Whitcomb: Three Connected Stories; Inside Farming; Offshore Angst; Natural Cities
Sunday, September 05, 2021
“Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do….’’
-- From “September 1, 1939, ‘’ by W.H. Auden (1907-1973), Anglo-American poet. World War II started on that date with the Nazi invasion of Poland
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST
“Autumn is the American season. In Europe the leaves turn yellow or brown, and fall. Here they take fire on the trees and hang there flaming.’’
Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), in New England: The Four Seasons. MacLeish, lawyer, poet, essayist and government official, lived for many years in the Massachusetts “Hill Town’’ of Conway, Mass.
xxx
The acorns fall ever thicker on the sidewalks and sunlight slants in on late afternoons in its September way, making one squint driving west after work.e
xxx
We’ve had lots of floods in New England from hurricanes and their remnants over the years. So how much are this year’s floods due to global warming and how much are simply due to what the scientists call “natural variability’’?
xxx
The 20th anniversary, next Saturday, of 9/11 makes one think of the three biggest American disasters that happened over the last 20 years. 9/11 led to the open-ended “War on Terror,” with the disastrous invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Tax policies and lax financial regulation, and a Federal Reserve Board heedless of the long-term dangers of ballooning consumer and corporate debt, also helped cause the crash of 2008. The economic anxieties exacerbated by 9/11 pushed along these policies. These factors intensified financial speculation and widened income inequality, and thus political inequality, in favor of the very rich, a process accelerated by Trump, who presided over a relentlessly plutocracy-promoting regime.
The third big event was, of course, COVID-19, made worse in America by GOP underfunding of public-health agencies and Trump’s demagogic appeal to the willful ignorance of millions. And, of course, we still don’t know details of the virus’s Chinese origins – innocent leak from research lab, germ-warfare research, wild animals? What might next ooze out from Xi Jinping’s empire?
I was in Lower Manhattan on that beautiful mild Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, having lunch with two friends. We ate outside and had a view of the Twin Towers, toward which we made the usual nasty comments about their bad or at least boring Modernism but agreed that they were now “iconic,’’ perhaps even more than the Empire State Building, and that they were handy as a point of reference, especially for out-of-towners.
I noted that Marty Hollander, an editor with whom I had worked at The Wall Street Journal (at 22 Cortlandt St., across the street from the towers) had remarked to me as we walked up Broadway one day in 1974 that “some plane is going to crash into one of those things.’’ After all, a B-29 had hit the Empire State Building in 1945, though it wasn’t intentional.
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, would of course permanently change how we live to varying degrees. (Just think airports and other public places.) 9/11 was a reminder of how much our lives and the world can change in a moment. So, in the immortal line from the great war movie Breaker Morant:
“Live every day as if it were going to be your last; for one day you're sure to be right.’’
There used to be a saying on Wall Street that investors and public officials forget the lessons of past mistakes in a generation. Now, with the Internet, they forget faster.
xxx
When I think of Labor Day I mostly remember that I had to labor on many of them, given the demands of the newspaper business. There was that and the grim knowledge as a kid that school was about to start up again. But for many adults, the next few weeks are the year’s most pleasant.
xxx
The CDC advises people who haven’t been vaccinated not to travel this long weekend. But of course, those are just the kind of people who would ignore what such experts advise!
No Pain Relief From Cynicism
Small-time drug peddlers get sent to the slammer. But not members of the Sackler family. They own Purdue Pharma, which has made billions marketing the highly addictive opiate OxyContin with very misleading promotions. Their sleazy promotions helped addicts and kill many thousands, but the Sacklers will get to keep some of their billions and stay in their mansions.
America’s traditional lenience toward white-collar crooks in all its infamy.
The Greenhouse Effect
A bunch of people in Exeter, R.I., are trying to put up roadblocks to the Schartner family’s plan to erect a 25-acre solar-powered greenhouse on their 250-acre farm in which to grow tomatoes year-round for the regional market. Think of it – very fresh, locally grown tomatoes that don’t have to be shipped, with burning of fossil fuel, from, say California (which is drying up) and Florida in the cold weather around here.
Tim Schartner, the farm’s leader, wants to put up the greenhouse so that the family will have enough revenue so they can keep all their farm property going in agriculture. But some locals seem to think that it would be like an unsightly factory. Well, yes, manufacturing food – like any farm.
Perhaps the foes would prefer some McMansions instead? How about a strip mall?
Recalling controversies over wind turbines and solar-energy farms, foes say the idea of big greenhouses to produce food year-round is a fine one, just not near them.
In any event, let’s hope for more big greenhouses.
For more information, please hit these links:
and:
xxx
In other NIMBY news, we have the effort of a few folks on that isle of privilege called Nantucket and, among others, a shadowy right-wing (the euphemism is “libertarian”) organization called the Caesar Rodney Institute to block Vineyard Wind. That enterprise aims to put up dozens of wind turbines some 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket that could power 400,000 homes and businesses with clean energy. It would be interesting to see how much, if any, secret fossil-fuel money might be behind this effort and how much simply very rich people not wanting to look at turbines from their yachts; they would have a hard time seeing much of the turbines from their summer places on Nantucket and the Vineyard even on a very clear day.
The group wants to block Vineyard Wind with so many regulatory and legal challenges that the well-respected company gives up and goes away. It’s amusing how many right-wing groups claiming to be almost religiously pro-capitalist oppose capitalism if it creates new competition for their old industries and offends their sense of personal power – their members’ feeling that they can buy their way out of anything to control their surroundings.
The latest gambit is to argue that endangered Right Whales would be, well, endangered by the turbines. I doubt that many Vineyard Wind foes give a damn about these whales, whatever the images of them on their red pants! In any event, the Vineyard Wind project would have stringent controls on noise and other factors in those periods when Right Whales would be moving through the turbine area.
