, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy’s annual international coastal cleanup removed more than 11,000 tires.
Tires retrieved from the waters off Fort Lauderdale will be ground up for use in road projects and burned for fuel, among other uses.
“It’s going to be a huge job bringing them all up,” said Michael Sole, chief of the state Department of Environmental Protection. “It’s vigorous work. You have to dig the tires out of the sand.”
Essay: Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior
By DANIEL GOLEMAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.
“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”
Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.
Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.
In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.
The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.
This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.
Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.
Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.
True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.
And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send” before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.” We flame.
Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room.
While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.
And now, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described as “Britain’s first ‘Web rage’ attack,” a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.
One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with video. The assumption is that getting a message along with its emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame.
All this reminds me of a poster on the wall of classrooms I once visited in New Haven public schools. The poster, part of a program in social development that has lowered rates of violence in schools there, shows a stoplight. It says that when students feel upset, they should remember that the red light means to stop, calm down and think before they act. The yellow light prompts them to weigh a range of responses, and their consequences. The green light urges them to try the best response.
Not a bad idea. Until the day e-mail comes in video form, I may just paste one of those stoplights next to my monitor.
Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”
Books on Science: The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.
Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.
Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.
Their book, “Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future,” originated in a seminar Dr. Pilkey organized at Duke to look into the performance of mathematical models used in coastal geology. Among other things, participants concluded that beach modelers applied too many fixed values to phenomena that actually change quite a lot. For example, “assumed average wave height,” a variable crucial for many models, assumes that all waves hit the beach in the same way, that they are all the same height and that their patterns will not change over time. But, the authors say, that’s not the way things work.
Also, modelers’ formulas may include coefficients (the authors call them “fudge factors”) to ensure that they come out right. And the modelers may not check to see whether projects performed as predicted.
Eventually, the seminar participants widened the project, concluding that erroneous assumptions, fudge factors and the reluctance to check predictions against unruly natural outcomes produce models with, as the authors put it, “no demonstrable basis in nature.” Among other problems, they cite much-modeled but nevertheless collapsed North Atlantic fishing stocks, poisonous pools unexpectedly produced by open pit mining, and invasive plants and animals that routinely outflank their modelers.
Two issues, the authors say, illustrate other problems with modeling. One is climate change, in which, they say, experts’ justifiable caution about model uncertainties can encourage them to ignore accumulating evidence from the real world. The other is the movement of nuclear waste through an underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, not because it has failed — it has yet to be built — but because they say it is unreasonable to expect accurate predictions of what will happen far into the future — in this extreme case, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years from now.
Along the way, Dr. Pilkey and Ms. Pilkey-Jarvis describe and explain a host of modeling terms, including quantitative and qualitative models (models that seek to answer precise questions with more or less precise numbers, as against models that seek to discern environmental trends).
They also discuss concepts like model sensitivity — the analysis of parameters included in a model to see which ones, if changed, are most likely to change model results.
But, the authors say it is important to remember that model sensitivity assesses the parameter’s importance in the model, not necessarily in nature. If a model itself is “a poor representation of reality,” they write, “determining the sensitivity of an individual parameter in the model is a meaningless pursuit.”
Given the problems with models, should we abandon them altogether? Perhaps, the authors say. Their favored alternative seems to be adaptive management, in which policymakers may start with a model of how a given ecosystem works, but make constant observations in the field, altering their policies as conditions change. But that approach has drawbacks, among them requirements for assiduous monitoring, flexible planning and a willingness to change courses in midstream. For practical and political reasons, all are hard to achieve.
Besides, they acknowledge, people seem to have such a powerful desire to defend policies with formulas (or “fig leaves,” as the authors call them), that managers keep applying them, long after their utility has been called into question.
So the authors offer some suggestions for using models better. We could, for example, pay more attention to nature, monitoring our streams, beaches, forests or fields to accumulate information on how living things and their environments interact. That kind of data is crucial for models. Modeling should be transparent. That is, any interested person should be able to see and understand how the model works — what factors it weighs heaviest, what coefficients it includes, what phenomena it leaves out, and so on. Also, modelers should say explicitly what assumptions they make.
