Vox clamantis in deserto
‘Between structural and free-formed’
“Found and Woven,’’ by Eric Stark, at Boston Sculptors Gallery, through Aug. 16.
He says:
“I am an architect and educator by training and profession. Basketry is like architecture in that the viewer has first-hand experience with both a basket and a building. It is this familiarity with the art form that makes basketry (like architecture) approachable, and immediately creates the possibility of engaging the viewer with the work.
“Unlike architecture, basketry affords me singular and relative control of the creative process, from concept through final weaving. My investigation lies within this process of creation; a process that moves from the imagination to the physical, between the structural and free-formed, existing for both function and as art. With my hands I bend the spokes and weavers, attempting to realize what lies in my imagination. The process is simultaneously straightforward and yet limitless.’’
Edward D. Mellilo: Guano helped spawn modern agriculture and the American Empire; Mass. played a role
At the Pacific Guano Company’s operation in the Woods Hole section of Falmouth, Mass., in 1879. Read this.
From The Conversation (except picture above)
AMHERST, Mass.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-third of the world’s fertilizer normally passes, has made clear that access to nutrients for crops remains as strategically important in the 21st Century as access to oil.
As an environmental historian, I study how fertilizer transformed the modern world. That history is about more than scientific innovation or agricultural progress. It also reveals the hidden costs of modern food production, including the brutal treatment of workers and the expansion of imperial power.
Even before the Iran war began, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had disrupted natural-gas markets and the global trade in nitrogen fertilizers; sanctions on Belarus had unsettled global markets for potash, one of agriculture’s principal sources of potassium; and China had restricted phosphate exports in an effort to stabilize domestic prices.
Even further back, long before synthetic fertilizers transformed farming in the 20th century, farmers increasingly relied on a scarce and geopolitically contested resource: seabird guano. Here is how bird droppings reshaped global agriculture and helped build an overseas empire for the United States.
The first Green Revolution
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, fertilizer companies shipped millions of tons of dried bird excrement from islands in the Pacific and Caribbean to farms across Europe and North America. Rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, guano transformed agricultural productivity at a time when expanding populations and industrializing societies demanded more food than traditional farming systems could produce.
Guano became the first fertilizer commodity traded on a truly global scale. For centuries, farmers had sustained soil fertility by recycling locally available nutrients, including animal manure, crop residues and human waste. Those nutrients circulated within largely closed ecological systems linking soils, crops, livestock and people.
As industrialization accelerated during the 19th Century, the local nutrient cycles that had sustained farming for centuries began to unravel. Expanding cities drew food from increasingly distant farms but returned few nutrients to the countryside. Instead, material that used to fertilize farms accumulated in urban streets, rivers and sewers, while rural soils grew steadily poorer with each harvest. Farmers searched for new ways to replenish depleted fields as they struggled to feed rapidly growing populations.
For millennia, millions of seabirds, including guanay cormorants, Peruvian boobies and pelicans, had nested on rocky outcrops along South America’s arid Pacific coast. With almost no rainfall to wash away their nutrient-rich droppings, guano accumulated in towering layers. Islands that appeared barren were, in fact, among the world’s richest natural sources of fertilizer.
And since at least the 13th Century, Indigenous farmers along Peru’s Pacific coast had understood the extraordinary resource stored on the Chincha Islands 13 miles offshore.
European scientists began to appreciate this fact only after 1804, when Alexander von Humboldt carried samples of Peruvian coastal guano to Europe, where scientists demonstrated its unusually rich nitrogen content. Commercial interest in guano surged in the 1840s after agricultural chemists – most notably Justus von Liebig – demonstrated that crop growth depended on replacing nutrients removed from the soil. Peruvian guano suddenly appeared not as an exotic curiosity but as an extraordinarily concentrated natural fertilizer.
An early 20th-Century ad for Navassa guano touted its soil-enriching characteristics. Navassa Guano Company via Science Photo Library
European and North American agricultural journals hailed guano as a miraculous remedy for exhausted soils. Wheat farmers in Britain, sugar beet growers in central Europe, tobacco planters in Virginia and cotton cultivators across the American South all embraced the new fertilizer. Farmers who had long relied primarily on local sources of fertilizer increasingly depended on nutrients transported thousands of miles across the world’s oceans.
This new global trade in agricultural nutrients marked the first Green Revolution. Decades before synthetic ammonia transformed agriculture, millions of tons of naturally accumulated nitrogen and phosphorus crossed oceans from remote ecosystems to the world’s farms. For the first time, agricultural fertility itself became a globally traded commodity, laying the foundations for the chemically intensive agriculture that emerged after World War II.
The hidden costs of fertilizer
Chinese workers stand on a hill of guano on Peru’s Chincha Islands, circa 1865. Henry de Witt Moulton, Alexander Gardner and Philp & Solomons, via Library of Congress
Contemporary observers commonly compared the guano deposits on the Chincha Islands to cliffs or small mountains. When commercial extraction began in the 1840s, workers were not simply shoveling loose bird droppings. Centuries of accumulated guano had been compressed by its own weight into a dense, cementlike mass that had to be hacked apart with picks, crowbars and iron bars before it could be shoveled into sacks.
