The big picture

"Above'' (oil on linen),  by Lully Schwartz, in the show ''New England Pastoral,'' at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Into the color

"Deerfield (Vt.) Autumn,'' by Ann Coleman, at Ann Coleman Gallery, Wilmington, Vt.

Frank Carini: Zoologist sees human overpopulation as world's central problem

James 'Skip'' Lazell in nature.

Via ecoRI news (ecori.org)

JAMESTOWN, R.I.

Even as a kid in the 1950s, James “Skip” Lazell knew that there were too many people living on the third rock from the sun. He got a vasectomy in 1960, when he was 21.

“Population has been a hot topic of mine for some time, but there’s very little we can do about it,” he said. “The economic system is a Ponzi scheme that requires growth, growth, growth to sell more and more products. More consumers are needed year after year. Overpopulation is the root cause of all of our problems, from excess carbon dioxide to global warming.”

His evolving concerns about human population and its impact have been formulated by his life’s work, plenty of discussion and much reading, such as the controversial bookThe Population Bomb, by Paul R. Ehrlich. The 1968 book sold millions. While Ehrlich’s doomsday scenario — the Stanford University biologist predicted hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s — didn’t materialize, hunger is a major problem on a planet now inhabited by some 7.4 billion people. Our population is projected to exceed 9 billion by 2050. Our numbers are driving the planet’s sixth mass extinction.

While global population growth must be part of the conversation about sustaining the planet, it’s seldom discussed. Lazell has seen the issue sidelined for most of his 78 years.

“Sea-level rise, desertification and ocean acidification are linked to overpopulation,” he said. “Human-induced climate change is going to wipe out entire species and ecosystems. It’s likely going to end with catastrophic population decline."

Lazell, however, isn’t alone when it comes to talking about an issue that most of the world largely ignores. Geologist Walter Youngquist has called for a “greatly reduced” population as a critical element to the solution of natural-resource shortages.

In his 2016 paper, "Framework of the Future,'' Youngquist draws on his professional experience as a petroleum geologist and earth scientist to predict a grim future for the world’s people and its energy resources.

“It is doubtful the 7.4 billion people here now, and the billions more expected, can be sustainably supported in any decent standard of living beyond the time of the widespread use of fossil fuels,” he wrote. “This is the human dilemma. We have built a world based on fossil fuels ... and moving on to much less energy-dense and much less versatile alternative sources in the face of an ever-growing population is a challenge before us. ... If there is a solution to this problem it is a greatly reduced and much less affluent population.”

Youngquist and the Virginia-based organization Negative Population Growth both have noted the conspicuous absence of any official U.S. population policy. Author Alan Weisman’s 2013 book, Countdown, looked at how many peoplethat the planet can sustain. Lazell believes thatit’s a billion. The longtime/part-time Rhode Islander is concerned that the crush of humanity will wipe out many of the creatures he has spent his life finding, studying and conserving.

“We’re pretty smart, but we need leadership to get interested in overpopulation,” Lazell said. “The United States devours the most, and much of the rest of the world wants to live like Americans. Our consumption level is unsustainable.”

ecoRI News visited with Lazell last month at his modest home on Swinburne Street, Jamestown, a house he bought in the late 1960s. We sat in his living room for more than an hour talking about the natural world and the many pressures squeezing it. While he has long been concerned with human population, his life’s real passion, animals, most notably reptiles and amphibians, also began when Lazell was a child.

As a youngster, Lazell spent hours reading and studying his world atlas. His interest in geography often focused on islands. His scientific niche naturally grew into “island biogeography.” In its Dec. 8, 1957 edition, the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine featured an article about the 18-year-old naturalist and how he had, among other things, recently captured crocodiles in Jamaica.

Lazell was born in New York City and grew up in suburban Philadelphia. His accent, however, has been softened by boyhood summers spent with family in Jackson, Miss. But Rhode Island, specifically Conanicut Island (Jamestown), has served as his summer and fall base for decades.

Lazell earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island — he also has graduate degrees in biology and zoology from Harvard University and the University of Illinois. In 1988, in Jamestown, a friend’s mother introduced Lazell to a Chinese-born woman, Wenhua Lu, who would become his wife. Wenhua, who also earned a Ph.D. from URI, married Lazell in 1992. They don’t have any children, for obvious reasons.