And instead of demanding to know exactly how high seas will rise or how many fish will be left in them or what the average global temperature will be in 20 years, they argue, we should seek to discern simply whether seas are rising, fish stocks are falling and average temperatures are increasing. And we should couple these models with observations from the field. Models should be regarded as producing “ballpark figures,” they write, not accurate impact forecasts.
“If we wish to stay within the bounds of reality we must look to a more qualitative future,” the authors write, “a future where there will be no certain answers to many of the important questions we have about the future of human interactions with the earth.”
Questions for Drew Shindell: Political Heat
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.
By NASA? Well, it’s a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily.
Are you referring to President Bush and his plan to send Americans to Mars? The moon and Mars, yes. It’s fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet.
Why is NASA involved in climate research in the first place? There is no federal agency whose primary mission is the climate, and that’s a problem, because climate doesn’t command the clout that it should in Washington. Since NASA is the primary agency for launching new scientific satellites, it has ended up collecting some of the most important data on climate change.
I take it you don’t ride along on the satellites. Like the guy in “Dr. Strangelove” who was riding on the bombs? No. I would volunteer to go up on the shuttle, but I don’t think they would take someone like me. My eyesight is really bad.
What do you make of the news of that female astronaut who reportedly planned to kill a romantic rival? Who knew that NASA would turn up in Congress one week and in the tabloids the next?
There are now several bills floating around Congress that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Is one better than the others? They are useful first steps. But they are just baby steps. In the long term, we have to reduce emissions much more than any of these bills envision. At the state level, California is a great example of what the rest of the country should be doing. They require that energy be used efficiently, and as a result their per capita energy use has stayed level for decades, despite the growth in their economy.
Why do you think the federal government has been so phobic about adopting energy-efficiency regulations? “Phobic” is the right word, because it’s irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers’ pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us.
What do you consider the most immediate threat of global warming? More heat waves, more drought, rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes.
On the plus side, will New Yorkers one day be able to walk down Broadway in the dead of winter and get a tan? No, it’s not going to get sunnier. Same amount of sun. Just hotter.
The president acknowledged the problem of “global climate change” in his State of the Union address last month. What do you think of the phrase? I’m mostly O.K. with it. It’s a phrase scientists use all the time.
And “global warming”? A bad name. Global warming sounds cozy and comfortable.
So perhaps you should try a new coinage. “Climate meltdown” sounds a little more ominous.
RESTORING HISTORY The tent in 1909.
Call It Serendipity: A Missing Piece of Washington’s War Tent Is Found
By EMILY B. HAGER, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
For nearly a century, a large oval-shape linen tent where George Washington is believed to have slept during the Revolutionary War sat on display in Valley Forge, Pa., with a gaping hole in its roof.
But now a combination of luck and forensic detective work has led to the discovery of the missing section of fabric — snipped out, historians believe, by a memorabilia seeker — and to the discovery that the tent was originally striped blue and white.
“It is the missing piece,” said Loreen Finkelstein, a textile conservator who made both discoveries while restoring the tent for the American Revolution Center, a nonprofit organization collecting artifacts and raising money for a Revolutionary War museum.
The tent, 25-feet-10-inches long by 17-feet-7-inches wide by 13 ½-feet high, is a faded beige, but Mrs. Finkelstein has learned that it was originally striped blue and white and had red wool trim.
Historic documents describe another sleeping tent with red and white stripes that was bought in May 1776 as part of a set of tents for Washington. Mrs. Finkelstein’s discovery appears to confirm for the first time that there was more than one set. Considering the wear and tear of traveling from one encampment to another, it is not surprising that Washington’s quartermasters may have had several sets of tents.
“This has been recognized as part of the commander in chief’s equipment since the 18th century,” Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, who was hired to assess the American Revolution Center’s artifacts, said of the tent that has been on display.
The American Revolution Center plans to make the tent a featured exhibit in its museum in Valley Forge. When the group acquired it in 2002 from the Valley Forge Historical Society, it needed to be completely restored.