As the global abolition movement brought the Atlantic slave trade to an end, employers increasingly turned to debt peonage and indentured labor, systems that occupied the uncertain terrain between slavery and freedom. Agricultural productivity in Europe and North America depended not only on the long-distance transfer of nutrients but also on the equally consequential transoceanic movement of workers around and across the Pacific Ocean.
Peru’s Chincha Islands became notorious for the brutal exploitation of Chinese indentured laborers recruited through the so-called “coolie trade.” Thousands worked beneath an unforgiving sun, hacking hardened guano into pieces while breathing caustic clouds of ammonia-laden dust that burned their eyes and lungs. In 1854, after British ship captains reported appalling conditions on the Chinchas, the British foreign secretary, the Earl of Clarendon, wrote: “I have read with horror and disgust the details therein contained of the cruelties practised on the unfortunate Chinese labourers employed in the export of guano.”
Guano and empire
Faced with increasing fertilizer demand, governments began to treat guano as a strategic resource. American policymakers worried about dependence on Peruvian supplies, prompting President Millard Fillmore to urge federal action to secure reliable access to fertilizer. Congress responded with the Guano Islands Act of 1856, authorizing U.S. citizens to claim unoccupied guano islands in the name of the United States. The law transformed a quest for fertilizer into a new mechanism of American territorial expansion.
Over subsequent decades, dozens of islands across the Caribbean and Pacific entered the expanding orbit of U.S. power because of their valuable fertilizer deposits.
Few places illustrate this history more clearly than Navassa Island, a remote limestone outcrop between Haiti and Jamaica and the subject of my upcoming book. From the 1860s onward, American companies transformed Navassa into an industrial mining colony that supplied guano to farms throughout the eastern United States.
Black workers, recruited primarily from Baltimore, excavated guano amid conditions of unrelenting heat, dust and isolation. Their rations consisted of little more than herring, maggot-infested biscuits and salted beef. The island’s hierarchy reflected the emerging racial order of the Jim Crow era. The miners were overwhelmingly Black, while their overseers were white men. To reconstruct the workers’ experiences, I draw on their diaries, correspondence with friends and relatives, and interviews with their descendants.
On Sept. 14, 1889, years of resentment erupted into violence. That day, 137 Black miners rebelled against the Navassa Phosphate Company’s 11 officers. By evening, five white supervisors were dead. The U.S. Navy dispatched the steam-powered warship USS Kearsarge, which carried 18 Black workers to Baltimore to stand trial for murder.
The Order of Galilean Fishermen published an account of the trial of the 18 men accused of crimes on Navassa. Thomas L. Hall and Columbus Gordon via Library of Congress
The following year, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In Jones v. United States, the justices upheld the federal government’s authority to prosecute crimes committed on the island. The court reasoned that a nation could exercise legal authority over territory maintained through “actual, continuous, and useful possession,” even when that occupation served only a particular business, such as “working mines.” The ruling confirmed American jurisdiction over Navassa. Read in the context of the uprising that produced it, however, the decision illustrates how resource extraction, racialized labor and the expansion of federal power had become intertwined.
Several defendants received death sentences, but pressure from Black civic organizations and other supporters helped persuade President Benjamin Harrison to commute those sentences in 1891. The case therefore tells a story not only of racial violence and exploitation, but also of Black legal activism and community mobilization during a period often remembered largely for racial repression.
Lessons from the Guano Age
Agricultural abundance has long depended on far more than fertile soil. It has relied on distant nutrients, global shipping networks and the workers whose labor connected remote islands to farms around the world.
Guano did more than fertilize fields. It created a global agricultural system whose supply chains stretched across oceans, depended on distant workers and were vulnerable to geopolitical disruption. From the Chincha Islands to the Strait of Hormuz, the history of fertilizer reminds us that the world’s food supply has long rested on fragile connections between remote places.
Edward D. Melillo is a professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Ships bringing guano from the Pacific islands off Peru and phosphates from Italy are docked at the Pacific Guano Co. factory on Penzance Point (then known as Long Point), in the Woods Hole section of Falmouth, Mass. Ancestors of Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, were partners in the business.
‘New England’s Dark Day’; sue the bastards?
"Dark Day," a mural by Delos Palmer, depicts Connecticut Governor’s Councilor Abraham Davenport and Gov. Jonathan Trumbull on May 19, 1780, on what became known as “New England’s Dark Day.’’ The 1934 WPA mural is at Stamford’s Government Center.
On that day an unusual darkening of the daytime sky was observed over New England, caused by wildfires to the west. The darkness was so dense that candles were required from noon on.
Edited from a Wikipedia report:
“In Connecticut, a member of the Governor's council (renamed the Connecticut State Senate in 1818), Abraham Davenport, became most famous for his response to his colleagues' fears that it was the Day of Judgment:
“I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.’’
