'Why is the world so old?'

On a beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

“The low sandy beach and the thin scrub pine,

The wide reach of bay and the long sky line,—

O, I am sick for home!

The salt, salt smell of the thick sea air,

And the smooth round stones that the ebbtides wear,—

When will the good ship come?

The wretched stumps all charred and burned,

And the deep soft rut where the cartwheel turned,—

Why is the world so old?

The lapping wave, and the broad gray sky

Where the cawing crows and the slow gulls fly,

Where are the dead untold?

The thin, slant willows by the flooded bog,

The huge stranded hulk and the floating log,

Sorrow with life began!

And among the dark pines, and along the flat shore,

O the wind, and the wind, for evermore!

What will become of man?’’

— “Cape Cod,’’ by George Santayana

Photo taken around the turn of the 20th Century.



Jill Richardson: Billionaire candidates don't get it

Via OtherWords.org.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz just announced he may run for president as an independent centrist candidate in 2020.

I have some concerns about billionaires, however well-intentioned, running the country.

For one thing, people generally pay a lot of attention to those who have more than them, but they are less aware of those who have less. A billionaire with “just” a private jet will compare himself to an even richer billionaire with their own private island. They don’t have any idea what life is really like for a single parent raising two kids while working and attending night classes.

Social psychologists find that people usually believe they are responsible for their successes, but blame their failures on external factors like bad luck or a sluggish economy. They also extend the same benefit of the doubt to people within their own group.

When looking at people in other groups, they are less generous. Then they tend to blame people for their own failures.

As a result, the rich generally believe that worked hard for everything they had — but many think the poor are probably poor because they’re lazy. In reality, all people’s fates are due to both their own talents and efforts and their circumstances.

Think about Donald Trump. He was born to a wealthy and well-connected real estate mogul in New York. His father gave him millions, sent him to elite schools, trained him in the business, and introduced him to the powerful people whose help he needed to succeed.

Would Donald Trump gone anywhere in business if he were born to your parents? Very unlikely. But could you have done even better than Trump in business if you were born to his parents? It’s definitely possible.

Trump, no doubt, believes his success is solely due to his own work and “genius,” but it’s undeniable that the circumstances he was born into played a role.

The same of true for those with less extraordinary privilege.

Imagine a college classroom filled with 30 equally talented and hardworking students. Some come from well off families, live with their parents, and don’t need to work while attending school. Others come from poverty and hold full time jobs to pay their living expenses and tuition.

Perhaps some are homeless, or food insecure. Maybe they have to care for children or elderly relatives in addition to attending school. They might not have reliable transportation or own a computer at home.

Who will get better grades? Who will graduate sooner? Who might not graduate at all?

Good bet the students from wealthy families will feel they’ve earned their good grades and will have no idea what the students with lower grades were facing at home. They might even think students who got poor grades did so because they were stupid, lazy, or both.

In such a class, the best way to get grades up might be to help the students have stable living situations, enough to eat, fewer money woes, and less need to work full time while attending school. Just telling the low income students to work harder can only help so much when they’re in such a tough situation — it may even demoralize them further.

We need a government that understands the lives and struggles of ordinary Americans and can craft policies to help them. Billionaires generally won’t, regardless of their intentions, because it’s human nature to be generally clueless about those with less privilege than you.

Jill Richardson, a sociologist, is an OtherWords.org columnist.

Absorbing the forest

“Rhododendron Forest 1” (incised photograph) by Hilary Tolan, in her show “Emerge,’’ at the Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 14.

The gallery says that her “images, both delicate and fierce, encourage the viewer to slow down and absorb the stillness and intricacy they offer. Emerge is a collection of photographs and drawings initiated 10 years ago during a three-week residency and daily walks into an overgrown rhododendron forest. ‘‘

Kudos for UNH research

Thompson Hall, finished in 1892, is the oldest academic building built for the flagship campus of UNH, which moved to Durham from Hanover in 1893.

This is from The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com):

“The University of New Hampshire (UNH), a New England Council member, has been ranked by the Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education as one of the top research universities in the country. This new rating places UNH among the 130 doctoral-granting universities with a ‘very high research activity’ label. UNH is one of only three public universities in New England, along with UMass at Amherst and the University of Connecticut, to achieve the ‘R1’ rating.

“With research programs in a range of fields, from space physics to vulnerable populations, the school attracts more than $110 million in research funding each year. UNH officials believe that this new ranking will attract talented students, researchers, faculty, and staff, as well as signal to government agencies, philanthropists, and businesses that the school can be expected to conduct high-quality research and education.

