Job is the measure

"Job,'' by Leon Bonnat.

"Wake when dog whimpers; Prick

Finger. Inject insulin.

Glue teeth in.

Smoke cigarette.

Shudder and fret.

Feed old dog. Revise syllabic

On self-pity. Get Boston Globe.

Drink coffee. Eat bagel. Read

At nervous speed.

Smoke cigarette.

Never forget to measure oneself against job.''

 -- From "Death Work,'' by Donald Hall, former U.S. poet laureate and resident of Wilmot, N.H.

Scroll of the Book of Job.

Llewellyn King: My long but now failed love affair with guns

A Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, the kind of weapon used in the Lakeland, Fla., attack that killed 17 people at a high school.

I have until now eschewed writing about guns. It’s personal. I like guns.

I grew up in what might be called a gun culture, but it was very different from today’s gun culture in the United States. It was in colonial Africa and guns were for hunting. They were also, as here today, just for having, works of art to be revered.

Many boys, at age 13 or 14, got a .22 rifle. Some got a combination rifle and shotgun: a .22 rifle on the top and a .410 shotgun on the bottom.

Handguns didn’t figure: They were illegal. The only man I knew who had one was always worried that he’d be discovered and prosecuted. Automatic weapons were still on the horizon where we were in a British colony -- what was then called Southern Rhodesia and  is now called Zimbabwe

Military training, though sketchy, started early, when we were still in high school. We were issued British army, circa 1918, Lee Enfield .303 rifles — heavy, durable and lethal. We were told — as soldiers everywhere are — that our weapons were our best friends and would save our lives one day. We took the friendship part very seriously. People with guns do.

I still had some of that when I moved to the United States, in 1963. But my friendship with guns deteriorated in the era of the Saturday-night special.

Now in this era of the assault rifle, I believe that our gun tolerance is a fatal social disease. It’s a public-health issue right up there with the big killers and more terrible because so many of the victims, and most of the perpetrators, are children.

I was once the keynote speaker at a pro-gun group’s event. It was a seminal day, Nov. 5, 2008: the day after Barack Obama was elected president.

At that point, Obama had said nothing that I’d been able to find about guns. I told them that.

I told them about myself. I told them that members of my family, including my mother, had been professional hunters in the 1920s when felling large animals was acceptable, indeed regarded as a serious sport and as a way of harvesting nature’s bounty, even for ivory.

I didn’t tell them that I was leaning toward gun registration or my thoughts about the need to begin to turn the culture against guns, just as the culture had turned against homophobia and segregation. Just the facts. That’s what I tried to give them and what I had agreed with my speakers bureau. Yet when I sat down, the chairman said, “I think we have to read between the lines with journalists.”

The audience wasn’t what you might think of as gun extremists. They were serious, middle-class business people, mostly men; some were in the gun industry working for manufacturers. They believed that they were the victims of a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy their businesses, their sport and their culture. They also believed, despite what I’d said, that I was the agent of that conspiracy.

So it is with my friends who are gun owners, from Florida to New Hampshire and across the country to Arizona. They vary from an erudite historian who has a collection of ancient and modern weapons in working order, to an electrician who believes he’s defending the people from the government by owning an AR-15, to a conservative economist who took to guns when he took to Republicanism.

Michael Gerson of The Washington Post has pointed out that the real child carnage, the senseless ghastly slaughter often over a gesture or an imagined slight, is in the inner cities. Tonight and tomorrow night, on and on, in the inner cities, children with guns will kill children, teenagers will kill teenagers. It’ll happen in Chicago and Baltimore and Detroit and across America to Oakland, Calif. Those who’ve been betrayed by their upbringing, by their absent fathers, and by their schools will be betrayed again. This time by the false security of their friend: the gun.

We have an estimated 300 million guns in America and 265 million passenger vehicles. The difference is we know the whereabouts of the vehicles: We register them. We also engineer them for safety, and we teach the drivers to drive. With guns we do just the opposite.

