Study says New England needs to protect much more wildlands
Excerpted from ecoRI News by Rob Smith
PETERSHAM, Mass. (home of Harvard University’s research forest)
“New England isn’t conserving enough wildlands to mitigate climate change or meet conservation goals.
“That’s according to a new study released late last month by Wildlands, Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities (WWF&C), a coalition group of conservation organizations, educational institutions, local governments and private nonprofits.
“The first-of-its-kind analysis, performed jointly by (the} Harvard Forest of Harvard University, the Northeast Wilderness Trust and Highstead Foundation, examined how much wildlands — tracts of land where the management policy is to leave nature ‘alone’ and allow natural processes to prevail without human interference — are preserved across the region, and the answer is: not much.
“‘The wild condition of the land derives not from the land’s history, but from its freedom to operate untrammeled, today and in the future,’ wrote the study’s authors.
“The study lays out three criteria for land to meet its wildlands definition: the land must have a deliberate wildland purpose; it must be allowed to mature freely under prevailing environmental conditions with minimal human intervention; and it must be protected in perpetuity.
“The key factor in wildlands is time. In New England, where much of the land has been developed and used, wildlands are more likely to develop via natural rewilding, an ecological restoration practice that aims at reducing the influence of humans on ecosystems. Wildlands are more likely to look like recently clear-cut areas or former pastures than old growth forest.
“Only 1.3 million acres, around 3.3% of New England’s total land area, protects wildlands across 426 individual properties, with much of it limited to the remote and rural areas of the region, a band of land that stretches from northwestern Connecticut to Baxter State Park in Maine. Meanwhile WWF&C has set a goal of preserving 10% of the region as wildlands.’’
Diorama at the The Fisher Museum at the Harvard Forest, which offers exhibits on current research as well as 23 dioramas portraying the history, conservation and management of New England woodlands.
Llewellyn King: What happened to the kingmakers of journalism?
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
What happened to the kingmakers of journalism?
They seem to have died in 2011 with David Broder, of The Washington Post. In an age when columnists could still influence the flow of events, Broder stood out as much for what he wasn’t as for what he was.
He wasn’t, for example, a flashy writer. He didn’t have George Will’s turn of phrase. He didn’t add to the language like another kingmaker a generation before him, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann gave us “Great Society,” “Cold War” and “stereotype.”
What set Broder apart was the depth of his political reporting.
I worked with Broder at The Post, and he was relentless. If you were into politics, you were grist to his mill. From precinct captains to senators, they were all of interest to Broder, all worthy of his probing; all had a tale to tell, and Broder wanted to hear it.
Journalists at The Post used to drink in a genuinely downmarket bar called The New York Lounge, next to the better-known Post Pub, which, ironically, was eschewed by most of the editorial staff. Incongruously, Broder would be found there occasionally with some political apparatchik, notebook out and drinking a Diet Coke.
A reporter who traveled with Broder described how when they arrived in Midwestern city at 10 p.m., Broder got on the phone to see who of the local political establishment was up. It could have been a candidate or the local state party chairman; all were worth talking to in Broder’s world.
Whereas some newspaper grandees talked to presidents and the power elite (Lippmann helped Woodrow Wilson write his Fourteen Points, Joe Alsop shared sessions with Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War, and George Will rehearsed Ronald Reagan for his debates with Jimmy Carter), Broder reported relentlessly at all levels.
For all but the very end of his career, Broder worked as a reporter who wrote two columns a week. This industrious reporting underpinned the columns. They were magisterial and analytical.
You didn’t pick them up to be entertained but to get insight. That is where Broder’s strength lay, and that is what made him a kingmaker. Other political journalists and writers read Broder and were informed by him.
He told them which way the wind was blowing, and that filled their sails and influenced their work. Broder informed the political universe.
That is how he affected the careers of many a political grandee. He said in his studious and understated way, “Look at so-and-so.” And they looked, and then they wrote, and the landscape was changed.