“Jan Nisbet, UNH senior vice provost for research, commented, ‘This is a powerful recognition of UNH as one of the nation’s highest-performing research universities. It underscores our ongoing commitment to research and scholarship that improves the lives of people here in the Granite State and across the globe.’’’

David Warsh: A climate dividend plan gains wide support

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

The existence of a concrete and credible plan to steadily reduce carbon emissions in the United States makes it possible that the 2020 presidential election could be about climate change instead of the vandal presidency of Donald J. Trump. How likely IS that? Today, it’s anybody’s guess. But a couple of things have become apparent this month.

One is that the preponderance of expert opinion, at least among the most distinguished economists, now supports a climate dividend plan. (Resource economists, a subset of the whole, hard to sample, and less attuned to politics, may be a different matter.) The other is that a logical candidate to campaign on the issue is on the verge of declaring his candidacy.

The revenue-neutral tax and dividend plan has been publicly espoused since 2013 by two grandees of the Republican Party, James Baker and George Shultz, secretary of s

tate, respectively, to George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. They first proposed it, with former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as Western forest fires began to ramp up.

Since then, the Climate Leadership Council, a two-year-old Washington think-tank founded by serial policy-entrepreneur Ted Halstead has built support for the plan among multinational corporations, business leaders, and non-profit organizations. Founders include BP, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and ExxonMobil, among major energy companies; General Motors, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, the Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund.

In 1997, Halstead organized an Economists Statement on Climate Change, drafted by Kenneth Arrow, Dale W. Jorgenson, Paul Krugman, William Nordhaus, and Robert Solow, on the eve of Kyoto Protocol negotiations. The framers then were ambivalent as to the best means of emissions control: either carbon taxes or cap-and-trade permit auctions designed to meet emission targets. Since then, support has waned for cap-and trade, on grounds that those auctions concentrate power in the hands of administrators and politicians.

This month, the CLC published a second expression, Economists Statement on Carbon Dividends, signed initially by 27 Nobel laureates, all 4 living former Fed chairs, and 15 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers.

This time the signatories came down firmly on the side of carbon taxation. Among laureates, only Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, James Heckman and Edward Prescott declined to sign. Organizers included politically involved economists Martin Feldstein, Lawrence Summers, N. Gregory Mankiw, and Austan Goolsbee.

The Economists Statement omitted key details of the Baker-Shultz plan, presumably in the interest of attracting the widest possible array of support. Not all signers, for instance, are eager to buttress the American government’s income security programs grouped together as the Social Security system. The second of four tenets of the plan promoted by CLS reads,

“All the proceeds from this carbon fee would be returned to the American people on an equal and quarterly basis via dividend checks, direct deposits or contributions to their individual retirement accounts. In the example above of a $40/ton carbon fee, a family of four would receive approximately $2,000 in carbon dividend payments in the first year. This amount would grow over time as the carbon fee rate increases, creating a positive feedback loop: the more the climate is protected, the greater the individual dividend payments to all Americans. The Social Security Administration should administer this program, with eligibility for dividends based on a valid social security number.’’

What about the promise that elimination of regulations that would be rendered superfluous by a rising carbon fee, so long as it was buttressed by the popularity of quarterly dividends? Many, though not all, of the Obama-era carbon dioxide regulations could be safely phased out, proponents promise, including an outright repeal of the Clean Power Plan. They continue:

“To build and sustain a bipartisan consensus for a regulatory simplification of this magnitude, however, the initial carbon fee rate should be set to significantly exceed the emissions reductions of all Obama-era climate regulations, and the carbon fee should increase from year to year.’’

So how much would it cost the ordinary consumer of gasoline, electricity, and gas or oil heat? Alas, that is a matter for experts, well beyond EP’s capability to determine, except by reference, in this or any other column. That first-year estimate of $40 a ton for the cost of carbon emissions is deliberately low – an increase in the price of a gallon of gas measured in dimes rather than dollars. It would certainly steadily rise.

But no plan of experts goes beyond the op-ed pages without the backing of a candidate. The putative candidate who holds the strongest views on the threat posed by global warming is Michael Bloomberg, financial data entrepreneur and former mayor of New York.

It’s no accident that Bloomberg chose last week to blast Trump in the most scathing terms. Bloomberg’s candidacy as a Democrat is still undeclared. Conventional wisdom is that he is too old, too centrist, and too short (he is 5’8’’ tall.) On the other hand, he is very rich and thoroughly tested by his three successful terms as mayor. An announcement is expected next month.

