The Wrack

Some 1,200 students participated in 49 field trip programs during spring and fall this year. Thank you, docents and teachers!

It sounds cool: Blue carbon. Have you heard of it? What does it make you think?

Frankly, I don't understand why giving comes *after* shopping. As if the other 364 days of the year, I should be... not giving?

The Wells Reserve at Laudholm is a timeless place, but these are changing times.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 11/23/2014.

The most important thing I can say about this years midterm election is simply: thank you for voting.

Maine had the highest voter turnout in the entire 50 states, with 59.3% of us going to the polls, well above the national average of 36%. If it was the gu-bear-natorial nature of our election, so be it: each vote tallied was an expression of individual preference. Some races were decided by single digits; others, by lopsided majorities. In each race, and on each ballot question, we now know what a majority of our fellow Mainers decisively think. Thats valuable information and worth thinking about.

Volunteers measure river conditions at 20 monitoring sites as part of a statewide program.

In 1989, after a few years away, my wife and I moved back to Maine. Just a few months earlier, the Maine Supreme Court had handed down its Moody Beach decision, confining public use of privately owned beach property to the colonial eras permitted uses of fishing, fowling and navigation. As someone with a profound love for the Maine coast, I read the courts decision with great personal and professional interest.

For most of my career, I have worked to conserve special places in Maine  to protect natural resources and to provide the public with access to the coast. Realizing that 2014 would mark 25 years since Moody, I organized a public lecture series so people could better understand and appreciate the legal issues surrounding public access and private ownership of coastal lands.

This summer and fall the Reserve hosted four evenings that involved all the key players from Moody and subsequent court cases dealing with coastal access in Maine. Each time, we filled the auditorium to capacity.

It was a great experience for all of us. Together we learned that Maine is not an anomaly; other states have access conflicts and must also contend with legal ambiguities over shoreline use and ownership.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 11/2/2014.

From reports, it sounds like this years midterm election is a doozy, money-wise: across the country, campaigns are spending record sums marketing their candidates and causes.? So I read, anyway: I do not watch broadcast TV, I have an ad blocker on my computer, and I only listen to satellite radio and MPBN. Voluntarily [and gratefully] deaf to the din from most of the marketing wars, I rarely hear about the latest advances in breakfast cereal, let alone the biannual election season onslaught.

About the only political advertising I do see are ads in newspapers (bless you, candidates, for feeding our starving print publishers), and outdoor campaign signs.

On September 26, 2013, the Wells Reserve invited a team of ghosthunters from New Hampshire, the Seeking the Unknown Realm Society, to spend a dark and eerie night poking through the basements, barns, attics and outbuildings of the Wells Reserve.

Accompanied by [skeptical] Reserve educators Suzanne Kahn, Kate Reichert, and Caretaker Ed, the ghosthunters deployed their electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, infrared cameras, and flickery flashlights across "old Laudholm Farm."

What they found surprised and shocked them.