'Vivid in their stillness'
On the Schoodic Peninsula, in Acadia National Park.
-- Photo by Bob LeChat
"The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.''
-- Alexander Chee (writer)
April 1 North Country scene
"Blue Snow'' (oil on canvas), by Marilyn Wendling, at Alper Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
'Only you are gone'
APRIL this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
From orchards near and far away
The gray wood-pecker taps and bores,
And men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.
The larger streams run still and deep;
Noisy and swift the small brooks run.
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Song of a Second April''
'Egg-addling' to try to stem Canada geese population explosion in Boston
From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com
My friends at The Boston Guardian report that there’s an effort underway to get some residents to help reduce the swelling Canada geese population by “egg-addling,’’ which includes “painting vegetable oil on the eggs or gently scrambling them so they don't come to term. ‘’ Sounds cruel, but the goose droppings are a bit of a health issue, albeit probably exaggerated.
Marion Larson, spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, explains that Canada geese were once used as live decoys for hunters until that practice was banned in the ‘30s. But, she told The Guardian, while many of these birds were then liberated, they had “their migratory instincts bred out of them.’’ So now their descendants hang around all winter and make a mess, although they are fun to watch.
They particularly love golf courses, which take up too much open space.
Like raccoons and more recently coyotes, these wild animals have learned to live among people, opportunistically taking advantage of the human-related food, such as garbage and backyard plants, and the relative lack of other predators near people. Given how human over-population is rapidly taking over and ruining much wildlife habitat, in the end perhaps only such opportunistic species will thrive in the future.
They'll bloom without me
"The year is ended, and it only adds to my age;
Spring has come, but I must take leave of my home.
Alas, that the trees in this eastern garden,
Without me, will still bear flowers."
-- Su Ting, in 720 CE
Llewellyn King: Regulation can give a big push to creativity and innovation
The Exxon Valdez, aground and leaking massive amounts of oil in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
There is a paradox of regulation clearly not known in the Trump White House. It is this: Regulation can stimulate creativity and move forward innovation.
This has been especially true of energy. Ergo, President Donald Trump's latest move to lessen the impact of regulation on energy companies may have a converse and debilitating impact.
Consider these three examples:
When Congress required tankers to have double hulls, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, in 1989, the oil companies and their lobbyists wailed that it would push up the price of gas at the pump.
Happily, the government held tough and soon oil spills in from tanker punctures were almost eliminated.
The cost? Fractions of a penny per gallon, so small they can not be easily found.
Victory to regulation, the environment and common sense. In due course, the oil companies took out advertisements to boast of their environmental sensitivity by double-hulling their tankers.
When the Environmental Protection Agency mandated a 75-percent reduction in hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions from two-stroke marine engines in 1996, with a 10-year compliance period, the boat manufacturers issued dire predictions of a slump in recreational boating and a huge loss of associated jobs.
In fact, two things happened: Two-stroke marine engines were saved with electronic fuel-injection, and four-stroke marine engines started to take over the market – the same four-stroke engines the manufacturers had said would be prohibitively expensive and too heavy for small boats.
Today, most new small boats have four-stroke engines. They are quieter, more fuel-efficient, less polluting and have added to the joy of boating. The weight and economic penalty, predicted by the anti-regulation boat manufacturers, turned out to be of no account. The problems were engineered out. That is what engineers do when they are unleashed: They design to meet the standards.
Similarly fleet-average standards, so hated by the automobile industry, have led to better cars, greater efficiencies, a reduction in air pollution and oil imports. They also pushed the industry to look beyond the internal combustion engine to such developments hybrids and all-electric vehicles and news concepts, such as hydrogen and compressed natural gas vehicles.
A high bar produces higher jumpers. Water restrictions have produced more efficient toilets, electric appliance ratings have reduced the consumption of electricity. Regulation is sometimes incentive by another name.
