Swanning in the Public Garden

“City parks are for pleasure. Boston’s Public Garden is a gentle park and the pleasure comes from the tulip beds’ swatches of color that proclaim the spring, from the roses that follow, and from the all-summer contrast of shade and sunlight under the great trees. The action is provided by the Swan Boats, which made their first voyage in the lagoon in 1877, and have been circling the tiny island ever since.’’

 -- The late Atlantic Monthly editor Edward Weeks, for his essay “The Swan Boats of Boston,’’ in Arthur Griffin’s New England: The Four Seasons. The Atlantic was founded in, and based for many years in, Boston.

Tim Faulkner: More hurdles for plans to import Quebec electricity

Proposed New England Clean Energy Connect project.

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)

News continues to get worse for the Northern Pass project and efforts to deliver Canadian hydropower to southern New England.

On May 24, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee denied an appeal by Northern Pass to overturn the decision that rejected the 192-mile-long high-voltage transmission line though the state.

The siting committee initially rejected the $1.6 billion project on Feb. 1 because of concern that the network of unsightly power lines and towers would harm tourism, local businesses and the environment.

According to the siting board, the appeal failed because there was no new information to review. And despite objections by Northern Pass, the positive elements of the application had been considered in the initial decision, committee members said.

"If there were conditions they could meet to approve it, we would have approved it with those conditions," said Bill Oldenburg of the Site Evaluation Committee in a video of the meeting taken by WMUR-TV, of Manchester, N.H.

In an online statement, Northern Pass, a joint venture between Eversource and Hydro-Québec, said it remains committed to the project and is considering taking the siting committee’s decision to court.

“We intend to pursue all options for making this critical clean energy project a reality, along with the many economic and environmental benefits for New Hampshire and the region. This opportunity to significantly lower energy costs for customers should be given great weight,” said Eversource New Hampshire president Bill Quinlan. “Large infrastructure projects of this scale often face challenges during the siting process, and we will continue to work with all of the stakeholders to present a project that receives New Hampshire’s approval.”

Meanwhile, Massachusetts, which has agreed to a 20-year power-purchase agreement for Northern Pass energy, has shifted its focus from Northern Pass to New England Clean Energy Connect (NECEC), a power-line transmission project that delivers Québec hydropower through western Maine to Lewiston, Maine, and on to Massachusetts.

The 145-mile project has broad community support, including from Maine Gov. Paul LePage.

The transmission system is opposed by the environmental group  (NRCM), which says the project will damage 53 miles of forest. The conservation group worries that NECEC won’t receive the same vetting as Northern Pass.

“Rather than allowing Maine regulators to go through the same thoughtful process that led New Hampshire to reject that project, Gov. Paul LePage, through a spokesperson, has vowed to ram the project through Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection,” according to a March 19 NRCM statement.

The Boston Globe editorial board criticized opponents of NECEC for overlooking the 1,200 megawatts of low-emission-creating electricity and the tax revenue it will bring to communities along the route.

The financial benefits are far less than the $200 million in tourism funding and $30 million in annual tax revenue promised by Northern Pass. So far, local taxes are the only revenue promised by NECEC.

State and local lawmakers are now rethinking their initial support for the project, in hopes of increasing the financial benefits to the state. There is also concern over the fact that none of the hydropower will be available for in-state use. Local renewable-energy projects will also be unable to connect to the power lines.

NECEC is being developed by Hydro-Québec and the utility Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of the multinational corporation Avangrid.

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and state utilities are negotiating a power-purchase contract with Central Maine Power for the project. The agreement must be approved by the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities. State permits are expected by the end of 2018. Federal permits are expected in 2019.

Tim Faulkner is a journalist with ecoRI News.

Literature for the ages

"Charlotte's Web'' (crystallized book), by Georgia Heard, at Patricia Ladd Carega Gallery, Center Sandwich, N.H.

Llewellyn King: Subjected to corporate 'elites' electronic runaround, voters turned to Trump

Trump is the product of a frustrated electorate sick of elites in Washington which pay no heed to the people who pay the taxes and have little interest in them. Thus runs the popular narrative of how we got President Donald Trump and why his base, despite everything, is firmly committed to him.

