Adapting to rising seas
“Letter to the Ocean” (video still), by Alejandra Cuadra and Ashley Page, in their show at Fountain Street Gallery, Boston, through April 2.
'Lights a window in Amherst'
“It’s New England time,
the sun
comes like an old puritan
and it rises over the ocean
and gives leave to the flight of the birds,
it lights a window in Amherst
where the eyes of a woman contemplate the world….’’
— From “The Balada of New England,’’ by Fernando Valverde (born 1980), translated from the Spanish by Carolyn Forche. The “woman’’ referred to is Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), the famed poet.
Frank Carini: Lawn fertilizers and pesticides threaten public health and environment
A newly seeded, chemically fertilized and mowed lawn.
— Photo by Animaldetector
An example of eutrophication caused by fertilizer runoff. These nutrients cause the excessive growth of algae, which can block light and air exchange. The algae eventually are broken down by bacteria, causing anoxic conditions and "dead zones".
Text from article by Frank Carini in ecoRI News
“While this winter in southern New England has mostly felt more like a three-month extension of fall, spring officially arrives in a few weeks and that means the lawn-care industry’s push to douse lawns with chemicals is in full bloom.
“Industry professionals and homeowners have been dumping pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on lawns for generations, all in hopes of creating lush, green carpets of neighborhood envy. This heavy reliance on chemicals has instead turned residential soil into de facto dumping grounds for lawn-care poisons that threaten public health and the environment….
“When these monolithic landscapes are then flooded with mass-marketed poisons and nutrients, they become bad for human and pet health, pollute local waters, deter wildlife, and degrade the environment.’’
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
Be patient
“Greylock {Mt. Greylock, in the Berkshires} Meadow Green” (drypoint engravings), by Saugus, Mass.-based artist Kelly Slater, at the gallery at WREN (Women’s Rural Entrepreneurial Network), in Bethlehem, N.H.
At the Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site — the site of the first integrated ironworks in North America, founded by John Winthrop the Younger and in operation between 1646 and about 1670.
It includes the reconstructed blast furnace, forge, rolling mill, shear, slitter and a quarter-ton trip hammer.
It has seven large waterwheels, some of which are rigged to work in tandem with wooden gears connecting them. The facility has a wharf from which to load the iron onto ocean-going vessels, as well as a large, restored 17th-Century house.
Chris Powell: Rent-control bill a fraud; college-job racket; nimbys vs. Bridgeport
In a studio apartment.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Nearly everyone agrees that Connecticut badly needs more inexpensive apartments. Many basic two-bedroom units in the state carry monthly rents that are as high as a home mortgage payment, and rents are still rising. As was demonstrated the other day at a state legislative committee hearing, many renters are desperate, especially with unprecedented electricity price increases coming on top of rent increases.
But no one has explained how a law restricting rents -- government price control that would be exclusive to housing even as the prices of all other necessities are rising sharply as well -- is going to encourage construction and renovation of rental housing. Indeed, with a rent-control law Connecticut may send a powerful signal to rental-housing developers to avoid the state and a powerful signal to landlords to convert their apartments to condominiums and sell them.
Rent control may help people who already have apartments but it won't increase supply or slake demand.
Fortunately the major rent-control legislation under consideration in the General Assembly is a fraud. It would restrict annual rent increases to 4 percent plus inflation. With the latest official U.S. inflation rate at 6.4 percent, the legislation would hardly cap rents at all. Its main value to its advocates may be to establish the principle of expropriating property without fair compensation.
Then, after a few years, other legislation might cap rent increases at 4 percent without an inflation adjustment, and then freeze rents entirely. After all, many advocates of rent control think that everything necessary should be free. Of course nothing is really free, and decisions about who should pay can be messy, since cost-shifting is such a big objective of government.
Many people oppressed by their rents aren't familiar with economics and how the real world works. But many advocates of rent control are, and they know exactly what they are doing and what they are not doing.
They are not encouraging the crowd to understand inflation and where it comes from -- government itself. They are not encouraging the crowd to notice that since most important prices have risen sharply, landlords aren't to blame.
Nor are the rent-control advocates concentrating on the only solution to rising rents: increasing housing supply. No, expropriating is their objective.
There are solutions to supply, but they aren't quick and easy.
Liberalizing municipal zoning is the one most discussed. But any zoning solution will be slow and disjointed.
State government could build housing directly, exempting itself from municipal zoning, using eminent domain to obtain land, hiring contractors, and assigning construction plans, but that would risk much corruption.