OtherWords (slightly edited) article by Basev Sen
The 2026 heatwave is a global phenomenon, inflicting extreme temperatures on billions of people from the United States to Europe and South Asia.
Extreme heat is deadly. In Europe, an estimated 10,000 people have died from heat this summer, and the official count of a few dozen deaths in India and Pakistan is likely to be too low by several orders of magnitude, according to a recent scientific study.
Dozens of Americans died from heat over the Fourth of July weekend alone — a toll that’s still unacceptably high.
Meanwhile, much of the country has been blanketed in smoke from wildfires in Canada and Minnesota, triggered by the hot and dry conditions arising from the heatwaves. Like heat, wildfire smoke is also deadly. A similar wildfire smoke event in 2023 led to an estimated 33,000 premature deaths in the U.S. alone.
Scientists have found that all of these regional heatwaves were made likelier and more severe because of human-caused climate change, mainly attributable to burning fossil fuels.
Major oil and gas corporations have known for decades that their business model would cause disasters like these. Their response was to minimize or even hide their findings to keep the public in the dark about the risks — and pay front groups to deceive them.
This drive to preserve profits at the expense of humanity has understandably caused outrage. Eleven U.S. states, two tribes, and dozens of local governments are suing fossil fuel corporations for damages for the harm they’ve suffered from climate disasters.
State legislators have also joined the fray. New York and Vermont have passed “Climate Superfund” bills that require fossil-fuel corporations to pay for economic losses arising from extreme heat, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and flooding. Similar laws are being considered in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.
The U.S. has experienced more than $200 billion in climate damages every year since 2016, and it’s only fair that fossil-fuel corporations pay for some of the damage caused by their reckless greed.
But instead of trying to make Big Oil pay up, some lawmakers in Congress are trying to do the opposite. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) have introduced House and Senate bills, respectively, that seek to dismiss ongoing climate damages lawsuits, shield Big Oil from similar future cases, pre-empt state Climate Superfund laws, and — most outrageously — block any state level regulation of greenhouse gases.
This is legislation expressly designed to protect a powerful, wealthy industry from having to face any accountability for harming the public. And when you follow the money, you can see why.
Rep. Hageman has received more than $23,000 in campaign money from the petroleum refining and marketing industry in this cycle, making it the second biggest industry (after sugar) backing her candidacy. She’s also received thousands more from other fossil fuel interests.
Also in this cycle alone, Sen. Cruz has gotten more than $129,000 in contributions from different segments of the oil and gas industry.
Effectively, these legislators — like too many others — were bought by a powerful industry to put their corporate interests over the health, and the very lives, of the broader public. This is naked corruption.
And if we want the kind of democracy we need and deserve, the rest of us shouldn’t tolerate it anymore.
Basav Sen directs the Climate Policy Program of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Too late for a mortgage
“Wanderer 15 (detail)’’ (collage, charcoal, pastel, acrylic, and graphite on wood), by Seth Clark, in the group show “Home Sweet, Somewhere,’’ at the Lamont Gallery, Exeter, N.H., Sept. 1-Nov. 21.
— Image courtesy of Paradigm Gallery + Studio.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
— Winston Churchill
The galleery says:
“Ruin, both real and imagined, fuels Seth Clark’a artistic exploration. Through the study of abandoned structures, he explores the convergence of suffering and resilience, encouraging audiences to consider how transience shapes both landscapes and lives amid continuous global instability. Clark’s collage works incorporate layers of tactile and distressed papers as their foundation and incorporate charcoal, pastel, and graphite to add depth and definition.’’
The gallery says of the whole show: ‘ “Home Sweet, Somewhere’ is a contemporary exploration of the spaces we call home. This exhibition invites the viewer to see how the architecture around us becomes a vessel for memory, emotion, and our subconscious. The layered complexities of the places we inhabit evoke a sense of lived experience, reflecting and shaping our identities as they evolve over time. Though ‘home’ is personal, carrying a unique meaning for each individual, the emotional bonds we form with our surroundings are a shared aspect of the human experience.’’
Llewellyn King: Rubio should learn a little history before he helps speed up a nuclear-arms race in the Mideast
The MIT Nuclear Research Reactor (MITR), in Cambridge, Mass., is the fourth-oldest operating reactor in the country.
The first iteration of the reactor, MITR-I, operated from 1958 to 1974. The reactor was then upgraded to a new design, MITR-II.
There are plans to convert the reactor to use low-enriched uranium by 2027 instead of high-enriched uranium to mitigate the international proliferation risk.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The Trump administration last week announced and appeared to crow over an agreement with Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom not only to build nuclear-power plants, but also to enrich the uranium fuel. The plan has become a bit murkier since Trumps wants to make Saudi diplomatic recognition of Israel part of the deal.
There is no reason for the Saudis to enrich uranium. There are plenty of willing suppliers of enriched uranium and more are coming online.