Wake up America and smell the cordite. It’s going off and killing someone near you right now.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Little Compton's splendid Stone House

The Stone House.

Visit the uber-charming Stone House, in Little Compton, R.I., across from Newport and on bucolic Sakonnet Point. It's on the National Registry of Historical Places.

It's made to order for honeymoons.

For more information, please hit this link.

The air was too clear

Summer sailing off Acadia National Park, in Downeast Maine. Actually,  pea soup fog is more common than blue sky in much of the summer on the Maine Coast.

"I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it.''

-- Controversial photographer Sally Mann
 

Don Pesci: Why does prison so rarely rehabilitate convicts?

Down the Rabbit Hole:

How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime

By Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz
Available at Amazon

Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages

Down the Rabbit Hole, a penological eye-opener, was written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence?

The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, possibly because prisoners, many of them victims of programs that do not reduce recidivism rates, are not credentialed. Most people in prison are graduates of the school of hard knocks, not Harvard.

McCall and Liebowitz, serious criminals, are mechanics uniquely situated to answer the question:  Why doesn’t rehabilitative imprisonment usually rehabilitate?

There are four criminological pillars to incarceration: incapacitation, punishment, deterrence, and rehabilitation. The authors find all four goals defensible, even desirable. However, the thesis of this book, very hard to dispute, is that only one engine, incapacitation, is pulling the train.

Punishment, in their view, does not rehabilitate because in most cases punishment is not viewed by prisoners as punishment: “We witness it every day. In a nutshell: prisons are often too comfortable; discipline is frequently too lax, inconsistent and arbitrary; and the staff generally doesn’t take rehabilitative programs any more seriously than the inmates do.”

The four goals of incarceration can only be met “… if there is proper implementation. When offenders are allowed to lay back in the relative comfort of an air conditioned cell watching color TV, listening to CD’s or playing video games, it can hardly be considered severe enough punishment to deter anything. Hell, that’s what most of the guys in prison enjoyed doing prior to their incarcerations. Couple this with the fact that inmates know that the vast majority of rule violations they commit will be ignored – even when committed in clear view and with the full knowledge of institutional staff members –and that effectively there are no performance expectations placed on them in either their job assignments or the programs they take – and you have a veritable recipe for failure.”

Young students confronting authority demands engage in what used to be called, before the collapse of public education, “reality-testing.” Will the authority figure apply his sanction equably? Will he apply it at all? If not, the efficacy of the sanction disappears. More destructively, the failure to apply sanctions will be interpreted as a failure of will and a sanctioning of illicit behavior. Sanctions unapplied or indifferently applied are, quite literally, dead.

The book finds that attempts to change rooted behavior in criminals fail for two principle reasons: 1) the content of the reform is wrong. You cannot teach dolphins to play pianos; better to teach them how to swim; 2) the messenger is wrong. Many of the messengers, and prison officials teach every day through example, are poorly instructed and fatally disengaged in what should be a primary mission -- changing the culture of prisons.

The authors note that the arc of penology, driven by perceptions of failure, has in the past moved between deceivingly opposite poles. “Every twenty years or so,”  they write, “the pendulum swings from an ostensible focus on rehabilitation, with its apparent emphasis on prison programs, job training and compassion towards offenders, to get tough on crime policies, which supposedly means longer sentences and harsher prison conditions.”

This is a false either-or: “Firm condemnation of offenders and rehabilitative efforts can go hand in hand… punishment and reforms are not mutually exclusive objectives. In fact, punishment, or the threat of punishment is crucial to generating the motivation to change.” The culprit in prisoner reform – the authors assiduously avoid the word “rehabilitation” -- is an unjust and random implementation of both sanctions and reform efforts. As in the broader society, culture -- the real-time application of both punishments and reform efforts -- determines the success of penological programs.

