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View Larger + Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Sometimes I nod to my neighbor

as he flings lath and plaster or cleared

brush on the swelling pile. Talk

is impossible; the dozer shudders toward us,

flattening everything in its path.’’

From “At the Town Dump,’’ by Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), New Hampshire-based poet

“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.’’

-- Robert Frost (1874-1963), New England’s most famous poet

“It must be wonderful to be 17, and to know everything.’’

-- Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), English science-fiction writer

View Larger + Public access site in Bristol PHOTO: CRMC Shoreline access continues to be a stormy issue in Rhode Island. There’s constant conflict that pits beach walkers, swimmers and sitters from the general public against generally affluent shoreline house owners, who have taken over more and more of the New England coast, with many striving mightily to keep the public as far away from their houses as they can. Understandable!

Public access site in Bristol PHOTO: CRMC

There’s a measure in the Rhode Island House that attempts to end the old confusions about how high on a beach the public can go without being  legally kicked off by irritated owners. (“We paid a lot of money for this place!”) It states that folks can go 10 feet landward beyond a “recognizable high tide line.’’ That’s defined as the mark left “upon tide flats, beaches, or along shore objects that indicates the intersection of the land with the water’s surface  level at the maximum height reached by a rising tide.’’  (Lawyerly poetry!) That would often, but presumably not always, mean a line of seaweed, oil, shells or other debris.

None of this means that you could legally climb up the wall in front of someone’s house, whatever passes for the high-water mark.

A not very helpful 1982 state Supreme Court ruling said that the mean high-water mark is the appropriate boundary between the shoreline to which the public has access and private property, but the court said that determining the line  requires “special surveying equipment and expertise.’’  What with the changes wrought by waves and storms, it can be mighty hard to find the high-tide mark in any case. Confused and/or nervous beach visitors would thus tend to move down to the low-tide mark (also not always easy to define).  The new legislation doesn’t seem on the face of it to make things much easier for beach walkers to follow. And where can beach strollers sit down without being yelled at?

Inevitably, a shadowy group, with the windy title of “Shoreline Taxpayers for Respectful Traverse, Environmental Responsibility and Safety,’’  representing affluent owners, plans to fight the measure with lawsuits. Since the rich generally run America, I’d bet they’ll win; and I suspect that most of the group’s clients are from out of state.

(Some members of this same crowd also try to stop the sand from washing away in front of their houses by putting up hard barriers to catch and hold it. But that just ends up depriving the shores further down the shore of sand. Indeed, it worsens erosion.)

But wait! Rising seas caused by manmade global warming may make this issue more wrought.  Estimates are that sea level will rise by almost a foot between now and 2050, and there will be more and worse hurricanes and other storms. That would push the high-tide mark (or marks), and the strolling public, further landward, toward those beach houses.

For that matter,  it will also force some landowners to eventually abandon their houses, many of which shouldn’t have been put there in the first place, let alone subsidized by taxpayers through federal flood insurance and frequent repairs to beach roads by states and municipalities. Indeed, permanently removing structures from stretches of the immediate shore will be a rapidly increasing phenomenon in the next few decades. Sad. Most people love being close to the water, as real-estate prices suggest.

Will the Feds be buying out a lot of these properties through the Federal Emergency Management Agency?

Before the rise of the shoreline summer house, spawned by the money from the Industrial Revolution, few people in New England coastal communities built houses right along the shore. It was considered too insecure in the face of storms and flooding. Houses were built much higher up. So you can see that the oldest buildings in New England coastal towns are in village centers or associated with now mostly gone farms.

Part of my family has long lived in Falmouth, on Cape Cod. Some of their 18th and 19th Century houses are still standing near the town green. These people were in farming, boat building, fishing and assorted other trades. On the other hand, most of the houses around the harbors and along the beaches of the town date from the 1870’s and later, when they were built as summer places after the extension of the railroad brought affluent people, including some of my other ancestors, from the Boston area to summer on the Cape. This sort of movement was replicated on coasts, including the Great Lakes, around America.

Occasionally hurricanes or other big storms would damage or destroy the houses, but the owners would usually have enough money and/or insurance (including in the past few decades federal flood insurance) to rebuild in exactly the same insecure places.

In any event, with rapidly rising seas, that can’t go on. Let the great trek inland begin (if only a few dozen yards).

