Vox clamantis in deserto
Avoid niceties
Three deckers in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood
“I hate the grass and mosquitos—
in the Midwest, it’s never polite
to tell the truth, but I’m back East
now, where niceties waste everyone’s
time….’’
— From “Housesitting, Boston,’’ by Ting Triglio, about, among other things, seeing a deer amidst three-deckers a couple of blocks from the subway.
Trout still there?
“Trout Pool,’’ by Bill Hall
Can I go back
to the life I’ve known
to think of those
who now are gone.
Will empty pastures
and tired farms
bring a flood of visions
where I seek calm.
Or will the summer pool
at Stevens Brook
still hold the trout
no one took.
— “Vermont,’’ by Bill Hall
David Warsh: We were warned that things would go wrong
Lancaster, Ohio, devastated by the effects of the new forms of corporate financial manipulation that took off in the 1980s.
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
The appearance of a new edition of America: What Went Wrong?, a 1992 best-seller by Donald Barlett and James Steele, prize-winning reporters for The Philadelphia Inquirer, is an opportunity for those of us still in the news business to reflect. I have no problem with the subtitle they have added, The Crisis Deepens. But what was I thinking when the book was published?
What Went Wrong appeared in the spring of 1992, based on a series that had appeared in the newspaper the autumn before. Already there was plenty of carnage to fill chapters titled “Dismantling the Middle Class,” “Shifting Taxes – from Them to You” and “The Chaos of Health Care.” H. Ross Perot was warning about the “giant sucking sound” that would accompany passage of the North American Free Trade Act, as American manufacturing jobs were shifted to Mexico. Reagan had made the idea of NAFTA part of his 1980 presidential campaign. George H.W. Bush had signed the Canadian portion of the measure in 1988. Bill Clinton defeated Bush in November, while Perot received 19 percent of the popular vote. The overall treaty was ratified by the Democratic-led Senate in December the following year.
The U.S. was deep in the political/cultural mood-swing I have come to think of as “the market turn” – away from the propensity to regulate, towards enthusiasm for the promise of technological and financial innovation, with a predisposition toward globalization and reliance on market processes to sort it all out.
My prior beliefs about America’s foreign trade at the time were informed mainly by a little conference volume from 1986, Strategic Trade Policy and the New International Economics, edited by Paul Krugman, of MIT. Twenty-two years later, Krugman would be recognized with a Nobel Prize in economics for the work he had done in those years about competition among what we had recently begun calling “high-tech” products. “Industrial policy” had been a somewhat daring taste, but now it was coming out of the closet.
The fast growth of Japan in the 1970s and ’80s had been a false alarm; you couldn’t conclude that America has “gone wrong” from Toyota’s success; only that it had received a clarion wake-up call. By 1990 Japan’s economy was mired in recession. But things were definitely changing.
The first leveraged-buyout book I read was When the Machine Stopped (1989), by Max Holland, about a disastrous Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts buyout 10 years before of toolmaker Houdaille Corp. I reviewed American Steel: The Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt (1991), by Richard Preston, about the new scrap mill industry, then read with special care the brilliant Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (1988), by Baltimore Sun reporter Mark Reutter. By then I was reading books about Wall Street, of which Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken (1992), by Jesse Kornbluth, seemed the most damning.
But the eyes-wide-open moment for me arrived with IBM’s decision in 1994 to sell its personal-computer business to China’s Lenovo. I had reviewed Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM (1993), by Paul Carroll, of The Wall Street Journal. So I knew something about how Bill Gates had snookered IBM out of the far more profitable than hardware personal-computer software industry. The question was, could a Chinese company continue to make a success of a high-gloss American manufacturing business?
Ten years later, the answer was in: They had, and then some. By then, Harvard economist Dani Rodrik had published his heretical Has Globalization Gone Too Far? (1997). The 1999 Seattle protests as China prepared to join the World Trade Organization had made it clear there was trouble on the horizon. William Overholt had been prescient in The Rise of China: How Economic Reform Is Creating a New Superpower (1993), but not until James Kynge, of the Financial Times, published China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future (2006) were the dimensions clear.
By the time that David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson published “The China Shock Learning from Labor Market Adjustments to Large Changes in Trade’’ in the Annual Review of Economics, in 2016, Donald Trump has become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. “The China Shock” and the work that’s come after may warrant another Nobel Prize 20 years hence; and an avalanche of books about American job losses has roared through in recent years, including the best-selling Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of Family and Culture in Crisis (2016), by the many-faceted J.D. Vance. My favorite was Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of an American Town (2017), by Brian Alexander, about Lancaster, Ohio, his hometown.