I recall vividly a lunch at the Financial Times headquarters in London in 1975. Apart from FT people who included, as I recall, David Fishlock, the science editor, there was Virginia Hamill from The Washington Post News Service and Bernard Ingham, who was to become Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary.
The talk was about who would win the Democratic nomination. I had flown in from Washington the day before and had read Broder in The Post, so I blurted out, “Jimmy Carter.” The group looked askance and wanted to know why I had such a crazy idea. I replied, “Because Broder has discovered him.”
Broder’s influence was subtle but pervasive. He was the reporter’s reporter, the columnist’s columnist.
In the time since Broder’s death, everything has changed. There is so much commentary based on little reporting and politics is dominated by click-bait politicians — for example, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.
Analysis has been replaced with tribal bellowing, and social media has taken the debate off the editorial pages and handed it to influencers, who wouldn’t have gotten a letter to the editor published before the internet.
While dwelling on the kingmakers of old, it is worth mentioning the king-humblers, particularly Robert Novak. Novak got the goods.
Again, Novak wasn’t a great writer but was the source of hard gossip. If you wanted to point to wrongdoing in high places, a call to Novak would set the wheels of justice, or at least the downfall would be in motion.
Novak, a friend, thought that you should tell readers what they didn’t already know — and he did, often changing career trajectories for politicos.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
White House Chronicle
Just ignore the Canadian smoke
Looking west toward the Adirondack Mountains and Lake Champlain from Charlotte's, Vt.
— Photo by Niranjan Arminius
Riverbank restoration project along the Connecticut River in Fairlee, Vt.
”Look. And smell. Breathe deeply. Feel the air; touch it now and sense its purity, its vigor, its super-constant rejuvenation (that supposedly has given Vermonters their long life — if you discount their stubbornness).’’
— Evan Hill, in The Connecticut River (1970
‘Dig out King George’s coffin'
Federal marshals escort slave Anthony Burns to a ship amidst protests by Boston’s many abolitionists.
To get betimes in Boston town, I rose this morning early;
Here’s a good place at the corner—I must stand and see the show.
Clear the way there, Jonathan!
Way for the President’s marshal! Way for the government cannon!
Way for the Federal foot and dragoons—and the apparitions copiously
tumbling.
I love to look on the stars and stripes—I hope the fifes will play
Yankee Doodle.
How bright shine the cutlasses of the foremost troops!
Every man holds his revolver, marching stiff through Boston town.
A fog follows—antiques of the same come limping,
Some appear wooden—legged, and some appear bandaged and bloodless. 10
Why this is indeed a show! It has called the dead out of the earth!
The old grave—yards of the hills have hurried to see!
Phantoms! phantoms countless by flank and rear!
Cock’d hats of mothy mould! crutches made of mist!
Arms in slings! old men leaning on young men’s shoulders!
What troubles you, Yankee phantoms? What is all this chattering of
bare gums?
Does the ague convulse your limbs? Do you mistake your crutches for
fire—locks, and level them?
If you blind your eyes with tears, you will not see the President’s
marshal;
If you groan such groans, you might balk the government cannon.
For shame, old maniacs! Bring down those toss’d arms, and let your
white hair be; 20
Here gape your great grand—sons—their wives gaze at them from the
windows,
See how well dress’d—see how orderly they conduct themselves.
Worse and worse! Can’t you stand it? Are you retreating?
Is this hour with the living too dead for you?
Retreat then! Pell—mell!
To your graves! Back! back to the hills, old limpers!
I do not think you belong here, anyhow.
But there is one thing that belongs here—shall I tell you what it
is, gentlemen of Boston?
I will whisper it to the Mayor—he shall send a committee to England;
They shall get a grant from the Parliament, go with a cart to the
royal vault—haste! 30
Dig out King George’s coffin, unwrap him quick from the grave—
clothes, box up his bones for a journey;
Find a swift Yankee clipper—here is freight for you, black—bellied
clipper,
Up with your anchor! shake out your sails! steer straight toward
Boston bay.
Now call for the President’s marshal again, bring out the government
cannon,
Fetch home the roarers from Congress, make another procession, guard
it with foot and dragoons.
