Foot by foot
New England Clean Energy Connect map
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
There’s recently been progress, albeit still too slow, on making New England’s energy greener.
First, there’s that a state jury in Maine has voted 9-0 to let proceed the long-delayed transmission line for moving electricity from Hydro Quebec into our region. In a deeply dubious move, foes of the line, including three companies with natural-gas facilities in the state, had sought to kill the Avangrid Inc. project, called New England Clean Energy Connect. They did this by putting up a ballot question approved by voters after a massive campaign against the project that was aimed at retroactively killing Avangrid’s project, which regulators had approved. Armed with permits, the company had already spent hundreds of millions of dollars before the ballot question to clear the wooded, mostly wilderness route, logically assuming that it could legally do so. Talk about unfair
The jury verdict came in the wake of a Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling that in effect backed the continuation of the project.
It seems that as of this writing that the project will be completed, adding more clean juice to the region’s grid to such other new green-energy production as also-too-long-delayed offshore wind projects and solar. (Will nuclear fusion to generate electricity eventually be our savior? Research on it, much of it happening in New England, is coming along at a good clip.)
Utility Dive reported:
Anne George, spokesperson for ISO New England (which manages the region’s grid), said that it’s pleased that the project can move forward.
“The New England states’ ambitious climate goals will require building significant amounts of new infrastructure in a region where building infrastructure has been difficult,’’ she said.
Phelps Turner, a senior lawyer at the Conservation Law Foundation, said the delay caused by the legal challenge is “symptomatic of building energy infrastructure in New England.”
“We lost a lot of time.’’
New England, despite many of its citizens’ progressive rhetoric, is a remarkably Nimby place, in energy matters, housing and some other fields. Many Red States have done far more than New England in setting up renewable-energy operations.
Then there are such little noted options as geothermal. Consider National Grid’s pilot program at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. The company will use boreholes to see if a geothermal network can be established there using piping and pumps to pull heat out of the ground to warm the university’s buildings in cold weather and then pump heat from them into the ground to cool them in the summer.
#New England Clean Energy Connect
‘Restlessness and vulnerability’
From Hannah Morris’s show, “Moveable Objects,’’ at the Brattleboro (Vt.) Museum and Art Center, through April 30, 2024
Ms. Morris, who lives in Barre, Vt., writes:
“These recent works are a continued exploration of the contrast between ambiguity and specificity. The space between the two creates a stage for new visual narratives. Applying layers of paint over an initial collage, I cover, expose, and refashion to tell new stories. I use found imagery to ground myself in a moment in time, and from there, I develop a new narrative by combining old imagery with new. Using a visual language based on colors, tones, marks, and details, I create believable yet implausible scenes. The underlying restlessness and vulnerability of the people in these scenes is a reflection of a struggle to define ourselves.’’
# Hannah Morris #Barre# Brattleboro
Barre’s U.S. Post Office is one of many Barre buildings and sculptures made from stone from the famous local granite quarries.
Barre's Hope Cemetery is widely known for its elaborate granite headstones.
— Photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel
Thinking of heaven and earth
Spring clouds over Temple Emanu-El on the East Side of Providence
— Photos by Lydia Whitcomb
A downtown homeless person classically draped
— Photo and text by William Morgan
It’s 11 on a Saturday morning in downtown Providence, and someone is sleeping in. This stretch of Chapel Street between Grace Church and the Providence Performing Arts Center has two or three encampments, where building-entrance alcoves provide a modicum of shelter from the elements.
The sadness and embarrassment of homeless people, and the failure of a supposedly enlightened city to take care of its marginalized and less fortunate, tear at one’s heartstrings.
Whatever the issues around social conscience and civic breakdown, some credit is due to this intrepid street denizen. He or she is wrapped in an ecclesiastical purple blanket, like a giant burqa without eye holes. The draping of the fabric recalls classical Greek statuary, such as the Elgin Marbles, from The Parthenon.