Down the Rabbit Hole, suffused with hope, is remarkably free of bitterness. Still, an honest review of the tangle of unworkable prison reforms that do little to reduce the recidivism rate in Connecticut or other prisons -- "Statistics show that 67.8% of inmates released from prison nationwide are charged with at least one serious new crime within three years of their release" -- calls forth this sulfurous appraisal: “During the course of a single prison sentence, the offender can attend a series of programs that convey fundamentally different and often contradictory ideas about what the cause of his criminality is and what is required of him to correct it. In one program, he is told that he is the hapless victim of an inherently unfair societal power structure and that he simply needs to be open to the benevolent intervention of an inscrutable cosmic force. Another program teaches that he is the victim of a pernicious disease that robs him of the ability to choose and induces him to behave poorly. Still another program informs him that he is really just the victim of a cruel world that has mistreated him from birth and continues to fail to acknowledge his innate goodness, thus causing him to express himself through artificial sub-personalities he was forced to create in an effort to merely survive… And every once in a while, someone might mention that he needs to take responsibility and correct his thinking errors – though how exactly that is to be accomplished puzzles even those offering the admonition.”

The book offers constructive remedies. What is wanting in the confusing slop of pretend-reform programs is a conversion regimen that will purge the demons within that thrive on confusion, disorder and despair. There is life and hope at the end of the rabbit hole. The book, which pulls no punches and is what politicians might call a “frank and honest” discussion of life behind bars, is an easy read, free of suffocating academic jargon, though some destructive reform remedies do not survive the authors’ petri dish.

The audience targeted by the authors is the general public, and the book itself may best be appreciated as a message in a bottle sent to the wide world by Robinson Caruso, who is best able to provide the reader with the clearest understanding of Caruso’s island, which regularly ships island dwellers, hopefully reformed, to the mainland.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist and frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Ethanol from the air

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

Sometimes what might turn out to be a big story is lurking nearby with little attention. Consider the tiny startup company in Fall River called Catalytic Innovations. There, scientist Stafford Sheehan and his team are developing a  reactor system that uses air, water and sunlight (which turns into electricity in the company’s solar panels) to transform atmospheric carbon dioxide into clean-burning ethanol. Carbon dioxide has been  ominously increasing with our burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Catalytic Innovations’ work might profoundly strengthen efforts to combat global warming while providing an abundant source of clean energy.

Reuters has a short video on this exciting company.  (No, I do not own stock in it.) To see it, hit this link.

https://www.reuters.com/video/2018/02/12/catalyst-makes-alcohol-and-perfume-from?videoId=400622152&videoChannel=118065&channelName=Moments+of+Innovation

Bringing back the Rutgers tomato

Via OtherWords.org

Food corporations and their academic cohorts keep trying to “make” an industrial tomato to rival Mother Nature’s product. And they keep failing. They might consider this instead: the Rutgers 250. It’s a revived version of the classic hybrid tomato bred in 1934 by Rutgers University and Campbell Soup. The Rutgers tomato’s excellent flavor and texture made it the variety choice for years, eventually accounting for 60 percent of all tomatoes grown commercially in the United States.

But it fell out of favor in the 1960s, when big industrial growers in California and Florida switched to hard — and tasteless — tomatoes bred to withstand the crushing power of the harvesting machines they’d begun using.

That year — with the Good Food movement mushrooming and with consumers demanding that supermarkets sell truly flavorful tomatoes — plant breeders discovered that Campbell still had genetic material from the parent plants used 75 years earlier to develop the original Rutgers variety.

Since then, they’ve been working with it again, using cross-breeding techniques that go back to Latin America’s pre-Columbian natives. Slowly but surely, they brought back the Rutgers and its natural flavor, glowingly described as “the very taste of summer.”

The resurrected Rutgers tomato isn’t hard enough to be machine-harvested and shipped across country — which is one its major virtues. The fact that this tomato must be grown and marketed regionally is one step towards a decentralized, deindustrialized, and better food economy.

Instead of trying to squeeze nature into a high-tech, corporate model, this tomato represents an understanding that our food system can — and should — cooperate with nature and foster the growth of regional economies.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, public speaker and editor of the populist newsletter.