Well-thought out regulation is constructive, mindless regulation deleterious -- as when the purpose is political rather than practical. Restrictions on stem cell research and the unnecessary amount of ethanol added to gasoline come to mind.
In his energy executive order, repealing many of the Obama administration's clean energy regulations, Trump has done no one any favors: Less challenge, less innovation, less protection of the environment, and less global leadership is a cruel gift.
Take coal mining. Trump wants to save coal mining jobs, but his executive order will cause coal production to increase, further glutting the market. There are ways of burning coal more cleanly and if the president wants to help the coal industry, he should be supporting these. He also might want to look at the disposition of coal ash and its possible uses, not bankrupt what is left of the coal industry by false generosity.
Trump's energy executive order might have had virtue 40-plus years ago. Back in the bleak days of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and the future shock it induced, coal was only plentiful energy source. I was one of the authors of a study, prepared for President Richard Nixon, that highlighted coal. Hence a passion that lasted through the Carter administration to gasify coal, liquefy it and back out oil with it whenever possible.
However the national genius produced a flood of innovation, leading today’s abundance of oil and gas.
The Trump administration is exhibiting a worrisome trend: fixing what is not broken, even if you have to break something to do it.
Llewellyn King, a frequent contributor to New England Diary, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com. This first ran on Inside Sources.
Chris Powell: Deal for Colt's makes Connecticut an arsenal of hypocrisy
The Colt Armory, in Hartford, in 1857.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy has made a political career out of denouncing scary-looking, military-style "assault weapons" like the one used by the disturbed young man who perpetrated the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012. Yet last week the governor announced that his administration will subsidize Colt's Manufacturing Co., a manufacturer of those weapons, with a discounted $10 million loan, $2 million of it forgivable if the company increases its workforce.
Colt came out of reorganizational bankruptcy last year and the loan will finance most of the company's purchase of its factory in West Hartford, an indication that private financing is not available to the company on favorable terms and that state government is taking substantial risk here.
Colt is a venerable name in Connecticut, where the company started in 1847, and still employs 600 people, many of them represented by a major Democratic Party constituency, the United Auto Workers union. Apparently to address the irony of the Malloy administration's subsidizing a manufacturer of "assault weapons," Colt promises to put gun-safety information on its internet site.
But Colt's internet site only adds to that irony when it promotes the company's Expanse M4 rifle, one of those "assault weapons," urging gun fanciers: "Start your adventure here." Colt's Internet site also advertises the company's manufacture of 30-round magazines, though at the governor's insistence Connecticut has outlawed magazines with capacities greater than 10 rounds.
Also advertised at Colt's site is a pistol that has been "updated to meet your concealed-carry needs," though many legislators of the governor's party, opponents of Second Amendment rights, don't like carrying handguns outside the home, and of course the governor himself proposes to make pistol permits prohibitively expensive.
So what's going on here? Colt never has pretended to be anything but a gun manufacturer. But the governor seems to be saying that guns are bad unless they are made by members of a union allied with his political party, in which case guns become a jobs program.
Thus the state once known as the arsenal of democracy may become the arsenal of hypocrisy.
xxx
A federal government report cited last week by the Connecticut Mirror finds that black public school school students in the state are almost twice as likely as white students to be taught by teachers with less than five years of experience, the largest such such disparity in the nation.
No explanation was given, but it's either that teachers, perhaps the most politically correct professional group, are actually racist, or that many teachers tire of how their work is affected by racially disproportionate poverty, which sends them so many disadvantaged kids from poor households who are not prepared to learn. As a result teachers transfer to schools with better demographics demographics.
Connecticut and the country really don't need government reports that only confirm the obvious -- that poverty stinks. They need reports explaining why poverty policy stinks and just keeps perpetuating poverty.
xxx
East Windsor's first selectman, Robert Maynard, shouldn't stop with prohibiting former U.S. Rep. Robert H. Steele from speaking at the town's senior citizen center because his opposition to locating a gambling casino in town might upset the old folks.
