In 1997, I moved to Greenbelt, Maryland, a few years after I had earned a bachelors degree from St. John’s College, the “Great Books” school in Annapolis, Maryland. I came to Greenbelt to work at NASA Goddard in the data processing center for an experimental weather satellite. In 2008, I earned a Ph.D. in Computational Sciences from George Mason University. I have researched various aspects of extreme storms. Over the years, I have drawn, photographed, and written about the Greenbelt North Woods. In 2017, the Greenbelt City Council appointed me to the town’s Forest Preserved Advisory Board. I have also written about magnetic-levitation rail lines. Details are given below.

Maglev Analysis

One of the subjects that I have written about is magnetic-levitation railroad technology, which people refer to “maglev” technology. In the whole world, only one high-speed maglev line has ever provided commercial passenger service. That line began service in Shanghai, China, in 2004. In the United States, the Federal Railroad Administration published in January 2021 a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for a high-speed maglev line that would connect Baltimore with nearby Washington, DC. Reviewing the data in the draft EIS, I found that it revealed several flaws in the proposal. I discussed them in a 2021 blog post and in a report titled Ridership Revisited. In August 2021, the federal government stopped work on its environmental review without publishing a final EIS. Since then, the company that wants to build and operate the proposed Baltimore-Washington maglev line has continued to advertise it as if the project’s approval and funding were assured. In 2024, I presented a paper at the Maglev 2024 conference in which I explored success criteria for high-speed maglev lines. In section 6 and Appendices B and C of this paper, I measured the Baltimore-Washington proposal against these success criteria and I found that it fell short.

Studying the Greenbelt North Woods

To help people learn to identify some of the plants growing in Greenbelt’s forests, I wrote and self-published A Hundred Wild Things: A Field Guide to the Plants of the Greenbelt North Woods. First printed in December 2019, the book has 246 pages and is full of color photographs of trees, bushes, flowers, ferns, mosses, lichens, fungi, and other living things. The book can be purchased from me (okelley@gmu.edu) or online retailers (Barnes and Noble or Amazon). The first few pages can be previewed here: field guide. A post about the field guide was published on February 2020 in the Greenbelt Online blog: interview.  To learn more about this forest, take a look articles and blog posts that I have written about it. In 2023, I wrote about a 300-year-old black-gum tree that grew near the edge of the North Woods, and in 2022, I wrote about a 228-year-old white oak that grew at the forest edge. I mapped the location of trees in the North Woods with large-girth trunks and speculated about their age. I wrote an article about slime molds in the North Woods, an often overlooked set of organisms that are neither plant nor animal. As a member of the Forest Preserve Advisory Board, I co-authored a document that described the forest’s legal protections.

Photo Magazine

Searching for a way to combined present-day photos of the Greenbelt woods with historical photos of the forest from the town’s New Deal beginnings, I came up with the idea of printing this story as a glossy photo magazine in 2021. Think of it as a quirky, shorter version of an issue of National Geographic Magazine. The title of my work is BEInG, which stands for Biota Ephemera In Greenbelt. “Biota” refers to the collection of living things in an ecosystem and “ephemera” means a collection of short-lived things that, in this case, have lasting influence. In its 24 pages, the magazine clarifies both the title and the historical importance of Greenbelt’s forests. Greenbelt’s North Woods is after all a contributing element to the Greenbelt National Historic Landmark that is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Sample pages are available here: Contents, page 5, and page 12.

Drawing the Forest

To familiarize people with the trails and plants of the Greenbelt North Woods, I have drawn two maps and several plant identification posters. One map is shown here. This map could be used to show the potential impact on the North Woods of the proposed Baltimore-Washington maglev rail line. One of two possible routes would come out of a tunnel from DC near the Northway athletic fields in Greenbelt, which is located near the lower right corner of this map. Regardless of which route were chosen for the maglev, the maglev’s elevated track would broadcast throughout the forest the aerodynamic noise of the train’s 300-mph passage. The frequently repeated noise would shatter the tranquil atmosphere of this forest that currently enables it to function as a contributing element to the Greenbelt National Historic Landmark. The New Deal plan for Greenbelt was that the forests and fields surrounding the town’s residential neighborhoods would contribute to residents’ quality of life.

Dance History

In 2002, I wrote and self-published a social history of the Friday night contra dance at Glen Echo Park, one of the largest and longest running contra dances in the United States.  In recent decades, the dance has been held weekly at this National Park Service property just outside Washington, D.C. The 244-page book is titled How the Friday Night Dance Came to Glen Echo Park.

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