As I passed, from a tent pitched in the next entryway, a female voice wafted out, “Have a nice day.’’
William Morgan is an architecture writer and historian based in Providence. His latest book, Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, will be published in October.
New innovation-focused BalanceBlue Lab at the New England Aquarium
A weedy sea dragon in the New England Aquarium’s Temperate {Zone} Gallery
Edited from a New England Council report
The New England Aquarium, on Boston’s waterfront, has announced creation of the BalanceBlue Lab, which will support innovation in such sectors as fishing, aquaculture, offshore wind and coastal resiliency.
Emiley Zalesky Lockhart will be the inaugural head of the BalanceBlue Lab, with the title of associate vice president for ocean sustainability, technology and innovation for the aquarium. Before joining the aquarium, Lockhart was deputy general counsel and secretary of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a general counsel and policy director in the Massachusetts Senate. Her main goals regarding innovation from this new lab are to support startups and industry technical advising.
“I think the idea is leveraging that science and being technical experts and helping companies, whether startups or large organizations, figure out how to create solutions in a more sustainable and responsible manner,” said Zalesky.
Outside the aquarium on a summer day
Grandeur or at least mystery at Good Fortune
— Photo and text by William Morgan
At a time when most public art is too realistic, too political, and just too awful, it can be a pleasure to stumble upon some unplanned artistic achievement– art in spite of itself.
This urinal in Good Fortune, the giant warehouse of Asian food in the Elmwood section of Providence, offers humor, dignity, and an appropriate aura of mystery befitting an intriguing work of art.
This plumbing fixture is broken, but the sign, “Operation Suspended,’’ hints at grander exploits, such as the cancellation of a moon shot or an aborted Navy Seals raid.
Set off by faux marble and black poly-something-or-other, the flushing mechanism takes on the look of a sleek, abstract chromium sculpture – a tribute to American industrialization, perhaps. A dismembered torso, or perhaps a tuxedo on a coat hanger, lurks beneath the shiny, elegant, mink-coat-black drape.
High fashion or a postponed plumbing repair?
William Morgan is a Providence-based writer and architectural historian. He holds a Ph.D. in American Art from the Bidens’ alma mater, the University of Delaware. His latest book, Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States, will be published this fall.
#art #Providence
Sam Pizzigati: Major League Baseball’s dangerous new beer-selling extension
— Photo by Schyler
The original Boston Beer Company about 1880. The current version of the company, founded in 1984, makes Samuel Adams Beer, which is very popular at Fenway Park.
From OtherWords.org
BOSTON
“Take me out to the ball game,” as baseball’s fabled 1908 classic song puts it. The ancient refrain ends: “I don’t care if I never get back.”
Unfortunately, America’s billionaire baseball owners may not care if you get back, either. Just look at how baseball’s owners are reacting to the success of Major League Baseball’s new rules to speed up the game.
“Time of play” has emerged over recent years as a major concern of just about everybody in baseball, especially fans.
Decades ago, the vast majority of Major League games ended in less than three hours. In 1981, for instance, the average game ran just a tad over two-and-a-half. By 2021, average games were running over 40 minutes longer.
Those long times were bumming out fans — and baseball owners as well. These owners worried that fans would simply stop showing up if the games kept lasting so long. The answer? A set of mostly welcome rule changes that speed up the games.
These rule changes went into effect this season. With no runners on base, pitchers must now deliver their pitches within 15 seconds. A new “pitch clock” is even keeping track.
Fans seem to love the pitch clock and other new time-saving rules. Games are already running significantly shorter, by just over a half-hour. Players like the new pace of play, too.
But the owners now realize that they have a problem. With shorter game times, fans have less time to buy beer. Owners don’t like that. They make a lot of money off beer sales — the average beer at a Major League ballpark last year cost nearly $7, with fans in Chicago paying well over $10.