It was when I read An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Post-war Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy (2015), by economic journalist Marc Levinson, that my sense of the overall narrative crystalized. Those first 30 years after World War II had indeed seen a period of remarkable economic growth in the United States and Europe – les trente glorieuse in France; a “golden age” in Britain; the Wirtschaftswunder in West Germany, il Miracolo in Italy. But those first 30 years were a phenomenon of the Atlantic World. The next miracles of growth occurred around the Pacific. It was U.S. power and America’s commitment to principles of free trade that facilitated the growth that brought down communism, and created a vastly richer and more equal world – equal, at least, among nations. Does that make it safer, too? The world certainly has become dangerously warmer. There is nothing “ordinary” about the global economy of today.
I didn’t vote for Ross Perot in 1992. Nor did I believe America had “gone wrong” then, at least not in a general way, though abuses were beginning to pile up. Barlett and Steel were definitely on to something, along with other center-left journalists, in particular Thomas Edsall, then of The Washington Post, and David Cay Johnson, then of The New York Times. Only in 2016 did America’s elected government decisively break bad, at least for a time. Thanks to Perot and Barlett and Steele and all the others, including young Paul Krugman, we can’t say we were not warned.
David Warsh, an economic historian and veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.
Transformative disruption
"Levitate," by Sara Fine-Wilson, in the group show “Growth and Disruption,’’ at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston, through July 5.
The gallery says:
“Disruption can transform us. Jogged out of our usual paths, we reexamine what is around us and within us. Taking time for inner stillness, we reflect on what we value. We try new ways of operating in the world and come to know ourselves anew.’’
Ms. Fine-Wilson works in her studio in the old mill town of Millbury, Mass., on the Blackstone River, famous as the heartland of the start of the American Industrial Revolution.
The Torrey House in Millbury, where the future President William Howard Taft spent summers with relatives in his boyhood.
Dorothy Pond in Millbury
Julie Appleby: Whither hospital-at-home services after pandemic?
After seven days as an inpatient for complications related to heart problems, Glenn Shanoski was initially hesitant when doctors suggested in early April that he could cut his hospital stay short and recover at home — with high-tech 24-hour monitoring and daily visits from medical teams.
But Shanoski, a 52-year-old electrician in Salem, Mass., decided to give it a try. He’d felt increasingly lonely in a hospital where the COVID-19 pandemic meant no visitors. Also, Boston’s Tufts Medical Center wanted to free up beds for a possible surge of the coronavirus.
With a push from COVID-19, such “hospital-at-home” programs and other remote technologies — from online visits with doctors to virtual physical therapy to home oxygen monitoring — have been rapidly rolled out and, often, embraced.
As remote visits quickly ramped up, Medicare and many private insurers, which previously had limited telehealth coverage, temporarily relaxed payment rules, allowing what has been an organic experiment to proceed.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” said Preeti Raghavan, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. “It usually takes a long time — 17 years — for an idea to become accepted and deployed and reimbursed in medical practice.”
Physical therapists traded some hands-on care for video-game-like rehabilitation programs patients can do on home computer screens. And hospitals like Tufts, where Shanoski was a patient, sped up preexisting plans for hospital-at-home initiatives. Doctors and patients were often enthusiastic about the results.
“It’s a great program,” said Shanoski, now fully recovered after 11 days of receiving this care. At home, he could talk with his fiancée “and walk around and be with my dogs.”
But what will remain of these innovations in the post-COVID era is now the million-dollar question. There is a need to assess what is gained — or lost — when a service is delivered remotely. Another variable is whether insurers, which currently reimburse virtual visits at the same rate as if they were in person, will continue to do so. If not, what is a proper amount?
It remains to be seen what types of novel remote care will persist from this born-of-necessity experiment.
Said Glenn Melnick, a health-care economist at the University of Southern California who studies hospital systems: “Pieces of it will, but we have to figure out which ones.”
Hospital At Home
Long established in parts of Australia, England, Italy and Spain, such remote programs for hospital care have not caught on here, in large part because U.S. hospitals make money by filling beds.
Hospital-at-home initiatives are offered to stable patients with common diagnoses — like heart failure, pneumonia and kidney infections — who need hospital services that can now be delivered and managed at a distance.
Patients’ homes are temporarily equipped with the necessities, including monitors and communication equipment as well as backup internet and power sources. Care is overseen by health professionals in remote “command centers.”
Medically Home, the private company providing the service for Tufts, sent its own nurses, paramedics and other employees to handle Shanoski’s daily medical care — such as blood tests or consultations via camera with doctors. They inserted an IV and made sure it was working properly during their visits, which often totaled three a day. Even when Medically Home employees were not there, devices monitored Shanoski’s blood pressure and oxygen levels.
For patients transferred from the hospital, like Shanoski, Tufts pays Medically Home a portion of what the hospital receives in payment. For transfers from an emergency room, Medically Home is paid directly by insurers with which it has contracts.