While zoologist Lazell focused on amphibians and reptiles — his thesis was on lizards of the West Indies — his 62-year-old wife is an entomologist with a keen interest in beetles.

When he was 17, the Philadelphia Zoo paid for Lazell to go to the West Indies to collect specimens. It’s where his doctoral work on Anolis, a genus of iguanian lizards, first came into focus. He returned a year later on another zoo-funded trip.

In fact, Lazell visited the West Indies every year from 1957 to 2014, making his last visit when he was 75. His favorite island there is Dominica.

For this work researching clouded Anole on the uninhabited West Indies island of Redonda, Lazell rented a boat, was given a compass and was wished good luck. He loved the experience, a wide grin formed on his face when he recalled the tale. His 30 years of work on Guana Island reportedly produced the most comprehensive, long-term record of the natural history of a Caribbean island.

Iguanas, salamanders and crocodiles, however, haven’t consumed all of Lazell’s professional time. He first recognized the potential for successful reintroduction of flamingos to the salt ponds of Anegada in the early 1980s.

He has been published in scientific journals more than 200 times; he’s discovered some 30 new species and rediscovered some of the planet’s rarest ones. In 1985, Lazell made Rhode Island’s first official recording of spring salamanders, commonly called gyros, in Foster.

His 1976 book, This Broken Archipelago: Cape Cod and the Islands, Amphibians, and Reptiles, has detailed chapters on 38 species of frogs, salamanders, toads, turtles and snakes, their natural history, and how they got there. His 2005 book,  Island: Fact and Theory in Nature, describes Guana’s flora and fauna against the backdrop of islands worldwide and their ecology, evolution and conservation.

The longtime naturalist worked with the late Roger Conant, a herpetologist, author and educator who wrote one of the first comprehensive field guides for North American reptiles, in 1958. He also was director emeritus of the Philadelphia Zoo.

Lazell studied with the late Ernest Edward Williams, a noted Harvard University herpetologist. Before founding a Jamestown-based nonprofit in 1980, Lazell had stints with The Nature Conservancy and the Audubon Society. He taught biology at the Palfrey Street School in Watertown, Mass.

He founded the The Conservation Agency to work globally to provide and publish scientific data “contributing to the protection of biodiversity and promoting sustainable relationships with valued wildlife.” Lazell was the organization’s president until a few years ago, when his former Palfrey Street School student Numi Mitchell took the reins. He said the founding of The Conservation Agency was the “biggest thrill” of his career.

Now 78, Lazell, who is recovering from open-heart surgery, still speaks enthusiastically and passionately about his life’s work and the wondrous natural world in which we live. He and his wife will return to Jackson, Miss., to his late parents' home, in early November as usual, after they enjoy New England’s fall foliage and crisp air.

His proudest accomplishment, though, may be this:

“I was the only person to be a full-time employee at both Yale and Harvard with a full beard, earring and tattoo,” he said with a smile.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News

Bright urban jungle

Image from Mark Freedman's show through Nov. 16 at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Art Gallery,  in New Bedford. The curator says the exhibition features "paintings of the urban environments with their unique ability to capture and hold light.''

N.E. woodlands are now shrinking

Borderland State Park, in Easton, Mass. Another photo below.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

Many New Englanders know that much of New England used to be open farmland, a lot of it pasturage, but with lots of cropsgrown in the valleys, especially the Connecticut River’s. But as the region’s farming declined,  and manufacturingand then modern services became dominant, the woodlands returned, eventually making New England one of the most densely populated but thickly wooded areas in the world.

I once had one of those panoramic photos, taken about 1905 of the hills of Norwich, Vt., as seen from Hanover, N.H., which showed open fields with sheep grazing on them. New England used to have a big woolen-textiles industry. I looked at the same hills the other week and they seemed completely covered with trees. When the leaves fall off in the autumn you can see houses owned by the affluent people who have moved to town, at least from May to October.

The small town-becoming–a-Boston suburb I lived in as a boy had several farms; one was across the street from us. I’m told that one is now part of the estate of a Fidelity Investments executive. We loved going over there and irritating a bull.

Now a new Harvard Forest report says that reforestation had halted. The region was losing 24,000 acres of woodland a year to development from 1990 to 2010, most of it to residential building.  Such deforestation is thought to be continuing although more recent data are lacking. The researchers also found that funding for land conservation in the region has fallen 50 percent since the financial crash of 2008 and that the acreage of woodland being conserved annually has dropped from 333,000 to 50,000 a year since 2010.