Burgeoning print life

"Print Life: Neurogenesis, from Seed to Growth" (molded paper woodcut with wheat berry seeds, and flipbook), by Eric Avery, in the "2017 North American Print Biennial,'' at the Lunder Arts Center at the Lesley University of Art and Design, Cambridge, Mass., through March 4.
 

Health system needs surge protectors

U.S. Army field hospital.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

Rhode Island and many other states have more hospital beds than they need most of the time. So here and elsewhere, some hospitals are  being closed or being turned into entirely outpatient operations. Consider the recent closing  of the inpatient part of Memorial Hospital, in Pawtucket, with considerable local anger.

But what happens when a big epidemic, such as  the current flu outbreak, or a sudden disaster, such as the Station nightclub fire, strikes?  That Rhode Island,  and the rest of New England, has an older demographic than most of America and thus a higher percentage of people who could get very sick, makes us particularly exposed.

Where do you put all these very sick and/or injured people in times of widespread medical emergencies? Instant hospitals under tents, such as on battlefields?

Our health "system'' needs surge protectors.

Suggestions appreciated.

Well, yes, there's only one

The Housatonic River at Shelton, Conn.

"Housatonic, Quinnipiac and Connecticut,

Making their way to Long Island Sound.

Connecticut, what does it mean?

With its New Englanders of every race, color and creed.

A state of great beauty and a state of mind,

There is no other place that you will find ...

A State called Connecticut.''

-- From "A State Called Connecticut,'' by Camille Simone

Industry and high culture in Worcester

American Steel & Wire Company, circa 1905,  in Worcester. At its height, the company employed thousands.

To many, Worcester may be best known as an old industrial city, with a particular focus on things made out of metal. Indeed, some people used to call it "The Pittsburgh of New England.'' 

Bu it  also has such aesthetic  and educational delights as many fine examples of Victorian-era mill architecture and Victorian mansions as well as such treasures as the American Antiquarian Society, the Worcester Art Museum, the Higgins Armory Museum, the Mechanics Hall concert venue, the EcoTarium and Clark University, where Freud gave his only lecture in America and from which came Robert Goddard, the pioneer of rocket technology.  Then there's a leading Catholic institution, the College of the Holy Cross, up on a windy hill.

Many of the rich local industrialists were avid patrons of the arts and education even as some of them were happy to employ children in their factories.

And there's  the Worcester Music Festival, allegedly the oldest music festival in the U.S.,  the Canal Festival (there are canals in Worcester dating back to Industrial Revolution days) and Rock and Shock

Beautful Mechanics Hall, in downtown Worcester.

Art against misogyny

"Bees with Honey'' (fiber), by Kimberly Becker,  in the group show "A Woman's Place,'' at the Belmont Gallery of Art, Belmont, Mass., through March 10. Kimberly Becker, a painter and embroider who is also the curator of "A Woman's Place."  Becker explains on her Web site, kimberlybecker.com; "My work speaks to current political and social issues that I believe need a loud voice. Women must tell their stories, and insist that the misogyny stop." 
 

Chris Powell: Political sanctimony won't solve gun-violence challenge

An AR-15, which was easily bought by Nikolas Cruz at a gun store and then used to murder 17 people at a Florida school.

Estimates are that 300 million guns are in private possession in the United States, 55 million Americans own guns, and that at any particular moment about 20 percent of the population is suffering some form of mental illness.

So the remarkable thing may be not that the country has mass shootings every week but that there aren't several every hour and that anyone lives beyond age 40, especially as the political atmosphere has become stifling with sanctimony about guns.

The country sure does have a gun violence problem. But the rhetoric about it often lacks much relevance.

The bodies hadn't even been hauled away from the high school massacre in Florida last week before Connecticut U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy was pacing the Senate floor denouncing Congress for having done nothing about guns. Gov. Dannel Malloy, whose administration gave early release to convict Frankie "The Razor" Resto, who quickly went on to murder a store owner in Meriden, angrily accused Republican congressmen of having blood on their hands. 

