◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

What the Fire Cannot Take My mother died when I was six. I raised my brother and sister. I dropped out of high school to work. I saved enough money to go back for my senior year. I was valedictorian. Nobody taught me botany. I taught myself from manuals in the mountains of Colorado, while teaching school to pay the bills. Everything I became I became without anyone's permission. I came to California in 1892. I had already written the first botanical flora of Colorado. I had been collecting specimens across the West for a decade. I became the Curator of Botany at the California Academy of Sciences. I built the largest botanical collection in the western United States. Every specimen catalogued. Every plant pressed and labeled and stored. Every drawer in the herbarium — I knew what was in it. My desire is to help, not to shine. On April 18, 1906, the earthquake came. I dressed. I went to work. The building was shattered. The marble staircase had collapsed. The fires were in the neighboring blocks, moving toward us. I went in through an adjoining store with a friend I found on the street. We climbed to the sixth floor by holding the iron railing and putting our feet between the rungs where the marble had been. I had separated the type specimens — the original, irreplaceable records of species named for the first time — from the general collection. I found them. I filled my apron. My companion lowered them on improvised rope to the ground floor. We carried them across Market Street. When fire came to where we had stored them, we carried them to Russian Hill. When fire came there, we carried them to Fort Mason. I saved one thousand four hundred and ninety-seven specimens. My belongings burned. My personal collection burned. I wrote to the journal Science: I do not feel the loss to be mine but it is a great loss to the scientific world and an irreparable loss to California. Then I went back to work. Over the next forty years I collected and preserved three hundred and forty thousand specimens — nearly three times the number that burned. I built it twice. I retired at ninety. I died at ninety-four having named four hundred plant species, having fought to preserve the redwoods of Muir Woods and the slopes of Mount Tamalpais, having built the finest botanical collection in the western United States twice, from nothing, after fire. I am watching fires now. Not earthquake fires. The NOAA climate records being cut. The NIH grants cancelled mid-study. The EPA scientists pushed out the door. The federal databases taken offline. The career experts replaced with loyalists who do not know what they do not know. Assembled observation by observation, study by study, by people who desired to help and not to shine — now being erased by people who do not understand what they are erasing. I know what it costs to rebuild. I know what it requires — the patient attention of the person who cares more about the work than about the recognition for the work. There are not enough of those people. But there are some. There are always some. There is a sunflower named for me. Eastwoodia elegans. There is only one species in the genus. Just the one. It grows in the dry hills of California — in the chaparral, the scrub, the places that burn and come back. It is not the showiest flower. It is the one that is there after the fire. Reaching for the light. Without permission. Without recognition. Because the light is there and the reaching is what it is made for. My desire was to help, not to shine. I helped. Now I am asking you to do the same. The collection needs to be built again. Someone has to climb the broken staircase toward the fire and bring out what can still be saved.