Regions in search of a country

See “The Nine Nations of North America,’’ by Joel Garreau

— Map by A Max J -

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Colin Woodard’s book Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood  is at its core a narrative of how wishful thinking,  racism and willful ignorance led historians to promote pictures of America that ignored the huge impact of slavery/Jim Crow and regionalism. (Note that a previous Woodard book was entitled American Nations.)

He sees the United States as having developed mostly region by region -- politically, economically and culturally --  and not in a unitary way. Consider “Greater New England’’; the Planter Class of Tidewater Virginia and Maryland down to Georgia, and the tough Scots-Irish in the Border States and interior South.   The caste system that developed with slavery had a great deal to do with how the last two groups turned out.

Mr. Woodard mostly tells his tale through biographies of five people: New England’s George Bancroft (1800-1891), a very  intellectually dishonest but popular historian; South Carolina writer and politician William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a romanticist of the slave-owning South, especially its “aristocratic’’ coastal Planter Class;  Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) the great abolitionist, orator and writer; historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), whose theories about sectionalism and the role of the frontier revolutionized the teaching of American history, and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the deeply racist president, political scientist and popular historian.

After reading this book I was again reminded of  how it still sometimes  seems more  a collection of quasi-countries than a unified country. Just look at our national elections up to last November!

Fishing lessons from Maine

Lobster boat off Portland, Maine.

Maine lobster traps ready to be taken on board in 1928.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier, by Colin Woodard, is a history of the storied Maine Coast in which the ups and downs of the fishing industry in the Pine Tree State have played a big part.

The book is a deeply researched, reported and colorful narrative. It may also be of particular interest to New Englanders now in light of the overdue restrictions just imposed on the herring fishery. There are many lessons to be gained from a study of the management and non-management of fish species in the spectacular protein factory known as the Gulf of Maine. Overfishing has led to the Maine Coast having only one major commercial species left – lobsters. Catches of such formerly lucrative species as cod, haddock and halibut are a fraction of what they were a few decades ago.

All too often fishermen blame “natural cycles’’ for fishing stocks that are collapsing because of extreme overfishing. Modern fishing techniques, including fish-finding electronic devices and bigger, better nets and boats, have had devastating impacts. Overfishing of such species as herring that are essential food for the survival of larger fish can be particularly damaging to fishing ecology.

So it was muted good news that federal regulators decided to slash catch limits by 55 percent and impose buffer zones where no commercial herring fishing would be allowed. However, many scientists think that the whole herring fishery off New England should be shut down for a while in order to save it.

“The population is stressed, and we really need to start building resiliency,” Erica Fuller, senior lawyer with the Conservation Law Foundation, told the council.

Rarely does any economic interest group eschew short-term profit for long-term gain. People will almost always take the money and run. (An apparent exception is Maine’s lobstermen’s remarkably cooperative and voluntary efforts in recent years to save that fishery.) Strong measures can do wonders in saving species, as in the case of striped bass, whose revival owes much to the late Rhode Island Sen. John H. Chafee’s push for research and regulation to save the sportfish from extinction off the East Coast.

Llewellyn King's journal: Sad story about the seas; a movie mystery; D.C. lawyers' cold marble

Beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

I have not yet been to the beach this year and with the arrival of hot weather, a dip is in order. But the fact is that  the beach is not what it used to be for me. Ever since I started making television programs on the oceans, I have stared out to the waves with a different mindset -- foreboding tinged with sorrow.

Like most of us I thought of the oceans as the last refuge of untrammeled nature, a place where man’s predations could not defeat nature; the last safe place for the world as it was. Then I started doing television interviews about the state of the oceans and found how wrong I was.

The first interview was with Mark Spalding of The Ocean Foundation; the second with Colin Woodard of The Portland Press Herald; the third was with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is my senator; the fourth with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Sunshine Menezes; and the fifth was another detailed discussion of the state of the oceans with Whitehouse in his office on Capitol Hill.

Whitehouse is a passionate advocate for the oceans and an articulate voice about  their deplorable condition, due to acidification, infestation with plastic, overfishing, and the relentless rise in temperature and sea level -- up there with acidification, and likely in the future to wipe out coastal communities.

It is grim stuff: a horror story of our own making and one that is sometimes lost among other stories of environmental disaster. But this is  one that will get us all in some way.

They say Algernon Charles Swinburne, the 19th Century English poet, would not only write poetry about the ocean, but also would shout his verses into the waves. This summer as we flock to enjoy the beaches in New England and elsewhere, maybe we should shout “sorry” into the sick waves, because they are sick of a disease that can be arrested if we just have the mind to start.

Movie mystery: What gets the distributors' nod?

To me, part of the mystery of the movie business is as much in the distribution as in how particular movies come to be made. I say this because an exceptional film -- one of the few of recent releases -- has got short shrift from the distributors in Rhode Island. I cannot speak for the rest of New England or the country as a whole.

The movie is Norman,, starring Richard Gere -- and starring is the operative word because he is seldom off-screen. It has all of the ingredients which make a movie great to my mind – and for what it is worth, I once reviewed movies for newspapers. The story is,  briefly, the tale of a somewhat sleazy New York fixer who ingratiates himself with an Israeli politician who rises to become prime minister of  that nation. They become durable friends.