Jonathan Thompson, a senior scientist at Harvard Forest and one of the study’s authors, told Harvard Gazette: “Peak forest cover is over in New England. For more than 150 years, forests expanded and regrew. That history is how we gained the status of as among the most populated and most forested regions in the world.’’

At the current rate of deforestation, Mr. Thompson said, the region will lose woodlands equivalent to twice the size of Rhode Island by 2060. (Poor Little Rhody – the yard stick for everything.) This would mean the destruction ofsome eco-systems, and thus possibly the extinction of some regional flora and fauna. It will also undermine attempts to slow global warming: Woodlands lock up carbon dioxide.

Let’s hope that state and local policymakers take stronger measures to protect New England’s woodlands, which, with our plentiful water, may be our greatest environmental comparative advantage.

To read more, please hit this link: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/09/harvard-research-reports-major-forest-loss-in-new-england/

-- Photo by Evilbish

Bob Lord: Trump prepares to use tax-cut plan to cut himself a huge check

The Worship of Mammon (1909),  by Evelyn De Morgan.

Via OtherWords.org

What’s the largest personal stake a U.S. president has ever had in legislation he signed into law? Whatever it was, it’ll be dwarfed by what Donald Trump’s signature will be worth — to himself — if Congress passes his proposed tax plan and puts it on his desk.

If that happens, Trump will be effectively cutting himself a check from the U.S. Treasury for several billion dollars.

Call me cynical, but it seems that’s exactly what Trump has in mind. His plan just fits his tax situation — or what we know of it, without access to his tax returns — too perfectly.

The president’s tax proposal eliminates two taxes that mostly benefit the wealthy, and cuts a third tax roughly in half. That would bestow a windfall worth billions on the Trump family.

First, there’s the elimination of the alternative minimum tax, or AMT.

The AMT applies to taxpayers whose income tax liability otherwise would be reduced excessively by certain deductions, including deductions commonly claimed by real estate owners like Trump. It’s like an alternative tax system in which the rates are lower but fewer deductions are allowed.

The one glimpse we’ve had of Trump’s tax returns suggests he stands to benefit massively from the repeal of the AMT. In 2005, Trump’s income exceeded $150 million, but his regular tax liability was just $5.3 million — that’s barely a 3.5 percent tax rate.

But the AMT increased Trump’s tax liability that year by over $31 million. Had Trump’s tax plan been in effect in 2005, it would’ve saved him that $31 million.

Still, that’s chump change in comparison to the tax windfall he hopes to bestow upon himself by cutting the top tax rate on the bulk of his income by more than half, from nearly 40 percent to 15.

We’re not talking about the corporate tax rate here. Trump could reap a tidy personal benefit from slashing the corporate income tax too, but the far bigger prize in his plan is its treatment of income from businesses that don’t pay corporate taxes.

Under current law, the income of those businesses is taxed to their owners at individual income tax rates. Under Trump’s plan, income from those businesses would receive preferential tax treatment, with a maximum tax rate of 15 percent.

That would be the final act in turning our nation’s tax policy on its head.

In 1980, before Ronald Reagan’s election, the maximum rate on workers’ wages — earned income — was less than the maximum rate applicable to all other types of income except long-term capital gains.

Under Trump’s tax plan, the maximum tax rate workers pay, after accounting for employment taxes, will be higher than the rate applicable to any other type of income.

That means no matter how Trump invests his billions — in real estate, bonds, stocks, business ventures, etc. — the income he generates would be taxed at a rate lower than what workers pay on their wages.

Trump’s preferential rate for business income is unprecedented. Is it a coincidence that the first politician to propose it just happens to be a real estate magnate with interests in literally hundreds of unincorporated businesses?

The biggest tax windfall Trump hopes to secure for himself, however, is one he won’t live to enjoy. I’m referring to the estate tax, of course — a federal levy on estates worth over $5.5 million for individuals.

Trump’s plan would eliminate that tax, no matter how large the estate. For Trump, that would mean as much as $1.4 billion on an estate estimated by Forbes at $3.5 billion.

The bottom line: If Trump’s tax plan passes, he’ll have secured for himself billions in tax benefits in less than a year as president. Not bad work if you can get it, huh?