Besides, it has always seemed curious that Saudi Arabia, with its huge fossil reserves and its abundant, reliable sunshine, should want to stress its industrial infrastructure with a nuclear-power program when it clearly doesn’t need it.
We are at war with Iran not because of nuclear power, but because it refuses to abandon its enrichment ambitions.
Enrichment raises the potency of uranium fuel by increasing the amount of the fissile isotope Uranium-235.
Today’s generation of light water reactors — the workhorses that provide about 20 percent of U.S. electricity — use uranium that has been enriched by 3 percent to 5 percent. The uranium for the new small modular reactors will be enriched by about 20 percent
.
Weapons-grade enrichment is generally considered to be uranium that has been enriched by over 90 percent. But Ernie Moniz, who was secretary of energy in the Biden administration and is a nuclear physicist, told a conference organized by the Earthshot Foundation on June 8 that “You can make a pretty good bomb” with 60 percent- enriched uranium, a reference to the Iranian stockpile that we are trying to destroy.
I have been covering nuclear power – and by extension nuclear proliferation — for over 50 years. For most of that time, Saudi Arabia has hankered for nuclear power and enrichment. The question is why.
When I began my coverage, there was great fear of nuclear proliferation — that more counties would get nuclear weapons. Those who have, in that time, are Pakistan and North Korea. China acquired a weapon in 1964.
Israel has never declared itself nuclear-armed, but the arms control community believes it has a weapon and that the United States helped it get one years ago.
The original nuclear weapons nations, the United States, Russia, Britain and France, held the technology close and were loath to see any country step in that direction.
But making civilian nuclear power available to the world has been a plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Eisenhower launched the “Atoms for Peace” program in 1953.
One of the beneficiaries of that program was Iran. In fact, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, American companies, led by Bechtel, the giant engineering firm, were set to build reactors across Iran.
America’s global nuclear policy was, de facto, nuclear civilian power, yes, nuclear enrichment, no. It was pretty sensible and has worked well. Now it is set aside.
The U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal comes at a time when many nations would like to start down the weapons path. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are a stark inducement to go nuclear.
If Ukraine hadn’t given up its nuclear weapons, would Russia have invaded? Almost certainly not. If Iran had a proven bomb, would Israel and the United States have attacked? I think not.
Nonetheless, every nuclear weapon is a threat to world security. The danger isn’t only that desperate or ambitious countries will use them aggressively, but also that the danger of accidental detonation is ever-present.
The United States and the Soviet Union were so concerned about this that they shared safety technology. For example, when we developed an insensitive TNT for the trigger of a nuclear device, we shared this with the Russians. Neither side wanted a thermonuclear war triggered by someone dropping a weapon off a forklift.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio would seem to be so busy that he hasn’t had time to read up on the history of proliferation.
Rubio, declared about the U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal, “Suffice it to say that any agreement that we are going to make with any country in the world on civil nuclear is going to be one that will have safeguards in place to ensure that it can’t be turned into a weapons program.”
Rubio might want to take a few minutes to ponder these three things: How it is that we came to be at war with Iran, how Iran started with civilian power and went on to weapons, and how safeguards were bypassed.
Saudi Arabia’s neighbors in that volatile region will soon be at Rubio’s door looking for nuclear power -- and enrichment. First up, expect Turkey, then Egypt.
If Congress approves Rubio’s deal, then a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East is more or less assured. Is there a worse place to have that happen?
Llewellyn King, an international energy-sector consultant and commentator, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com , and he’s based in Rhode Island.
‘All things were transfigured’
Franconia Notch, in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.
All yesterday it poured, and all night long
I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat
Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,
Upon the grass like running children’s feet.
And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,
Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,
Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,
And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.
But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!
The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,
The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,
The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.
And all things were transfigured in the day,
But me whom radiant beauty could not move;
For you, more wonderful, were far away,
And I was blind with hunger for your love.
“Summer Morn in New Hampshire,’’ by Claude McKay (1889-1948)
Learn by doing
“Self-Taught’’ (reclaimed wood, image transfer and mixed media), by Duncan Johnson, at Front Four Gallery, Stowe, Vt.
The gallery says:
“Duncan Johnson has been in conversation with wood since he was a small child. From his earliest obsession with gluing sticks of wood together to today’s mastery of craft and signature aesthetic, the inherent beauty and qualities of wood has been Johnson’s medium of expression. Working with reclaimed wood that he finds in his home state of Vermont, Johnson has been known for arresting sculptural works puzzling countless bits of wood into elegant organic forms. In the last few years Johnson has made a departure from the 3-dimensional to the 2-dimensional in the form of assembled paintings. Using found wood with the original color maintained, Johnson precisely mills strips of wood and assembles them into enigmatic, loosely geometric compositions.
“The long thin strips of wood placed side by side create stripes that slide into and out of each other organically and with a sense of rushing vertical movement. The entire field of pattern and color is overlaid with a grid of tiny silver brads that have the effect of stitching or netting. The contrast of the precisely applied delicate silver webbing over the warmth and richness of the wood below emphasizes the ambiguity of scale and weight, opening the door to a range of interpretations.’’