If, as Maynard maintains, East Windsor's old folks are really so frail intellectually, he should discourage them from paying any attention to the world at all and discourage them from voting. Or else he should apologize for insulting them and freedom of speech.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.
'They kept track of everything'
"The men who founded and governed Massachusetts and Connecticut took themselves so seriously that they kept track of everything they did for the benefit of posterity and hoarded their papers so carefully that the whole history of the United States, recounted mainly by their descendants, has often appeared to be the history of New England writ large.''
-- Edmund Morgan (historian)
MBTA needs to promote reliable weekend commuter train service
MBTA train at Route 128 Station on the Providence/Stoughton Line.
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal24.com
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (a Republican who, with California’s Jerry Brown, a Democrat, may be the most able governor in America) has wisely dropped a proposal to end all weekend MBTA commuter rail service to reduce the agency’s red ink, though apparently there might still be weekend cutbacks on some lines.
The original proposal would have made the MBTA the only commuter rail service in America to shut down on weekends! With work schedules becoming more fluid and business and building booming in Boston, such a shutdown would have been a false economy.
Of course, labor contracts and some other things need to be changed at the deficit-ridden agency but, still, it produces far more wealth for Greater Boston than it costs. It does this by easing road congestion, making business schedules more reliable, reducing the disruption from bad weather, providing a service that lets people work (and sleep!) while they commute and all in all improving the quality of life in Greater Boston (and to some extent in Rhode Island, too.) And, if you tally up all the costs, it’s always cheaper to take the train than to drive a car you own. The MBTA is a major reason that Greater Boston is prosperous.
What the MBTA needs to do is to heavily promote its weekend service to raise ridership. Regularity and reliability of service are essential for successful promotion.
A Syrian artist's 'Homeland inSecurity'
This was just sent to us by Boston's Lanoue Gallery, which, in collaboration with the office of Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton and Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative, is presenting an exhibition called ""Homeland inSecurity,'' featuring sculpture and installation works by Mohamad Hafez.
Mr. Hafez, who was born in Syria and is a permanent resident of the United States, is an architect and artist currently residing with his family in New Haven. Lanoue says that the artwork featured in "Homeland inSecurity'' came out of Mr. Hafez’s "pained response'' to seeing media coverage of his homeland, which has been devastatedby a war that has turned more than 11 million Syrians into refugees.
The exhibition showcases 20 works by Mr. Hafez, some of which feature lighting and sounds recorded in Syria giving viewers a multi-sensory experience. It will be the largest exhibit of his work to date. He says of the exhibition opportunity, “My art is a voice for the Syrian refugees, for Muslim Americans, for forced migrants. I understand the fear of the unknown.''
Chuck Collins: Welcome to underwater nation
"The Drowned,'' by Vasily Perov (1867).
Via OtherWords.org
Are you or a loved one having trouble staying afloat? You’re truly not alone.
While the media reports low unemployment and a rising stock market, the reality is that almost 20 percent of the country lives in “Underwater Nation,” with zero or even negative net worth. And more still have almost no cash reverses to get them through hard times.
This is a source of enormous stress for many low and middle-income families.
Savings and wealth are vital life preservers for people faced with job loss, illness, divorce, or even car trouble. Yet an estimated 15 to 20 percent of families have no savings at all, or owe more than they own.
They’re disproportionately rural, female, renters, and people without a college degree. But the underwater ranks also include a large number of people who appear to be in the stable middle class. Health challenges are a major cause of savings depletion for these people, both in medical bills and lost wages.
Plenty more Americans could be vulnerable.
A financial planner will advise you to put aside three months of living expenses in financial reserves, just in case. So if your living expenses are $2,000 a month, you should try to have $6,000 in “liquidity” — money you can easily get to in an emergency.
But 44 percent of households don’t have enough funds to tide themselves over for three months, even if they lived at the poverty level, according to the Assets and Opportunity Scorecard.