Mrs. Finkelstein was hired to prepare the tent for exhibition. With its poles stored and its tired folds resting across her home workshop, Mrs. Finkelstein began laying sheets of Mylar, a polyester product 10 to 20 times the thickness of kitchen plastic wrap, over the tent. In this way she created a Mylar impression of its entirety — every stain, every hole, every repair, even every thread.
As she was working, she discovered the blue and white stripes. “I noticed,” she said, “that there was a very faint, very occasional, what looked like a line on the fabric.”
Mrs. Finkelstein called a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Douglas Deedrick, for help. She sent him tiny samples of blue and white threads from the tent. Mr. Deedrick studied them under a variety of microscopes and lights to measure how much light they absorbed and reflected, and at what wavelengths they did it.
But he saw the stripes best with his naked eye and Mrs. Finkelstein’s camera.
In the fall of 2004, while Mrs. Finkelstein was vacuuming and washing the tent, she was also busy with something else: the George Washington sculpture project at Mount Vernon, his estate in Virginia.
One day she and Carol Borchert Cadou, a senior curator at Mount Vernon, were studying one of Washington’s waistcoats. As she worked with gloved hands, Mrs. Finkelstein casually talked about the hole in the tent.
“I said,” Ms. Cadou recalled in an interview, “ ‘We have several fragments in our collection that are associated with Washington’s tents.’ ”
By chance, an art handler overheard them and mentioned that some of the fragments were kept in the very room where the women stood.
As Mrs. Finkelstein looked at one of the fragments, on loan from Yale University, she said, “This looks like the missing piece.”
She did a thread count, collected a few fibers for forensic tests and traced the fragment’s outline on a Mylar sheet. But she told no one else what she suspected.
“Why cause a problem if you don’t know for sure?” she said in an interview.
When Mrs. Finkelstein returned home and set her Mylar template into the ceiling’s hole, it fit like a missing puzzle piece.
More testing showed that the piece of fabric and the tent had the same weave, the same thread count and the same decorative blue threads. Most significant, they shared a seam, and the top and bottom stitching techniques along that seam also matched.
Through all this analysis, however, the tent and the fragment remained separated. The American Revolution Center, Yale and Mount Vernon finally brought them together, and on Jan. 20, when Mrs. Finkelstein set the fragment in the ceiling’s hole, it was an exact match.
She believes there is still another small fragment missing, but as she wrote in one of her formal reports, “To have found the missing fragment of this extremely important textile fabric is extraordinary.”
How Green Was My Wedding
By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times, February 11, 2007
Kate Harrison’s idea of a fairy tale wedding goes something like this:
Gather more than 150 friends and relatives at an organic farm for a prewedding day of hikes and environmental tours.
Calculate the mileage guests will travel and offset their carbon dioxide emissions by donating to programs that plant trees or preserve rain forests.
Use hydrangeas, berries and other local and seasonal flowers for her bouquet and the decorations, instead of burning up fuel transporting flowers from faraway farms. Design an organic autumnal menu (same reason). Find a vintage dress to avoid the waste of a wedding gown that will never be worn again.
“It’s well worth it to start your life together in a way that’s in line with your values and beliefs,” said Ms. Harrison, 28, a graduate student at Yale, who is to marry in October. “You don’t want this event that is supposed to start your life together to come at the expense of the environment or workers in another country.”
Call Ms. Harrison the anti-Bridezilla, whose wedding is all about the planet, rather than “all about me.” People in the wedding business say the eco-friendly or “green” wedding has arrived, its appeal having expanded to spur a mini-industry of stores and Web sites offering couples biodegradable plates made of sugar cane fiber and flowers grown according to sustainable farming practices.
The quality and choice of products has so steadily improved that the green concept is spreading to other kinds of parties, allowing hosts to embrace the earth without sacrificing style, party planners and others say.
“People are making purchasing decisions based on environmental concerns,” said Gerald Prolman, the founder of OrganicBouquet.com, an online organic florist. Mr. Prolman, who said his Web site has doubled its sales yearly since it began in 2001, added a wholesale business last August to meet growing demand.