Finally, a way to sleep through surgery!
Daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes of a historic ether operation at Massachusetts. General Hospital, in Boston, on July 3, 1847. The MGH Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine traces its roots back to the Oct. 16, 1846 public demonstration of medical ether
Boston Guardian article by Mannie Lewis (not including picture above), slightly edited.
Robert Whitcomb, New England Diary’s editor, is chairman of The Boston Guardian
A single 19th Century operation at Mass General Hospital (MGH) transformed surgery from an excruciatingly painful endeavor into a safe, routine and widespread practice.
In 1846, the fledgling hospital was home to the first publicly demonstrated use of ether, an anesthetic that finally allowed doctors to perform surgery with minimal pain. That procedure proved a turning point in the history of medicine, kicking off almost two centuries of change.
When MGH was founded more than 200 years ago, surgeries were performed without anesthesia, making them unpleasant, to say the least, for doctors and patients alike.
These procedures were so gloomy that MGH’s operating room was purportedly built on the hospital’s top floor to prevent the noise of writhing patients from disturbing other people in the hospital.
As a result, surgery was infrequent, focusing primarily on fixing obvious problems visible from the body’s surface, according to Sarah Alger, director of MGH’s Russell Museum of Medical History.
“Surgery, at the time, didn’t happen terribly often,” Alger said. “Since your patient was conscious, you couldn’t go that deeply into the body. You had to worry about blood loss and shock.”
Confronted with this problem, doctors tested a range of chemicals they thought could relieve pain. Some doctors used nitrous oxide on patients, but these attempts were derided as unsuccessful “humbugs.”
William T.G. Morton, a Boston dentist, was among the first medical professionals to try ether as an anesthetic, inspired by ether’s popularity as a recreational drug. After some successful experiments, he was invited to MGH’s operating theater, now known as the Ether Dome.
Morton arrived at MGH on Oct. 16, 1846, to assist with a routine surgery. Morton held a glass globe filled with ether up to a patient’s mouth, and the patient fell unconscious, according to notes cited by Alger. After the patient woke up, he felt so little pain that he assumed that the procedure had not started yet.
“Gentlemen, this is no humbug,” head surgeon John Collins Warren excitedly told the other doctors.
News of this painless surgery spread rapidly. A surgeon in London used ether within two months, according to Alger, and doctors around the world adopted the chemical as an essential part of surgery.
It met early resistance from religious leaders, some of whom argued that pain is important to the human experience, Alger said. Still, doctors began using ether extensively, which stimulated the discovery of other pain-relief drugs. The era of anesthesia had arrived.
Despite the fanfare, recognition and wealth that Morton accumulated, he was not even the first medical professional to use ether as an anesthetic. Shortly after the MGH procedure, a dentist in Georgia revealed that he had privately used ether on patients for several years, though he never published his findings, Alger noted.
No matter its origins, ether anesthesia transformed the medical field. Surgeons were no longer so constrained by time, allowing them to be more precise, Alger said. By the time ether fell out of favor in the 1940s, it had vastly broadened surgeons’ ability to serve their patients.
“It allowed surgeons to explore more deeply in the body than ever possible,” Alger said. “Anesthesia is really credited with allowing surgery to become the field that it is.”
Swimmers and fliers in color
“Fish and Butterflies” (watercolor over graphite, on cream wove paper), by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), in the show “Coastlines: American Prints and Drawings,’’ at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., through Sept. 27.
Chris Powell: Conn. courts consider something new for mentally ill defendants
“Anxiety,’’ by Edvard Munch.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut's courts are tired of dealing with criminal defendants who are mentally ill but not criminally insane. State government has a place for the latter sort of criminals: Whiting Forensic Hospital, in Middletown. But they are a small subset of the mentally ill, criminals so sick that they are not responsible for themselves.
Most criminal defendants who are mentally ill and convicted of serious crimes end up in Connecticut's prison system -- which may be even more tired of dealing with the mentally ill than the courts are. The prisons are full of people from what the politically incorrect past properly called broken homes, people whose upbringing was miserable, who didn't get a decent education and entered adulthood fit only for menial work, people to whom crime and drug abuse seemed the most practical way of life, and people with learning disabilities.
The prison system does what it can with those people but it's not terribly effective, since most released prisoners return to crime and are back in prison within a few years even as many released prisoners also return to crime but aren't caught.
Connecticut's courts strive to avoid putting people in prison, knowing how prison can damage and handicap troublesome people even more. But the state is full of repeat offenders who should have been locked up permanently after multiple convictions, and at some point the public simply has to be protected. The public is not as protected against repeat offenders as it should be, but prison is expensive and most legislators and governors have preferred to have the public pay for repeat offenders by enduring more crimes than pay with taxes for imprisoning more criminals.