As is often the case, the problem with the quick denunciations arising from the Florida massacre is that none of the common prescriptions for diminishing gun violence would have made any difference.

More background checks? Desirable as they are, the perpetrator in Florida had no criminal record and his rifle was legally purchased at a gun shop. No "gun show sales loophole" was involved.

More mental-health appropriations? These would be helpful. But while many of the perpetrator's acquaintances regarded him as troubled and he had been expelled from high school because of misconduct, he rejected treatment.

Limit the capacity of gun magazines? This is trivial, since plenty of damage can be done whatever the magazine size and empty magazines are quickly replaced with loaded ones. 

Outlaw "assault weapons"? This usually means any rifle that just looks scary. But the only thing that matters about a gun is not its appearance but its mode of firing, and there are only three kinds of guns. 

There are fully automatic guns, semi-automatic guns and single-shot or double-shot guns The first kind reloads automatically and permits multiple rounds to be fired with a single squeeze of the trigger. The second kind also reloads automatically but requires individual trigger pulls for the discharge of each bullet. The third kind requires reloading for every one or two discharges.

Fully automatic guns are tightly regulated by the federal government and are not widely in public possession. Most modern guns are semi-automatic, as the Florida perpetrator's was. Outlawing them means outlawing most modern rifles and pistols -- that is, outlawing most of the guns held by the public -- and limiting public ownership to shotguns, bolt-loading guns, and derringers. 

If outlawing most guns is what the advocates of more restrictions want, they should be honest about it -- and they will need luck with confiscation. After all, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns -- along with President Trump, that paragon of mental stability who also controls the country’s nuclear arsenal.

So unless the country chooses gun confiscation, it may be stuck with the public identification and preventive detention of the mentally ill and more armed security for its many soft targets like schools, theaters, and nightclubs.

Where 20 percent of the population is armed and another 20 percent is psychotic, inevitably there will be some overlap, against which the usual political sanctimony will be no defense.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.,  and a frequent contributor.

 

Study suggests benefits of 'home hospital' care for acutely ill

A study  by researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital suggests that a “home hospital” care model in which patients receive hospital-level acute care at home may cut costs without hurting quality, including patient safety.

Although many  patients prefer to receive care at home, there are few “hospital at home” programs in America.

FierceHealthcare reports that gaps continue between hospitals and home-based care providers, which can pose patient-safety issues. “Home health workers are often provided incomplete or inaccurate information, and they often lack access to electronic health records to doublecheck patient information,” the news service reported.

The Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s  small randomized control trial on its pilot home hospital program found that it cut healthcare costs by half.

 The program included a daily visit from a physician and two daily visits from a home health nurse with patients also linking to physicians outside of those visits through video and/or texting.

“We haven’t dramatically changed the way we’ve taken care of acutely ill patients in this country for almost a century,” David Levine, M.D., a primary-care doctor at Brigham and the study’s lead author, said in an announcement about the study.

“There are a lot of unintended consequences of hospitalization. Being able to shift the site of care is a powerful way to change how we care for acutely ill patients and it hasn’t been studied in the U.S. with intense rigor,”  Dr. Levine added.

He and his team plan to expand the study to include a larger number of patients.

To read the study, please hit this link.

To read FierceHealthcare’s take on this, please hit this link.

The usual state of things

"Stalemate.'' by Cindy Journey, in the group show "With Eyes Wide Open,'' with the National Association of Women Artists, at the Thompson Gallery at the Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, Mass. through March 2.

'Oars & Paddles'

Into a rapture

Snow drops blooming on south-facing slope in Providence on Feb. 18.

"Was it the smile of early spring
That made my bosom glow?
'Twas sweet, but neither sun nor wind
Could raise my spirit so.

Was it some feeling of delight,
All vague and undefined?
No, 'twas a rapture deep and strong,
Expanding in the mind!"

--  Anne Bronte, "In Memory of A Happy Day in February''

A foundation for prettiness

"The White Church'' in Grafton, Vt.