“Whether it’s food or cotton or flowers,” Mr. Prolman said, “people are asking questions: How are farmworkers treated? Who produced the product? How is the environment affected in that process?”
Eric Fenster, an owner of Back to Earth, an organic catering company in Berkeley, said that when he started his business in 2001, his clients consisted almost exclusively of social justice and environmental nonprofit groups. But that market has expanded to make weddings a third of his business.
And few events offer as many opportunities to say “I care” than a wedding, whose average cost is $25,000 to $30,000. Bridal magazines, too, have recognized the trend, and a new online site, Portovert.com, made its appearance last month, catering to “eco-savvy brides and grooms.”
Millie Martini Bratten, the editor in chief of Brides magazine, said that over the last five years the interest in green weddings has blossomed from a desire to incorporate a few green elements, like a vegan menu, to making sure the entire celebration won’t contribute to the depletion of natural resources. This may include finding halls that recycle, hiring caterers who use locally grown ingredients, decorating with potted plants that can be transplanted and using soy-based candles, rather than those of petroleum-based wax.
“If anything, it makes the wedding even more meaningful,” said Ms. Martini Bratten, whose magazine’s February-March issue features a planning guide for a green wedding.
Today, some in the eco-business note, even the honeymoon can be green without roughing it. “You used to have to go camping,” said Ted Ning, the executive director of the Lohas Journal, a resource guide for businesses that serve the environmentally conscious market. “Now you have these amazing luxurious spas in Africa or Fiji. You can look at different animals while getting a massage in a tree.”
But can weddings really make a dent in global warming, particularly if the couple then set out on an emission-spewing trans-Atlantic flight for the honeymoon?
Janet Larsen, the director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental research group in Washington, said that every little bit helps. “All the actions add up,” she said. “Anything individuals can do to reduce their overall environmental footprint can make a difference.” Joshua Houdek, 32, and Kristi Papenfuss, 35, are planning a “zero waste” wedding for 250 guests in August. It will take place on a farm and include compostable plates and utensils, organic and fair trade-certified food, locally brewed beer and organic wine and wedding rings that are “100 percent reclaimed, recycled, ecologically responsible gold,” said Mr. Houdek, who works as a Sierra Club organizer in Minneapolis.
In lieu of traditional gifts, Mr. Houdek and Ms. Papenfuss, an elementary school teacher, plan to ask guests to sign up for renewable energy and reforestation projects to counteract their energy consumption or to donate to the Sierra Club or other environmental groups.
The couple doesn’t think it’s too much to ask. “We’re not forcing them,” Mr. Houdek stressed, though Ms. Papenfuss said that some people have been surprised at the elements that are making an appearance at their wedding.
“We’ve had a few people say ‘What?’ when we talk about biodegradable forks that are potato-based,” she said. ‘What do you mean forks made out of potato?’ ”
For her wedding, Ms. Harrison, who is working on a law degree and a master’s in environmental management, and her fiancé, Barry Muchnick, 33, also a graduate student at Yale, plan to treat guests to a rehearsal barbecue dinner at an organic farm in Garrison, N.Y. The next day’s ceremony is to take place at Castle Rock, a state-owned 19th-century castle in a scenic trail area, followed by the reception at a golf club, whose restaurant serves organic food.
The couple are looking for shuttle buses that run on biodiesel fuel to move guests between sites, and Ms. Harrison is making pottery for her guests to take home as party favors. It all sounds like more work and expense than the traditional wedding. While Mr. Ning of Lohas Journal noted that going organic often means paying up to 20 percent more because many products come from small farms that receive no government subsidies, some brides noted that a wedding at a farm is more economical than at a hotel or hall.
“It doesn’t have to be any more or any less expensive,” Ms. Papenfuss said.
Some couples make tradeoffs so they can afford to go green. Sarah Minick, 29, an environmental planner in the Bay Area, and Siddhartha Mitra, 27, a doctoral student at the University of California at San Francisco, kept their wedding last July on the small side, about 75 guests, so they could offer an organic menu, which they said cost about 10 percent more than traditional food. The couple had their ceremony and reception in a natural setting that required few decorations, the University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley. They went less green on the favors, though: they gave non-native tropical plants because they thought them more beautiful than locally grown varieties and felt their guests would enjoy them more, Mr. Mitra said.