Half right, I say.

There was a great national dissatisfaction at the time of the election and there is so today. But was that really the result of unhappiness with elites in Washington?

I’d suggest that it is the daily frustration we all face in simply going about our business. Elites are to blame, but not the elites named in the political narrative that has become the conventional view of the Trump phenomenon.

The elites who frustrate us are the large corporate ones that we cannot live without and have difficulty living with. Substitute corporations for elites.

In no particular order, they are the insurance companies, the banks, the credit-card companies, the airlines, the hospitals, the telephone companies, the cable TV providers, Amtrak, Amazon and other corporations that hide behind a battery of devices programmed to avoid any direct human contact with the customer.

In fact, to most billion-dollar-plus corporations, the individual is less significant than a grain of sand on a California beach. These suppliers of our needs are hidden in a thicket of automatic phone systems that seem to require that you spend half an hour in a maze of prompts before, maybe, you reach a person who will also behave as though he or she is a recording; a person who is reading from a script and diverting your pleadings.

Collectively, what they’d like to tell you is you are in the wrong and will always be in the wrong because you are a statistical inconvenience, your custom a nuisance.

Step forward my bank.

More than 40 years ago, I added my then-wife to a credit card. We had an amicable divorce and we both got married again.

Regularly, over the years, I’ve asked my bank to remove her name, Jane Doe King -- to protect her privacy -- from the card. I paid all the bills and my notes with the payments and letters were never answered.

Suddenly this year, my bank decided that it was imperative that they get information on Jane Doe King, who is a nonexistent person. I went to my branch, explained the situation and was told by an officer that she’d been removed from the card. All’s well that ends well.

But it wasn’t the end, and all wasn’t well.

A few days later, when I tried to call an Uber car, I learned that my card was blocked because Jane Doe King hadn’t supplied her financial information to my bank.

I called my bank. After the de rigueur half an hour of playing the equivalent of telephone pinball with their answering system and the irrelevant prompts, I spoke to a representative. He might as well have been a recording because no matter what I said, he went back to the script in front of him.

I explained, he demurred. Jane Doe King would have to prove first that she existed and then that she wanted to be removed from the card, which she had never used in more than 40 years.

I asked him to call the officer in the bank’s branch with whom I’d spoken. He said his phones didn’t have outgoing lines and so he couldn’t do that. I said I’d go to the bank’s branch and have the officer call the credit card department and straighten out the matter. But he wouldn’t give me his direct-dial number or his last name; just his first name and the general number. I went into serious profanity-suppression mode.

Only the appearance of the person who does not exist would satisfy the Man Who Can’t Make Phone Calls. Fearing temper loss, I hung up and emailed the bank officer who had “fixed” the problem. He hasn’t replied.

The message is that you, the customer, and your account and patronage don’t count.

Even as you read this, thousands of Americans are getting the electronic runaround as they try to solve simple issues. Confused and angry they are turning to the wildest political solution they can: Trump. Sadly, this is another abortive pursuit.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

Oily East Coast to come?

Kelp covered with oil from coastal spill.

The Trump administration wants to allow oil and gas drilling off the East Coast, except off big swing state Florida. But Republican and Democratic governors and local leaders are up in arms about it because of the potentially devastating effect on tourism -- people generally don’t like oily beaches – and fishing.

Trump’s love love of retro, fossil-fuel energy seems particularly vivid when seen against the news of the big wind turbine installations soon to go up south of Massachusetts.

Some fishermen --- squid catchers particularly -- are concerned about the impact of  setting up these “wind farms,’’ but they should think about what an oil spill could do. And, as has been shown in European coastal wind farms, the wind-turbine foundations act as reefs,  which can increase the number of  fish (and species) around coastal and offshore wind installations. Hit this link to read more on this.

and this link.

'For what they are'

"By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,        

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet        

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are. ''

-- ''Hyla Brook,''   by Robert Frost

Hyla Brook was near the farm on which Frost and his family lived in 1900-1911.