Meanwhile, the field of Democratic presidential candidates is fragmented, the Republican Party is fractured, and it seems (to me, at least) more likely than ever that Trump won’t run again, because, seeing he cannot hope to win, he will prefer to cut his losses.

The logic of punishment in very powerful. The newspapers can be expected to devote major resources to the Trump presidency until its bitter end. There is, however, a question of balance. The carbon dividend story has yet to break into the pages of the major newspapers, much less onto their front pages.

The stakes are high. Were it adopted, even after a quadrennial loss or two, the carbon dividend plan would at least vault America back into a position of global leadership in the battle against global warming, even if it weren’t enough to stave off the worst of the peril. (There is geo-engineering for that.) Granted, journalism is what journalists do. But what’s the bigger story here, Trump or the fate of the Earth?

XXX

I asserted last week that Sir James Mirrlees had failed to join his fellow laureates in their statement on carbon dividends. He had a good excuse. Mirrlees died last August, at 82. John Kay gave him this first-rate send-off in the Financial Times. Richard Blundell and Ian Preston provided a lucid account in Vox EU of Mirrlees’ penetrating ideas. Presumably Jean Tirole and Christopher Pissarides were not consulted because they are not US citizens.

Had I been sharper, I might have mentioned New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s New Year’s Eve explanation of his doubts about his fellow-laureates’ sentiments.. A revenue-neutral carbon tax high enough to make a difference is, he writes, “a fantasy at best, a fossil-fuel-industry ploy to avoid major action at worst.”

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

Plus money

“All You Need Is …Joy’’ (Calder & Miro Dancing at La Coupole) (mixed media on canvas), by Barbara Burgess Maier, in the group show “All You Need Is…’’, at the Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Jan. 30-Feb. 24.

'Code Green from sun-up'

Home by Now

“New Hampshire air curls my hair like a child’s
hand curls around a finger. ‘Children?’ No,
we tell the realtor, but maybe a dog or two.
They’ll bark at the mail car (Margaret’s
Chevy Supreme) and chase the occasional
moose here in this place where doors are left
unlocked and it’s Code Green from sun-up…’’

— From “Home by Now,’’ by Meg Kearney

Don Pesci: On transactional journalism

An anti-Adams screed by James Callendar in the vicious presidential campaign of 1800.

VERNON, Conn.

Journalism, we are told, is suffering from two ailments: Fake news – some of the boys and girls are just pestiferous ideologues – and transactional journalism. Of the two, the more fatal is transactional journalism, because it perverts the very purpose of honest reporting, which is to tell the truth and shame the Devil.

Reporters who engage in transactional journalism are the Donald Trumps of the reportorial world. Journalism is, among other things, a business, and business orbits around access to a product. When he was attorney general of Connecticut for more than 20 years, Dick Blumenthal was a master at putting his product before the television cameras, so much so that it was said of him -- by journalists weary of having to make his frequent media releases into reportorial foie gras -- that there was no more dangerous place in Connecticut than the space between Blumenthal and a television camera.

Transactional journalism, as the name implies, involves a mutually beneficial arrangement – or a Faustian bargain, depending on your point of view -- between a politician and a journalist: The journalist will give the politician the kind of coverage he wants, and the politician will return the favor by giving the journalist the kind of access he needs; both are frauds parading as saints.

Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson discussed transactional journalism at the Hillsdale College (in Iliinois) National Leadership Seminar in 2018. She was presenting to the faculty and students of the college a modern iteration of an arrangement that is as old as the country.

The Adams-Jefferson campaign of 1800, truly vicious, was prosecuted by proxies; gentlemen of the time did not engage publicy in three ring campaign circuses. Jefferson, according to one surrogate defamer, president of Yale College at the time, presented a danger to virtuous wives and daughters. Should Jefferson become president, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” A Connecticut newspaper warned that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”

Jefferson, for his part, found James Callender, an influential journalist of the day, a useful tool. Callender specialized in incendiary pamphleteering. Pulling out all the stops on his media organ, Callender, a satirist born in Scotland, wrote that Adams was a “rageful, lying, warmongering fellow,” a “repulsive pedant” and “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”

Callender had a private beef with Adams. He had been prosecuted and imprisoned by the Adams administration for violating the execrable Alien and Sedition Acts and was receiving payments for his seemingly objective journalism from Jefferson. To his credit, Callender later turned on Jefferson, authoring a series of newspaper articles alleging that Jefferson had sired children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves.
Stumbling out of a bar in 1803, Callender drowned in the James River; so it was reported. However, there were doubters. Federalists suspected skullduggery since Callender was due to testify in a much publicized trial, The People vs. Croswell, involving charges against publisher Harry Croswell for having reprinted claims that Jefferson paid Callender to defame George Washington.