Or maybe state government could exempt itself from local zoning, use eminent domain to obtain property near water and sewer lines and transit infrastructure, put the properties out to bid to apartment developers, and then exempt them from taxes as long as the properties were well maintained.
Such a policy would be sounder environmentally and possibly less controversial than putting apartments in rural towns that lack infrastructure.
But there can be no substantial construction of housing anywhere without controversy. In the end the issue is a choice between the haves and have-nots. Government may try to mollify the have-nots with free bus rides, diapers, and contraceptives, but what they need most is less expensive housing.
* * *
In the meantime state government will continue to take care of itself better than anything else.
Central Connecticut State University, in New Britain, has just announced its hiring of former Hartford Democratic state Rep. Edwin Vargas as the new occupant of the Gov. William A. O'Neill Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Practical Politics. The job pays $69,000, pretty sweet for someone who is 74 with pension income. That’s "practical politics" for you.
Vargas won re-election last year but, betraying his constituents, declined to take office in January so he could accept the university job. His predecessor was another state legislator, former state Sen. Donald J. DeFronzo, a Democrat from New Britain.
If Republicans ever want to occupy an endowed chair in public higher education in Connecticut, they'll have to start winning a lot more elections.
View of Sikorsky Memorial Airport (left), the Housatonic River and Stratford. The airport is named for aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky (1889-1972).
No place in Connecticut has as much untapped potential as its largest and most impoverished city, Bridgeport -- on Long Island Sound with a great harbor, superhighways leading to the east, west and north, a major stop on the Northeast Corridor railroad line, and a city-owned airport just over the municipal line in Stratford.
But state government long has overlooked Bridgeport's potential because no one in authority has dared to deal with the poverty of the city's residents.
Refurbishing the airport and restoring scheduled commercial flights there could contribute greatly to Bridgeport's revival and economic development. But predictably enough Stratford doesn't want to cooperate. Two of its state legislators, Republican Sen. Kevin Kelly and Democratic Rep. Joe Gresko, have introduced legislation to thwart Bridgeport's sale of Sikorsky to the Connecticut Airport Authority, essentially giving Stratford control of the airport, which would mean no improvement.
Bridgeport is too poor and ill-managed to restore Sikorsky itself. But it could be done by the airport authority, which has greatly improved Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks. If Bridgeport is ever to be improved in any respect, state government will have to do it. Let it start with Sikorsky.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Connecticut. (CPowell@JournalInquirer.com).
Eccentricies of Beantown
Northeastern University’s Wayne Turner with the 1980 Beanpot after Northeastern won the annual Beanpot hockey tournament.
“Boston is both a world-class city, home to some of the best academic and medical institutions on the planet, and a quirkily parochial place, where one of the biggest annual sporting events involves college hockey players competing for a beanpot and where generations of baseball fans actively believed they were victims of a curse.’’
— Steve Kornacki (born 1979 and a native of Groton, Mass.) political journalist
Real beanpots.
Using drones to monitor changing Eastern forests
Mt. Katahdin, in the midst of the Maine Woods.
Log jam at Ripogenus Gorge, Maine, during 1870s log driving.
Edited from a New England Council report (newenglandcouncil.com)
“The U.S. Department of Agriculture has awarded a $10 million grant to research teams from the University of Maine, Purdue University and the University of Georgia to develop technology that would use drones to monitor forests.
“The main goal of this research project is to help landowners and stakeholders better adapt forests to complicated economic and climate conditions in the Eastern region of the United States, aiming to improve the management of 15 million acres of those forests. With this, the University of Maine will be receiving $2.7 million of the overall $10 million for its efforts on ‘PERSEUS,’ or ‘promoting economic resilience and sustainability of the eastern United States forests.’ This project will use digital technology including drones, piloted aircraft, and satellite-based sensors which will provide real-time, accurate measurements of the forests. The information collected from this project will be extremely influential to forest policy and the lawmaking of the region.
“‘Forestry generally prides itself as a boots-on-the-ground business, while technology is rapidly changing access to information, [but] PERSEUS will provide the necessary training to help both students and landowners alike leverage these new tools,’ said Aaron Weiskittel, professor of forest biometrics and modeling, and director of the Center for Research on Sustainable Forests, at the University of Maine.’’
Mountain Men
“Moat Mountain {in the White Mountains} from North Conway,’' by Benjamin Champney (1817–1907)
“Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”
— Daniel Webster (1782-1852), American statesman, politician, lawyer and orator.
Boating formal wear
Advertisement mock-up for “This is Boatwear,” in the MIGHTY-MAC Collection of the Cape Ann Museum Library and Archives, Gloucester, Mass.
The Eastern Yacht Club, in Gloucester.
