We went for the first time this year to the Orono Bog Boardwalk on Monday morning. This is an absolute gem of a resource for the Penobscot Valley community, giving people easy access to a part of our Acadian landscape that is not often so easily visited. If you have never been there you will […]
For the past few weeks we have heard a Northern Bobwhite singing in our neighborhood. This is a bird we associate with Southern New England, so we were surprised to hear it in Eastern Maine. My first thought was, here is yet another bird whose range has moved north in response to climate change, a […]
In the last two decades of the 20th Century, environmental economists made tremendous strides in developing techniques to measure economic values when there are no markets (they call these “non-market valuation”). These efforts grew out of the criticism of the environmental statutes adopted in the 1970s like the Clean Air Act or the Endangered Species […]
In Henry Beston’s eloquent classic of nature writing, The Outermost House, he worried about the decline in birds he was seeing on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Even in the 1920s when he spent his year on the Beach, humans were adversely impacting birds and other parts of nature. Beston identified a “new” danger: […]
It was an honor to give the Geddes Simpson Memorial Lecture at UMaine last week. In the lecture I put forth the proposition that the State of Maine adopt an open firearms season on chickadees under which every holder of a hunting license could shoot an unlimited number of chickadees during the year. After all, the […]
The term “renewable” is now magical when applied to energy policy. We understand intuitively that fossil fuels are fixed, not renewable. Even if they are abundant now, every bit of coal, oil, or natural gas we use means there is less available, and their use causes a host of environmental and national security problems. If […]
The numbers of some bird species in North America are in steep decline, in part due to human activities. For some people this is of little concern, birds are not of interest to them. But for many humans, birds are an important part of their lives. Economists would say that many people value birds. By […]