Before the pandemic, at least 20 U.S. health systems had some form of hospital-at-home setup, said Bruce Leff, a professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who has studied such programs. He said that, for the right patients, they’re just as safe as in-hospital care and can cost 20% to 30% less.
Tele-Rehab?
Glenn Shanoski, a 52-year-old electrician, spent 11 days with hospital-level care at home —– offered by Tufts Medical Center in Boston. Tufts provides daily visits from medical teams to closely monitor patients in their homes. (Courtesy of Glenn Shanoski)
When the coronavirus shut down elective procedures, many physical-therapy offices had to close, too. But a number of patients who had recently had surgery or injuries were at a crucial point in recovery.
Therapists scrambled to set up video capability, while their trade association called insurers and regulators to convince them that remote physical therapy should be covered.
At the end of April, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services added remote physical, speech and occupational therapy to the list of medical services it would cover during the pandemic. Just as it had done for other services, the agency said payment would be the same as for an in-person visit.
Though some patient care cannot be done virtually, such as hands-on manipulation of tight muscles, the doctors discovered many advantages: “When you see them in their home, you can see exactly their situation. Rugs lying around on the floor. What hazards are in the environment, what support systems they have,” said Raghavan, the rehabilitation physician at Johns Hopkins. “We can understand their context.”
Using video links, therapists can assess how a patient moves or walks, for example, or demonstrate home exercises. There are also specially designed video-game programs — similar to Nintendo Wii — that utilize motion sensors to help rehabilitation patients improve balance or specific skills.
“Tele-rehab was very much in the research phase and wasn’t deployed on a wide scale,” Raghavan said. Her department now does 9 out of 10 visits remotely, up from zero before March.
Pneumonia Monitoring
Even before the coronavirus emergency, some patients with mild pneumonia were treated as outpatients.
Now, with hospitals busy with COVID-19 cases and patients eager to minimize unneeded exposure, more physicians are considering this option and for sicker patients. The key is using a small device called a pulse oximeter, which clips onto the end of a finger and measures heart rate, while also estimating the proportion of oxygen in the blood. Costing at most a few hundred dollars, and long common in doctors’ offices, clinics and emergency rooms, the tiny machine can be sent home with patients or purchased online.
“We do it on a case-by-case basis,” said Dr. Gary LeRoy, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. It’s a good option for relatively healthy patients but is not appropriate for those with underlying conditions that could lead them to deteriorate rapidly, such as heart or lung disease or diabetes, he said.
A pulse oximeter reading of 95% to 100% is considered normal. Generally, LeRoy tells patients to call his office if their readings fall below 90%, or if they have symptoms like fever, chills, confusion, increasing cough or fatigue and their levels are in the 91-to-94 range. That could signal a deterioration that requires further assessment and possibly hospitalization.
“Having a personal physician involved in the process is critically important because you need to know the nuances” of the patient’s history, he said.
What It All Looks Like In The Future
Virtual therapy requires patients or their caregivers to accept more responsibility for maintaining the treatment regimen, and also for activities like bathing and taking medicines. In return, patients get the convenience of being at home.
But the biggest wild card in whether current innovations persist may be how generously insurers decide to cover them. If insurers decide to reimburse telehealth at far less than an in-person visit, that “will have a huge impact on continued use,” said Mike Seel, vice president of the consulting firm Freed Associates in California. A related issue is whether insurers will allow patients’ primary caregivers to deliver treatment remotely or require outsourcing to a distant telehealth service, which might leave patients feeling less satisfied.
The industry’s lobbying group, America’s Health Insurance Plans, said the ongoing crisis has shown that telehealth works. But it offered no specifics on future reimbursement, other than encouraging insurers to “closely collaborate” with local care providers.
Whether virtual therapy is cost-effective “remains to be seen,” said USC’s Melnick. And it depends on perspective: It may be cheaper for a hospital to do a virtual physical therapy session, but the patient might not see any savings if insurance doesn’t reduce the out-of-pocket cost.
Julie Appleby is a Kaiser Health News reporter.jappleby@kff.org, @Julie_Appleby
In remote places
— From Химки ТВ
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:
“Remote learning” is a chaotic disaster (and often an oxymoron) for many students, and COVID-19 cases among those under 20 are minuscule. The disease is overwhelmingly that of older adults. The flu is the biggest threat to children.
To reopen the physical schools, measures can be taken to protect everyone, such as rearranging/staggering classes and using big screens so that one teacher can teach in more than one classroom at a time, allowing fewer students in a room. And maybe the kids should continue to wear masks some of the time. But continuing to block in-person teaching would have very bad academic/intellectual, social and economic effects, especially for the socio-economically disadvantaged.
And so while this will be a work in progress, in response to changing health data, it was good to hear Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo announce that the state’s public schools will open Aug. 31, but with these provisions, among others:
- Fewer kids on buses
- Masks likely to be mandated.
- Desks further apart
- More controls to prevent kids (and others) from going to school sick
So soon?
