In praise of maintenance

Doing the effective thing over long periods of time is hard but it's what really makes a difference.

Maintaining a thing of value requires commitment and hard work, but is generally undervalued. How we change that?

For example, long-term data have extraordinary value. Oftentimes, the small pieces of these long-term datasets might not have value. But when you add it all up? Priceless.

The classic example of this is when Dave Keeling set up a carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa in 1958, and took monthly measurements which continue to this day. The full story on the origin of this dataset is here from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements taken continuously since 1958 at Mauna Loa.

After a few years, this dataset showed that the planet demonstrates an annual cycle in atmospheric CO2 concentrations (as the balance between photosynthesis and respiration shifts with the seasonal tilt of the earth and the predominance of land mass in the northern hemisphere). That’s a cool thing to see, eh?

And even more significantly, these long-term data (now known as the Keeling Curve), became a key piece of evidence to understand and demonstrate anthropogenic effects on global climate change. But you probably already knew that, as this is the famous example of long-term data being important.

There are a lot of cases where long-term data would be useful, but we don’t have it. For example, in recent years we have collectively realized that the numbers of insects are dropping all around us, we are doing our best to figure this out. But we don’t have any entomological equivalent of Dave Keeling who was systematically measuring insect densities for decade after decade. (Also, it doesn’t help that these insect declines are far more idiosyncratic than could be explained by any single dataset, anyway). So the various teams working on this problem need to do their best by cobbling together variously incomplete pieces of historical data.

Keeping a valuable dataset going, year after year after year after year, requires a vision for the importance of the work, but also it helps to appreciate and take joy in the process itself. When I was in grad school and well into my years as a professor, I had the fortune of being able to know and work with Drs. Deborah and David Clark, who based themselves out of La Selva Biological Station, and ended up building and maintaining decades-long records of tropical rain forest demography, growth, reproduction, and so on. (Here’s some of these incredibly useful records.) I think I learned a lot from being exposed to some scientists who were working to answer questions on the scale of decades, even as I was doing manipulations on ant colonies and communities that would take just weeks or months.

The value of long-term efforts is a lesson close to my heart. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much time in museums, which are scaffolded on the accumulated efforts of careful unglamorous work being done in the background. These ecological fieldwork, but about structures and activities that make a difference the lives of people. We have a lot of organizations and structures for doing science outreach, mentorship, professional development, fostering equity and access, and so on. There are professional societies, institutional offices, leadership positions, volunteer roles, community organizations, and you name it, that have been built to help people and make things better for all of us.

All of these positions take work, and it’s generally not glamorous, and never involves as much thanks as it deserves. Yet, we have many of our colleagues who keep on keeping on, by doing the things that make this a better place for everybody. We minimize this work by calling it “service,” but when we recognize it as leadership we are giving more credit where it is due.

Creating something new and shiny often attracts praise. Think of the celebrities who will invest money into a new charity that they just created instead of building the capacity of existing organizations that are already high effective. Think of the new university administrator who slashes budgets that fund existing effective programs, creates new programs of their own invention, claims victory, and then moves on to a new position elsewhere higher up the bureaucratic ladder.

There is a bit of this renvention-of-the-wheel that happens among people working to effect change in our academic communities. It might be a program to support equity in STEM, get kids outdoors, provide research opportunities to teachers, mentor undergraduates, or something else. Building these things takes energy, but the real heavy lifting is consistent maintenance.

The next time awards are going out at your university and in your academic society, we seek out the maintainers and make sure they get some honors?