You want a pretty town? It helps to find a rich foundation.

Thus it was with lovely Grafton, Vt., where back in the' 60s the Windham Foundation set up a preservation program for the whole town that did such prettifying things as restoring old buildings and covered bridges and burying all electrical and telephone lines.

The foundation says it "strives to preserve Vermont's rural way of life'' and works "to enhance the social, economic and cultural vitality of Vermont's smaller communities.''

Its efforts in Grafton were helped by the fact that many rich people "from away'' have weekend and summer homes in the rather precious-looking town.

The Grafton Inn, founded in 1801, has hosted many famous people, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling (who lived in Dummerston, Vt., in 1892-96; a battle with his alcoholic brother-inn-law drove him away) Theodore Roosevelt and other celebs down to the present day.

 

Frank Carini: Rhode Island tries to deal with a rising sea

Here at the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge, in Middletown, R.I., the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service are working to restore and strengthen salt-marsh habitat as the rising sea level poses an intensifying challenge.

Via ecoRI News (ecofri.org)

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — Rhode Island is losing and has lost thousands of acres of salt marsh, much of it to development. These unique ecosystems are a priceless resource with irreplaceable benefits, including their ability to protect the human-built world from sea-level rise.

“We’re going to hit a point when marshes can’t keep up with sea-level rise,” University of Rhode Island researcher Simon Engelhart said. “We need to let them migrate inland, or we will lose them. We need to allow marshes to do what marshes do.”

He said humans should already be retreating from the coastline. He also noted that the clearing of trees and the destabilization of soil impacts the ability of salt marshes to migrate inland.

Engelhart, an assistant professor in URI’s Department of GeoSciences, is investigating how the state’s coastline has responded to past sea level-rise changes and studying the influence of land subsidence from the last ice age to better understand future implications as sea level-rise projections continue to climb.

So far, his research has found that sea-level rise is happening faster than at any point in Rhode Island’s past 3,000 years, in part because the Ocean State is sinking. Low-lying areas such as Island Park, in Portsmouth, and Oakland Beach, in Warwick, are among the most vulnerable areas.

Engelhart noted that sea-level rise is a complicated issue with many variables, such as gravity, density changes of water, water temperatures, the strength of the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents, the draining of aquifers, groundwater withdrawals, and the rate of ice-sheet melting in Greenland, the West Antarctic, the East Antarctic and the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.

“It doesn’t go up uniformly everywhere. The ground moves, shakes and is active,”  Engelhart said during a Feb. 14 talk at the Coastal Institute Auditorium on URI’s Bay Campus as part of Rhode Island Sea Grant’s annual Coastal State Discussion Series. “Sea-level rise is about what the ocean is doing and what the land is doing.”

Although Rhode Island is losing only 1 millimeter of ground annually, according to Engelhart, it plays a meaningful role in present-day flooding along a coastal state that is mostly at sea level or 10-30 feet above.

He said land subsidence — the gradual settling or sudden sinking of the Earth’s surface owing to subsurface movement of earth materials — “is going to be important in the short-term even though it’s small because it’s still a component of what we’re seeing,” referring to nuisance flooding where high tides can now cause road closures and overwhelm storm drains. These events are expected to increase with continuing sea-level rise, he added.

“This may seem minimal compared to projected sea levels, but is still a significant contributor to sea-level rise at present,” Engelhart said.

Since 1930 the Newport tide gauge has measured about 2.7 millimeters annually of relative sea-level rise. The Providence tide gauge has measured 2.2 millimeters. Those measurements, however, don’t tell the full story.

“Eighty to ninety years of data is not enough to put anything into context,” Engelhart said. “Those are just linear rates ... they’re not accounting for the acceleration of the current rate. There’s clear acceleration in the records of the past 25 years. We need to address greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Last year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration increased its sea-level rise projectionsto up to 8 feet by 2100. The Northeast is projected to experience an additional 1-3 feet on top of NOAA modeling.