Largest self-reported ancestry groups in New England.
—From Thesouthernhistorian45
“New England is a finished place….It is the first American civilization to be finished, to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilIzation, the first permanent civilization in America.’’
Historian and essayist Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) in the March 1932 Harper’s Magazine.
Worn down to beauty
Beach grass
“The houses
of so many mussels and periwinkles
have been abandoned here, it's hopeless
to know which to salvage. Instead
I keep a lookout for beach glass--
amber of Budweiser, chrysoprase
of Almadén and Gallo, lapis
by way of (no getting around it,
I'm afraid) Phillips'
Milk of Magnesia….’’
— From “Beach Glass,’’ by Amy Clampitt (1920-1994), an American poet who spent much time on the Maine Coast.
UMass researcher gets prize for ‘green electronics’ work
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com):
“Dr. Derek Lovley of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has been awarded the Mahoney Life Science Prize for his work on ‘green’ electronics. {Green, aka sustainable, electronics are electronic products made with no toxic chemicals, recyclable parts and reduced carbon emissions during production.}
“The Mahoney Life Science Prize is awarded to one researcher at UMass who enhances the connection between life science research and industry development. Dr. Lovley’s research focuses on protein nanowires, electronic material made using bacteria. In addition to being biodegradable, the wires contain the potential to be used in a variety of devices, from storage devices to biomedical sensors. The prize is funded by UMass alumnus Richard Mahoney, former chairman and CEO of Mansanto Company, and his brother, who is also an alumnus.
“‘We are proud to support the expert research being carried out by UMass researchers through the Mahoney Life Sciences Prize,’ said Richard Mahoney. ‘Dr. Lovley’s research is representative of those efforts, and he leads the state, nation and world in his area of microbiological research. The incredible breakthroughs that happen locally at UMass Amherst continue to place UMass at the forefront of research institutions everywhere.”’
The New England Council commends Dr. Lovley and UMass for their commitment to sustainable solutions to address pressing problems. MassLive reports.
Even now
“Keeping You Close XXV” (acrylic & mixed media on canvas), by Karine Leger in her current show at Lanoue Gallery, Boston, through July 31. See www.LanoueGallery.com
Don Pesci: Deep historical ignorance fuels push to moth-ball Columbus statues
Statue of Christopher Columbus in Seaside Park, in Bridgeport, Conn.
VERNON, Conn.
Christopher Columbus statues across Connecticut are being mothballed, but politicians in the state’s larger cities desperately want Italians to understand, in the words of Don Corleone in Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, “It’s nothing personal.”
The pols in Connecticut, a state that has in it more Italians per square inch than most others, still need Italian votes. Will Italians, during the next elections, turn on anti-Columbus (and moth-balling supporters) such as Mayor Justin Elicker, of New Haven, and Mayor Luke Bronin, of Hartford? Italians, everyone knows from reading Puzo, like their revenge cooled in the fridge.
Both mayors have given Columbus statues the boot. Bronin said, “When the statue of Columbus was erected in Hartford a hundred years ago, it was meant to symbolize the fact that Italian-Americans, who had faced intense discrimination, had a place in the American story. But surely we can find a better way to honor the immense contributions of the Italian-American community in our country and in our community. I’ll also be working with our Italian-American community in Hartford and throughout the region to find an appropriate way to honor their incredibly important place in Hartford’s and our nation’s history.”
And Elicker concurred: “The Christopher Columbus statue for many Italians is a celebration of Italian heritage. But the statue of Christopher Columbus also represents a time of colonialism and atrocities committed. It is the right decision to remove the statue. After the statue is removed, I believe it is important that we, as a community, have a conversation about how to best honor the heritage of so many Italians who have made New Haven their home.”
Whomever these mayors have in mind for suitable stand-ins for Columbus – no names have been mentioned – none of the stand-ins will have been credited with opening the new continent to European exploration, the real irritant in the craws of Columbus haters.
The assault on Columbus by "Black Lives Matter" is particularly annoying because it is so wrong-headed. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, as we were taught to recite in schools long before it became fashionable to celebrate tribal differences in the United States under the rubric of diversity. We are quickly becoming “many out of one,” reversing the E Pluribus Unum motto on our increasingly worthless coinage.The first slaves were brought to what later became the United States – now the clannish dis-United States – in 1619, long after the death of Columbus. Certainly Columbus is less responsible for slavery and the oppression of African-Americans than, say, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the original Jim Crow.
Jim Crow was a fictional character created by “Daddy” Rice, around 1830, a little more than three decades before the father of the Republican Party, President Abraham Lincoln, issued his Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery in the midst of a bloody, corpse filled Civil War waged, among other reasons, to end slavery.