Bob Lord is a veteran tax lawyer who practices and blogs in Phoenix.  He’s also an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. 

Checking in

"One more arrival. Parking in the drive

of our house that too much of the time is yours,

I think of an evening down at Holbrook's Wharf

when I glanced up from supper to speak to you,

but stopped my breath as a motor launch slid in....''

-- From "Commuter Marriage: Homecoming,'' by Henry Taylor

That special light

“She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.”

-- Joe Hill, book author and comic-book writer and a son of Bangor, Maine-based novelist Stephen King.

Entrepreneurial New Hampshire

"In New Hampshire, we know that small businesses and entrepreneurs are the engines of economic growth in the 21st-Century economy, and our state has long been defined by the entrepreneurial spirit of our people. ''

-- U.S. Sen (and former Gov.) Maggie Hassan
 

Chris Powell: Lies and betrayal from Vietnam through today; rich school employees

With their 10-part series The Vietnam War just broadcast on PBS, documentary makers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done a great service not only to history but also to contemporary public policy.

The documentary emphasizes that the famous Tet offensive of Communist North Vietnam and its guerrillas in South Vietnam, launched in January 1968, was actually a military triumph for the United States and South Vietnam but also a political disaster for them. For it exposed the U.S. government's years of lies that the war was close to won. 

Indeed, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his political associates libeled the anti-war movement as disloyal and Communist even as they confessed to each other in private that the war was going poorly and was ill-conceived. So the war was continued for another seven years just to save face.

The series also brilliantly contrasted the astounding courage and heroism of U.S. soldiers with the equally astounding stupidity of the strategy that their generals pursued. 

A former soldier summarized that strategy this way: Walk into the jungle and see if you can draw fire. Of course, our soldiers did draw fire, suffered terrible casualties, and then withdrew to remote and poorly defended fire bases without ever holding the territory that they had won with so much blood. The United States dropped more bomb tonnage on the Vietnam War theater than it dropped on Europe during World War II, but that didn't hold territory for long either. That former soldier said he especially resented having to fight to take the same ground multiple times.

Of course, this is pretty much the "strategy" now being used in the 17th year of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan: Draw fire and then retreat with your casualties. 

At least the Trump administration, unlike the Johnson administration, doesn't pretend that the war is going well. But like the Johnson administration, the Trump administration continues the war anyway without any plausible plan for winning it -- and this time the American people and even supposedly humane members of Congress are indifferent to another endless war of attrition in Asia. 

So maybe in a decade or so Burns and Novick will be able to make a documentary called  The Afghanistan War. They could quote the quatrain from Kipling that belongs at the graves of Johnson and Nixon and will belong at Kissinger's:  


And the end of the fight is a tombstone white
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A Fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East."



LUXURIOUS EDUCATION: A community activist in Hartford, Kevin Brookman, notes that the city's school system employs about 70 people with salaries of $100,000 or more, many of them above the governor's salary, $150,000, not counting insurance and retirement benefits. The city's new school superintendent is paid $260,000.

If the Connecticut General Assembly doesn't quickly pass a state budget he likes, the governor, operating the state by executive order, may divert to Hartford and a few other cities all the education money state government has been giving to the rest of the state's municipalities.

What will Hartford do with it all? Create more $100,000-a-year positions? Build another stadium? 

If experience is any guide, the city won't improve education with it, since student educational performance is almost entirely a matter of family cohesion, of which Hartford has little.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Boston Guardian has an opening for reporter

The Arlington Street Church, very close to the headquarters of The Boston Guardian.

The Boston Guardian, the city's biggest weekly and covering the most dynamic parts of Boston, has an opening for a reporter with two or three years experience. If interested, please contact David Jacobs, publisher, at:

djacobs@thebostonguardian.com

Fall fashion

"The morns are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown;

The berry's cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,

The field a scarlet gown.

Lest I should be old-fashioned,

I'll put a trinket on.''

-- "Autumn,'' by Emily Dickinson

Mysterious African minimalism at UMass

Untitled painting by Fred Wilson, in his show "5 takes on African Art,'' at the University Museum of Contemporary Art, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, through Dec. 17.

A fearsome place

Children gathering potatoes on a large farm in Aroostook County in 1940. Schools did not open in those days until the potatoes were harvested.