View Larger + PHOTO: file As usual at this time of year, some Rhode Island legislators propose to raise taxes on rich people. Well, taxes are too low for the services and public physical infrastructure that the public demand, even as they strive to avoid paying for them. The rich, who have never been richer, benefit at least as much as the poor from the government. But tiny Rhode Island must follow the economic dynamo of Massachusetts’s lead in taxation. It can’t be seen as less “competitive.’’

Eventually, the Feds will have to substantially raise taxes to comport with the fiscal reality of gigantic public debt. The slash-taxes-and-boost-spending program since Reagan can’t go on forever.  Russia’s (and maybe China’s) unofficial war on the West, necessitating higher defense spending, may help push the public to accept the reality that taxes are too low.

Providence mayoral candidate Brett Smiley, who has held high managerial positions in both Rhode Island state government and Providence City Hall, may well have chosen the right approach: Present himself as a  version of the late Boston Mayor Thomas Menino – an “urban mechanic’’ who focuses on the basics of local governance – snow plowing, filling potholes, maintaining adequate police and fire protection, addressing various idiosyncratic neighborhood quality-of-life issues, repairing schools and public buildings and so on.

He would, apparently, tend to stay away from implementing new social-engineering programs. Good. They are best left to the state and federal governments, which have far greater resources to pay for them, if they actually make sense at all. And remember that cities and towns are legal children of the state. And we already ask such municipal employees as teachers and police officers to do far too much stuff – especially social work – that’s not in their core mission.

It’s too early to know whether Mr. Smiley has the fortitude, creativity, endurance and political coalition-building strength to get elected, and if he’s elected whether he could engender enough loyalty and fear to bend city employees to his will, as Tom Menino was famously able to do.

I read last week in GoLocalProv that Residential Properties, the Providence-based company that has a particular affection for high-end customers, has set up an office in Westport, Mass. No wonder! The South Coast region has drawn many more summer and year-round home buyers in the past few years, drawn by the beautiful rolling countryside (with vineyards and farms), Buzzards Bay, which is remarkably warm in the summer, and the ease of getting to the area.

It’s lured a lot of people who in prior years might have gone to Cape Cod or the Hamptons.

This migration has shot real-estate prices through the roof on the South Coast (in which I’d include the coastal towns from Little Compton all the way to Marion (but excluding New Bedford). The big surprise to me is how long it took so many people to discover it.

View Larger + PHOTO: Kitchener Ontario CC: 2.0

Please, please, please research the insecticides you use in your gardens and avoid those that kill bees, butterflies and other pollinators  (and directly hurt people, too) that are essential for plant life (and for humans). The decline in these populations is scary. Meanwhile, look to grow plants that attract pollinators.

Seek pesticides with garlic, kaolin clay, corn gluten and bacillus thuringiensis. If one of these is the key ingredient for a pesticide, it's probably safe for pollinators.  Avoid pesticides with neonicotinoids.

While I was waiting last Wednesday in the parking lot of some doctors’ offices, I looked over to a pine grove on the side as a shaft of sunlight through the clouds lit up the ground, on which pigeons, rabbits, and squirrels were foraging for seeds. The Peaceable Kingdom.

View Larger + Putin as a member of the KGB What Fuels Putin’s Killings

Putin as a member of the KGB

You have to assume that anything Putin’s blood-soaked regime says is a lie, such as promises to reduce its attacks on Ukrainian civilians. (The dictator seems to particularly enjoy murdering children.)

This is just maneuvering in the hope that the West will soften its opposition to his brutality.

So what’s he up to? Well, among other things, he’s trying to steal Ukraine’s rich coal and gas deposits in the east and south and to dominate the Black Sea. This theft would tend to further impoverish Ukraine,  and put it even more at the mercy of the Kremlin, at least until more alternate energy can be brought online.

Of course, the invasion of Ukraine by fossil-fuel-rich Russia (which uses its energy sales to kill people) is a brutal reminder of the peril of depending on oil, gas and coal, a disproportionate percentage of which is controlled by dictators, even as the world’s fossil-fuel burning threatens catastrophic global warming. So while we’ll be trapped having to use fossil fuel for years to come, we must accelerate our move away from it.

The West’s dependence on the stuff has been its greatest geopolitical weakness, forcing it to subsidize petro-dictators’ aggression and human-rights abuses.

So Biden is wisely using the Defense Production Act to boost domestic production of critical minerals, such as lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt and manganese, for electric-vehicle and other types of batteries.  The DPA would help mining companies access $750 million under its Title III fund and also could push recycling of battery material. 