Even having a positive net worth doesn’t mean you can always tap these funds, especially if wealth takes the form of home equity or owning a car.
A Bankrate survey found that 63 percent of U.S. households lack the cash or savings to meet a $1,000 emergency expense. They’d have to borrow from a friend or family, or put costs on a credit card.
Seven percent of U.S. homeowners are underwater homeowners, with mortgage debt higher than the value of their homes. And more and more people have taken on credit card debt to pay the bills. Meanwhile, student debt is rising rapidly and is projected to become one of the biggest factors in negative wealth.
Conservative scolds will blame individuals for “living beyond their means” and being financially irresponsible. And individual behavior is important. But the financial stresses facing millions of families are more likely the result of four decades of stagnant incomes.
Half the workers in this country haven’t shared in the economic gains that have mostly gone to the rich. Their real wages have stayed flat while health care, housing, and other expenses continue to rise.
So not everyone is on the edge at this time of dizzying inequality, after all. The 400 wealthiest billionaires in the U.S. have as much wealth together as the bottom 62 percent of the population.
This is only possible because of the expanding ranks of drowning Americans.
Some politicians will scapegoat immigrants or other vulnerable people for this suffering. When this happens, hold on tight to your purse or wallet. They’re trying to distract you from the rich and powerful elites who are rigging the rules to get more wealth and power.
They want to deflect your attention away from the reality that your economic pain is the result of deliberate government rules that give more tax cuts to the super-rich and global corporations, keep wages down, push up tuition costs, and let corporations nickel and dime you for all you’re worth.
Congress and the Trump administration are proposing to cut health care, pass more tax cuts for the rich, and give global corporations even more power over you. They promise benefits will “trickle down.”
Unless we speak up, the only trickle will be the expansion of Underwater Nation.
Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a co-editor of Inequality.org. He’s the author of the recent book Born on Third Base.
More than enough of it
Not bustling midtown Dublin, N.H., in early spring (we think).
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary'' column in GoLocal24.com
“Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. There is only one thing certain about it: You are certain there is going to be plenty of weather.”
-- Mark Twain lived many years in Connecticut but it was said that his favorite place in late life was Dublin, N.H. That's New England’s highest town and was once home of Beech Hill Farm, a famous drying-out clinic and retreat for mostly affluent alcoholics. It still hosts Yankee Publishing Inc., publisher of Yankee Magazine and the Old Farmer's Almanac.
And so we go into another spring, up and down weatherwise but trending the right way. First the flowers that can take freezing and thawing and refreezing – the crocuses and the snowdrops. Then the somewhat less hardy daffodils and the tulips.
It will be “Mud Time’’ for a few weeks in New England’s north country. And, of course, it’s pothole season!
A lot of folks are so impatient for spring that they strip down to shorts and T-shirts and wander around outside when it’s still in the forties, in a triumph of hope over experience.
Plant the radishes first!
The buds on the trees swell and then seem to almost explode on one afternoon in late April or early May—that is, except right along the coast, where the cold water delays the season as the warmed-up water delays winter late in the year. As visitors to Fenway Park know “Boston’s famous east wind’’ can drive down the temperature of a mid-April day by 20 degrees in 15 minutes.
Then comes that hot, humid day in late May or early June when the lushness is almost tropical. In New Hampshire when I lived there, it sometimes seemed as if winter ended one day and summer started the next.
Spring seems at once the real start of the year, at least of the natural year, as well as its ending, a feeling that for most people goes back to their memories of the school year’s approaching end.
This recalls the Rodgers & Hammerstein song "It Might as Well Be Spring,'' whose last lines are:
"I haven't seen a crocus or a rosebud or a robin on the wing
But I feel so gay in a melancholy way
That it might as well be Spring .
It might as well be spring….''
Warning! This uses the old-fashioned meaning of "gay''.
