Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii announced that he's sponsoring the National Language Coordination Act of 2009, which he also sponsored in 2005. The bill would create a cabinet-level language czar to "oversee, coordinate, and implement continuing national security and language education initiatives." Sounds great, but if the czar has no budget control, it probably won't work. As I wrote for the New Republic (the original TNR link is dead),

Akaka's bill gives the czar a budget for p.r. but no oversight over anyone else's budget, so the czar wouldn't set goals and steer a national language strategy to meet them as much as hope for the cooperation of the agencies represented on the council. Akaka's bill doesn't specify to whom the czar would report, either, which leaves no one responsible when the goals aren't met.

Even though we have a president with a basic proficiency in Indonesian, the country's language needs are no less dire now than they are then, which means that Akaka's bill has the same limitations -- though as the post-9/11 political will fades, establishing even a symbolic role would be a victory. (One name that came up a lot as a language czar candidate is Leon Panetta, now head of the CIA--who else could fill the role?)

The second paragraph of my new essay, an homage to my time at the Dobie Paisano ranch, up at Design Observer:

Cutting cedars is a lot like writing, but it doesn't replace writing, and I've never gone out until I've done my daily. Standing, searching, bending, cutting, standing: it's repetitive work but has its art, too. You have to jam the clipper mouth around the tree stem below the dirt so the stump can't find the light and send up sprouts, but not so low that you grab a rock and chip the blade. Always in the back of your mind you have to know the line you're walking and working, more to guard yourself than for cedar-cutting efficiency, because the bigger trees would rather beckon you into the thick stands, where they grow fourteen, twenty feet high, and deep in their midst, where no sun ever reaches, the dry branches will first blind then skewer you, and there you'll wither and twist out of sight of the sky. Jerky gifts for coyotes.

And with that I'm also a contributing writer at Design Observer, where I've been happily writing sporadically for a few years. (An archive is here.)

CORRECTION: The number of countries that Ethnologue tracks is 226, not 156.

The full text of my recent Science piece can be found here. It begins like this:

After a long day in the field, deep in the mountains of southwestern China near the border with Vietnam, retired environmental health professor Gary Shook was surprised to meet another American, Jamin Pelkey, staying in the same government guesthouse. The two exchanged pleasantries.

"I'm collecting tiger beetles," explained Shook, who had found four new species in the region. "What about you?"

"I'm collecting new species of languages," replied Pelkey, then a graduate student at La Trobe University in Australia doing fieldwork for his dissertation...