Most Mainers know something about seaweed, some of what they know might even be true. My mother sang the praises of dulse in her diet, though I recall that she rarely ate it. My father used what we called rockweed from the shores of Penobscot Bay to enrich his vegetable garden. R.P.T. Coffin describes the […]
We know when it is a Congressional election year. Like clockwork, in the mail arrives a letter from Maine Second District Representative Bruce Poliquin. The envelope boldly declares: “Public Document Official Business.” At first the letter is a puzzle. What “official business” do we have with this office? Then we remember. Mr. Poliquin uses the […]
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 […]
The third post for Stirring the Pot in August 2015 was titled Class Warfare and dealt with the problem of inequality in the United States. It is an issue that I have returned to several times since. Inequality continues to erode the social fabric of this nation and the situation grows worse with each passing […]
Not that long ago the purchase of many types of alcoholic beverages in Maine required a visit to a State-run liquor store. This was rooted in the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which ended the Prohibition era in 1933 and allowed states to regulate importation of liquor. But no longer, Maine got out of […]
I have listened now to all the candidates for Governor in Maine. There are some I could happily vote for and some others scare the bejesus out of me. But among all the candidates, there is a notable lack of vision for Maine. There are lists of “where I am on the issues.” There is […]
Cornell University ecologist David Pimentel and colleagues estimated that the earth might be able to sustain only 2 billion people by the end of the fossil fuel era. There are about 7.5 billion humans on the planet right now. It seems counterintuitive that there is nearly 4 times the sustainable population now living on the […]
Before last weekend, the last time I had spent any time on Maine’s Southern beaches was a field trip for a geology class in my first year of college (don’t ask the year). Professor Hussey used the trip to immerse us in the patterns of coastal geology. In early April we spent a couple of […]
I first encountered the idea that the future was something one could study in 1971 from historian Roger Howell Jr. In one way or another, thinking about the future informed much that I have written about since, including here in Stirring the Pot. In my way of thinking about the future, I believe there should […]
Mailboxes are flooded with direct mail fliers. The roadsides are littered with plastic signs. We are admonished to Vote Yes On Question 1 on November 7. This is one of the clearest examples of rent seeking behavior I have ever seen. It is text book quality. Rent seeking occurs when an economic actor, in this […]