'Rising from and heading toward nowhere'
Along the shore of Acadia National Park, Maine
-- Photo by Brian W. Schaller
“They were walking along a roadway of great slabs of stone set down one after another, the beginning and end of which they could take in at a glance, a road rising from and heading toward nowhere now.
"'You can't get there from here,' William said, using a Down East accent. 'Anymore.' Maine, they thought of Maine, then. Evidently this truncated road could still carry them as far away and as long ago as that.”
-- Nancy Clark, from A Way From Home: A Novel
Don Pesci: These progressive Conn. pols are libertarian about two grim things
The Republican plan to abolish and replace Obamacare has now collapsed. After much huffing and puffing, Republicans pulled their replacement plan, such as it was, shook the dirt of medical-care reform from their feet, and vowed to move on to the next big issue -- tax reform. One imagines U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D.-Conn.), who made some frantically intemperate remarks in the House before the Republican replacement plane crashed and burned, was delighted.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.), move over: Mrs. DeLauro has now become the chief progressive maenad of Congress. She brought to her performance suitable demagogic props, a large sign that said “Get Old People,” the words arranged horizontally and the first letter of each word – G-O-P – in fierce bold script. C-Span captured the historic moment here. Mrs. DeLauro was not wearing her pussy hat at the time; so the members of the House were spared that indignity.
Seen from a progressive bubble, Obamacare is a crashing success. It is, in fact, a political success but a real-world wreck from within, and it has been so from the beginning. Obamacare has never been more than a program hardwired to fail that would lead, when it did fail, to universal health care, a nationwide government healthcare program palely imitating European models that would drive many insurance companies -- unable to compete with a tax-supported, progressive driven healthcare system – out of business.
Under a universal healthcare system one fourth of the economy in the United States would move from the private to the public sector, and insurance companies in Connecticut would become boutique providers serving rich people – mostly wealthy Republicans who, in DeLauro’s view, want to Get Old People (GOP). Mrs. DeLauro’s gerrymandered lair is Connecticut’s 1st District, an impregnable progressive fortress; so then, she need not fear that she will be undone politically by championing a lost cause.
And Obamacare is a lost cause. Even in her home state, insurance providers have pulled out of the program with their pants on fire; premiums have skyrocketed across the nation, and the coroner has been sent an e-mail.
The authors of the U.S. Constitution supposed that legislators would be unwilling to pass ruinous laws under which they themselves would suffer. How quaint! Barack Obama himself is now wealthy enough to buy retirement properties worth millions anywhere in the world the chooses to live, in or outside the United States; socialist Bernie Sanders owns three houses; millionaire Connecticut U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal had money enough to send his children to expensive private schools that many of Mrs. DeLauro’s constituents could never afford.
Politics has been good for Mrs. DeLauro and her millionaire husband, Stan Greenberg, both of whom own expensive property in the Washington Beltway, where they entertain similarly minded progressives in lavish splendor that might bring a blush to the cheek of the Great Gatsby.
It may strike some hearty rationalists as unseemly that two millionaire politicians who favor partial birth abortion and euthanasia – which clips life it its beginning and end – should profess such a touching concern for old people. Only on questions of life and death are Mrs. DeLauro and Mr. Blumenthal, the Senator from Planned Parenthood, excessively libertarian. Blumenthal, who never met a regulation he didn’t like, would leave Planned Parenthood – which makes most of its profits from abortion – as the only unregulated big business in America.
China still pursues a policy of forced abortion; in that totalitarian country women, liquidated as infants in the womb, are perceived as somehow less valuable than men. International Planned Parenthood has in fact been working hand in hand with the population control program in China, almost since its inception. China joined the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) in 1983.