This centre—piece for them:
Look! all orderly citizens—look from the windows, women!
The committee open the box, set up the regal ribs, glue those that
will not stay,
Clap the skull on top of the ribs, and clap a crown on top of the
skull.
You have got your revenge, old buster! The crown is come to its own,
and more than its own.
Stick your hands in your pockets, Jonathan—you are a made man from
this day; 40
You are mighty cute—and here is one of your bargains.
— “A Boston Ballad” (1854), by Walt Whitman (1819-1992). This poem protests the case of escaped slave Anthony Burns in 1854, wherein a federal judge decreed Burns should be returned to his owner. Because Boston was strongly abolitionist, masses came out to jeer at the marshals who were charged with escorting Burns to the ship that would take him back to the South.
Before we go extinct, too
“Where Did the Dinosaurs Go?’’, by Connecticut artist and art teacher Lily Morgan, at The Norwalk (Conn.) Art Space.
The gallery says:
“Her work explores the relationship between abstraction, geometry and realism. Her paintings are built, layer by layer, and increase in complexity as they move towards the surface.’’
Coastal atmosphere
“William Shattuck: Paintings, Drawings and a Book!” (opening July 8) at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass.
This quote from Mr. Shattuck is via the New Bedford Whaling Museum:
“Drawn in by color, composition and light, I find I’m also inspired just as easily by the temperature, the character of the air and atmosphere in the moment. I am not a Plein Air painter by any means, but I do spend a good deal of time walking through the fields, woods and marshes along this shoreline, noting the beauty and interplay between land, water and sky. I’ll sometimes make a line drawing with color notes, then eventually execute a finished piece in my studio.”
xxx
The Whaling Museum’s note:
“William Shattuck lives in Southeastern Massachusetts. His paintings reflect a fascination with the tidal marshes, estuaries and woodlands along that coastline. Having moved there in 1980 from New York, he has appreciated the changing patterns of light and weather throughout different seasons and times of day.’’
#Dedee Shattuck Gallery
#Westport, Mass.
#William Shattuck
Jim Hightower: Roger Payne was the man who discovered the music of whales
Humpback whale breaching
Via OtherWords.org
When you think of Americans whose music has made a lasting difference, you might think of Scott Joplin, Woody Guthrie, Maybelle Carter, Harry Belafonte … or Roger Payne.
Who? I came across Payne in an obituary reporting that he’d died at age 88 on June 10 at his home, in South Woodstock, Vt.
Yes, I occasionally scan the obits, not out of morbid curiosity, but because these little death notices encompass our people’s history, reconnecting us to common lives that had some small or surprisingly large impact.
Payne’s impact is still reverberating around the globe, even though few know his name. A biologist who studied moths, in the 1960s he chanced upon a technical military recording of undersea sounds that incidentally included a cacophony of baying, shrieking, mooing, squealing, and caterwauling.
They were the voices of humpback whales.
What others had considered noise “blew my mind,” Payne said, describing them as a musical chorus of “exuberant, uninterrupted rivers of sound.” His life’s work shifted from moths to whales and finally to the interdependence of all species..
At the time, whales were treated by industry and governments as dull, lumbering nuisances. But Payne’s musical instincts came into play, sensing that the “singing” of these magnificent mammals might reach the primordial soul of humans. Perhaps that Payne’s mother was a music teacher had a role.
So he collected their rhythmic, haunting melodies into a momentous 1970 recording titled Songs of the Humpback Whale. It became a huge best-seller, altered public perception, and spawned a global “Save the Whales” campaign — one of the most successful conservation movements ever.
Without writing or performing a single musical note, this scientist produced a truly powerful serenade from nature that continues to make a difference.
To connect with Roger Payne’s work and help extend his deep understanding that all of us beings are related, contact the global advocacy group he founded, Ocean Alliance, at whale.org.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.
Classic New England church in South Woodstock, Vt.