Two morals may be drawn from all this reportorial perfidy: 1) If you are a seasoned politician and want a good press, you should buy a sympathetic reporter; 2) If you are a bought reporter, stay bought, and avoid bars and rivers.
American campaigning and American political journalism were born in the same crib. In the good old days, newspapers were little more than party organs. Honest Abe Lincoln wrote editorials for a sympathetic paper under a pseudonym. The notion that the press is and ought to be non-partisan and objective is a modern aspiration, sometimes attained, sometimes not.
Attkisson sees transactional journalism as a noxious practice, fatal to honest journalism. The coin of the realm in transactional journalism is not money, but favorable news in return for access, which is corrupting on both ends; the reporter becomes a conveyance of partisan news, and the politician’s messaging is dishonestly sold as objective reporting. In biblical terms, the bought reporter sells his birthright of honest journalism for a mess of political pottage.

Attkisson’s book The Smear offers some timely advice followed by a warning: “One smear artist I interviewed said nearly every image you run across in daily life, whether it’s on the news, a comedian’s joke, a meme on social media or a comment on the Internet, was put there for a reason. It’s like scenes in a movie, he said. Nothing happens by accident. Sometimes people have paid a great deal of money to put those images before you. What you need to ask yourself isn’t so much ‘is it true,’ but ‘who wants me to believe it and why?’”
She warns that the firewall between political reporting and propaganda may easily be breached: “We are not keeping an adequate firewall, giving the very people access to the newsroom who are trying to sway our opinion and shape news coverage. I am often not sure what these pundits on both sides add, besides propaganda talking points. This is part of what I call the soft ‘infiltration’ of the news media. We haven’t done a good job at staying at arm’s length from the interests that seek to use us as tools.”

Don Pesci is a Vernon-based essayist.

Labels: Adams, Attkisson, Callender, Croswell, Hillsdale, Jefferson, Lincoln, The Smear, Trump

More troubled small colleges

Emily Dickinson Hall at Hampshire College. The building was designed by the architecture firm of former faculty member Norton Juster, and and houses much of the space devoted to humanities at the college, including creative writing and theater. It’s named after the famed 19th Century poet, who lived in Amherst.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

A couple of minor private Massachusetts colleges have announced in the past year that they’re folding -- Mount Ida and Newbury colleges. And Green Mountain College, in Vermont, announced last week that’s closing. Small colleges have been closing around America at an accelerating rate but few of them have been particularly distinguished.

However, as the demographic and financial crisis of higher education mounts, some prestigious colleges must close, too, or merge with larger, nearby institutions. Still, it was a bit of a bombshell last Tuesday to learn that Hampshire College, in Amherst, Mass., is in serious enough trouble that it’s seeking a partner, and, I assume, might have to close if it doesn’t get one.

Will a nearby institution rescue Hampshire? If so, it will probably be one of the four that helped found Hampshire in 1965 (it opened for students in 1970} for experimentation in the liberal arts when the Baby Boomer population meant surging applications. Those are the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Smith, Amherst and Mount Holyoke colleges. Hampshire and the four comprise the Five College Consortium, whose students can take course at any of the schools.

Hampshire is known for its alternative curriculum, emphasis on portfolios rather than course-distribution requirements and reliance on professors’ narrative assessments instead of grade point averages. Despite this seemingly touchy-feely approach, the college sends a big percentage of its graduates off to highly selective graduate schools.

Since 1970, Hampshire (sometimes affectionally called “Hamster’’) has become a sort of semi-elite institution. But its $52 million endowment is far too small for its ambitions and its applications have generally been slipping in recent years as they have at many other private colleges.

Hampshire, unlike some other economically challenged colleges, has not tried to turn itself into a glorified vocational school. Rather it has stuck with an emphasis on the liberal arts – an education that produces the most engaged and effective citizens. So I hope that some way may be found for Hampshire to survive with maximum independence and not just as a sort of experimental-education campus of one or more of the other four institutions in the Five College Consortium.

Hampshire College is in foreground, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst is in the upper left while Amherst College is in upper right. They comprise, with Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges, the Five College Consortium.