So since the governor and General Assembly seem indifferent to the mental-illness problem faced by the courts and prisons, the Judicial Department has bravely undertaken to try to do something about it on its own.
This month state Chief Justice Raheem L. Mullins announced a committee to plan the creation of an experimental "behavior health court" to be based in New Haven and potentially expanded statewide.
The committee will include judges, police officials, medical and addiction experts, educators, and people who have gone through mental illness and addiction themselves. One of the judges, Dan Klau, lost a daughter to drug addiction and mental illness, and not for lack of trying to help her. Indeed, nearly everyone knows someone who is mentally ill or addicted; the problem is getting worse in Connecticut even as state government, in its relentless pursuit of tax revenue, increasingly facilitates drug and gambling addiction.
Mentally ill or addicted people "might initially come to court for minor incidents," the chief justice says. "However, without proper intervention, their conduct can spiral out of control, especially if they choose to self-medicate with alcohol or illegal drugs. Our goal is to triage these individuals and get them help before they inflict irreparable harm on themselves or someone else."
The chief justice hasn't defined a particular format for the behavioral-health court, leaving that to the committee. Getting people "the help they need" is a cliché that needs definition too.
There are many other questions. Judges already have great discretion in sentencing and can condition sentences and probations on a defendant's cooperation with various treatments, but how well do they work? If judges made enough use of their discretion in sentencing the mentally ill and addicted, and if enough treatment was available and worked, would a behavioral health court be needed?
Would a behavioral-health court be just another mechanism of what state law euphemizes as "accelerated rehabilitation," the gradual erasure of a defendant's responsibility, and the release of more repeat offenders? Who would audit the results of the court to prevent it from becoming such a mechanism? How much would the court cost, and, if it worked, how much might it save?
They committee should answer these questions. In any case it aims to confront a longstanding disaster the rest of state government has been happy to overlook.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Addressing fundamental struggles
“The Beast at Bay in the Garden of Appetites’’(ink on paper), by James Dye, in his show “The Void, the Wheel, and the Monster,” at the Fitchburg (Mass.) Art Museum, through Sept. 13.
The museum says:
“James Dye uses a painstaking and detailed ink drawing technique to create images of mysterious narratives. His idiosyncratic imaginary universe is deeply informed by symbols inspired by mythology, religion, psychology, and the history of art and architecture. Ultimately, Dye’s work tells stories – both personal and universal – about the terrors and wonders of the struggles between chaos and order, light and dark, and existence and oblivion.’’
In our smoky high summer
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Tomatoes, tomatoes – multi-colored! Heirloom! New England has a shorter vegetable-growing season than much of the country (though it’s getting longer), but those plants we do grow are particularly delicious, and many of them are ready to eat now. Next stop: sweet corn.
Some people may see a certain beauty in air pollution: When it hasn’t been gray or various shades of blue this summer, the New England sky has somertimes been tinted a golden cast by smoke (which you could taste) from wildfires in Minnesota and Ontario. While it lowered temperatures from what had been predicted, it was quite creepy. As man-made global warming continues, we can expect much more of this stuff. Forests dry more quickly in the heat.
So ozone pollution, the main ingredient in smog, will increase. It’s very bad for your lungs. All this as the regime tries to gut the EPA in association with campaign donations from certain industries.
Hydrangeas, with their huge flower heads, seem exuberant emblems of New England in the summer, particularly along the coast. Looking at their vibrant blues, purples and pinks can raise our spirits, even on the hottest, most humid days.
Hydrangeas in bloom on Cape Cod.
But wear long pants
“Way to the Sea,’’ by Nancy Friese, in the “Radical Quiet’’ show opening at the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, N.H., on Aug. 8.
Elan Abrell: Potential dangers of ‘pest control’
Eastern Wild Turkeys which are very common in New England.
From The Conversation (not including image above)
MIDDLERTOWN, Conn.
After wild turkeys attacked an 83-year-old woman in May 2026, sending her to the emergency room for stitches, police warned residents of Alameda, California, to avoid interacting with the animals. Wild turkeys can be particularly aggressive during mating season. They can also damage property: digging up gardens, staining decks with their droppings and occasionally attacking cars and windows when they mistake their own reflections for rival turkeys.
Turkeys may be a nuisance to Alameda’s human residents, but they have also been highly valued by multiple cultures throughout the history of North America. Given these threats to human safety and property, is it fair to call this quintessentially American bird a pest?
As an anthropologist who studies human-animal interactions, I have found that the idea of a “pest” is a flexible concept that changes over time and across cultures. Just as one person’s weed can be another’s wildflower, the category of pest is a subjective one that depends on social, aesthetic and economic values within a particular culture.
If Turkeys decorate American dinner tables and are pardoned by presidents, are they still pests?
Labeling an animal a pest typically justifies the use of harmful or deadly methods to remove undesirable species from human spaces. But these methods can lead to costs that far outweigh their benefits, causing unnecessary suffering for not only the so-called pests, but also for humans, other animals and entire ecosystems.