How are owners reacting to this spring’s drooping beer sales? Not well. To maintain the beer revenue they net, some owners have actually started putting baseball fans at serious risk.
Up until this year, most ballparks stopped selling beer in the seventh inning of their nine-inning games. That policy made eminent sense. No one should be drinking beer one moment, then heading out to the parking lot and the drive home the next.
Baseball owners, facing shorter games, are now starting to change that long-standing policy. Several Major League ball clubs have begun extending beer sales through the eighth inning.
To be responsible, Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Matt Stram counters, baseball’s beer policies ought to be going in the exact opposite direction. With games over sooner, ballparks ought to be cutting beer sales off before the seventh inning.
The seventh-inning cut-off, Stram points out, gives “our fans time to sober up and drive home safe.” With innings and games now taking less time, he asks, shouldn’t baseball be moving “beer sales back to the sixth inning” to give fans that same time to sober up?
Baseball’s owners can certainly afford to put safety first. Of baseball’s 30 principal owners, all but six currently rate as billionaires. The “poorest” among the 30, Cincinnati’s Robert Castellini, has a fortune worth $400 million.
Unfortunately, umpires don’t have the authority to call the sport’s owners out. But city councils and other government bodies that have subsidized baseball owners over the years do have some power here.
Local leaders have often used “eminent domain” to seize — in the “public interest” — the property that sports owners have wanted for new ballparks and stadiums. Maybe we ought to be using eminent domain to seize sports teams and run them in the public interest.
Boston-based Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.
#drinking
#Major League Baseball
#beer
Land conservation has favored the white and wealthy
In Westport, Mass., where affluent summer and year-round homeowners have helped protect much countryside from development.
From article in ecoRI News (ecori.org) by Frank Carini
Concern about environmental and social injustices is spreading, but little research documents how the benefits of land conservation are distributed among different groups of people. In fact, the findings of a new study reveal efforts are likely needed to account for human inequities while continuing land conservation needed for ecological reasons.
Protecting open space from development increases the value of surrounding homes, but a disproportionate amount of that newly generated wealth goes to high-income white households, according to the study published recently in the Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences.
Land conservation projects do more than preserve open space, ecosystems, and wildlife habitat. These preservation projects can also boost property values for nearby homeowners, and those financial benefits are unequally distributed among demographic groups in the United States.
The study, by researchers from the University of Rhode Island and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, found that new housing wealth associated with land conservation goes disproportionately to people who are wealthy and white.
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
#land conservation
Judith Martin: How to maintain a social network as you age
Except for the cigarettes, healthy social interactions
— Photo by Tup Wanders
See New England Centenarian Study
“It’ s never too late to develop meaningful relationships.’’
— Robert Waldinger, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
For years, Carole Leskin, 78, enjoyed a close camaraderie with five women in Moorestown, N.J., a group that took classes together, gathered for lunch several times a week, celebrated holidays with one another, and socialized frequently at their local synagogue.
Leskin was different from the other women — unmarried, living alone, several years younger — but they welcomed her warmly, and she basked in the feeling of belonging. Although she met people easily, Leskin had always been something of a loner and her intense involvement with this group was something new.
Then, just before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it was over. Within two years, Marlene died of cancer. Lena had a fatal heart attack. Elaine succumbed to injuries after a car accident. Margie died of sepsis after an infection. Ruth passed away after an illness.
Leskin was on her own again, without anyone to commiserate or share her worries with as pandemic restrictions went into effect and waves of fear swept through her community. “The loss, the isolation; it was horrible,” she told me.
What can older adults who have lost their closest friends and family members do as they contemplate the future without them? If, as research has found, good relationships are essential to health and well-being in later life, what happens when connections forged over the years end?
It would be foolish to suggest these relationships can easily be replaced: They can’t. There’s no substitute for people who’ve known you a long time, who understand you deeply, who’ve been there for you reliably in times of need, and who give you a sense of being anchored in the world.