In December of last year, Women’s Rights Without Frontiers wrote a letter to President Donald Trump calling for “a full-scale investigation of International Planned Parenthood to determine the exact nature of its operations in China… Transparency is demanded by the fact that IPPF receives taxpayer dollars from the United States and other nations as well. I believe it is impossible to partner so closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s forced abortion machine without being complicit in its atrocities. This is especially the case when this year we learned that the number of abortions in China is not 13 million, but a staggering 23 million a year.”
What a pity the group did not address its petition to Mrs. DeLauro, defender of the poor and oppressed, or Mr. Blumenthal who, as the Senator from Planned Parenthood, may possibly exercise more leverage with the IPPF than does Mr. Trump and the entire Republican Party which -- as we all know, thanks to Mrs. DeLauro’s campaign bumper-sticker outburst in the House – wishes to oppress if not euthanize their grandmothers.
Don Pesci (donpesci@att.net) is a political and cultural writer who lives in Vernon, Conn.
Moving through the claustrophobia
From the "Peripheral Visions'' collection of photographer, author (of the best-selling The Death of Common Sense, among other books) and civic leader Philip K. Howard.
Mr. Howard says that his images in this series "frame the repetitive patterns of daily landscapes that we feel but rarely consciously observe. Shot on 35mm film at slow shutter speeds to convey how most of us experience these moments, they are impressionistic, with large prints taking on a pointillistic quality.'' They seem tinctured with urban angst but also with aesthetic pleasure and even a kind of droll humor.
See his Web site: http://philipkingphoto.com/
Be patient
"Spring Field'' (on on panel), by Hannah Bureau, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.
Mom & pop Vermont
Dan & Whit's general store, in Norwich, Vt.
"I represent a rural state and live in a small town {Norwich, Vt.}. Small merchants make up the majority of Vermont's small businesses and thread our state together. It is the mom-and-pop grocers, farm-supply stores, coffee shops, bookstores and barber shops where Vermonters connect, conduct business and check in on one another. ''
-- Congressman Peter Welch
Frank Carini: Human overpopulation's assault on the environment
Via ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Lost in the discussion about climate change — at least the snippets of it not drowned out by the air horns of special interests — is the issue of overpopulation, arguably the main reason that the planet is heating up, the oceans are acidifying and the atmosphere is wheezing.
Our sheer numbers are mostly a threat to, well, ourselves. The planet will recover; we won’t if we fail to take real action. Our most recent response — a full-on assault of women’s reproductive rights — doesn’t leave our children’s children much hope.
Sensing this blatant disregard for their future, a group of 21 kids, in 2015, filed a climate lawsuit against the federal government. It’s moving forward. In the lawsuit, the young plaintiffs have accused the federal government of violating their constitutional rights by knowing about the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels and supporting the development of fossil-fuel production anyway.
The residents of Burrillville, R.I., can relate.
Meanwhile, many of the adults elected to lead us forward act like spoiled brats. In the face of overwhelming scientific proof — never mind common sense — that human activities are changing the climate and punishing the natural resources that sustain us and all other life, they dismiss the importance of family planning and reproductive heath to push ideology.
Tom Price, current secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, hates birth control. As a member of Congress, he voted to terminate the program that subsidizes contraception for low-income women. He voted against a law barring employers from firing women for using contraception. He rages against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requirement that insurance plans cover contraception without a co-pay.
He told ThinkProgress in 2012 that there are no women who struggle to afford birth control and that the ACA’s contraceptive mandate is wrong. “Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one,” he is quoted. “The fact of the matter is, this is a trampling of religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.”
This widely shared heavenly worldview is helping trample the life out of this planet. It’s a big middle finger to the future.
Consider this staggering fact: human population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion during the course of the 20th Century, according to the United Nations Population Fund. It took 199,900 years for the population to reach 1.6 billion, and then, in a blink of a century, 4.5 billion more people were added.
The worldwide population, now at 7.4 billion, is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. We need intelligent conversations — not intelligent design — about our population, to eschew escalating wars fought over natural resources and to avoid increased pain and suffering.