Rice was a “black face,” white minstrel artist who introduced Jim Crow, a fictional stereotypical slave, into his act. As his show became more and more popular, the expression “Jim Crow” became a widely used designation for blacks, and later, around the time Republican President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to facilitate the desegregation of public schools, the expression became a battle cry against racial discrimination in the south – not that the north was Simon-pure with respect to a poisonous tribalization of races that militated against E Pluribus Unum.
Hey, they don’t teach this sort of stuff anymore in Yale or Harvard; or, for that matter, in Hartford and New Haven high schools.
The whole business of discrimination still resonates with many Italians. The largest lynching in the United States occurred in 1891 -- 385 years after Columbus, certainly among the greatest navigators of his age and the man responsible for opening the Americas to a European discovery, died in obscurity, bleeding from his eyes at his home in Spain – when a New Orleans mob murdered 11 Italian-Americans following a trial of the Catholic “dagoes,” accused of murdering a police chief, that had produced six not-guilty verdicts and three mistrials. New Orleans was impatient for the justice of the rope, and so the innocent men were strung up.
Ah, well, stuff happens. Scripture tells us none of us are perfect, and history, we know, is pockmarked with imperfections. Democratic President Obama used to tell us that the details of history were less important than the arc of history. Modern historians and students -- engaged, like air-brusher Joseph Stalin, in the art of revising history through the murder of his political opponents – seem to think that the arc of history is less important than their own fictional version of the way things ought to have been during the days of Columbus.
The above named mayors of major cities in Connecticut have all claimed they are performing a public service by ridding public squares of Columbus statues to prevent vandalism, which is on a par with closing banks to prevent bank robberies or closing police stations to prevent arsonists from burning them down or tolerating the vandalization of the Lincoln Memorial by historical amnesiacs who have not, before despoiling the memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address engraved on the north wall of the memorial. In merry old England a statue of Churchill – who, along with President Franklin Roosevelt, wiped the noses of real Fascists in the dust – has been vandalized, likely by European anti-fascist-fascists, brothers and sisters in arms with domestic terrorists such as ANTIFA here in the USA.
Are there no video cameras that might be deployed around Columbus statues to apprehend and arrest the vandals? Are we truly incapable of making proper distinctions between peaceful, lawful protesters and the thugs who shield themselves behind licit protests to liberate Louis Vuitton stores of bags that may be sold on the black market to finance, among other things, the toppling of Columbus statues in Connecticut?
An Italian from New Haven writes me, that he wishes someone would say something “to let the public know that not everyone is complicit” in what he and most Italians regard as the usual, time honored anti-Italian, anti-Catholic historical revisionism.
Done.
My correspondent tells me he plans to vote in the upcoming November elections – after cool, revengeful deliberation -- to strike a blow for historical lucidity, liberty under law and those few politicians in Connecticut who find distasteful the destruction of public monuments in the state’s urban cultural war-zones.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
Grace Kelly: Trying to protect 'Dr. Seuss's garden'
The deep-sea canyons, which can plunge to depths greater than 7,000 feet, and seamounts, which rise thousands of feet above the seafloor, of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument create habitats that are home to corals, fish, marine mammals, and turtles. (CLF/NRDC)
Ancient corals sway as currents push by, dolphin pods stream across the surface, and a plethora of undiscovered underwater species scurry through deep canyons and up seamounts. The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, about 130 miles southeast of Cape Cod, is teeming with life.
“It was like swimming through Dr. Seuss’s garden,” said Peter Auster, a senior research scientist at the Mystic Aquarium and an emeritus research professor at the University of Connecticut. “From the very first research trip out to the canyons and later to the seamounts, it was obvious these were special places.”
The monument — the only one of its kind in the Atlantic Ocean — was designated by the Obama administration in 2016 after a strong case for its creation was presented by Auster and his colleague Scott Kraus, an affiliate scientist at the New England Aquarium’s Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life, among others.
“The monument region included a diversity of communities, from shallow to deep, much like you see different life zones climbing up a mountain,” Auster said. “From the surface to the deep-sea floor, all these things were packed together in a very tight space, so we wrap up this incredible example of our natural heritage.”
This heritage is under attack from the Trump administration, which issued a proclamation June 5 that reopens the area to commercial fishing.
Commercial fishing groups had lobbied for the change, claiming the restrictions had cost the industry millions of dollars. Critics of Obama’s decision to use the Antiquities Act to create the Atlantic marine monument have argued that the move circumvented federal law established in the 1970s to regulate fisheries.
Trump’s recent proclamation removed the prohibition on commercial fishing and allowed management of fisheries within the marine monument to revert back to the New England Fishery Management Council.
“Under the last administration, commercial fishermen and Maine lobstermen were suddenly informed that nearly 5,000 square miles of ocean would be closed to commercial fishing,” Trump said during a recent visit to Bangor, Maine. “This action was deeply unfair.”
However, Trump fails to note that fishing is, in fact, still allowed.