Salt marshes are highly productive ecosystems that filter out pollution, provide habitat for wildlife and protect homes from flooding. They’re also sensitive to development. 

For the long-term context of Rhode Island sea-level rise, Engelhart and his research team turned to Narragansett Bay salt marshes. He explained that salt marshes grow at different elevations to the ocean and that life in them tells a specific story. To read these marsh stories, Engelhart’s team has taken core samples from four salt marshes — Fox Hill, Touisset, Nag Creek and Osamequin — and closely examined their finds with radiocarbon dating.

The team has plans to expand the number of salt marshes where core samples are taken.

Salt marshes are shoreline wetlands that are flooded and drained by salt water brought in by the tides. These intertidal ecosystems — foraging habitat for fish, shellfish, birds and mammals, and home to nursery areas and spawning grounds — are essential for healthy coastlines, communities and fisheries. They are an integral part of Rhode Island’s economy and culture.

They also have and continue to take a pounding. For instance, more than 50 percent of Narragansett Bay’s salt marshes have been destroyed during the past three centuries. Much of the remaining marshes have been diminished by coastal development and failed mosquito ditching. Mosquito ditches are narrow channels that were dug to drain the upper reaches of salt marshes. It was believed that such efforts would control mosquito breeding, but all that work did was drain salt marshes and kill off mummichogs, a mosquito-eating fish that are important prey for herons, egrets and larger predatory fish.

Healthy salt marshes help communities, buildings, infrastructure and the environment better withstand the impacts of sea-level rise and coastal storm surge. Salt marshes protect shorelines from erosion by buffering wave action and trapping sediment. These vital ecosystems reduce flooding by absorbing rainwater, and protect water quality by filtering runoff and metabolizing excess nutrients, such as nitrogen.

Salt marshes, however, are highly sensitive to development. Polluted stormwater runoff from inland development can damage salt-marsh health. Engelhart also noted that the marshes of Narragansett Bay face another problem: a lack of sediment supply.

James Boyd of the state’s Coastal Resources Management Council partook in an informal conversation, which included about a dozen questions from the audience, after Engelhart’s recent presentation.

Boyd noted that if sea level in Rhode Island rose a foot, 13 percent of the state’s remaining salt marshes would be lost; 3 feet, 62 percent; 5 feet, 83 percent.

“Our salt marshes are in trouble,” said the coastal policy analyst. “The ability of salt marshes to migrate inland is the most important element. We need to preserve that upland. That’s what will save our salt marshes: room to move.”

The impact of losing healthy salt marsh can be seen across southern New England. The coastal portion of the Sapowet Marsh Wildlife Management Area, in Tiverton, has experienced more than 90 feet of shoreline erosion in the past 75 years, according to the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

The Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service are working to restore and strengthen salt-marsh habitat at the Sachuest Point National Wildlife Refuge, in Middletown, to better withstand the impacts of sea-level rise, coastal storm surge and coastal erosion.

Salt marshes of the picturesque Narrow River are threatened by a combination of rising water and human activity. In recent years, motorboat wakes and extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy have destroyed 15 percent of the watershed’s marshland, according to state officials.

Salt-marsh islands in the West Branch of the Westport River have declined by nearly half during the past 80 years, according to a 2017 report.

By studying aerial imagery of six salt-marsh islands in the river’s West Branch, scientists found that the total area of salt marshes has consistently declined during the past eight decades, with losses dramatically increasing in the past 15 years. Altogether, the six islands lost a total of 12 acres of salt marsh since 1938. If marsh losses continue at the accelerated rate observed during the past 15 years, the Westport River’s marsh islands could disappear within 15 to 58 years, according to the researchers.

“Plan for the worst-case scenario is the best way to handle sea-level rise,” Engelhart said. “Take the longer-term view. There’s benefits regardless if we cut greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Engelhart’s research aims to provide a better understanding of future coastal hazards, to help coastal planners make more informed decisions.

Frank Carini is editor of ecoRI News.