Human activity is causing the greatest mass extinction of species since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, at rates of 1,000 to 10,000 faster than normal. (Center for Biological Diversity)
Climate change, or if you prefer the label global warming, is really just about numbers — ours. It’s a simple math problem. But the issue of human population is never debated during presidential campaigns or discussed by cable TV’s talking heads.
Population, climate change and consumption are inextricably linked in their collective global environmental impact, according to the Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program.
The Worldwatch Institute says the two overriding challenges facing mankind are to mitigate climate change and slow population growth.
“Success on these two fronts would make other challenges, such as reversing the deforestation of Earth, stabilizing water tables, and protecting plant and animal diversity, much more manageable,” according to the Washington, D.C.-based organization. “If we cannot stabilize climate and we cannot stabilize population, there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save.”
Addressing these two interconnected issues starts with improving the health of women and children, especially in developing nations. By reducing poverty and infant mortality, increasing female access to human rights, such as economic opportunity, education and health care — funding that the White House wants to cut because some of the organizations helping to improve the lives of poor women and girls also provide abortions — educating women about birth-control options and ensuring access to family planning services, women worldwide would have stronger voices.
Knowledge, after all, is power, but we seem determined to curtail education, as we relentlessly attack climate science and evolution, and spout rubbish about the Environmental Protection Agency generating “propaganda” and “brainwashing” children.
If he isn’t already, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.., should be named as a defendant in the kids’ climate lawsuit. The senator who recently spewed that brainwashing garbage received $465,950 from the oil and gas industry during the past five years to help fatten his campaign coffers.
Humans continue the geo-engineering of the natural world to sustain our unsustainable numbers. The bough will eventually break.
More than two centuries ago, English scholar Thomas Malthus published ''An Essay on the Principle of Population''. In his writing he noted that human population tends to grow geometrically, while the resources available to support it tend to grow arithmetically. Under these conditions, he wrote that human population will inevitably outgrow the supply of food. He predicted that population growth would lead to degradation of the land, and eventually massive famine, disease and war.
Improvements in agriculture and the Industrial Revolution postponed the disaster Malthus thought was imminent, although much of what he predicted as happened, just not in one fell swoop.
Now, 219 years later, can we again tech our way out of the numerous impacts our rapidly growing population has and will create?
If so, it will likely come at the cost of diversity, and a considerable price has already been extracted. It also will likely expand the already-too-wide gap that separates the wealthy from the poor.
Simply discussing the issue of population is taboo, and many of the conversations that are held inevitably veer toward population control and China’s since-lax one-child policy.
Ignoring the problem won’t solve it. We need to have grown-up discussions about reproductive health. We need to address public health and population at all levels of government. After all, humans are the main force behind environmental pollution.
In the United States, at least, these vital conversations are muted by politicians who clap their tiny hands and get all giddy about rolling back laws enacted to protect public health and the environment. God forbid if the words “penis” or “vagina” are mentioned in a classroom.
A voluntary family-planning program in Iran helped drop the highest rate of population growth in the country’s history to replacement level a year faster than China’s compulsory one-child policy. The program subsidizes vasectomies, offers free condoms and affordable contraceptives, and supports countrywide education on sexual health and family planning.
Iran’s collection of spoiled brats, which, like here, consists mainly of older, whiny men, wants to defund the program.
It seems the “leaders” of these two countries have more in common than they know.
Frank Carini is the editor of ecoRI News.
State economies: How much do governors really matter?
From Robert Whitcomb's 'Digital Diary'' in GoLocal24.com:
The role of governors and states’ dominant political philosophy and policy in the economic success or lack thereof of these jurisdictions has always been exaggerated. Economies are very complicated. You see this in the list of states that haven't regained the jobs lost in the Great Recession. In New England, those are Rhode Island and Connecticut – both states mostly run by liberal Democrats. But the other states on the list --- Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico and Wyoming – are all run by Republicans.