Understanding why people label certain animals pests can help society respond to potential conflicts while minimizing harm to both humans and animals.
What is a pest?
The English word “pest” comes from the Latin word “pestis,” meaning plague, instrument of death or destruction, or nuisance.
The Black Death is one of the most infamous historical examples of the link between disease and pests. This pandemic of bubonic plague spread via rodents carrying infected fleas, killing an estimated 25 million people in the 14th Century in Europe. The discovery that animals carried the plague gave rise to one of the earliest pest control professions: the ratcatcher.
Some animals that humans consider pests are synanthropes: wild animals that have adapted to human habitats for the various benefits they receive from human activities. Sometimes, this adaptation is self-directed, as in the case of rodents or coyotes attracted to human food stores.
Pigeons have adapted well to urban living with humans. Catherine Falls Commercial/Moment via Getty Images
But humans often contribute more directly to the adaptation of synanthropic animals, as in the case of pigeons, one of the earliest domesticated bird species. The wild descendants of domesticated rock doves, pigeons still thrive in human environments where they can find food and nest in the clifflike edifices of buildings.
People have also contributed to the spread of nonnative or “invasive” species. Maritime travel dispersed rodents and feral pigs across countless island ecosystems. Misguided efforts at controlling other pests, in this case insects that damage sugarcane crops, led to the introduction of cane toads in Australia.
Animals out of place
Many pest animals pose no actual threats to humans or their ecosystems, but this does not stop people from seeing them as trouble.
Most species of spiders, for example, are harmless to humans and can help eliminate insects that may be even more unwelcome in a home. And despite their status as despised backyard invaders, moles actually provide benefits to gardens by aerating soil and consuming insects and mollusks that feed on plants.
To understand why harmless animals are still often perceived as pests, you can look to anthropologist Mary Douglas’ foundational concept of matter out of place. In her 1966 book “Purity and Danger,” Douglas argues that cross-cultural concepts such as purity and pollution are based on normative ideas about the proper places for particular things.
Squirrels become pests when they wander where people say they shouldn’t be. Jed T. Hoyt/Wakelee's Pharmacies/California business ephemera collection/California Historical Society via Flickr, CC BY
Dirt, for example, is not a specific unclean substance, but a social category people use to describe matter that is in a place where it does not belong. Mud smeared on your clothes, skin or eating utensils, for example, might be dirt in this sense, whereas mud on the ground would just be a part of the soil where it belongs.
Pests, similarly, can be understood as animals that violate spatial boundaries determined by cultural values. For example, a deer and her fawn grazing in a meadow, or a family of squirrels nesting in a tree, might become pests if they were to start grazing on prized rosebushes or nesting in an attic.
Like plague-spreading fleas, these animals can pose real harms to humans, but the category of pest need not be tied to an objective assessment of risk.
Potential dangers of pest control
Designating animals as pests can sometimes do more damage than the animals themselves.
Historical efforts to control or eradicate pests illustrate both how culture influences which animals are placed in this category and the unintended consequences that can arise from putting them there.
The culling of sparrows through China’s Four Pest Campaign, which lasted from 1958 to 1962, led to mass famine after causing ecological imbalance. Wikimedia Commons
In 1532, the Tudor Vermin Laws provided bounties for killing a broad range of species perceived as a threat in Early Modern English society to agricultural food stocks. These animals included badgers, bats, crows, foxes, hedgehogs, otters and owls, among many others. Vilified for superstitious or erroneous beliefs, many of these species did not actually compete with people for food or pose other significant dangers.
Four centuries later, in the mid-20th Century, China’s government similarly encouraged people to eradicate over a billion sparrows to prevent them from depleting grain supplies.
These policies in England and China pushed many species to the brink of extinction, inflicting ongoing harm on ecosystems while failing to address food supply problems. In the case of China’s anti-sparrow campaign, a failure to recognize sparrows’ ecological role as insect predators led surviving swarms of locusts to devastate the grain crops, contributing to mass famine that killed nearly as many people as the Black Death in Europe.
Contemporary efforts at pest control have also caused unanticipated collateral damage. The pesticide DDT notoriously caused widespread harm to ecosystems while also posing a significant risk to human health. The regular use of chemical rodenticides is a danger to humans, companion animals and wildlife.
New ways of coexisting
Humans have very good reasons to be concerned about potentially harmful species. Indeed, the mosquito, one of the most common pests around the world, is also responsible for more human deaths than any other animal.
However, the category of pest has often provided an overly simple framework for targeting other animals for extermination, in many cases with serious ecological consequences.
Beyond the many harms of efforts to eradicate pests, the concept of pest itself has contributed to human violence by providing a powerful metaphor for dehumanizing marginalized groups throughout history.
Rather than denigrating other animals as pests, people can address potential dangers of other species while also taking responsibility for how we contribute to these fraught relations. Understanding pests as a subjective cultural category opens space for questioning whose interests are served by such designations, who is harmed by the label, and what possibilities for alternative relations may exist.