Those North Country youths were specialists in being generalists

The New Hampshire Farm Museum on White Mountain Highway (New Hampshire Route 125), in Milton.

Three centuries of Granite State rural life, and ingenuity, are presented  at the museum, whose center is an historic farmhouse. The museum includes a 104-foot-long,  three-story great barn with collections of agricultural machinery, farm tools, sleighs and wagons. There are also live farm animals, a nature trail and a museum shop.

The museum is  on the former Plumer-Jones Farm, with  a typically  New England series of connected buildings. The farmhouse's oldest part dates to the late 18th Century and  the barns to the mid 19th Century.

"A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.''

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Chris Powell: A tax increase called 'Passport to Parks'; must cute cows come first in Conn,?

Dairy farm in Redding, Conn., now part of New York City exurbia.

Why all the celebration this week of "Passport to Parks," the new policy of free parking at state parks for vehicles with Connecticut license plates?

For the parking won't really be free at all. It has been extended to Connecticut drivers because last year the General Assembly and Gov. Dannel Malloy enacted a $10 increase in vehicle registration and renewal fees to finance the removal of parking charges for state-registered vehicles.

The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection had been complaining that reductions to its budget were jeopardizing access to the parks. So the increase in vehicle registration fees has established a fund dedicated to park purposes.

But it's a fraud. For the governor and legislature seize supposedly dedicated funds and move them into the general fund whenever money runs short, and the higher registration fees are forcing all drivers, including hundreds of thousands of people who never use the parks, to pay even more for their upkeep while people who do use the parks are paying less.

Financing the parks with vehicle registration fees is worse than financing them with income, sales, and business taxes. For vehicle registration fees are less progressive than those taxes. That is, unlike those taxes, registration fees have no correlation with ability to pay and so they fall more heavily on the poor.

But legislators and the governor thought that raising vehicle registration fees was better politically than an ordinary tax increase because it would make a tax increase on people who don't use the parks look like an increase in services to [ITALICS] everyone. [END ITALICS]

And why the celebration this week of Governor Malloy's restoration of $1.4 million in state government subsidies to dairy farmers?

Yes, as the governor and Agriculture Commissioner Steven K. Reviczky said at Cushman Farms in Franklin as they announced renewal of the subsidies, Connecticut's dairy farmers work hard for little profit and milk prices can be volatile. But many businesses in the state are having difficulty. What makes dairy farms so critical? 

Commissioner Reviczky cited the jobs provided by dairy farms and what he said the farms add to the state's "quality of life." But dairy farm jobs are few, and the contribution of dairy farms to quality of life is, at least for their neighbors, mainly muck and stink. 

The manager of Cushman Farms, Jim Smith, argues that "the money doesn't stay at the farm very long. It goes back out into the economy. So this is more like a stimulus." But of course that could be said for any government subsidy. Most of the money would have been spent as well if state government had left it with taxpayers instead of transferring it to the dairy farmers.

The problems with the dairy industry in Connecticut are that its farms are on average too small ever to be competitive nationally, that the state just isn't rural enough anymore to allow for larger farms, and that any farm large enough to be competitive would have too many neighbors who wouldn't stand for it. These days neighbors complain about farms even where the farms long preceded housing.

Further, while state government this week was discovering $1.4 million to prop up a failing business model, it still faces, for example, an estimated $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and a waiting list of 2,000 mentally handicapped people living with elderly parents and seeking placement in group homes.

At a distance cows can be cute and scenic, but must they really come first? 

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

 

Thinking outside the frame

"Evaporation, flow study #7,'' by Patty Stone, at the Brookline (Mass.) Arts Center group show "Unframed,'' June 15-July 20.   The show displays unframed art work  on paper. The gallery says that "Each piece is purposely displayed directly on the gallery wall, allowing a more thorough exploration of each piece. 'Expanding and releasing the paper from its constraining structure often creates visual, as well as structural problems within the work,' said Elaine Sapochetti, one of the artists  in the exhibition. 'Yet, challenging these restrictions also makes the development of the art endlessly exhilarating and the completed work always a surprise. Just as in life, pushing boundaries can frequently lead to new, complicated, exciting, and inspiring revelations."'