“There were six to eight permit holders that were fishing for crab and lobster in the area. It was lightly fished, and all of those permit holders were granted a moratorium to continue fishing for seven years,” said Kelly Kryc, director of conservation policy and leadership at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium in Boston. “So, the fishing that was happening in the monument is still happening.
“Recreational fishing is also allowed in the monument, and in response to fishermen’s concerns, the original boundary of the monument was reduced to allow access to the more fertile fishing grounds. So, the monument that exists today is smaller than that which was proposed, and that was in direct response to concerns from the fishing community.”
Kryc also noted that the government’s own data shows that the designation hasn’t had a negative impact on fishing quotas and productivity.
“The government’s data shows that since the monument was designated in 2016, the fish landings for pelagic species have actually gone up since the monument’s designation,” she said. “They haven’t gone down as was predicted by the fishing industry. Now, it’s really important to be clear that’s not because of the monument’s designation, but the designation hasn’t adversely impacted the fishing community.”
The deep-sea canyons, which can plunge to depths greater than 7,000 feet, and seamounts, which rise thousands of feet above the seafloor, of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument create habitats that are home to corals, fish, marine mammals, and turtles.
Preserving areas of the ocean may be even more critical as the world battles a climate crisis, which could have a more devastating impact on the commercial fishing industry than 4,913 square miles of protected ocean.
For context, consider that the entire Atlantic Ocean spans 41.1 million square miles, making the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument a mere 0.012 percent of its entire expanse.
“As sea levels rise, the natural infrastructure and protection that is conferred from healthy ecosystems provide an economic benefit to coastal communities,” Kryc said. “Now, the monument is a little bit too far out for that, but what is needed is a network of marine protected areas, not a monument in name only.”
There are four marine monuments in the Pacific Islands region, but the Atlantic marine monument off the coast of New England remains the lone bastion along the Eastern Seaboard.
To combat the recent repeal, the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) is suing the Trump administration, claiming the modification of the monument is illegal.
“It is illegal for any president to revoke or modify a prior president’s monument proclamation because he has no authority to do so,” Peter Shelley, senior counsel at CLF, wrote in an email. “The Antiquities Act, where Congress authorized presidents to create monuments and protect objects of historic and scientific interest in the monument, does not confer the power to undo the monument actions of prior presidents. Only Congress can do that after a monument has been created.”
In a June 17 press release, Bob Vanasse, executive director of Saving Seafood, a Washington, D.C.-based group that represents commercial fishermen, noted that the inclusion of prohibitions against commercial fishing was controversial throughout the process of creating the monument.
As for the CLF lawsuit, he wrote, “The creation of an Atlantic Marine monument without appropriate stakeholder consultation has been a centerpiece of the Conservation Law Foundation’s (CLF) political agenda for over five years.”
In the meantime, the fate of the monument remains in a tenuous balance.
“Every time a submersible goes down, they discover a new species,” Kryc said. “These are demonstrably special places with extraordinary amount of biodiversity and things that are magical and awe-inspiring and beautiful, and there’s value in protecting them just because they exist, but we can take it a step further and make the links that are necessary for other people to understand the economic value and the resilience value of it, the job creation value of it. So, all this recent action is a disappointing outcome.”
The New England Aquarium has an online form that can be used to send a pre-written letter calling for the protections to be reinstated.
Grace Kelly is a reporter for ecoRI News.
Nothing and too much
— Photo by Stephen Nunney
Suddenly,
there's nothing to do
and too much—
the lawn, paths, woods
were never so green....
— From “Summer Solstice,’’ by Rose Styron, a Martha’s Vineyard and Roxbury, Conn.-based poet; she’s the widow of the novelist William Styron.
Huxtable: Shedding clothes and tensions; 'not a perfect thing anywhere'
At Old Orchard Beach, in southern Maine
“Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.’’
— Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), famed architectural critic, on vacationing in New England, in the September 1977 New York Times
Although the New York City-born and -bred Huxtable was most associated with that city, she spent much of her time in Marblehead, Mass., where she had a modest one-story house.
She wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2011, explaining her “Full confession: I am no fan of perfection”:
“I have spent a good part of my life in a small New England town with a priceless American heritage where such over-the-top perfectionism simply does not exist. There are offbeat and off-kilter compromises by carpenter-builders trying to follow the examples in English pattern books in the new towns of the New World, dealing with costs and shortages, substituting materials, inventing their own details. The 18th-Century house built for the richest man in town is made of wood cut in blocks to simulate stone that was not available. This place is genuine; its buildings retain the hallmarks of its history, something that can never be imitated or reproduced, and there is not a perfect thing anywhere — for which I am eternally grateful.”