— Photo by MonsieurNapoleon

A take on being working class in the 21st Century

Painting by Sam Belisle in his group show with Teddy Benfield, Laurence Cuelenaere and Kenson Truong called “Forward Thinking: Four Young Artists’ Take on the 21st Century,’’ at the Adelson Galleries, Boston, Feb. 1-24.: The gallery says “Mr. Belisle’s paintings highlight the working class and specifically aim to show dualities in perceptions of the environment and space created by socioeconomic upbringings.’’

If only I had written it down too

“My Young Father’s Drawings’’ (encaustic), by Nancy Whitcomb, now showing at the Providence Art Club.

What we see and don't see

“Collapse: Of the Self ‘‘ (oil and ink on wood panel), by Steve Sangapore, as part of a group show with Lydia Kinney and Casey Stanberrry from Jan. 30 through Feb. 24 at Fountain Street Gallery’s Annex, Boston.

Mr. Sangapore's works address the idea that consciousness creates the universe. His pieces are split down the middle, with one side showing what we perceive, and the other the quantum world that we can't see

On Abolition Row

Images from the show “Black Spaces Matter: Celebrating New Bedford’s Abolition Row,’’ at the UMass Dartmouth Art Gallery, New Bedford. The exhibition features the story of Abolition Row in New Bedford, where African-American historical figures such as Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists resided. The show includes virtual reality neighborhood tours, documentary films, 3-D printed models, artistic illustrations, student projects, historic maps and photographs.

‘Dear old New England’

Stereographic card showing an MIT mechanical drafting studio, 19th ]Century (photo by E.L. Allen, left/right inverted).

“I never fully realized how much a New England birth in itself was worth, but I am happy that that was my lot. I have felt it so keenly these last few days. Dear old New England, with all her sternness and uncompromising opinions; the home of all that is good and noble.”

― Matthew Pearl, in the novel The Technologists, set in 19th Century Greater Boston and involving the early days of MIT.

Don Pesci: Trump replenishes Connecticut's treasury as state's cultural reinvention continues

Airline plane engine maker Pratt & Whitney’s headquarters in East Hartford. Its sales have surged with, among other things, government contracts.

While Connecticut Democrats were busying themselves thumping President Trump during the recently concluded elections – the state’s all Democrat U.S. congressional delegation would not shed a tear if U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer were to succeed in impeaching him – Trump has delivered the goods to The Provision State.

The state’s underperforming economy may finally join the rest of the nation, much of which had recovered from the Great Recession many moons ago, in a splendid recovery – just in time too. Economists in Connecticut have not titled the coming jobs boom The Trump Bump, although a recent Hartford Business Journal (HBJ) report, “UTC’s 4Q profits jump 73%; CEO Hayes airs separation plans HBJ” comes dangerously close.

Here is the good news: “Farmington conglomerate United Technologies Corp., which plans to split into three separate companies, on Wednesday said its fourth-quarter profits soared 72.7 percent on booming aerospace sales and a favorable U.S. corporate tax rate.

UTC CEO Gregory Hayes, a smile lighting his face, noted that profits were up and "2018 was a transformational year for United Technologies."

HBJ reported, “The thriving aviation market drove UTC's fourth-quarter surge, Hayes said in a conference call Wednesday morning, with newly acquired Rockwell Collins leading sales growth with $4.9 billion in revenues during the quarter, up 29 percent year-over-year. East Hartford's Pratt & Whitney posted $5.5 billion in sales, up 24.2 percent.”

A rising economic tide, President Kennedy once said, lifts all the boats. And this rising tide, the result chiefly of Trump’s new military procurements, will water Connecticut's parched treasury. A larger employment pie allows state government to engorge itself with new revenue – without raising taxes. It is a win-win for both anti-Trump Democrats in Connecticut like Congressman John Larson and tax-weary citizens of the state still reeling from former Gov. Dan Malloy’s crippling tax increases.

Republicans already are ringing the tocsin: Maybe if we wait a bit, we won’t need those tolls after all. Also, is it possible we may be fondling too often the third rail of New England’s social issues?

Prior to the progressive take-over of Connecticut, the state was prepared to go its own way, luxuriating in its own unique character. Connecticut was for much of its history a refuge from New York’s predatory politics and brutal taxation. All this changed with the advent of former Sen. Lowell Weicker’s successful gubernatorial bid in 1991. Weicker forced an income tax through the General Assembly; the playing field having been leveled, the state found itself in competition with New York City and Boston.

