A rare, sometimes brown, sometimes iridescent ground beetle will carry the former California governor's name into the future.
California is littered with tributes to past and present politicians — courthouses, roads, bridges, schools, parks, even an aqueduct, all named after elected officials anxious to ensure that their legacies live on long after they are gone.
At his insistence, there has been nothing named after California’s longest-serving governor. Until now., who rebuffed the naming convention both as the state’s youngest governor in modern times and the oldest, consented to lend his name to a rare species of beetle discovered on the rural ranch and ancestral home where he now lives:Many things are fitting about this designation. It is in Latin, a language often quoted by the classics major and former Jesuit seminarian.
Above all, the discovery marks for both the beetle and its namesake a “reinhabitation,” a term Brown borrowed from actor Peter Coyote to describe his decision to move to the isolated ranch his great-grandfather acquired in 1878. When Brown began visiting the Colusa County ranch an hour north of Sacramento, there were just a few dilapidated barns on the land where his ancestors had run the Mountain House Inn, a popular 19th century gathering spot at a well-traveled crossroads. While he was governor, the Browns began to spend weekends in a small cabin at the ranch, with no electricity or water.
Brown saw his return as a way to restore the Mountain House as a place conducive to communal conversation and exploration. Well before he moved in, he invited scientists to research the soil, flora and fauna. One of those was UC Berkeley entomologist Kipling Will, who studies beetles. Near a creek on the ranch, Will found a beetle he had never seen. It turned out no one else had either, in more than 55 years.
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