David Warsh: Amidst scandals, centrists are gaining as Mueller plays a long game

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Prosecutors’ charges against 13 Russian individuals and organizations for interfering with the 2016 presidential election are the latest step in a lengthy and painful process in which serious people of both political parties are working to straighten the U.S. political narrative out of a very difficult twist of the plot.

Remember its central feature; it now seems a long time ago.  The 2016 campaign was widely expected, at least for a time, to become a Hillary Clinton-Jeb Bush rematch -– a continuation of a 25-year antagonism in which both candidates had been damaged.  That prospect was so unattractive that challengers arose in both parties – 16 of them in the Republican case. Bernie Sanders failed to win his party’s nomination, but Donald Trump improbably gained his. The election campaign began. As Michael Wolf’s Fire and Fury: Inside Trump’s White House (Henry Holt, 2018) makes clear, Donald Trump never expected to win.

Two disruptive forces of particular interest intervened in the election itself.  One was the  Russian interference.  The other was an incipient FBI mutiny, involving agents in at least four field offices, eager to indict Clinton for matters related to the Clinton Foundation, and threatening to go to the press or to Congress.  Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett surfaced as much in "FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe''  (subscription required) on Monday, Oct. 31, 2016, a few weeks before he left the WSJ for The Washington Post.  Those angry agents had a point, of course: there was something suspect about the Clinton Foundation from the very beginning. But the late stages of a presidential campaign is no time to begin an investigation.

The Russian campaign has received a great deal of attention, the FBI mutiny hardly any at all, but it was the threat of disclosure of previously unexamined Clinton e-mails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop that forced  then FBI Director James Comey to reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private server. As former WSJ columnist Bret Stephens wrote last month in The New York Times (he moved to The Times a few months after the election), the FBI “probably did more than any other agency of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled FBI field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton e-mail investigation 11 days before the election.”

It is impossible to say with any real authority that either intervention tipped the election.  Clinton contends that Comey cost her the White House. Trump pretends that he received no such help. This much is clear: Had Clinton won, she would by now be up to her ears in investigations of the Clinton Foundation, from Congress at least.  Talk about the winner’s curse!

The new indictments mean that the Russian meddling that Trump has repeatedly denounced as a “hoax” turns out to have been quite real.  The charges make it much more difficult to fire Mueller. The president was quick to pronounce himself off the hook.  Soon after the Justice Department delivered the news, he tweeted, “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong. No collusion!”

Yet there are many more steps to go. It is still very much an open question whether Trump will serve out his term; it is highly unlikely that he could be re-elected. Congressional Republicans remain in Trump’s corner, it is true. Some development may yet turn them against him. Maybe.  Maybe not.

Meanwhile, dealing with FBI mutineers remains part of the problem, moving them onto side tracks, or out of the bureau altogether, proceedings the still-divided agency understandably hopes to keep within the family.  They may not be able to.  Part of Trump’s aim in firing Comey presumably had to do with hopes of advancing the careers of agents who helped him during the campaign, including the mutineers. The rogues continue to stick up for themselves, in leaks to two WSJ columnists, William McGurn and Holman Jenkins Jr. (subscription required). Former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani has all but disappeared from the news, after serving as one end of a conduit for “outraged FBI agents” during the campaign.

This is how plot lines adjust. Elections take time. It doesn’t help for the enraged Left to say that the Republican Party “basically lies about everything.” Everything?  Deputy Atty. Gen.  Rod Rosenstein announced Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments last week – both men are long-time Republicans.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a James Baker III proxy, is still on the job. So are White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the other two calming generals:  Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster.

Meanwhile, former presidential nominee Mitt Romney announced his candidacy last week for the Senate in Utah. If elected, he will take on the role performed to this point by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) – a conscience of sorts for a political party that has otherwise lost its head.

The sooner the current Republican majority in Congress loses power to the Democrats, the sooner that sensible women and men can begin rebuilding the party. The Democrats’ own major rebuilding is well underway.

David Warsh, an economic historian and long-time business and political columnist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this first ran.