The main threats to the Right Whales: being hit by vessels, drowning after becoming entangled in fishing lines, and fossil-fuel burning, which is acidifying the oceans and screwing up ocean currents, most notably the Gulf Stream.
Vineyard Wind would help address the increasingly urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel burning, while creating energy-related revenue and highly paid jobs in southern New England. It would let us send less money to the oil, gas and coal states. And the turbine supports act as reefs that attract fish.
We’ll need nuclear power, too.
Whether it’s the difficulty of putting a high-speed rail line anywhere near the homes of well-heeled folks on the Connecticut coast, or offshore wind farms, for far too long the public interest has been rejected in favor of the wishes of small groups of affluent, and thus politically powerful, people.
This is why, along with a far too litigious and legalistic society, and far too many layers of regulation overseen by far too many jurisdictions, America continues to fall behind other developed nations. It’s only its anxious entrepreneurial dynamism that keeps it going.
xxx
I wouldn’t be surprised if Rhode Island’s (and America’s) housing-price bubble pops before the end of the year. Too many buyers just don’t have the money, and lenders are wary.
But the shoreline properties will always draw those who can pay with millions in cash for ocean views, and then do what they can to block public access to those views.
xxx
Discarded face masks have become the new cigarette butts, littering sidewalks. Please throw them in the trash!
$2.3 Trillion – Real Money!
The cost of the lost war in Afghanistan is estimated by Brown University researchers to have been around $2.3 trillion. Think of what only a fraction of that could have done to improve America’s physical infrastructure and otherwise make the country stronger and more competitive. And what if the GOP had failed to slash tax enforcement to please its donor base? That, too, would have freed up a lot of money for infrastructure.
Elite School Contortions
There’s a sometimes amusing article about the contortions and hypocrisies of New York City elite private schools trying to be ethnically (if not socio-economically) “diverse” and politically correct. In the story, you see some interesting issues of free speech and censorship and arguments over what it really means to be “anti-racist,” as well as the dangers to rigorous education, and the wider society, of identity politics run amok.
In a democracy, I’ve always thought, people should be treated as individuals before they’re treated as members of this or that racial, religious, sexual or other defined group. To do otherwise is to encourage corrosive tribalism.
To read The Times’s piece, please hit this link:
Nature in the Cities
We much enjoyed receiving a copy of Providence nature writer Scott Turner’s collection of essays, in the form of his book Beauty in the Street: Nature Tales from the Neighborhood. There’s a very wide range of topics but the best thing about these richly informed essays is that so many are about the natural world in cities. Mr. Turner grew up in the Bronx, and knows a lot of gritty stuff.
One thinks of the late New York Times columnist John Kiernan’s essays about wildlife in that metropolis, particularly in Central Park, and of writer Robert Sullivan, who has written wonderfully about such phenomena of urban nature as the Jersey Meadowlands and New York City rats.
Mr. Turner’s book would be a handy thing to take with you on your walks down mean and other streets, with quiet wonders you might not have noticed without his book. Look at those invasive species, including us!
Related Articles
- Whitcomb: Just Don’t Call Them ‘Reparations’; Back to Work; Summer Agoraphobia; Cash for Corridor
- Whitcomb: Perilous Pause; The Polar Park Era; The Quiet Mega-Crook
- Whitcomb: People Moving Around; R.I. Leaders Should Think Long Term; Growing Season
- Whitcomb: Hackerama; Reusing Old Buildings; Big Name for Mid-Size Airport
- Whitcomb: Quick, Summer! Watch Those Contract Talks; Bribe ‘Em; Weather Museum
- Whitcomb: Sense of Occasion; Continuous Cancellation; Getting Rich at a Nonprofit; Garrahy Part II?
- Whitcomb: Taxes and Infrastructure; Prov Teachers Pension Obsession; Superman Scrap
- Whitcomb: Transitions; Imperiled Town Meetings; Cancellations; Texas Trial; and Feeling Chipper
- Whitcomb: Offshore Energy; Call in the State Police; Head an Hour East
- Whitcomb: Make Them Want to Stay Home; Beware Business Breaks; Downtown Dining Hall
- Whitcomb: Better Places for the Homeless; Somerset Mess; Permanent Pandemic; Guns, Guns, Guns
- Whitcomb: Patience, Please, on School Reform; Beach Brawl; Toward Population Implosion? Fragile Kids
- Whitcomb: No Pension Panacea but a Start; Slowing the Streets; Feast on Scary Food
- Whitcomb: Lost Opportunity; Too-Wide Streets; Getting Physical; Newport at Season’s Height
- Whitcomb: Intimations of an Ending; Always on Camera; Therapy for Tax Trauma?
- Whitcomb: Law and Order; Summer Challenges; High-Level Risk Takers; A Real Meritocracy?
- Whitcomb: After Afghanistan; Time Passing Them By; Extreme Localism
- Whitcomb: Would They Pay for It? Hurricane Hype; Unsightly Lines; ‘God Is Not Great’
- Whitcomb: Outdoor Angst; Wave Art; Goat Dairies; Viral Ignorance; Remembering Sundlun
- Whitcomb: Jobs and Character; Income Supports; Singles in the Jewelry District; Profitable Lies
- Whitcomb: Summer Spraying; School Leadership; A Classics Case; ‘Autonomous Political Lunatic Asylum’
- Whitcomb: Club Culture; Drivers’ Licenses for All? Courtesy Collapse
- Whitcomb: Bombs Away! School Meritocracies; Parasitical N.H.; Nimbys vs. Coastal Crops
- Whitcomb: The Paranoid Style; More Audits, Please; Plants Under the Panels; Socialite Stress