— Photo by Doug Kerr
#Roger Payne
#humpback whales
Information, please
We seek suggestions about interesting, dynamic people aged 70 or over, and in New England, to interview who are still working because they want to.
Please send suggested names to:
rwhitcomb4@cox.net
But beware the jungle
”Terrace Oasis” (watercolor), by West Barnstable, Mass.-based Brenda Bechtel, at the New England Watercolor Society Gallery’s 2023 “Celebrating New England’’ show, at the gallery, in Plymouth, Mass., through Sept. 7.
The gallery says:
“{The} exhibition … brings together 49 works from New England Watercolor Society members. The show is juried by Vladislav Yeliseyev, a Signature Member of the National Watercolor Society and the American Impressionist Society.’’
#Brenda Bechtel
#New England Watercolor Society
Don Pesci: In Connecticut (!) at a glorious center of conservatism on the Glorious Fourth
“Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776,” a 1900 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson working on the document.
SOMERS, Conn.
The Fourth of July this year, as everyone in Connecticut who has tolerated the weather the past few days well knows, was wet. The weather, along with fidgety concerns about the effect of fireworks displays on an apparently violated environment, have thrown cold water on John Adams’s view of a proper celebration of independence.
“The Second Day of July 1776,” Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on the occasion of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, “will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival [of Independence] …It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
The official celebration of Independence on July 4, pedants will note, is off by two days.
The weather did not matter on this July 4, as the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom, an offshoot of Hillsdale College, in the city of the same name in Michigan, celebrated the real founding in 1776 of the United States of America. All the fireworks were inside the center in Somers.
My wife, Andree, and I were in attendance and found the building itself, a brick-by-brick recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, astonishing, along with the company in attendance, a crowd who draw comfort and illumination from the Founding Fathers of the country; the Blake Center’s executive director, Labin Duke, and the two speakers – Hillsdale Professors Thomas West and David Azerrad, – who shed illumination, if not pomp, on the subjects they chose to present.
The first speaker, West, the author of The Political Theory of the American Founding; Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom, limited his remarks to a discussion of the foundational understanding of modern views concerning the odd shape of our post-liberal foreign and domestic policy. What would the Founders, for instance, have thought of an interventionist foreign policy – that is, an activist foreign policy in which one nation imposes its political views upon another?
Most of them would have felt, as John Adams did, that “America is the friend of liberty everywhere, but the custodian only of our own.” And then, too, there is Washington, the weld of the American Revolution, warning his fellows to avoid “entangling alliances.”
The second speaker, David Azerrad, ventured into our current Marxist-inflected mare’s nest – are we all racists?
The short answer, although there continues to exist in our relatively racist-free society some real racists who continue by their morally offensive and unorthodox behavior to prove the rule that the United States has left racism behind us. Such obnoxious idiots might well profit from a Hillsdale education and a careful reading of the Declaration of Independence, written chiefly by Thomas Jefferson -- “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” -- himself a slave owner.
That declaratory bit concerning “natural rights” having been authored by the Christian God who endowed mankind with “certain unalienable Rights,” among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” is the wooden stake thrust into the heart of a vampire-like slavery, done to death in a Union-shattering Civil War watered with the blood of patriots at Shiloh and Gettysburg.
The founder of the Friendly’s restaurant chain, S. Prestley Blake, and his wife, Helen, at first sold the property to one buyer, later repurchased it and then more or less gifted it to Hillsdale, in 2019.
In four short years, The Blake Center for Faith and Freedom has become, its patrons realize, an inestimable pearl of wisdom located providentially on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts.
We should count ourselves lucky – though the center itself regards such “luck” as providential – to have in our presence such a pearl buried deep in an ocean of muddy neo-progressive nonsense. And all of us know for a certainty that no one may reach the pearl without a deep personal dive into history, the U.S. Constitution, the deposit of Christian faith and morals, and the luminous writings of honored precursors of the American experiment in ordered liberty.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based columnist.