“We’re really happy with how it turned out,” the bridegroom said. “It reflected us.”
The environmentally conscious party concept is spreading. Marriott International will soon announce deals with organicbouquet.com and other vendors to make organic flowers available to customers for events, starting in the spring, said Laurie Goldstein, a spokeswoman for the hotel chain. Ms. Goldstein, who said the demand was driven by corporate meeting planners seeking to be more socially responsible, called organic flowers “the first step” to offering all-green events, including organic food and organic cotton tablecloths.
Even Hollywood is jumping on the bandwagon. For the Golden Globes last month, E! Entertainment partnered with the Environmental Media Association as hosts to a Golden Green after-party, including napkins printed with energy-saving tips. The organizers also committed themselves to planting a tree for each of the 800-plus guests.
For private parties, as for weddings, Ms. Martini Bratten advises couples that no matter how well intentioned, they should not appear to be coercing guests into contributing to a cause. Asking them to buy a certain gift or donate to a specific group is fine as long as that is conveyed as just one choice, she said. “It shouldn’t be a requirement,” she said. “Imposing your wishes on someone else is crossing the line.”
What about the host who wants to send guests home with energy-efficient light bulbs?
Many couples said that more often than not their friends and families want to make a difference, too. “I have a couple of relatives who think some of it is unnecessary, but they appreciate the mind-set behind it,” Ms. Harrison said. “It’s a huge opportunity for people to make choices that can effect change. It’s one of the biggest contributions you can make as a young adult.”
Tires Meant to Foster Sea Life Choke It Instead
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
A mile offshore from this city’s high-rise condominiums and spring-break bars lie as many as two million old tires, strewn across the ocean floor, a monument to good intentions gone awry.
The tires were unloaded there in 1972 to create an artificial reef that could attract a rich variety of marine life, and to free up space in clogged landfills. But decades later, the idea has proved a huge ecological blunder.
Little sea life has formed on the tires. Some tires that were bundled together with nylon and steel have broken loose and are scouring the ocean floor across a swath the size of 31 football fields. Tires are washing up on beaches. Thousands have wedged up against a nearby natural reef, blocking coral growth and devastating marine life.
“The really good idea was to provide habitat for marine critters so we could double or triple marine life in the area; it just didn’t work that way,” said Ray McAllister, a professor of ocean engineering at Florida Atlantic University who was instrumental in organizing the project. “I look back now and see it was a bad idea.”
Similar problems have been reported at tire reefs worldwide.
“They’re a constantly killing coral-destruction machine,” said William Nuckols, coordinator for Coastal America, a federal group involved in organizing a cleanup effort that includes Broward County biologists, state scientists and Army and Navy salvage divers.
Gov. Charlie Crist’s budget includes $2 million to help remove the tires. The military divers would work at no cost to the state by making it part of their training.
A monthlong pilot project is set for June. The full-scale salvage operation is expected to run through 2010 at a cost to the state of about $3.4 million.
Mr. McAllister helped put together the ill-fated reef project with the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers. He helped raise several thousand dollars (the county also chipped in), organized hundreds of volunteers with boats and barges, and got tires from Goodyear.
Goodyear also donated equipment to bind and compress the tires, and the Goodyear blimp dropped a gold-painted tire into the ocean in a ceremonial start to the project.
It was a disappointment, like other tire reefs created around the world in recent decades.
“We’ve literally dumped millions of tires in our oceans,” said Jack Sobel, an Ocean Conservancy scientist. “I believe that people who were behind the artificial tire reef promotions actually were well-intentioned and thought they were doing the right thing. In hindsight, we now realize that we made a mistake.”
No one can say with certainty why the idea does not work, but one problem is that unlike large ships that have been sunk for reefs, tires are too light. They can be swept away by the tides and powerful storms before marine life has a chance to attach. Some scientists also believe the rubber leaches toxins.
Virginia tried it several decades ago. But Hurricane Bonnie in 1998 ripped the tires loose, and they washed up in North Carolina.