Still, opportunities to create bonds with other people exist, and “it’s never too late to develop meaningful relationships,” said Robert Waldinger, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
That study, now in its 85th year, has shown that people with strong connections to family, friends and their communities are “happier, physically healthier, and live longer than people who are less well connected,” according to The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, a new book describing its findings, co-written by Waldinger and Marc Schulz, the Harvard study’s associate director.
Waldinger’s message of hope involves recognizing that relationships aren’t only about emotional closeness, though that’s important. They’re also a source of social support, practical help, valuable information and ongoing engagement with the world around us. And all these benefits remain possible, even when cherished family and friends pass on.
Say you’ve joined a gym and you enjoy the back-and-forth chatter among people you’ve met there. “That can be nourishing and stimulating,” Waldinger said. Or, say, a woman from your neighborhood has volunteered to give you rides to the doctor. “Maybe you don’t know each other well or confide in each other, but that person is providing practical help you really need,” he said.
Even casual contacts — the person you chat with in the coffee shop or a cashier you see regularly at the local supermarket — “can give us a significant hit of well-being,” Waldinger said. Sometimes, the friend of a friend is the person who points you to an important resource in your community you wouldn’t otherwise know about.
Carole Leskin lost a group of close friends just before the pandemic. Though she’s made several new friends online at a travel site, she misses the warmth of being with other people.
After losing her group of friends, Leskin suffered several health setbacks — a mild stroke, heart failure and, recently, a nonmalignant brain tumor — that left her unable to leave the house most of the time. About 4.2 million people 70 and older are similarly “homebound” — a figure that has risen dramatically in recent years, according to a study released in December 2021.
Determined to escape what she called “solitary confinement,” Leskin devoted time to writing a blog about aging and reaching out to readers who got in touch with her. She joined a virtual travel site, Heygo, and began taking tours around the world. On that site, she found a community of people with common interests, including five (two in Australia, one in Ecuador, one in Amsterdam, and one in New York City) who’ve become treasured friends.
“Between [Facebook] Messenger and email, we write like old-fashioned pen pals, talking about the places we’ve visited,” she told me. “It has been lifesaving.”
Still, Leskin can’t call on these long-distance virtual friends to come over if she needs help, to share a meal, or to provide the warmth of a physical presence. “I miss that terribly,” she said.
Research confirms that virtual connections yield mixed results. On one hand, older adults who routinely connect with other people via cellphones and computers are less likely to be socially isolated than those who don’t, several studies suggest. Shifting activities for older adults such as exercise classes, social hours, and writing groups online has helped many people remain engaged while staying safe during the pandemic, noted Kasley Killam, executive director of Social Health Labs, an organization focused on reducing loneliness and fostering social connections.
But when face-to-face contact with other people diminishes significantly — or disappears altogether, as was true for millions of older adults in the past three years — seniors are more likely to be lonely and depressed, other studies have found.
“If you’re in the same physical location as a friend or family member, you don’t have to be talking all the time: You can just sit together and feel comfortable. These low-pressure social interactions can mean a lot to older adults and that can’t be replicated in a virtual environment,” said Ashwin Kotwal, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of geriatrics at the University of California-San Francisco who has studied the effects of engaging with people virtually.
Meanwhile, millions of seniors — disproportionately those who are low-income, represent racial and ethnic minorities, or are older than 80 — can’t afford computers or broadband access or aren’t comfortable using anything but the phone to reach out to others.
Liz Blunt, 76, of Arlington, Texas, is among them. She hasn’t recovered from her husband’s death in September 2021 from non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. Several years earlier, Blunt’s closest friend, Janet, died suddenly on a cruise to Southeast Asia, and two other close friends, Vicky and Susan, moved to other parts of the country.
“I have no one,” said Blunt, who doesn’t have a cellphone and admitted to being “technologically unsavvy.”