— Photo by Oceanhistory
Playing with light
“Salvator” (acrylic, gloss gel and modeling paste on linen), by Ryan Crotty, in the group shpw “Glow,’’ at the Flinn Gallery, Greenwich, Conn., through March 22.
The gallery says: “With work that wouldn't look out of place on a sci-fi movie set, cyberpunk future or high-end gallery, these artists play with light in creative and interesting ways. ‘‘
Llewellyn King: Folks want more power but not power lines
High-voltage overhead power lines.
— Photo by Magnolia677
WEST WARWICK,R.I.
If you punch in “outage map” in a search engine, you will get a series of maps, ranging from the whole country to state by state and even smaller jurisdictions. These maps show electrical outages across the United States and territories and are within 10 minutes of real time. The data come from the electrical utilities themselves.
The maps are enlightening. At this writing, there are some areas in the dark in Michigan and California. As severe weather sweeps across the country, more outages appear on the maps.
Today’s outages are all weather-caused. But in just a few years, they will reflect something else, something more ominous: shortages in the available amount of electricity. They will occur when demand begins to outstrip supply, as it frequently does in some developing countries.
The nation is in the grips of two great transitions: a transition from fossil-based generation (coal, natural gas and some oil) to renewables (primarily wind and solar) and a transition to electricity, especially in transportation with electric vehicles.
We are in a rush to electrify in order to reduce carbon emissions.
There are an astounding 3,000 utilities, ranging in size from very small public and rural electric cooperatives to very large, investor-owned firms such as Southern Company and Exelon.
These make up the electric supply system, which has been described as the world’s largest engine. They all work together with surprising unity and are variously connected to the three electric grids, the Eastern Grid, the Western Grid and ERCOT, the free-standing Texas grid.
Their challenge isn’t only where will the power come from, but also will there be enough transmission to move it to where it is needed? Duane Highley, CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association Inc., an electric cooperative based in Westminster, Colo., told me that the addition of two electric cars to a family home can raise electric consumption by as much as 40 percent.
Many utilities, including those in such rapid growth states as Texas, are counting on distributed generation, which is when the utility enters into agreements with its customers to share the burden. This can involve agreements with incentives to allow the utility remotely to turn off certain functions during peak hours, and to buy power from its customers if they have rooftop solar installations or if they have backup generators.
After Texas was felled by Winter Storm Uri, in February 2021, many electric customers are turning to generators and rooftop solar to protect themselves, David Naylor, president of Rayburn Country Electric Cooperative Inc., in Rockwall, Texas, told me. Faced with a growth rate that has been as high as 8 and 9 percent in recent years. Naylor is vigorously pursuing distributed generation.
In the electric-utility industry, distributed generation is spoken of as “the first step in the virtual power plant.” In Connecticut there are two pilot projects, promoted by SmartPower, a nonprofit green-energy concern, with a utility, Eversource, and Connecticut Green Bank. They’re helping customers to install solar power and a substantial battery. In return the utility acquires the right to draw down from that battery on certain days at times of high demand.
All of this will help, but it doesn’t overcome the fact that between now and 2050, a target year for carbon reduction, electricity demand will double in the nation, according to many experts, and there is no way that demand can be met on the present generation and transmission trajectory.
The biggest frustration in the industry isn’t siting new wind farms and solar plants, but building new transmission to move electricity from the resource-rich areas where, as Tri-State’s Highley says, “the wind blows and the sun shines,” such as the Western states, to where it is needed.
With money pouring out of the Department of Energy for projects, the problem isn’t money but selfishness — selfishness as in “not in my backyard.” No one wants power lines, just the power. And everyone wants more of it.
The fact is that if the nation continues to electrify at the present rate, shortages could begin at the end of the decade and worsen as the century rolls on.
Those outage maps might become must-watching — until the power for our computers fails, and your region gets color-coded on the outage map you can’t see.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
What we have
Frozen forest in Hillsborough County, N.H.
Damage done to pine forests in Wolfeboro, N.H., in the 1938 hurricane
— Photo by Peter Roome
and Lakewentworth
— Graphic by Icy98 -
“New York has people, the Northwest rain, Iowa soybeans, and Texas money. New Hampshire has weather and seasons.”
— Donald Hall (1928-2018), poet and essayist who lived for many years at his family farm, in Wilmot, N.H.
Artificial art?
“All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace and Deeper Meditations #1-#6” (video still), by Memo Akten, at Burlington (Vt.) City Arts, in the group show “Co-Created: The Artist in the Age of Intelligent Machines’’.