#Blake Center for Faith and Freedom
Stare from the deep past
“Athenian fragment of a face,’’ (archival pigment print, oil, resin, wood ), by Boston-based artist Jennifer Liston Munson, in her show “Looking In + Looking Out,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, July 5-July 30.
Her artist’s statement includes:
“Jennifer Liston Munson’s work for her show …. creates lenses for the viewer to look in and for the subjects themselves to look back out. Her selection of art objects, ghostly figures, and landscapes call into question historical collection practices, the complexity of narratives, and the notion of belonging. ‘Looking In + Looking Out’ incorporates images of objects held in museum collections, photographs of unknown relatives, and abandoned historically significant interiors. In some of the pieces, Liston Munson makes the landscape the subject; spaces, trees, and enigmatic watery pools that remain while the bodies they contain dissolve to time, as layers of paint ooze from the edges to mark the art making process and the past. Other works look at architecture and history close up, making the past present.’’
#Kingston Gallery
‘Dread revelations’
“Maine Woods” (oil paint), by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Mount Katahdin in October
“Oh that we might be left alone for hours, to watch the changes of the landscape and hear the secret voice and dread revelations of these magnificent mountains! There are thoughts, deep and holy, which float through one’s mind, as, gazing down upon such a scene, one contrasts the smallness of man with the magnitude of God’s works, and in the weird silence contemplates the perishable of this world with the everlasting hills.
— From Canoe and Camera: A Two Hundred Mile Tour Through the Maine Forests, by Thomas Sedgwick Steele (1845-1903), American painter, photographer, writer and outdoorsman
Llewellyn King: Beware the dead hand of bad regulation
The Seabrook Nuclear
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
It is argued that if the Titan submersible had been certified (read peer-reviewed), the deadly accident, which killed all five on board, wouldn’t have taken place. That may or not be true.
Now there are calls for adventurism tourism to be regulated. I submit that if it is subject to regulation (read licensing), there will be very little of it — and it will be more expensive.
These days, there are calls to regulate everything from artificial intelligence to social media. Be warned: Whereas regulation does and should protect the public’s safety, it also has a dead hand. It curbs invention. It is comfortable with the known not the unknown. Purely seeking safety sets up a timid regime.
You want inventions to be safe but also free to evolve. The dynamic of the undertaking is crucial.
Regulations can have a negative dynamic or a positive one. They both seek to protect the public’s health and safety but with differing results.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the duty to regulate nuclear power and materials. It does this conscientiously but not progressively.
Evolution in nuclear power is very slow and difficult because of the NRC. Every wire, nut and bolt, pump and pipe in the nuclear steam supply system gets certified. And every change needs certification.
The result is that engineers design to pass NRC muster, not to reach into the great unknown of possibility or the soaring spirit of creative invention. The problem isn’t with the NRC staff but with its mandate.
Nowadays, there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power with small modular reactors, some using unproven but promising designs and technologies that haven’t been investigated since the 1960s, which was the end of the first wave of nuclear invention.
Some small modular reactors are being developed by U.S. companies in Canada and China so as to avoid initial NRC approval. Not that the promoters want to make an unsafe reactor but because if you are at the cutting-edge of invention, it is hard to deal with the safety mandate that is the driving force in the NRC.
Originally, safety and promotion were both handled by the Atomic Energy Commission. That agency had promotion as its primary function but as it well understood that nuclear can be very dangerous, it also had a regulatory function.
I covered the AEC as a reporter and, frankly, its regulation worked as well as what has succeeded it, namely the NRC.
The argument against the AEC reached a crescendo in the early 1970s, with relentless pressure from environmentalists and consumer groups, spearheaded by Ralph Nader, behind the slogan,“It’s its own policeman.”
But what the AEC had, which is now lacking, is a creative dynamic to develop new uses for nuclear but safely. It worked: Experimental reactors were built and experimentation with everything from nuclear stimulation of natural gas reserves — basically nuclear fracking — to a variety of cutting-edge reactors at the Idaho and Oak Ridge national laboratories.
Contrast the stultification in nuclear with the progress in aviation where the Federal Aviation Administration both promotes flying and regulates it, and certifies airplanes.