When we first spoke in mid-March, Blunt had seen only one person she knows fairly well in the past 4½ months. Because she has several serious health issues, she has been extremely cautious about catching covid and hardly goes out. “I’m not sure where to turn to make friends,” she said. “I’m not going to go somewhere and take my mask off.”
But Blunt hadn’t given up altogether. In 2016, she’d started a local group for “elder orphans” (people without spouses or children to depend on). Though it sputtered out during the pandemic, Blunt thought she might reconnect with some of those people, and she sent out an email inviting them to lunch.
On March 25, eight women met outside at a restaurant and talked for 2½ hours. “They want to get together again,” Blunt told me when I called again, with a note of eagerness in her voice. “Looking in the mirror, I can see the relief in my face. There are people who care about me and are concerned about me. We’re all in the same situation of being alone at this stage of life — and we can help each other.”
Judith Martin is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
#elderly
'I explore my secrets'
“Yearnings (4 men),’’ by Putney, Vt.-based sculptor Susan Wilson, at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, in Manchester, through May 7
She says in her artist statement:
“My work in clay has always been about seeking to understand my place in the world. With clay I explore my secrets, dreams, fears, hopes, and my questions. Using animal and figural images, I tell stories about being together and alone, about yearning for both connection and solitude, about dreaming and waiting, and about hoping for community.
“The three-dimensionality of clay enables me to create real spaces within and outside of which I can tell these stories. These stories float between and around the figures, charging the spaces with energy and unresolved tension.
“My most recent figurative work emerges from my retirement and move to a small and vibrant town {Putney} in Vermont and to a state full of energized people working together to build caring communities. I continue the yearnings for human connections and for a vibrant community as an antidote for all the pain and alienation in the present world. My work continues to be about waiting, hoping, yearning to find that community. I am making archetypal figures with slabs of clay. I am making hollow forms that continue to imply tangible interior space where the mystery and unanswered questions reside. I am exploring polarities such as interior and exterior, solitude and community. I use juxtapositions of scale to enliven and energize my forms and to invite questions.’’
Putney General Store, built 1840–1900
— Photo by Beyond My Ken
Putney is on the west side of the Connecticut River, above the mouth of Sacketts Brook. A falls on the brook provided water power for small early mills, and it was there that the main village was formed in the late 18th Century. But because the town did not have abundant sources of water power, it was largely bypassed by the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th Century, and remained largely rural. Putney has numerous buildings in the Federal and Greek Revival styles popular during its most significant period of growth, the late 18th to mid-19th Century.
The Theophilus Crawford House, built about 1808 and considered an important example of the Federal style.
‘Hairy with violets’
“I am fleshed at smaller sports, and grow in time
into the mineral thick fell of earth; Vermont
hairy with violets, roses, lilies and like
minions and darlings of the spring, meantime
working wonders, rousing astonishments….”
—From “West Topsham,’’ by John Engels (1931-2007), a Vermont-based poet and teacher. West Topsham is a village in the town of Topsham, Vt.
Town hall in Topsham
No refrigeration needed
“Shelf Life” (acrylic on Yupo), by Boston-based artist Wilson Hunt, at Alpers Fine Art, Rockport, Mass.
In Rockport
‘Long as you don’t inhale’
“Finding Atmosphere” (ceramic, wood, glaze, gold leaf and wire), by Ethan McGrath, in the show “Essence: 2023 Senior Exhibition,’’ at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, through May 26.
— Photo courtesy of Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery
The show brings together the artwork of 13 senior visual-art students — Christian Bachez, Jianing Bai, Brooke Bailey, Aisena Cekrezi, Unique Grimes, Teaken Haggerty, Obiamaka Igwenagu, Ethan McGrath, Kate Nedorostek, Kendra Offermann, Emily Skilton, Noelle Ventura and Olivia Wiatrowsk. The work encompasses a wide range of mediums (and themes) from sculpture, to murals and mixed-media.
xxx
“Pollution,’’ by Tom Lehrer (born 1928), American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist and math professor, including at Harvard, MIT and Wellesley College
If you visit American city,
You will find it very pretty.