-- Photo by Jack Delano for the WPA

"This is big country, larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, nearly the equal of Massachusetts; its vastness more suggestive of the West than of New England. Its winters, people will tell you, are fiercer, its forests thicker, its rivers wilder than anywhere else in the East.''

-- Mel Allen on Aroostook County, Maine, in "There's No Easy Way to Pick Potatoes,'' in the September 1978 issue of Yankee magazine.

Jill Richardson: Whites should consider what it's like being black

Via OtherWords.org

As white people across the nation criticize Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who “take a knee” for the national anthem, they ought to know something first.

White people in America have no idea what life is like for black people in America.

How can I make such a broad statement? How would I possibly know?

For one thing, I’m white. I grew up in a mostly white town. Like many white people, I was raised to oppose racism, at least as I understood it then. I celebrated Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I wasn’t quite sure who Malcolm X was — I’d heard the name, but we never studied him in school. I’d never heard of other black leaders like Marcus Garvey or Bayard Rustin.

I never used the N-word. I wouldn’t even write it in my essay on Huckleberry Finn in ninth grade English. And I’d never even heard of most other racial slurs for African Americans — or any other race for that matter. Nobody used language like that.

But that was the extent of my background when, three years ago, I found myself assigned to be a teaching assistant in a sociology class on race. The professor would give the lectures; I would lead the discussions.

To say it was terrifying is an understatement. I didn’t know any of the material I now had to teach, and I was flying by the seat of my pants.

Fortunately, I did know how to listen. And I know how to empathize.

In the years since, I’ve taught hundreds of students of all races — first as a teaching assistant and now as an adjunct professor.

And it’s funny. When you start listening, you learn things.

I learned that being black in America means people who aren’t black think it’s OK to touch your hair whenever they want — often without asking, even if they don’t know you.

When my students inadvertently made racist remarks, it didn’t hurt me as a white person. If I weren’t white, it would’ve stung. And I would’ve had to remain cool and professional while continuing to do my job — something I learned nonwhite people have to do all the time.

I learned that decades of housing discrimination robbed black people of wealth as most whites bought homes and built equity. The effects of those disparities live on.

Long after segregation was legal, we continue to live in racially segregated neighborhoods, and students like Michael Brown attend schools so poor I couldn’t even fathom that such a place would be called a school.

How can anyone succeed in college or find a good job if they barely even have one class a day where a teacher shows up and teaches using, as was the case in a district detailed in a 2015, This American Life, the NPR show?

Each year, I face the same conundrum: My students inhabit different worlds. The white students think that they know all there is to know about life in America. My job is to gently show them they have no idea — as I had no idea — what it’s like not to be white in America.

I can’t speak for black people, and I wouldn’t try to. They speak very well for themselves. I’ll just say that those of us who are white should listen when they do.

And to do that, white people must overcome their defensiveness. Not every protest against racism is a personal attack against them, the flag, the country, or whatever else.

So if you’re white, next time you see black football players take a knee and don’t understand, take it as a sign you have something to learn.

Jill Richardson is an OtherWords,org columnist.

America's training deficit

A computer-skills training class.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

It appears that the recent lethal ship collisions involving the Navy may be attributable in part to excessive work hours, rushed training and an over-emphasis on cheaper, online training, as opposed to teaching in person. The U.S. military has been overstretched for a long time: The collisions may be yet another example.

This reminds me of an intensifying problem in much of American business over the past few decades – major cutbacks intraining. The reason is simple: Doing a thorough job of training your people, while it helps build the long-term strength of an enterprise, cuts into quarterly profits.

I saw this inthe newspaper business. When most newspaper companies were closely held, and often family-controlled, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, many of these enterprises spent a great deal of time and money training their people, especially in new computer and other production-related systems. But then it became clear that many of  the larger newspaper companies would eventually go public, whereupon many were then quickly sold to other public companies.  

As this happened, there was less and less training because that would have cut into quarterly earnings and thus the stock price – a key metric for senior execs as well as shareholders (the most important of which were usually pension funds and other institutions).

I saw this happen at the old Providence Journal Co. Costs were slashed to dress up the company for sale.

But in, for example,  such very successful economies as Germany’s andthe Scandinavian nations’, managements take amuch longer view and expend much more money and time in training on a per-capita basis than found in short-term-focused America.

Daniel Regan: The benefits and challenges of 'Early College' programs

Bentley Hall at Johnson State College, with the Sterling Mountain Range in the background.