“Marblehead” (watercolor), by Maurice Prendergast (1914), in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Crowded Marblehead Harbor in high summer
The Amoskeag complex in 1911, during its textile-making heyday
Her biggest impact on New England probably came in her 1968 New York Times article “Lessons in Urbicide,” about the proposed destruction of the vast Amoskeag mill complex on the Merrimack River in Manchester, N.H.
She wrote: “The story of the destruction of the Amoskeag mill complex that has formed the heart of Manchester, N.H., for over a hundred years has a terrible pertinence for the numberless cities committing blind mutilation in the name of urban renewal. . . . We are making a dull porridge of parking lots and cheap commercialism, to replace the forms and evidence of American civilization.”
As it turned out, the complex was saved and repurposed.
Chris Powell: Their lives will matter when they live next door
Old Town Hall in Hebron, Conn.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Will the "black lives matter" clamor echoing among Connecticut's white elected officials and white suburban residents ever mean anything? Or will it remain the usual pious posturing that makes its participants feel righteous while disguising their irrelevance?
A good place for divining the future may be Hebron, population 9,500, a lovely rural town in eastern Connecticut that claims "historic charm with a vision for the future." Last weekend the Democratic Town Committee there held a rally to protest police brutality and racism.
Announcing the rally, committee Chair Tiffany Thiele said, "This is just one part of the problem. We also have to address our country's socio-economic system, which is designed to disenfranchise individuals of color from the opportunities afforded to others."
"Designed to disenfranchise," eh? So how about starting with the opportunity to live in Hebron itself?
Opportunity in Hebron is almost entirely limited to white households with incomes above $100,000. Ninety-six percent of townspeople are white, fewer than a half percent black. Ninety-five percent of Hebron's housing is owner-occupied, the median house value nearly $300,000. The town has little inexpensive housing and so has little poverty.
Those are great demographics and they make it easy to oppose police brutality, since, having little poverty, the town has little crime and needs just a few police officers.
Hebron's demographics are so good because, by excluding inexpensive, high-density housing, the town's land-use policy, like that of most Connecticut towns outside the inner suburbs, also excludes not just welfare households but many self-supporting people of all races. This is why Hebron is 99 percent nonblack and why "black lives matter" is, at the moment, a merely theoretical concept there.
So will the Democratic committee soon hold a rally in support of, say, building multifamily housing in town or expanding school regionalism so that nonwhite students might go to Hebron's schools? Will black lives ever matter that much to Hebron's Democrats?
While Hebron's Democrats, like many suburban and rural Democrats, may be hypocritical about exclusive zoning, such zoning is meant far more as economic policy than as racial policy and it dates to Connecticut's earliest colonial times. Back then to move into a town people had to gain the approval of the people already living there, had to become "admitted inhabitants," a procedure seeking to ensure that newcomers would be self-supporting and not impose expense on their neighbors. There was nothing racial about it.
Today society is far more prosperous but broadening a town's demographics still risks imposing expense and lowering living conditions. That's because decades of mistaken welfare policy have turned Connecticut's cities into crime-ridden poverty factories with an underclass of fatherless households, making education and general advancement terribly difficult if not impossible there.
People are entitled to want to escape that, and in recent years many people have escaped it into Connecticut's inner suburbs, which increasingly are integrated racially and economically. But state government shows no interest in changing its welfare policy and does not realize that economic and racial integration might be achieved not just by hurling the unassimilable underclass into resentful suburbs but also by making the cities habitable for the middle class again.
Black lives won't really matter in Connecticut until state government stops manufacturing the poverty that no one wants to live near.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Painter and camouflager
Work by the American impressionist painter Everett Longley Warner (1877-1963). He was also a printmaker and major contributor to U.S. Navy camouflage in both world wars. He spent his last 18 years in Westmoreland, N.H., in that state’s Monadnock Region, long famous as “The Currier & Ives Corner” of New England and the home, summer and year-round, of many famous painters and writers. Sadly, nine years after his death fire destroyed his studio, resulting in the loss of many of his drawings, paintings, letters, notes and camouflaged ship models.
The gorgeous Park Hill Meetinghouse (a Congregational church), in Westmoreland’s Park Hill village, north of the town’s center. It’s gabled roof, portico, broad five-bay facade, paired pilasters at the corners and three entrances framed by pilasters and topped by a long cornice are well known among New England architects.
The church, built in 1764, has been moved twice and extensively altered, as have many New England churches dating back to colonial days.
It was originally built without a steeple, and was moved in 1779 and again in 1824 to its present location, in part reflecting population changes within Westmoreland. The 1779 move including adding porches to its sides. But with the second move, the porches were removed, the main chamber was enlarged, and the tower and portico were added, based on the designs of Elias Carter used in other area meeting houses. In 1853 its exterior was restyled in the Greek Revival style, which was very popular at the time,
Swathed in fog
“Impression, Sunrise” (1872), by Claude Monet
The main town on Nantucket Island, when it was still called Sherburne, in 1775
”Swathed from head to toe
in seeming veils of muslin,
the figure in the Nantucket fog
poles along the shoreline on a flat barge.’’