Of course, there have been mistakes and there are frequent accusations that the FAA is too close to Boeing and the airlines. The most egregious failure might have been in certifying the Boeing 737 Max without insisting on better pilot training on a tricky airplane. The result was two catastrophic crashes with non-U.S. airlines.
Yet the skies are still safe, and they are filled with passenger and cargo aircraft that are evolving with each new technology coming along. When it comes to light aircraft, the FAA has been able to accommodate and find airworthy many new airplanes, from ultralights to aerobatic-certified engines and airframes, some from overseas.
These are exciting times for technology and the recreation it makes possible, and we shouldn’t regulate with the wrong dynamics.
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.
Dragons on the other side of the fog?
Foggy Cotuit Harbor, on Cape Cod, on this long, long July 4th weekend.
— Photo by Lydia Whitcomb
Close-up view of the dragons on the 1265 Psalter world map. Medieval mapmakers would often draw dragons to populate unexplored parts of the world.
Six historic New England Fourth of July celebrations; deconstructing inherited patriotic ‘pride’
Poster for the 1942 hit movie about Providence native George M. Cohan, starring the mega movie star and part-time Martha’s Vineyard resident James Cagney
Bristol, R.I.’s 232nd Fourth of July parade, in 2017
Read here about six historic New England Fourth of July celebrations.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Especially on “The Glorious Fourth,’’ we’re all supposed to say that we’re proud to be Americans, though most of us became citizens through the accident of birth; we didn’t choose to be here, however much we like it or not. If we had been born in another nation and stayed there, we’d probably be waving its flag and saying how “proud’’ we are to be its citizens. Call it passive pride. Or vacuous.
Of course, there are some American things to be “proud of’’’ and some to be ashamed of. I’ve never quite gotten all this “proud” stuff – “proud to have blue eyes,’’ “proud to be black and gay,” “Pride Week,’’ etc.
“Proud to exist”?
It’s one of those quirky things, such as religious believers and their clergies saying that they firmly believe that such and such dead person is heading to eternal joy in heaven even as they call the death a tragedy. And why have so many people become so afraid of death that more and more of them say someone “passed’’ instead of died? That reminds me of when writers of newspaper obituaries were warned by survivors, funeral homes and editors not to give “cancer” as the cause of death. Too scary. It was almost as if they feared using the word would give them the disease.
Like patriotism, religion is mostly inherited. If we’re born in, say, Iran we’re almost certainly Muslim, in India, Hindu, and in America, probably Christian. Not a lot of personal theological exploration going in.
I’ve never been particularly patriotic in the “my country right or wrong’’ way. Rather, I’m “proud’’ to say that I support the principles of liberal democracy and open societies that originated in Western Europe and are always under attack, including, increasingly, in the United States in the past few years.
To me, the real patriots are those who openly recognize America’s good and bad elements and try to help make the nation more just, fair and prosperous, not those who wrap themselves in flags and yell “USA! USA! USA!’’.
Don’t blow off your fingers with an illegal M-80 on Tuesday! When I was a kid, we often set off our July 4 explosives on a beach -- less chance of starting a conflagration. I still can smell the rich mingled aromas of black powder and seaweed.
‘For what they are’
— Photo J. Pinta (Redline2200)
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
— “Hyla Brook,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963). Hyla Brook is near the farm in Derry, N.H., where Frost lived with his family in 1900-1911, before he became famous.
J. Pinta (Redline2200) -
Chris Powell: Medical debt doesn’t vanish; graffiti causes hysteria
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Like the rest of the country, Connecticut is full of people who can't afford their hospital bills. These people may have medical insurance with high deductibles or have exhausted their coverage because of chronic ailments. While nobody is going to prison for medical debt, it can impair credit records and hold people back in life, especially people who were poor to begin with.