Lowell's literary 'Factory Girls'

The Boott Cotton Mill Museum and Trolley, in Lowell.

"Overnight the brick town of Lowell {Mass.} rose on the Merrimack River, attracting hundreds of farmers' daughters with relatively high wages. For a generation the Lowell Factory Girls, with their neat dresses, proud deportment and literary weekly, were one of the wonders of America -- the first which Charles Dickens, arriving in New England, requested to see.''

-- From How New England Happened (1976), by Christina Tree.

Literary journal by "Lowell Factory Girls''.

Dangerous neighborhood

"Turning Great Horn Owl'' (granite), by Andreas von Huene ,at the Mill Brook Gallery and Sculpture Garden, Concord, N.H.

Memories of my wet wealth

I wandered lonely as a star

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a bar,

A host of golden liquid thrills,

And there inside for me to choose,

All manner of delightful booze.

I asked and so I did receive

A cocktail heavy on the gin,

A perfect lovely bright reprieve

For me to drown my sorrows in,

And then more drinks, so nice and fine,

All leading me to joy divine.

"The world is in a glass!" I said.

"What more could I desire than this?"

Sobriety's like being dead,

And alcohol is surely bliss."

I drank and drank but little thought

What wealth these drinks to me had brought.

For oft when on my couch I lie,

I know well what these drinks have brought.

They flash upon that inward eye,

Complete with all the joy I sought.

I always can revive my mood

Recalling times when I got stewed.

"Who Needs Daffodils,'' by Felicia Nimue Ackerman

A cat would be safer

"One Day I'll Have a Cat and a Lover,'' by Candice Smith Corby, at the Fruitlands  Museum, Harvard, Mass.

Harvard is an affluent rural town in Worcester County  is about 25 miles west-northwest of Boston. It was settled as a  farming community  in 1658 and incorporated in 1732. It has hosted several eccentric communities, such as Harvard Shaker Village and the utopian Transcendentalist center Fruitlands, after which the museum is named.

Harvard's Shaker Village in about 1905.

Harvard's common.

Solidarity forever

Llewellyn King: Upheaval at work

"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse'', by Victor Vasnetsov.

Pondering the future requires an extrapolation from a data point in the present. But different data points give very different futures. Beware of the prognosticators.

Take this as a data point: Stephen Entin, senior fellow at the Tax Foundation, a think tank devoted to tax studies since 1937, predicts that with an aging population and low birthrates, we’re going to need more immigrants to fill the federal and state coffers with their taxes. We’re also going to need hundreds of thousands of workers for health care and aged care in the years ahead, he says.

Or take this as a data point:  Prof. Tom Kochan, of MIT's Sloan {business} School, fears that artificial intelligence will substitute for millions of employees. Retraining is possible, but can you see a long-haul truck driver pushing wheelchairs in an assisted-living facility? Not easily.

Upheaval in work is the most predictable aspect of the future.

It is, if you will, already arriving in the workplace. New techniques and new concepts of what is work are afoot.

The old concept is that a person leaves school, gets a job and signs on to the social/work contract — gets company-paid benefits and expects security and stability. The infrastructure of society pointed the way to employer-employee model.

The new concept is the gig economy, where contract work and freelancing rule. The work/social infrastructure where medical insurance, Social Security and retirement are part of the deal is dying. But a one has yet to emerge in concept and in law.

Business is in the throes of its own future adjustment. Take 3D printing, more correctly called additive manufacturing. What was novelty a decade ago is now a tool used in industrial plants across the country. Instead of taking a chunk of metal, say aluminum, and cutting and lathing it to make a part, which wasted most of the metal, there’s no waste with 3D printing.

Now to make a part, you print it from metal powder to a design lodged in a computer. The saving in material, shipping and manpower is enormous.