As in the case of Alameda’s turkeys, leaving other animals alone and finding ways to coexist may lead to better outcomes for all.
Elan Abrell is an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Wesleyan University.
He does not work for, consult, own shares in, or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Wesleyan University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.
Channeling ‘family mythology’
Painting by Kelly Sinnapah Mary, in her show at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn., through June 13, 2027.
She says: “When I paint, I am channeling both my family mythology––the stories that have been told to me, the memories I have––and broader histories and cosmologies to imagine a new world.”
The museum says the show brings together “a comprehensive view of her work to date and will include approximately forty paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and installations across two immersive institutional environments including the debut of new work.’’
What new federal housing act means for New England
“Men Building a House,” aka “Building Boom’’ (oil on canvas, 1937), by Louise Emerson Ronnebeck
From The New England Council (slightly edited)
BOSTON
On July 11, 2026, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act officially became law, marking the most significant federal housing legislation in decades. After months of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations, Congress delivered a comprehensive package designed to increase housing supply, modernize federal housing policy, and help make homeownership and rental housing more attainable for American families.
For New England, where housing affordability has become one of the region’s defining economic challenges, the legislation represents an important milestone.
The New England Council applauds the leadership of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and the Democratic sponsor of the legislation, as well as members of the New England Congressional Delegation who helped shape and advance the bill. We especially recognize Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, who serves alongside Senator Warren on the Senate Banking Committee; Masssachusetts Representatives Stephen F. Lynch and Ayanna Pressley, and Connecticut Representative Jim Himes for their leadership throughout the legislative process.
While no single law can solve the nation’s housing shortage, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act establishes a strong federal foundation for expanding housing opportunities by reducing unnecessary barriers to development, modernizing financing tools, supporting manufactured housing, strengthening community development programs, and encouraging policies that increase the supply of homes across the country.
Why This Matters to New England
Housing affordability continues to affect nearly every sector of New England’s economy. Employers across the region increasingly cite housing costs as a barrier to attracting and retaining workers, while families face rising home prices and limited housing inventory.
The need for action is clear. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston reports that home prices across New England rose by roughly 50 percent between 2020 and 2024, driven largely by a shortage of available housing. At the national level, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies continues to identify housing supply as one of the country’s most pressing economic challenges.
The bill serves as an important first step toward addressing those challenges by giving communities additional tools to build more housing and improve affordability.
The Council’s Advocacy
The New England Council and its Housing Working Group have supported the ROAD to Housing Act since its introduction.
Last fall, the Council published an op-ed in New England business journals highlighting the need for comprehensive housing reform and submitted a formal letter to Congress urging lawmakers to advance the legislation. Throughout the legislative process, the Council has remained engaged with policymakers and members on the bill’s progress.
That conversation continued June 16, 2026, when the Council, in partnership with Liberty Bay Credit Union, welcomed Congressman Stephen F. Lynch (D-MA). The discussion centered on a message echoed by employers across the region: housing is no longer just a quality-of-life issue, but a workforce and economic competitiveness issue.
The enactment of this housing package reinforces the importance of that conversation and represents meaningful progress toward expanding housing opportunities across New England.
Looking Ahead
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is an important milestone, but it is only the beginning.
The New England Council looks forward to continuing its work with policymakers, industry leaders, and members to advance practical solutions that increase housing supply, improve affordability, and strengthen New England’s workforce and economy.
We thank the members of the New England Congressional Delegation whose leadership helped make this landmark legislation possible and look forward to supporting the successful implementation of this historic law.
For more information, please contact Natasha Silva, the New England Council’s director of Federal Affairs, at nsilva@newenglandcouncil.com.
And when the public is corrupt?
Detail from “Corrupt Legislation’’ (1896), by Elihu Vedder, at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Three New Englanders on corruption:
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well".
John Adams: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".
Henry David Thoreau: "The fact which the politician faces is merely that there is less honor among thieves than was supposed, and not the fact that they are thieves".
Yes, we’re ready to go
“Another Country” (acrylic on can), by Bekka Teerlink, in the group show “New Members,’’ at Kingston Gallery, Boston, through Aug. 2
She says:
“I paint psychological landscapes built from pieces of the broken world around me. Recurring themes in my work included houses, gardens, and portals to other places and times. I grew up moving from place to place and never felt rooted in one place. From this experience, I developed an obsession with ‘home,’ especially of the homes I didn’t have. I daydreamed of places I wanted to live, drawing fantasy floorplans and illustrations. In my paintings, those imagined spaces began to merge with the real ones I’d experienced, creating a personal world that exists outside of any specific time or location.’’
Superb stone, but don’t breathe the dust
“Sheldon’s and Slason’s Marble Quarry” (West Rutland, Vt. (oil on canvas, 1851), by James Pope, at the Middlebury (Vt.) College Museum of Art. Marble and granite quarrying became a major industry in the Green Mountain State in the 19th Century. It’s much diminished now.