Hospitals are often ready to sell the least collectible of their patient debts for a tiny fraction of their nominal value. So with its new budget state government is joining a movement to extinguish the medical debts of people who probably will never be able to repay them. The budget include $6.5 million for distribution to nonprofit organizations that buy medical debt from hospitals and then cancel it. Advocates of the appropriation, including Gov. Ned Lamont, think it might eliminate as much as $650 million in medical debt to hospitals in Connecticut.
While this undertaking is well worth a try, journalism about it has been superficial to the point of misleading. For the debt involved here isn't really being eliminated at all, merely transferred. Indeed, in effect the debt already has been transferred back to the hospitals that have been carrying it. It has been built into hospital operating costs and is being recovered either through efficiencies at the hospitals or higher charges to medical insurers and patients who pay for themselves.
Like nearly everything in medicine, medical-debt-elimination programs are mechanisms of cost shifting. Medical insurers negotiate lower rates with hospitals, causing them to reduce costs or shift them to the less insured. The federal government medical-insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, pay less than what hospitals consider the full cost of treatment, and so hospitals must economize again or recover the government discounts with higher charges elsewhere.
Hospitals cannot operate at a loss for long, and if government wants them to stay in business, it has to subsidize them directly or indirectly, as by increasing government insurance payments. If government pays, then all taxpayers do, along with countries that buy the federal government's apparently infinite debt.
Medical care isn't ever really free, and medical debt can't simply be written off. Someone always will be paying for the people who don't pay. Such cost shifting is inevitable in any jurisdiction that won't let people die in the street, but it's not a magic wand.
Medical-debt elimination will be a boon to hard-luck cases and the poor, but it won't reduce the cost of medical care. It won't improve medical-insurance coverage. It won't lift anyone out of poverty. It will only recognize that many people remain poor.
While medical-debt elimination will repair some credit records, it won't prevent the same people from getting stuck with medical debt again. It also will make medicine a little more complicated and may even give people the idea that hospital bills are easily evaded if they hold out long enough. It will validate the principle articulated by the French economist Frederic Bastiat, who two centuries ago anticipated the modern world. Government, Bastiat wrote, is the great fiction by which everybody tries to live at the expense of everybody else.
One reason that the Connecticut General Assembly entertains many questionable proposals is the decline in journalism about the legislative process. Questionable proposals would die faster if local news organizations strove to do frequent surveys of legislators about their positions. As local news coverage has weakened, that kind of political journalism has disappeared.
Instead every other bit of graffiti and vandalism in Connecticut now is causing hysteria, being treated as the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan or Nazi Party and a tidal wave of "hate" sweeping the state. Such was the case with the recent defacement of the Hartford street mural that celebrates the Black Lives Matter movement.
Perhaps glad to be distracted from murder investigations, Hartford police quickly found the culprit -- a local vagrant with a long criminal record and many pending charges. Since he's not Donald Trump, reporters didn't ask why he wasn't already in jail.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
#medical debt
#Connecticut
#Chris Powell
New England may have to grow more of its own food
At a dairy farm in Redding, Conn., an exurban town. The state’s two biggest agriculture sectors are horticulture and dairy.
Vermont’s coat of arms reminds us of how important farming, especially dairy, has been to the Green Mountain State. But in the first half of the 19th Century, raising Merino sheep for wool was the big thing.
Produce from Mack’s Apples, a farm in Londonderry, N.H., that goes back to 1732.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
The New England State Food System Planners Partnership has looked into how the region could boost its food production so that it could produce 30 percent of the food it consumes by 2030. We’ve been harvesting less than about 20 percent of the food we eat.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the six states could grow enough vegetables and grains, and catch and grow enough animal protein (especially finfish and shellfish), so that it wouldn’t have to import nearly as much from far away, much of it from huge agribusinesses, with the accompanying energy and other costs. In so doing we’d get fresher food, employ many more New Englanders, reduce fossil-fuel burning and in some places get cheaper stuff to eat.
Something else to consider: Global warming and all its associated issues are expected to hit hard in such huge agribusiness regions as the Midwest, Florida and California’s Central Valley. New England’s climate outlook is much less forbidding. In any event, we may have to grow more of our food.