Most states have stopped using tires to create reefs, but they continue to wash up worldwide. In 2005, volunteers for the Ocean Conservancy’s annual international coastal cleanup removed more than 11,000 tires.
Tires retrieved from the waters off Fort Lauderdale will be ground up for use in road projects and burned for fuel, among other uses.
“It’s going to be a huge job bringing them all up,” said Michael Sole, chief of the state Department of Environmental Protection. “It’s vigorous work. You have to dig the tires out of the sand.”
Essay: Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior
By DANIEL GOLEMAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.
“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”
Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.
Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.
In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J., suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.
The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.
This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.
Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.
Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.
True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.
And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send” before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.” We flame.
Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room.
While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.
And now, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described as “Britain’s first ‘Web rage’ attack,” a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.
One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with video. The assumption is that getting a message along with its emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame.
All this reminds me of a poster on the wall of classrooms I once visited in New Haven public schools. The poster, part of a program in social development that has lowered rates of violence in schools there, shows a stoplight. It says that when students feel upset, they should remember that the red light means to stop, calm down and think before they act. The yellow light prompts them to weigh a range of responses, and their consequences. The green light urges them to try the best response.
Not a bad idea. Until the day e-mail comes in video form, I may just paste one of those stoplights next to my monitor.
Daniel Goleman is the author of “Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships.”
Books on Science: The Problems in Modeling Nature, With Its Unruly Natural Tendencies
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.
Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.
Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.
Their book, “Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future,” originated in a seminar Dr. Pilkey organized at Duke to look into the performance of mathematical models used in coastal geology. Among other things, participants concluded that beach modelers applied too many fixed values to phenomena that actually change quite a lot. For example, “assumed average wave height,” a variable crucial for many models, assumes that all waves hit the beach in the same way, that they are all the same height and that their patterns will not change over time. But, the authors say, that’s not the way things work.
Also, modelers’ formulas may include coefficients (the authors call them “fudge factors”) to ensure that they come out right. And the modelers may not check to see whether projects performed as predicted.
Eventually, the seminar participants widened the project, concluding that erroneous assumptions, fudge factors and the reluctance to check predictions against unruly natural outcomes produce models with, as the authors put it, “no demonstrable basis in nature.” Among other problems, they cite much-modeled but nevertheless collapsed North Atlantic fishing stocks, poisonous pools unexpectedly produced by open pit mining, and invasive plants and animals that routinely outflank their modelers.
Two issues, the authors say, illustrate other problems with modeling. One is climate change, in which, they say, experts’ justifiable caution about model uncertainties can encourage them to ignore accumulating evidence from the real world. The other is the movement of nuclear waste through an underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, not because it has failed — it has yet to be built — but because they say it is unreasonable to expect accurate predictions of what will happen far into the future — in this extreme case, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years from now.
Along the way, Dr. Pilkey and Ms. Pilkey-Jarvis describe and explain a host of modeling terms, including quantitative and qualitative models (models that seek to answer precise questions with more or less precise numbers, as against models that seek to discern environmental trends).
They also discuss concepts like model sensitivity — the analysis of parameters included in a model to see which ones, if changed, are most likely to change model results.
But, the authors say it is important to remember that model sensitivity assesses the parameter’s importance in the model, not necessarily in nature. If a model itself is “a poor representation of reality,” they write, “determining the sensitivity of an individual parameter in the model is a meaningless pursuit.”
Given the problems with models, should we abandon them altogether? Perhaps, the authors say. Their favored alternative seems to be adaptive management, in which policymakers may start with a model of how a given ecosystem works, but make constant observations in the field, altering their policies as conditions change. But that approach has drawbacks, among them requirements for assiduous monitoring, flexible planning and a willingness to change courses in midstream. For practical and political reasons, all are hard to achieve.
Besides, they acknowledge, people seem to have such a powerful desire to defend policies with formulas (or “fig leaves,” as the authors call them), that managers keep applying them, long after their utility has been called into question.