And additive manufacturing, just like everything else on the shop floor, can be automated. Machines can sinter — the term for 3D printing — through the night with only artificial intelligence supervision.

There’s a new existential worry in every large enterprise in the United States, from banking to manufacturing, from electricity generation to hospital management and from building crane operation to pharmaceutical design: cyber-vulnerability.

To paraphrase a line from several famous people about politics: You may not be interested in cyberwar, but cyberwar is interested in you.

I’ve interviewed widely on the subject, from top academics to some of the most successful cyber-security entrepreneurs, to National Security Agency sources. The story is the same everywhere: Nothing connected to computers is entirely safe; and if it’s safe today, will it be tomorrow? That plague, like the plagues of old, will, I’m assured, be with us for decades, if not centuries to come.

Cyber defenders build, cyber hackers build around. It’s a version of what one former secretary of defense, Harold Brown, said about the Soviet threat in the Cold War: “We build, they build.”

The changes are all around the home: Everything has changed since the day of the black AT&T phone, but you haven’t seen anything yet. Your packages may be delivered by drone, your phone service will be entirely mobile, and your life will be dictated by electronic secretarial aids. Alexa is just the beginning. With artificial intelligence, these robots will talk back to us and maybe argue, shudder the thought.

I pity the dogs. We had a dog that would be very upset if she heard my wife, a talk show regular, on the television when she was also elsewhere in the house. Dogs are sensitive to these things.

What if man’s best friend, eternal unquestioning companion, develops a strong affection for the electronic assistant and changes loyalties, especially if the gadget is feeding the dog? Will it be as Julius Caesar might have said, “Et tu, Fido?”

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

Old houses and high water

Easton's Point, Newport

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

The Point Association of Newport, the civic organization that represents the low-lying, flood-prone Easton’s Point neighborhood, famed for its 18th Century houses, is an exemplary model of local citizens trying to address rising seas by working with the city, the state, Rhode Island’s congressional delegation and others on mitigation of flooding.

Tom Hockaday, who chairs the association, told me that rising seas “have slowly bubbled up to a critical issue,’’ for which, of course, “no one has the total solution.’’

He wishes that “things would go faster’’ to address the threat, but, he says, “we have some time’’ to prepare even as with most difficult things, ‘’people will tend to wait until the last minute.’’
 

“The big questions are the cost, and who will take leadership.’’  (In the end, the primary leader must be the federal government.) In any case, he says, for now much of the association’s work involves communicating the seriousness of the developing coastal crisis.

Still, he said, house prices have not yet fallen in his pricey neighborhood, despite the more frequent flooding. People love the old houses and being by the sea and will put up with some risk to have them.

'Death looks gigantically down'

"The City" (graphite on paper), by Josefina Auslender, at Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, Maine.

"LO! Death has reared himself a throne

In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim West,

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.        

There shrines and palaces and towers

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not)

Resemble nothing that is ours.

Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky        

The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down

On the long night-time of that town;

But light from out the lurid sea

Streams up the turrets silently,     

Gleams up the pinnacles far and free:

Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls,

Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls,

Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers

Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers,       

Up many and many a marvellous shrine

Whose wreathëd friezes intertwine

The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie.        

So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in air,

While from a proud tower in the town

Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves       

Yawn level with the luminous waves;

But not the riches there that lie

In each idol’s diamond eye,—

Not the gayly-jewelled dead,

Tempt the waters from their bed;      

For no ripples curl, alas,

Along that wilderness of glass;

No swellings tell that winds may be

Upon some far-off happier sea;

No heavings hint that winds have been       

On seas less hideously serene!

But lo, a stir is in the air!

The wave—there is a movement there!

As if the towers had thrust aside,

In slightly sinking, the dull tide;    

As if their tops had feebly given

A void within the filmy Heaven!

The waves have now a redder glow,

The hours are breathing faint and low;

And when, amid no earthly moans,        

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence.''

-- "The City in the Sea,'' by Edgar Allen Poe

Wells Beach in 1908.

Wells Beach in 2017.