Of course, we think about this more in the summer, when we enjoy locally grown super-fresh vegetables. But an increasing number of large indoor “farms’’ are slowly adding to our locally grown year-round vegetable crops. And the warming climate might substantially extend our growing season.
Most of New England’s farmland is in the three northern states, which are largely rural. That won’t change, but we ought to encourage more agriculture near cities in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut. That would reduce shipping costs. Many farms in Europe and elsewhere abroad are remarkably close to large and small cities.
Where to find the land? One is to use some of the open space (parking lots, etc.) freed up by the demise of many shopping centers in the Age of Amazon. Of course, much of this acreage would require extensive remediation to make it safe for agriculture. Then there’s cutting down trees in some places to convert to farmland. There used to be much, much more open land devoted to farming (especially for dairy cows) in New England before the opening up of the flat and fertile farmland in the Middle West, California’s Central Valley and elsewhere. That made many of our region’s farms, most of which were small because of the hilly and rocky terrain in much of our region, economically uncompetitive. (There were some big exceptions, most notably the Connecticut River Valley.) Thus New England is far more wooded than it was 150 years ago.
But we’d need studies on how reducing our woodlands to plant food might worsen global warming. Trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide.
There’s been a bit of revival in raising cattle and pigs in some parts of New England for high-end markets. But raising such animals for slaughter is, in food-production and nutrition terms, very wasteful compared to raising plants. Most Americans still love eating red meat, though many who know the health drawbacks and/or have seen the horrific slaughtering process have given it up.
Then there’s aquaculture, a source of high-quality protein that could be greatly expanded. It was mild good news that Perry Raso, the South Kingstown, R.I. restaurateur and shellfish farmer, has reportedly received approval to modestly expand his farming.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is getting $3.3 billion under the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act to invest in science-based management and conservation of marine resources amidst global warming. Let’s hope that some of this money promotes coastal aquaculture.
Bravo to the New England State Food System Planners Partnership as it presses for greater regional food independence – good for public health, our economy and the environment.
Enjoy the sweet corn, tomatoes and other treasures of the New England summer. Patronize those farmstands.
Paper art in Portsmouth
Pieces from Natalie Fisk’s show "Why am I Here?", at 3S Artspace, Portsmouth, N.H., through Aug. 20
The gallery says:
{The} show {features} the artwork of Mexican American artist Natalie Fisk, “who makes sculptures, drawings, and paintings that use … Papel Picado to draw attention to the experiences that have marked [her] life. Papel Picado is a decorative craft made by cutting elaborate designs into sheets of tissue paper."
Street musicians perform across from North Church, in Portsmouth
— Photo by Billy Hathorn
Downtown Portsmouth in 1853
Providing access to ‘blue data’
Edited from a New England Council report:
“MITRE is launching the BlueNERVE Network to provide secure, real-time access to maritime data and testing resources for organizations involved in maritime technology research. The initiative is supported by a $2.2 million grant from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the administration of Gov. Maura Healey.
{Mitre is a not-for-profit organization with dual headquarters in Bedford, Mass., and McLean, Va. It manages federally funded research and development centers supporting various U.S. government agencies in aviation, defense, health-care, homeland security and cybersecurity, among others.}
“The network aims to facilitate the growth of the global Blue Economy by offering researchers and entrepreneurs access to ‘blue data’ to drive new discoveries, innovations and companies. BlueNERVE will connect various institutions, including universities and research centers, allowing researchers to conduct experiments and access real-time data remotely. MITRE’s BlueTech Lab, in Bedford, Mass., will serve as the central hub for the network.
“‘The oceans are an invaluable resource tied to many of the nation’s biggest challenges, including national security, climate resilience, and economic growth,’ said Douglas Robbins, vice president of engineering and prototyping at MITRE Labs. ‘This project will foster an attractive innovation ecosystem for BlueTech startup companies, providing a first-in-the-nation data sharing capability that will maximize advantages for the region and grow the BlueTech workforce to meet the needs of the New Blue Economy.”’