It was no contest, and Connecticut “got its clock cleaned,” a favorite expression of Weicker’s. How, for instance, can Connecticut compete with New York in job poaching?

Connecticut is now in a race to the bottom on so called “social issues.” Bad political models make for bad cultural dives to the bottom. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a nominal Catholic, has now begun a scuffle with his wounded Catholic Church. “Andrew Cuomo,” Fox News reports, “is under fire from faith leaders after he signed a bill into law that legalizes abortion up until birth in many cases.”

Cuomo will have no problem in a fisticuffs contest with his church’s faith leaders. In much of New England, it pays politically to scuff up Catholic doctrine. His real problem will be with pregnant mothers – they are women too – who have consulted ultrasound images and found that late-term fetuses bear a striking resemblance to born babies. But New York, in any case, has taken a great social leap forward, and Connecticut, a national leader on progressive social issues, has a bit of catching up to do. Progressives do not believe in definitional lines – fetus or baby? -- whatever science and common sense suggests.

Connecticut’s own Senator from Planned Parenthood, Dick Blumenthal, has yet to tell us, perhaps because no one has put the question to him publicly during one of his frequent highly scripted media availabilities, why his most cherished industry should be the only one in the United States that remains unregulated. The suit-prone Blumenthal was, for more than two decades as Connecticut’s attorney general, the state regulator-in-chief.

Connecticut’s cultural reinvention is well underway, and the political map has changed as well, mostly owing to the inattention of Republicans and the approval of the state’s left-of-center media. Culture is an Archimedean lever: Give me a place outside the world where I can place my lever, said Archimedes, and I will move the world. This is the progressive order of business; first change the culture and politics will meekly follow in its train.

Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.

Bring it on

“Summer Feeling” (mixed media paper collage), by Adam Langehough, in his show “New Landscapes,’’ at Paper Nautilus, Providence, through March 2.

Collared and leashed nature

Walkway in the “Emerald Necklace’’ — a string of parks in Boston and Brookline conceived by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park. (See below.)

“Early Spring Afternoon — Central Park’’ (1911), by Willard Leroy Metcalf.

“Such strangers will have to hide

and take cover before the caretakers

of the trail arrive tomorrow.

They will efficiently find all wildness

from the storm and make sure that

it is all discarded and hauled to the dump.

“Perhaps I am looking for nature

in all the wrong places.

Here it has been collared and leashed

and rendered docile.

Still it fights back.

My hopeful dog directs my attention to the stream

and points to an otter that sinks when I look.

‘Maybe this time, boss?’ he implores.

Overhead, three noisy geese, free as you please,

as insolent as if they were twenty,

announce their imminent landing

at the county water control pond.

Not all of us are on a leash yet.’’

 
— From “Down the Urban Trail,’’ by Ahellas Alixopulos

Trying to get their attention

A Prius hybrid car. You tend to find them in affluent suburbs.

GoLocal reported Jan. 12 that a “new study finds that less than fifty percent {43 percent to be precise} of Rhode Islanders are willing to make significant ‘lifestyle changes’ in order to combat climate change.’’  That would include such things as driving their cars less. I’m surprised that the percentage willing to help address the scientific fact of global warming is that high. It takes a disaster to park over their heads to get the attention of many, probably most people when it comes to big issues, especially global ones. Rhode Islanders, says the study, are the least likely in New England to make changes because of fear of climate change. Maybe a big hurricane would change their minds.

Two-thirds of Massachusetts people in the research are willing to make such lifestyle changes, but that probably mostly reflects the higher percentage of well-educated people there, as well as its affluence, especially in the densely populated eastern part of the state.  Obviously, the more affluent you are, the more likely you are to buy an electric car, etc.

To read the GoLocal article, please hit this link.

Addressing the analog-to-digital transition

“The Last Selfie’’ (acrylic), by Michael Spillers, in the “2019 International Juried Show’’ at Beacon Gallery, Boston, through Feb. 24.

This exhibition features works by 23 artists from across the United States who, the gallery says, “were asked to show how the analog-to-digital transition that technology has gone through has affected them as artists. The selected works reflect a wide range of opinions and ideas, both positive and negative. However the viewer feels about the transition, they will find works that both empathize with their opinions and that show them a different perspective. ‘‘

Or bumper cars

In Boston’s Financial District.

“Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.’’

— Bill Bryson, travel writer, including his hilarious A Walk in the Woods, about a misbegotten hike on the Appalachian Trail.