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!
Pollution, pollution!
They got smog and sewage and mud.
Turn on your tap
And get hot and cold running crud!
See the halibuts and the sturgeons
Being wiped out by detergeons.
Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly,
But they don't last long if they try.
Pollution, pollution!
You can use the latest toothpaste,
And then rinse your mouth
With industrial waste.
Just go out for a breath of air
And you'll be ready for Medicare.
The city streets are really quite a thrill -
If the hoods don't get you, the monoxide will.
Pollution, pollution!
Wear a gas mask and a veil.
Then you can breathe,
Long as you don't inhale!
Lots of things there that you can drink,
But stay away from the kitchen sink!
The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay
They drink at lunch in San Jose.*
So go to the city,
See the crazy people there.
Like lambs to the slaughter,
They're drinking the water
And breathing [cough] the air!
Not really revolutionary
Montague Center in 1907
“New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and fifty years behind the times.”
— Edward Pearson Pressey, in his book History of Montague (Mass.): A Typical Puritan Town (1910)
Felicia Nimue Ackerman: ‘Don’t call me older’
“Old Age Be Not Sugarcoated’’
(First appeared in Light, https://lightpoetrymagazine.com/)
Your language has me groaning.
I hate to be a scold,
But please don’t call me older
Instead of simply old.
And even worse is senior.
It makes me quite irate.
I haven’t been a senior
Since 1968!
— Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a Providence-based poet and a professor of philosophy at Brown University.
Llewellyn King: America is desperate for skilled tradespeople
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
There is a terrible shortage of people who fix things. I am thinking of electricians, plumbers, glaziers, auto mechanics, and many more skilled workers who keep life livable and society running.
It is frustrating if you can’t get a plumber when you need one. But the skilled- workers shortage has much larger consequences than the inconvenience of the homeowner. The very rate of national progress on many fronts is being affected.
More housing is desperately needed, but architects tell me that some new construction isn’t happening because of the skilled-workers shortage. Projects are being shelved.
The problem in electric utilities is critical — and interesting because they offer excellent pay, retirement and health care and still, they are falling short of recruits. They are very aware that many of their workers will be retiring in the next several years, adding to the problem. One utility, DTE, in Michigan, has been training former prisoners in vegetation control — the endless business of trimming trees around power lines.
Auto dealerships are scrounging for mechanics, now euphemistically called “technicians.”
Skilled workers are in short supply for the railroad and bridge industries. Many industries are prepared to offer training.
The need is great and it is having a quietly crippling effect on national prosperity.
President Joe Biden has been almost ceaselessly promoting solar and wind generation as job creators. Someone should tell him there is a severe shortage of those same electricians, pipe fitters, wind farm erectors and solar- panel installers.
The skilled-workers shortage has been worsening for some time, but it is now palpable.
There are contributory factors that have been building: The end of the draft meant an end to a lot of trade schooling in the military. Many a youth learned electronics, motor repair or simply how to paint something from Uncle Sam. That’s the generation that’s now retiring.
Then there is the education imbalance: We encourage too many below-average academic students to go to college. It is part of the credentialing craze.
Those less suited to academic life seek easier and easier courses in lesser and lesser colleges just to come out with a bachelor’s degree — a certificate that passes for a credential.
The result is a glut on the market of workers with useless degrees in such things as marketing, communications, sociology and even journalism. I can tell you that if you arrive in college in need of remedial English, your future as a journalist is likely to be wobbly.
Since childhood, I have been impressed with people who fix things: People like my father. He fixed everything from diesel engines to water well pumps, burst pipes and sagging roofs.
Men, and some women, of his generation worked with their hands but they were, in their way, Renaissance people. They knew how to fix things from a cattle feeder to a sewing machine, from a loose brick in a wall to a child’s bicycle to a boiler.