So the authors offer some suggestions for using models better. We could, for example, pay more attention to nature, monitoring our streams, beaches, forests or fields to accumulate information on how living things and their environments interact. That kind of data is crucial for models. Modeling should be transparent. That is, any interested person should be able to see and understand how the model works — what factors it weighs heaviest, what coefficients it includes, what phenomena it leaves out, and so on. Also, modelers should say explicitly what assumptions they make.
And instead of demanding to know exactly how high seas will rise or how many fish will be left in them or what the average global temperature will be in 20 years, they argue, we should seek to discern simply whether seas are rising, fish stocks are falling and average temperatures are increasing. And we should couple these models with observations from the field. Models should be regarded as producing “ballpark figures,” they write, not accurate impact forecasts.
“If we wish to stay within the bounds of reality we must look to a more qualitative future,” the authors write, “a future where there will be no certain answers to many of the important questions we have about the future of human interactions with the earth.”
Questions for Drew Shindell: Political Heat
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON, The New York Times, February 18, 2007
Q: As a physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, you recently testified before Congress about ways in which the Bush administration has tried to prevent you from releasing information on global warming. Can you give us an example? Sure. Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone’s interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate.
If your department is that politicized, how does that affect research? Well, five years from now, we will know less about our home planet that we know now. The future does not have money set aside to maintain even the current level of observations. There were proposals for lots of climate-monitoring instruments, most of which have been canceled.
By NASA? Well, it’s a NASA decision following the directives from their political leaders. The money has been redirected into the manned space program, primarily.
Are you referring to President Bush and his plan to send Americans to Mars? The moon and Mars, yes. It’s fine to do it for national spirit or exploring the cosmos, but the problem is that it comes at the cost of observing and protecting our home planet.
Why is NASA involved in climate research in the first place? There is no federal agency whose primary mission is the climate, and that’s a problem, because climate doesn’t command the clout that it should in Washington. Since NASA is the primary agency for launching new scientific satellites, it has ended up collecting some of the most important data on climate change.
I take it you don’t ride along on the satellites. Like the guy in “Dr. Strangelove” who was riding on the bombs? No. I would volunteer to go up on the shuttle, but I don’t think they would take someone like me. My eyesight is really bad.
What do you make of the news of that female astronaut who reportedly planned to kill a romantic rival? Who knew that NASA would turn up in Congress one week and in the tabloids the next?
There are now several bills floating around Congress that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Is one better than the others? They are useful first steps. But they are just baby steps. In the long term, we have to reduce emissions much more than any of these bills envision. At the state level, California is a great example of what the rest of the country should be doing. They require that energy be used efficiently, and as a result their per capita energy use has stayed level for decades, despite the growth in their economy.
Why do you think the federal government has been so phobic about adopting energy-efficiency regulations? “Phobic” is the right word, because it’s irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers’ pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us.
What do you consider the most immediate threat of global warming? More heat waves, more drought, rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes.
On the plus side, will New Yorkers one day be able to walk down Broadway in the dead of winter and get a tan? No, it’s not going to get sunnier. Same amount of sun. Just hotter.
The president acknowledged the problem of “global climate change” in his State of the Union address last month. What do you think of the phrase? I’m mostly O.K. with it. It’s a phrase scientists use all the time.
And “global warming”? A bad name. Global warming sounds cozy and comfortable.
So perhaps you should try a new coinage. “Climate meltdown” sounds a little more ominous.
RESTORING HISTORY The tent in 1909.
Call It Serendipity: A Missing Piece of Washington’s War Tent Is Found
By EMILY B. HAGER, The New York Times, February 20, 2007
For nearly a century, a large oval-shape linen tent where George Washington is believed to have slept during the Revolutionary War sat on display in Valley Forge, Pa., with a gaping hole in its roof.
But now a combination of luck and forensic detective work has led to the discovery of the missing section of fabric — snipped out, historians believe, by a memorabilia seeker — and to the discovery that the tent was originally striped blue and white.
“It is the missing piece,” said Loreen Finkelstein, a textile conservator who made both discoveries while restoring the tent for the American Revolution Center, a nonprofit organization collecting artifacts and raising money for a Revolutionary War museum.