— From “Summer Triptych,’’ by Linda Pastan
Llewellyn King: Save the Postal Service: It helps to make America great
The downtown Westerly, R.I., Post Office, designed in the Classical Revival style, in 1913, by architect James Knox Taylor. The single-story building features a broad curving facade with eight fluted Doric columns of Vermont marble, flanked by wide piers. The interior lobby space retains many original features, including terrazzo and marble flooring, and a coffered ceiling with decorative moulding.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Open Letter to the New Postmaster General Louis DeJoy
Dear Sir,
There is fear that you’ve been appointed Postmaster General (congratulations, by the way) to downsize and privatize the post office. I’m here to plead for the post office. It is a great institution and –yes, yes, yes –incredibly efficient.
How can I say that when for generations it’s been the butt of jokes, a standard applause line when denounced by politicians as an example of government run amok?
Simple: personal experience.
For 33 years, I published professional newsletters in Washington. The champion in my stable was The Energy Daily. Its success -- and it was very successful in the 33 years from its founding until I sold it -- depended on the absolute reliability of first-class letter service from the post office.
Every evening we mailed the paper in a No. 10 envelope at a post office in the Washington area. Every morning, I received one in my mailbox in The Plains, Va., 50 miles southwest of District. It was extraordinary. So, too, was its delivery across the country.
Not only did we deliver subscribers their copies by first-class mail, but we also did all the promotion the same way. Over the years we mailed hundreds of thousands of first-class sales letters, and it paid off.
Even now, in the Internet age, mail is more trusted and taken more seriously. The head of a large cancer charity told me they still rely on mail solicitations for most of their fundraising: They raise $15 million a year through it.
Years ago, the president of a large, Mid-Atlantic electric utility told me, “The post office is one of the most efficient organizations in the country. Every month we mail more than a million bills, and they all get delivered.” So, I asked, why it is cited as an example of why the government can’t do anything right? He answered, “Have you heard about the alligators in the New York sewers?”
President Trump -- to whom you, Mr. DeJoy, have made financial campaign contributions of over $2 million (a mail carrier earns just over $45,00 a year) -- wants to see the post office punished; presumably because it has a contract to deliver for Amazon whose CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the country, owns The Washington Post, which isn’t kind to Trump.
Now, I’ll agree, that the post office must stop losing so much money. Those first-class letters are few, shredding revenues. The package business is the future.
But the problem is, as much as anything, micromanagement from Congress.
When I lived in The Plains, there were a dozen nearby post offices: rural ones, close together, serving few people. Democratic and Republican congressmen get overly attached to their local post offices and fight their closure, even when it is clear there should be consolidation. Likewise, Saturday delivery; for reasons long forgotten, six-day-a-week delivery has become sacred. A private company would stop that on Day One.
Besides, you can understand the attachment to your local post office: It is part of the community. You get and send mail there, maybe buy some stamps, and catch up on the gossip -- postmasters know everything.
People don’t hang out at the FedEx office. Remember that. You damage the post office and you take away something from American life.
Also, what corporation would support rural delivery? The rural electric cooperatives were created as a part of FDR’s New Deal because there was no other way that the farms would be electrified. Even in this day and age, there is little broadband availability in rural America because it doesn’t pay to lay the cable. What will happen to the mail?
Here is a true story about the post office in The Plains. A stray village dog, one well-fed and well-known as Downtown Brown, became attached to the post office. He decided that he owned it and barred people he didn’t like from entering. Downtown Brown had to be rusticated to a farm so that the people of The Plains -- population 238 -- could once again use the post office.
It wasn’t decided then that the post office should be closed because the dog was affecting the mail. If you privatize the post office now, that is what you’ll be doing.
Do be careful. You are stepping in to take control of something very American, since 1775. It has social value as well as being an innovator, from stagecoaches to airplanes to automated sorting.
The post office helped make America great. Save the post office. About Downtown Brown: I’m told he lived a long and happy life and never went postal again.
Cordially,
Mail Customer
Llewellyn King is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Website: whchronicle.com
They knew when to leave
A female biting midge, Culicoides sonorensis, a species otherwise known as ‘‘no-see-ums.’’
“’No-see-um’ was an Indian word – red skin as vulnerable as white. To the early Indian, coming here {in the Maine woods} to make a warm-weather camping trip would have seemed the act of a fool: Thoreau, with his veil, his smoke from rotting logs; we with our Off and our Cutter. When the tribes lived here…they left in the summer. When the blackflies, the mosquitoes, and the no-see-ums hatched, the Indians departed, and did not come back until the bugs were gone.’’
— John McPhee, in The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975)
In a bark canoe in no-see-um land