From The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

JOHNSON, Vt.

Look around your campus this semester for some students who look unusually young, eager and attentive. It may not be, as faculty sometimes say, that “the students are looking younger every year” or that you yourself are aging rapidly. They may be students in an “Early College” program. Less evident at first gaze may be the multiple types of students within the ranks of Early College goers, as well as the challenges they, their parents and their colleges face in sustaining and navigating their academic endeavors.

Several factors have increased the popularity of these programs, though a proactive push from higher education to expand them has not been a primary one. The impetus for the growth of such programs has come from legislators as well as from high school students and their families, for reasons that will surprise no one: concern about the cost of a college education; national publicity about student debt at graduation; and questions about the quality of U.S. secondary education and thus college readiness.

A form of dual enrollment

Traditional Early College has long existed in the form of dual enrollment, in which high school students get a jumpstart on college, by taking a few courses on campus, online or at their high school (but taught by instructors certified as equivalent to part-time or adjunct college faculty). A growing trend is for colleges and universities to host full-blown freshman years for high school students, most often seniors. At least 28 states possess versions of these full-time programs, whose genesis in the U.S. traces back to 2002 with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, among others. Such programs make it possible for students to earn a high school diploma along with college credits. The students spend their school day at college, as full-time students, and may go to their high school for selected events, services and activities.

Vermont’s Legislature passed its version of Early College in 2013, as part of Act 77, “An act relating to encouraging flexible pathways to secondary school completion.” In the legislation, one of several “flexible pathways” is an Early College Program, which simultaneously serves as a student’s senior year of high school and provides a full year of college credit. For each accepted high school senior, the State of Vermont pays 87 percent of the tuition rate to an approved postsecondary institution, which accepts the amount as full payment.

Early College has proven popular. My own college exceeded its quota in the first year of the program, and was forced to seek supplementary legislation to redirect and gain seats unused elsewhere in the state system. Our local legislators provided strong and effective support.

Who are the students?

Several types of students may be part of an institution’s Early College population. Some programs began with a specific emphasis on attracting underserved, first-generation or low-income students. Otherwise, an Early College program’s earliest recruits will tend to be academic high flyers. They are the high performers who make for happy professors and delight in their campus’s outreach to high schools. At my institution, for instance, they help account for Early College students’ consistently outperforming the general student population, at least by the measure of GPA. In a recent fall semester, for instance, the average GPA for Early College students was 3.6, while for all freshmen, it was 2.9. As the latter group includes Early College, the actual difference is greater still.

Although academic high flyers may be in the first wave, they are not the only Early College constituency. Other student participants may prove similarly rewarding, though perhaps in different ways. Economic pragmatists—some academically proficient, others less so—may also be early adopters. In this era of academic cost-consciousness on the part of education “consumers,” these students and their families know how to spot a good deal. They quickly grasp that tuition for Early College courses is generally borne by the school system, not the individual family. Good high school advisors also play a major role, helping students from modest (and other economic) backgrounds become aware of opportunities to earn college credits inexpensively.

Besides academic high performers and economic pragmatists, there are secondary students who seek a new learning environment different from the one in their high schools. And finally, there are those who simply want to get out of their buildings. Early College programs would seem particularly good places for those high school students who, after a while, grow tired of fighting identity battles over issues such as sexual orientation or gender identity. Trading a high school classroom or lunchroom for a college or university campus can come as a relief.

Building credits and confidence

That these programs are likely to succeed will come as no surprise. They convey many benefits. Students earn transferable credits and build confidence in their college-going capacity. (According to one report, 86 percent of Early College students enroll in college the semester after high school graduation.) They enhance their readiness for higher education through early exposure to the intangibles of collegiate culture: getting used to few class hours and lots of homework (instead of the reverse, as in traditional high schools), learning how to read a syllabus and how a college class is conducted, even how a college dining service works. The institution benefits from enhanced professorial satisfaction and good will in the community. An unanticipated benefit--the retention of some students after their Early College year—may be a godsend for tuition-driven institutions, in some parts of the country, that are struggling to maintain a critical mass. Even the high schools that have surrendered these students get to proclaim their commitment to individualized instruction. They also avoid the problem of accommodating bored seniors who have maxed out what their high school can offer them.