— Photo courtesy Burlington City Arts
The gallery says the exhibition “explores the impact, ethics and aesthetics of art created by artifical intelligence. The show tackles tough questions about the nature of artwork through the work of eight artists’’ — Jane Adams, Memo Akten, Minne Atairu, Lapo Frati, Jenn Karson, Mauro Martino, Casey Reas and Jason Rohrer.
ECHO, Leahy Center for Lake Champlain, in Burlington.
From slush to lush (in two months)
On Feb. 28, gradations of gray along a western Long Island Sound estuary in Connecticut. But March 1 marks the start of meteorological spring.
— Photo by Hilary Cosell
Sweetening a false spring
Making maple syrup in the New England woods (hand-painted lithograph, 1856), by Nathaniel Currier, at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass.
Bringing them back at night
The Shubert Theatre at the Boch Center, in Boston’s threatre district.
The Paradise Rock Club (formerly known as the Paradise Theater) is a 933-person capacity music venue in Boston.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I love the title. Corean Reynolds has been named Boston’s “director of nightlife economy,’’ by Mayor Michelle Wu, in a post-COVID bid to re-energize consumers to patronize the capital of New England’s entertainment and eating-and-drinking sectors.
Her duties will include improving transportation and law enforcement.
Ms. Wu, like some other big city mayors, is animated by the desire to make the city less dependent on office workers as the move to remote work has slammed the city’s commercial real estate sector. This must include getting more people to live in the city, some via the conversion of office buildings into housing (much easier said than done) and, say, turning some streets into pedestrian-only ways.
I’m sure that Brett Smiley, Providence’s new mayor, will be watching how it goes
NHL promoting street hockey
A street hockey game.
Edited from a New England Council report:
“The National Hockey League has announced a partnership with RCX Sports, a leader in youth-organized sports, to create ‘NHL Street,’ a North American wide, youth street hockey league.
“Although the NHL was involved in street hockey programs in the 1990s, this rebirth has rebranded with a new look and its mission, NHL Street is a program with the intent to build a new era in street hockey that is fun, relevant and aimed at getting more kids involved in playing the game. This program also breaks down financial barriers that have prevented children from playing in the past by advocating for an accessible form of the game….
“‘We want to create good memories,’ said Andrew Ference, National Hockey League director of social impact, growth and fan development. ‘We don’t need to create a whole batch of the next NHLers. That might happen organically on its own, but we just want [to] create really fun times and memories with hockey.’’’
Scup popular, but not so much where a lot of it comes from -- R.I.
Scup
Consider the humble scup.
Ignored, disrespected, even feared, scup is one of the most plentiful fish in Narragansett Bay, a climate-change winner whose numbers are rising with Rhode Island’s water temperatures. Yet many Rhode Islanders have never heard of it, let alone tasted one.
Rhode Island fishermen caught more than 4 million pounds of scup in 2021, making it the state’s biggest catch among fish and second in the state’s commercial seafood school only to that better-known kingpin — squid, aka calamari.
While calamari is Rhode Island’s popular state appetizer, you won’t find scup in most supermarket seafood cases in the Ocean State. Instead, most of the commercial catch is exported to large cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago with large immigrant populations whose cultures are more familiar with scup.
To read the article, please hit this link.
Warren Getler: Constantine Menges and the threat from the Russia-China axis
Constantine Menges (1939-2004)
While China last week floated a relative non-starter of a peace plan to end Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine, Beijing at the same time is reported to be preparing the sale of artillery shells and other munitions to Moscow. We take a look at the current dynamic through the lens of the late Constantine Menges, a former senior national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Sometime in the next couple of months, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to land in Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That meeting could push world events toward a negotiated settlement in the war in Ukraine; or, more likely, it could lead to a prolongation of that year-long conflagration through the supply of Chinese-made offensive weaponry to the struggling Russian military.
Whatever the outcome, the Xi-Putin meeting exemplifies a further solidification of the post-Soviet Russian-China alliance, something which my late neighbor and U.S. presidential adviser, Constantine Menges, predicted would take hold with a vengeance and would threaten U.S. national security interests on an unprecedented scale.
Those predictions date back some 20 years, and they seem to be very much worth addressing amid the current geopolitical landscape. We ignore Menges at our peril.
In Washington-area policy circles, Menges (who worked in senior roles at the White House and the CIA) was known for being both persistent and prescient. “Constant Menace” was his light-hearted handle among those who respected his analytic skills and his passion for putting views forward on how to best protect U.S. national security and economic interests in an emergent tri-lateral world.