The movie, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, an Israeli film director, is taut, dodges heavy sentimentality and yet has flashes of sentimentality. It nails the banal cruelty of politics,  the mischief of gatekeepers and the pain of outsidedness. The craft of filmmaking is on display here at its best. Gere is great and the rest of the cast is also exceptional. I am sure that it will be studied for its technical skill for years to come in film schools.

So why, I ask, was it not on general release in Rhode Island? On Saturday, June 10, it only had an 11:30 a.m. showing in one of the malls. My wife, Linda,  and I ended up seeing it at Cable Car Cinema, a venerable but tiny art house in Providence, where it had a number of showings.

Why such limited release? The film was lavishly reviewed in the press, here and abroad. Curious business, movies – a joy when you see a great one where it was meant to be seen, in my view, in a cinema. and not on a TV screen.

Washington's marble lobbies: Cold, slippery and awful

Back to Washington last week for another speech and some visits.

Washington’s law firms set the pace for office decoration and two things dominate: marble and glass. One thing is eschewed: anywhere to sit.

Building after building, housing the myriad law firms, most of which are lobbying shops as well, have ridiculously obstructive security with rent-a-cops running little fiefs, and acres of cold, people-rejecting marble.

When you get upstairs, everything that can be glass is glass. One lobbyist makes sure that you are escorted at all times because of the number of people who have been hurt walking onto glass walls and doors.

Glass and marble: What does it all mean? What happened to wood and warmth and places to sit in lobbies? Heaven knows, human knees have not been converted to stone and glass.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Llewellyn King: Our destruction of life in the oceans

Memo to environmental activists: It’s the oceans, stupids.

This summer, hundreds of millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere will flock to beaches to swim, surf, wade, boat, fish, sunbathe, or even fall in love. To these revelers, the oceans are eternal -- as certain as the rising and setting of the sun, and a permanent bounty in an impermanent world.

But there is a rub: The oceans are living entities and they are in trouble. Much more trouble than the sun-seekers of summer can imagine.

Mark Spalding, president of The Ocean Foundation, says, “We are putting too much into the oceans and taking too much out.”

In short, that is what is happening. Whether deliberately or not, we are dumping stuff into the oceans at a horrifying rate and, in places, we are overfishing them.

But the No. 1 enemy of oceans is invisible: carbon.

Carbon is a huge threat, according to ocean champion Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The oceans are a great carbon sink, he explains, but they are reaching a carbon saturation point, and as so-called “deep carbon” resurfaces, it limits the oxygen in the water and destroys fish and marine life.

There is a 6,474-square-mile “dead zone” -- an area about the size of Connecticut with low to no oxygen -- in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are appearing in oceans around the world because of excessive nutrient pollution (especially nitrogen and phosphorous) from agribusiness and sewage. Two great U.S. estuaries are in trouble: the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound.

Warming in the North Atlantic is disturbing fish populations: Maine lobsters are migrating to Canada's cooler waters. Whitehouse and other Atlantic Coast legislators are concerned as they see fish resources disappearing, and other marine life threatened.

Colin Woodard, a reporter at The Portland  (Maine) Press Herald, has detailed the pressures from climate change on fish stocks in the once bountiful Gulf of Maine. He first sounded the alarm 16 years ago in his book, Oceans End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and now he says that things are worse.

The shallow seas,  such as the Baltic and the Adriatic, are subject to “red tides” -- harmful algal booms, due to nutrient over-enrichment, that kill fish and make shellfish dangerous to consume.

Polluted waterways are a concern for Rio de Janeiro Olympic rowers and other athletes. Apparently, the word is: Don’t follow the girl from Ipanema into the water. The culprit is raw sewage, and the swelling Olympic crowds will only worsen the situation.

My appeal to the environmental community is this: If you are worried about the air, concentrate on the oceans. It is hard to explain greenhouse gases to a public that is distrustful, or fears the economic impact of reducing fossil-fuel consumption. If I lived in a West Virginia hollow, and the only work was coal mining, you bet I would be a climate denier.

The oceans are easier to understand. You can explain that the sea levels are rising; that it is possible for life-sustaining currents, such as the Gulf Stream, to stop or reverse course; and you can point to the ways seemingly innocent actions, or those thought of as virtuous (like hefting around spring water in plastic bottles) have harmful effects.

Plastic is a big problem. Great gyres of plastic, hundreds of miles long, are floating in the Pacific. Flip-flops washed into the ocean in Asia are piling up on beaches in Africa. Fish are ingesting microplastic particles – and you will ingest this plastic when you tuck into your fish and chips. Sea birds and dolphins get tangled in the plastic harnesses we put on six-packs of beer and soft drinks. They die horrible deaths. Sunscreen is lethal to coral.

It is hard to explain how carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere cause the Earth to heat up. It is easier, I am telling my environmentalist friends, to understand that we will not be able to swim in the oceans.

I have met climate deniers, but I have never run into an ocean denier. Enjoy the beach this summer. 

Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This piece first ran on InsideSources.