Several problems remain, however, and are fairly predictable. While none negates the value of an Early College program, each deserves consideration and may merit a concrete solution, especially in the interests of ensuring equity of access.

Costs: Parents and students will face costs that, while routine for college, will be unprecedented for most high school families. Although tuition is free, fees may attach to particular courses. Even when communications are crystal clear, in the excitement of the Early College opportunity, parents will likely ignore the fine print and be surprised by course and activity fees. College books will be an additional expense. Then there is food, during the days on campus. In my local high school, for instance, half the students qualify for free or reduced lunch; none of that transfers to Early College. (Luckily, the director of our food services recognized the problem and created a cost-effective option for program participants.) Students may have to cover other costs, too, including health insurance and parking permits.

Commuters vs. residents: Transportation may be a concern, either the cost of public bus or train service or the commuting distance to campus for students from multiple high schools. These are generally 17-year-old drivers. Given Vermont’s long winters and snowy roads, we felt compelled to offer Early College students a residential possibility.

Staffing: Even in situations where space is available and room costs are bearable, youthful dorm residents may pose special challenges to the college or university that hosts them. Certainly, these students will require additional staff time and supervision, however academically prepared they may be. Additional staff resources may also have to be expended on recruitment and admissions work as well as on academic advising. And college advisers will have an additional responsibility: making sure that students are poised to satisfy all their high school graduation requirements. “What about that gym class that Sabrina needs to satisfy state requirements?”

Balancing act: It requires a deft touch for colleges and universities to address the unique needs of Early College students, but not segregate them from the general student body. Modest steps to create an identifiable cohort would seem advisable—perhaps, for example, an ice cream social at the start, followed by occasional meetings throughout the first semester (at least). A recognition event at the conclusion of the Early College year provides a good opportunity to celebrate their achievement.

Assurances: Considerable time may be required to devise an Early College Program, complete the paperwork and provide the assurances that state Departments of Education will likely require.

Transferable credits: Early College students are unlikely to be concerned about the acceptance of Early College credits at their eventual degree-granting institutions; but if they are not, they may be in for a surprise later on. Transfer credit policies and practices vary widely. Courses accepted for graduation credit, but not toward particular requirements—which is sometimes the case—may not accelerate the pace of college graduation, which is a key promise of Early College.

Time management: Also from a student perspective, a new kind of time juggling will be at a premium: how to perform in your high school play, play on the soccer team, all the while carrying a full roster of college courses as well as extra- or co-curricular involvements on campus?

High school concerns: From a secondary school perspective, there are a number of concerns. Administrators may be understandably reluctant to lose these students. They may be giving up significant public funding, computed per-capita, to surrender some of their best students. Even teachers’ work schedules may be affected, if they no longer have a sufficient number of students to teach a smaller, more advanced class they were counting on. And beyond all that, is exiting the building any real solution to deficits in secondary education, especially the senior year?

Despite these challenges, Early College programs provide very positive experiences for many participants, satisfaction for their families, benefits to the host colleges and universities, and the ability for sending high schools to claim—rightly so—a commitment to individualized learning.

Daniel Regan is accreditation liaison officer and former dean of academic affairs at Johnson State College, in Vermont.

The delightful Boston Harbor

America, the new world, compares in glamour and romance with the old, and Boston Harbor is one of the most delightful places in America.

-- Edward Rowe Snow, in The Islands of Boston Harbor (1935)

David Warsh: The great productivity stagnation

Economic Principals had a pretty good topic in mind this week – the proposition that good ideas are becoming harder to find.  That’s the conclusion contained in an important new paper by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb.  But there was too much background to tell and the piece sprawled out of control.  Here’s what Stanford’s news service had to say about their account.

The authors’ punchline:

“Our robust finding is that research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look. Taking the U.S. aggregate number as representative, research productivity falls in half every 13 years – ideas are getting harder and harder to find. Put differently, just to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the U.S. must double the amount of research effort searching for new ideas every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas.’’

The team is suitably cautious in whatever surprises may be in store. Who knows what else there is out there to know? Not engineering feats like hyperloops and better batteries, but basic breakthroughs such as  quantum computing, genetic editing techniques and artificial intelligence.