Menges, who died of cancer in 2004, made it his dying wish to his wife, Nancy, that his deeply researched work, China: The Gathering Threat, be published posthumously. Today, it’s extremely hard to find the book (published by Nelson Current in 2005,) and its ranking on Amazon is, sadly, way back in the dusty-shelf space.
Yet Menges’s unquestionably powerful and illuminating tome stands as the potential successor to statesman George F. Kennan’s remarkable article published under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. Kennan’s article, urging containment of the Soviet Union, set a course for U.S. foreign policy – rigorous Cold War policy -- in the immediate wake of World War II and throughout the closing decades of the last century. Menges’s overlooked work, which goes to the “big picture” kind of thinking that is often absent from today’s debates, should set descriptive swim-lanes for U.S. foreign, economic and military policy in the years running up to 2050. Kennan’s seminal article, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” clearly has its 21st Century match in Menges’s work, a richly footnoted book that focuses in excruciating detail on the sources of post-Soviet Russian conduct and associated Chinese conduct on the world stage.
In these times of heightened geopolitical uncertainty amid the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, I’m reminded of the over-the-fence talks in Georgetown I had in the early 2000s with Dr. Menges: about the new Russian leader, Putin, and about the emergent economic powerhouse, China.
Menges, in his quiet professorial way, would assert that while Middle East turmoil and state-sponsored terrorism would provide major challenges to American and Western interests, the “long-game” had to be focused on what he described as the coming dualistic challenge from both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, working in concert with each other.
Menges’s prescriptive book, written in 2004, lays out these key points, foreshadowing the current state of play.
*America’s most strategic challenge: the “China-Russia strategic axis is explicitly intended to counter the United States around the world and provide the basis for a still undefined ‘new political and economic order’ that China has declared to be a major global objective and which Putin endorsed at his first summit,” with the then Chinese leadership some 20 years ago.
*The “China-Russia strategic axis makes the world more dangerous. For the first time in forty years, the U.S. faces these nuclear-armed major powers coordinating their international actions or secretly providing each other with military guarantees in the event of conflict with the U.S. or other countries.”
*China’s ultimate goal is “regional dominance,” including the South China Sea zone of influence, leading to potential hemispheric dominance stretching to Europe through both economic muscle (direct investment) and military presence. Taiwan – the forever hot-button target -- sits in the cross-hairs of China’s growing shore-based phalanx of ballistic-missile systems, and the U.S. strategic response to an invasion by Beijing remains less than certain.
*Putin, “since assuming the presidency of Russia ….in 2000, is an intelligent, disciplined and systematic leader. He has said Russia should become a ‘strong state’ under a ‘dictatorship of law’ and that it must again play a major role in world affairs.”
*Russia “now stands precariously at the crossroads of a democratic or autocratic future. Which road Russia chooses will have historic and long-term consequences for the United States. The path favored by China and hardline elements in Russia could well plunge the U.S. back into a replay of the darkest days of the Cold War.”
We should read Menges, dive into his probing analysis of the inner-thinking of the hard-boiled Tier 1 autocrats in Beijing and Moscow over the past half-century. And, most important, we should listen to his call to action: “It’s time to get serious about strategy toward China and Russia and about geopolitics. The United States ‘must manage the peace,’ in confronting an expansionist Russia and “the rising, globally active, nuclear-armed and increasingly wealthy Communist regime in China.”
This upcoming summit in Moscow, a tete-a-tete of the world’s top two “autocrats for life,” is of critical significance for peace in Europe and beyond.
If the summit’s true agenda is to prolong the war in Ukraine through advanced-weapon supplies from Beijing to Russian troops, it would severely deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people and heighten the risks of an even broader war beyond current battlelines.
Putin, playing his China card like never before, would gain immensely from Chinese arms deliveries through a renewed ability to prosecute an invasion that keeps him in power as long as he is seen as having the upper hand on the battleground (currently very much in question by all observers.) Xi, in turn, would gain by keeping the global media’s focus on the hot war on Europe’s edge while quietly and steadily increasing the People’s Liberation Army presence in and around Taiwan and the South China Sea disputed territories.
How the Biden administration, and future U.S. administrations, deal with the “long-game” China-Russia challenge is first among priorities for America and the West. We would do well to consider the prescient wisdom of Dr. Menges, one of the key architects of the Reagan Doctrine and a most-thoughtful “framework” practitioner of big-picture foreign, economic and military policy.
Warren Getler, based in Washington, D.C., writes on foreign and military affairs. He has worked as a journalist at Foreign Affairs Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.
Thick with life
“Pond Edge” (oil on canvas), by Massachusetts-based artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009), at the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester, N.H.