A proper summer meeting

"Two Rooks and a Bishop" (oil on canvas), by Wendy Brusick, in the group show "Head Space,'' at ArtProv Gallery,   Providence,  June 8-July 21.

Jim Hightower: Don't be fooled by Trump's drug-price ploy

From OtherWords.org

President Trump is said to see himself as a sort of Teddy Roosevelt. TR, however, was known as a trust buster, while DT has become known as a trust hugger.

We recently saw the hugger in action when he held a PR event to ballyhoo 50 proposals to stop Big Pharma from gouging American consumers with monopolistic drug pricing.

People are rightly outraged that pill-peddling giants exploit patients who have life-threatening diseases and routinely jack up prices on common drugs by some 10 percent a year. As a presidential candidate, Trump jumped on this hot issue, accusing drug makers of “getting away with murder.”

So, now with typical modesty, he’s revealed his plan to stop the rip-offs, calling his 50 proposals the “most sweeping action in history to lower the price of prescription drugs for the American people.”

Yeah, “sweeping” — as in sweeping the problem under the White House rug.

Fifty is just a political number meant to puff-up Trump’s plan as something BIG. But as one congressional Democrat pointed out, all 50 amount to “a sugar-coated nothing pill.” Nowhere on that list of 50 things was Trump’s own campaign promise to use the purchasing power of Medicare to negotiate lower prices for seniors.

Far from feeling punished, Big Pharma itself felt it had gotten a warm presidential hug. Drug company stock prices went up immediately after the presidential speech.

It’s really no surprise that Trump is letting these corporate profiteers continue “getting away with murder.” After all, political posturing aside, he’s stacked his administration with drug industry executives like Alex Azar, a former Eli Lily honcho who is now Trump’s secretary of health.

How revealing that Azar was standing right behind the president at the White House media event, beaming and applauding as Trump announced… well, a lot of nothing.

Jim Hightower, an OtherWords columnist, is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. He’s also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown

Cape fishermen worry about midwater trawling catching everything

A large trawler.

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

CHATHAM, Mass.

Ted Ligenza, captain of the Reine Marie, has known for more than two decades that big changes are needed, ever since he first saw the impact of big midwater trawls working off the Cape Cod coast.

That day, according to the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, he figured he would just wait on his boat until the trawls pulled out, and then he would drop his hooks and lines on the bottom to pick up where he had left off. After all, midwater trawls are supposed to fish in the middle of the water column.

“I was soon to learn that if they are towing, nothing would be left there. They are basically catching everything,” he told the fishermen’s alliance. “We didn't realize how bad it was going to be.”

On June 19, Ligenza and others across Cape Cod are expected to testify to federal fisheries managers about how the local ecosystem has suffered from the prolonged presence of these industrial-scaled boats. They will be advocating for a buffer zone off the coast that protects the trawlers’ target, ocean herring, as well as river herring and other forage fish that are caught and discarded as bycatch.

The New England Fishery Management Council has scheduled the hearing at the Chatham Community Center, only a few miles from several herring runs that have seen populations decline. Industrial trawlers, often seen from Nauset Beach, are a familiar sight off the Cape Cod coast. Those concerned about the trawlers’ presence have noted how these ships break the local food web and remove so many baitfish that other species — cod, haddock, tuna and whales — also disappear.

Fishermen with the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance first started speaking out against midwater trawling near shore more than a decade ago, and have been joined by a growing coalition in recent years. Public officials from every Cape Cod town, Barnstable County and the region’s Statehouse delegation all support a year-round buffer, as do many environmental, scientific and civic organizations.

Rhode Island fishermen have also been outspoken about out-of-state trawlers, about 150 feet long, fishing close to the Narragansett and Charlestown shoreline.

“Of all the issues facing us as a fishing community, protecting herring and forage fish might be the most important step we could take to rebuild our fishery and revitalize our waters,” said John Pappalardo, CEO of the fishermen's alliance. “A strong call to action would be an important message for federal managers to hear.”

The public hearing is scheduled for June 19, at the Chatham Community Center, 702 Main St., from 6-8 p.m. Public testimony is welcome.