Still, for a decade or more, an intuition has been taking hold that the familiar rate of increasing plenty was slowing down, at least in the United States. This was not simply a matter of resources strained by soaring population. The basic mechanism that Thomas Malthus missed 225 years ago, of increasing know-how and economic growth, was thought to be involved as well.  In this view, an age of widespread affluence is not in coming to end, but perhaps it is stabilizing.

Economist Robert J. Gordon, of Northwestern University, argued strongly that “a special century” of rapid growth had occurred that would not be repeated.  In The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, 2016), he described the many very basic inventions – steam, electricity, motors, communications, modern agriculture,  public health – that could only happen once.  Others, he said, others reached natural limits.  Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, put it more colorfully a little earlier in The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better  (Penguin eSpecial, 2011)

For 30 years, this argument has been slowly working its way forward within technical, which is to say, scientific, university-based economics. Jones, in particular, has been at the center of it. It is hard to find a vein in economics that has made more progress recently than this one. It will make an interesting story someday.

David Warsh, a veteran economics and political columnist, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based ec

Saving coastal farm is biggest land-conservation project along Buzzards Bay

This 115-acre farm was one of the last undeveloped and unprotected areas of coastal farmland on Buzzards Bay. (Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust)

By ecoRI News staff (ecori.org)

DARTMOUTH, Mass.

The Buzzards Bay Coalition and its partners, the Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust and Round the Bend Farm, recently celebrated the permanent protection of 115-acre Ocean View Farm on Allens Pond, the largest land-conservation project ever completed along the coast of Buzzards Bay.

Completed this past summer, the protection of Ocean View Farm was an $8.1 million component of a larger land-conservation initiative on Allens Pond, which has been recognized as one of southern New England’s most significant coastal habitats. The larger Allens Pond Conservation Completion Project is expected to protect an additional 100 neighboring acres of forests, wetlands and active farmland.

“Visionary landowners and conservation organizations have worked together over decades to protect and preserve Allens Pond,” Buzzards Bay Coalition president Mark Rasmussen said. “But the fate of one landholding on the pond still threatened this landscape’s extraordinary agricultural and natural values. Ocean View Farm narrowly missed being covered with new homes, roads, and septic systems several times in recent years. With the support of so many levels of government and generous neighbors coming together to raise the money needed to save this place, this jewel of Buzzards Bay will now be protected forever.”

Ocean View Farm was one of the last undeveloped and unprotected areas of coastal farmland on Buzzards Bay.

“Ocean View Farm had long been one of the top conservation priorities in the town of Dartmouth due to its large size, prime location, outstanding agricultural land and abundant natural resources,” Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust (DNRT) executive director Dexter Mead said. “Without the remarkable support of so many public and private donors, we never could have accomplished our goal.”

Round the Bend Farm will put the deep, rich soils on the northern 55 acres to work as an all-organic farm, and DNRT will eventually open a new public trail on a 60-acre waterfront portion of Ocean View Farm.

“Our mission is to create a restorative community. The newly acquired 55 acres will bring our farm to 94 acres; expand our realm into focused, sustainable food production; and increase our impact on providing nutritious food for people of all socioeconomic demographics,” said Desa Van Laarhoven, executive director of Round the Bend Farm. “On this land, we intend to cultivate a community that is diverse in race, gender and culture. Our vision is opening this land to a new generation of farmers, specifically targeting women and people of color, those who have historically worked the land but have been locked out of long-term leasing and ownership.”

The Buzzards Bay Coalition holds a permanent conservation restriction on the northern portion of the farm and co-holds a conservation restriction on the southern portion, along with the Dartmouth Conservation Commission, ensuring that this land will never be developed.

During the past year, the coalition spearheaded assembly of a patchwork of federal, state and local government funding and private fundraising to protect this land for future generations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded the project nearly $2 million, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service provided $1.1 million.

“Public-private partnerships are essential in protecting the nature of our nation’s coastal wetlands,” said Mark Cookson, regional coastal program coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “These marshes provide us with clean water, and are important areas for wildlife including the federally endangered roseate tern.”

Last fall, Dartmouth residents voted to contribute $600,000 in Community Preservation Act funding to save 60 acres of Ocean View Farm. The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation also provided the project with a $400,000 grant.

The project was also supported by more than $2.92 million in private donations from 365 individuals and families. The Bromley Charitable Trust also contributed $2 million to the project in support of Round the Bend Farm. The Buzzards Bay Coalition and DNRT are seeking $70,000 in private donations to complete the project.