Bloomberg News reports that the administration has already allocated billions of dollars to develop a “U.S. battery supply chain and {to wean} the auto industry off its reliance on {our adversary} China, the leading producer of lithium-ion cells. Energy independence advocates have also pushed the administration to focus further upstream on mining and on minerals processing, a key step in the EV {electric vehicle} sector that’s also largely dominated by China.”

But much needs to be done in conservation, too. We could start by lowering the highway speed limit to 60 mph.  And maybe millions of suburbanites, concentrated in the South and West, might consider replacing their big pickup trucks that get 15-19 miles per gallon. That, too, would be a blow to Putin and other U.S. enemies.

The less we buy of dictators’ oil, gas and coal, the safer the world will be.

Hit this link to  look at a new, Massachusetts-based green-energy project:

Blame Biden? Hit this link:

Males who decide that they’re actually females and undergo operations, hormone treatments, and so on to become trans shouldn’t be allowed to compete as females against “real” females in school sports. It is blatantly unfair.

View Larger + Stressball PHOTO: file

I’m always leery of rankings – though they’re fun --  but Wallet Hub’s ranking of the states by the stress their populations feel about right:

The most stressed states, from most intense: Louisiana, Nevada (gambling!), New Mexico, West Virginia, Mississippi, Arkansas,  Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas and Tennessee. Note that except for Purple State Nevada and Blue State New Mexico, they are all rock-solid Trumpian Red States with lousy public services. The 10 least stressed: Utah (happy, abstemious Mormons?), Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Hawaii, North Dakota, Massachusetts, Nebraska and New Jersey. They all have better than average social services and relatively stable populations. Rhode Island is 33rd most stressed; Connecticut 30th. Odd.

Interesting that most of the least stressed states have cold climates. Florida is ranked as 13th most stressed, by the way.

It’s also interesting that urban life is associated with stress and yet two of the states here – Massachusetts and New Jersey -- are among the least stressed states and yet heavily urban. Massachusetts has very good health and public education which may help explain its high ranking.

Each state, of course, has a unique socio-economic and ethnic composition.

“We said goodbye with a highball Then I got as high as a steeple But we were intelligent people No tears, no fuss Hooray for us.’’

-- From Bob Hope’s theme song, “Thanks for the Memory’’

If polls are to be believed, a majority of the public approved of Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock for making a joke about Smith’s wife’s baldness during the Academy Awards. But then Americans like violent movies. Anyway, most of the Oscars are so oily, glitzy and phony that whatever happens there is a downer.

It makes one nostalgic for the old Oscars, especially the 19 times that Bob Hope (1903-2003) hosted them, with  (sometimes lame) humor and even a bit of dignity.

View Larger + Former Presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump Back to Watergate

Former Presidents Richard Nixon and Donald Trump

In the early and mid-'70s, I wrote The Wall Street Journal’s World-Wide column from time to time, and edited articles about Watergate during the scandal. I’ve  read two or three books about it since then, though not for perhaps 20 years until last week, when I went through the new Watergate: A New History, by Garrett M. Graff, who was born in 1981. I was surprised to read some new stuff in Mr. Graff’s narrative, which is exciting, even though you know the ending. Fifty years later, new documents still appear from time to time.

I’ll never forget seeing the huge New York Times headline “Nixon Resigns’’ at the newsstand in a Brooklyn subway station on that hot and humid Aug. 8, 1974. The copy I bought was still damp from the press.

I came away from the book with an even fuller sense of just how corrupt Nixon and most of his inner group were.  (Somehow Bill Clinton’s idiotic dalliance with, and lies about, Monica Lewinsky, or even Hunter Biden’s escapades, don’t quite reach Watergate levels….)  Nixon, while well read and very smart, was corrosively bitter and suspicious.  (He also engaged in a bit of treason in his ’68 campaign.) But Trump & Co. are vastly worse, swimming in a cesspool of treason, kleptocracy, non-stop lies and the most squalid demagoguery. And a depressing aspect is the extreme cowardice of most leading Republicans in Washington in refusing to openly denounce the Trumpians.  In Watergate, many leading Republicans spoke out against Nixon’s crimes well before he was forced to resign upon threat of impeachment.

The national GOP, now infected with QAnon, after having become increasingly corrupt over the decades, deserves to die, and be replaced with a conservative party where basic morality and principle have some sway. Still, the GOP has a few basically honorable and competent governors, including three in New England. Maybe they could be in the core of a new party.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.

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