The work of fixing, of keeping things running, isn’t stupid work; it involves a lot of deduction, much knowledge and acquired skill.
Men and women who fixed things were at one with men and women who made things, often bound together in a common identity inside a union.
Think of the great names of the unions of the past, and the sense of pride members once took in their belonging: the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, the Teamsters or the United Autoworkers. You had work and social dignity. You weren’t looked down upon because you hadn’t been to college.
We aren’t going to quickly bring back honor to manual work or reverence for the great body of people who keep everything running. So we might look to the hundreds of thousands of skilled artisans who would do the work if they could enter the United States legally. Yes, the migrants milling at the southern border. Many skilled welders, plumbers and masons are yearning to cross the border and start fixing the dilapidated parts of this country.
The owner of a clothing factory told me that she was desperate to find women who could sew. She said that it is a skill that has just disappeared from the American workforce. A landscape contractor in Washington told me he would close without his Mexican workers.
A modest proposal: Let us write immigration law on the basis of who is really needed. Add to this a work permit dependent on fulfilling certain conditions. You would soon find company recruiters mingling with the border agents along the Rio Grande.
And we would lose our fear of a burst pipe. Help is just a frontier away.
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.
Linda Gasparello
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Maine country place
“When Daddy’s downcellah busy with his lathe, I go to the edge of the grass to get a look at the Beans. The Beans’ mobile home is one of them old ones, looks like a turquoise-blue submarine. It’s got blackberry bushes growin’ over the windows.’’
— From The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985), by Carolyn Chute (born 1947)
Maybe never
“Call Home” (still from 16 mm film), by Elise Cohen, at the Emerson (College) Contemporary Gallery show “MFA Thesis Projects,’’ in Boston, through May 14
— Photo courtesy: Emerson Contemporary Gallery
The gallery says that Cohen’s work “incorporates mixed media to explore themes of transmission, alienation and memories though 8 mm and 16 mm home movies and audio recording.’’
The art of sound in New Bedford
At the New Bedford Art Museum, through June 4:
“Sound in Space, Sound in Place’’ is a survey of contemporary sound art, foregrounds sound and listening as powerful shapers of everyday experience and draws attention to sound’s unique properties as an artistic medium.
The exhibition features a collaborative work by established sound artists John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein—the richly exploratory sound installation “Cluster Fields” (2018–2023)—as well as “New Bedford Soundscape,’’ a crowdsourced collection of audio recordings by New Bedford residents; “Sonic Textures of Place,’’ experimental sound works by UMass Dartmouth students in Professor Walker Downey’s Spring 2023 sound art seminar; “NBWaves,’’ by Scapeghost, and “Whirly Chorus,’’ by Tess Oldfield.
Scott Bishop, aka Scapeghost, performs his six-song “NBWaves,’’ on April 28, 6-8p.m.
Where will the coastal year-rounders live?
Stonington waterfront in1915
Aerial view of fancy summer resort town Camden, Maine, from the harbor
—Photo by King of Hearts
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
‘Many coastal communities in New England face severe housing shortages for year-round residents of modest means. Around here, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island are infamous for this problem.
Consider Stonington, Maine, on Deer Isle. There, 80 percent of its shorefront is now owned by non-residents (mostly summer people), as are 56 percent of that fishing (mostly lobsters) port’s downtown properties, according to a report in the Portland Press Herald
The usually affluent summer folks bid up real estate prices to levels unaffordable to most year-rounders.
So where will the carpenters, yard-work people, plumbers, electricians and schoolteachers live? Perhaps some elderly summer people will leave their summer McMansions to towns to be converted into affordable housing. Just joking. But something must be done if these towns are going to have enough of the locals who make communities viable for year-round and summer people. That includes zoning changes and/or having states subsidize the construction of new housing in some places.