The tent, 25-feet-10-inches long by 17-feet-7-inches wide by 13 ½-feet high, is a faded beige, but Mrs. Finkelstein has learned that it was originally striped blue and white and had red wool trim.
Historic documents describe another sleeping tent with red and white stripes that was bought in May 1776 as part of a set of tents for Washington. Mrs. Finkelstein’s discovery appears to confirm for the first time that there was more than one set. Considering the wear and tear of traveling from one encampment to another, it is not surprising that Washington’s quartermasters may have had several sets of tents.
“This has been recognized as part of the commander in chief’s equipment since the 18th century,” Dr. R. Scott Stephenson, who was hired to assess the American Revolution Center’s artifacts, said of the tent that has been on display.
The American Revolution Center plans to make the tent a featured exhibit in its museum in Valley Forge. When the group acquired it in 2002 from the Valley Forge Historical Society, it needed to be completely restored.
Mrs. Finkelstein was hired to prepare the tent for exhibition. With its poles stored and its tired folds resting across her home workshop, Mrs. Finkelstein began laying sheets of Mylar, a polyester product 10 to 20 times the thickness of kitchen plastic wrap, over the tent. In this way she created a Mylar impression of its entirety — every stain, every hole, every repair, even every thread.
As she was working, she discovered the blue and white stripes. “I noticed,” she said, “that there was a very faint, very occasional, what looked like a line on the fabric.”
Mrs. Finkelstein called a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Douglas Deedrick, for help. She sent him tiny samples of blue and white threads from the tent. Mr. Deedrick studied them under a variety of microscopes and lights to measure how much light they absorbed and reflected, and at what wavelengths they did it.
But he saw the stripes best with his naked eye and Mrs. Finkelstein’s camera.
In the fall of 2004, while Mrs. Finkelstein was vacuuming and washing the tent, she was also busy with something else: the George Washington sculpture project at Mount Vernon, his estate in Virginia.
One day she and Carol Borchert Cadou, a senior curator at Mount Vernon, were studying one of Washington’s waistcoats. As she worked with gloved hands, Mrs. Finkelstein casually talked about the hole in the tent.
“I said,” Ms. Cadou recalled in an interview, “ ‘We have several fragments in our collection that are associated with Washington’s tents.’ ”
By chance, an art handler overheard them and mentioned that some of the fragments were kept in the very room where the women stood.
As Mrs. Finkelstein looked at one of the fragments, on loan from Yale University, she said, “This looks like the missing piece.”
She did a thread count, collected a few fibers for forensic tests and traced the fragment’s outline on a Mylar sheet. But she told no one else what she suspected.
“Why cause a problem if you don’t know for sure?” she said in an interview.
When Mrs. Finkelstein returned home and set her Mylar template into the ceiling’s hole, it fit like a missing puzzle piece.
More testing showed that the piece of fabric and the tent had the same weave, the same thread count and the same decorative blue threads. Most significant, they shared a seam, and the top and bottom stitching techniques along that seam also matched.
Through all this analysis, however, the tent and the fragment remained separated. The American Revolution Center, Yale and Mount Vernon finally brought them together, and on Jan. 20, when Mrs. Finkelstein set the fragment in the ceiling’s hole, it was an exact match.
She believes there is still another small fragment missing, but as she wrote in one of her formal reports, “To have found the missing fragment of this extremely important textile fabric is extraordinary.”
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Date: 2007-02-20 03:28 pm (UTC)Really, the greenest wedding is no wedding at all. My parents must have been ahead of their time.
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Date: 2007-02-20 03:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-20 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-21 02:05 am (UTC)In my family, my mother lost her own wedding and engagement ring years and years ago. About 30 years ago in fact, so she doesn't even have hers. [Unknown site tag] has a ring that's either her grandmother's or great-gmas, and it's so lovely.
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Date: 2007-02-21 01:12 am (UTC)also, this green trend is definitely skewed towards the upper-middle class and upwards, but it's the nyt so i guess i should have expected that.
two grad students having such an elaborate (albeit green) wedding? hmmm....something tells me it's not on their dime.