The Wrack

Teachers on the Estuary program continues its impact with fifteen educators in attendance this year.

How can small little bits persist or have any effect?

We are putting teachers on the estuary again this summer by offering a free workshop that will give educators data-driven climate change activities to bring back to their classes. The workshop will train up to ten educators in reserve-style environmental monitoring, "coastal blue carbon" concepts, and ways to understand and address climate change.

Weatherization has always been held up as one of the easiest and first solutions to climate change; why not pick that low-hanging fruit?

Its morning in Antarctica. Its high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and warmer ocean water and breezes have lifted the temperature on the Larsen C ice shelf to a balmy 32 degrees. Like a rifle shot, the ice occasionally gives off a pop that finds no place to echo across the flat, white,?featureless plain.

Its too early to tally the full damage from Hurricane Matthew, but I watched closely as four research reserves in our national system took the brunt of the storm.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/21/2016, and?Making It At Home's 8/24/2016 issue.

August 21^st is my 38^th birthday. The odometer keeping track of my trips around the Sun just rolled over 22.2 billion miles. Theres still plenty of tread on the tires. I am beginning to notice a few twinges of maturity, though. Joint pains, hair loss, reflexive stubbornness, the irrepressible need to give advice  the signs of creeping codgerdom.

Beach-based businesses, a powerful economic engine for Maine, are generally little prepared for storm surge and coastal flooding. Yet lessons learned from previous disasters underscore how important the recovery of businesses is to the overall recovery of a regions economy.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco?Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 3/20/2016, and Making It At Home's 3/23/2016 issue.

My wife and I and our two boys moved up to Maine full-time in July 2012. We felt like wed arrived in the Garden of Eden. Lobsters were four bucks, the ocean was 73 degrees, and the outdoor season stretched well into November. It wasnt the Maine I knew from my childhood (swimmable water!?), but who cared? It was awesome.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition of 1/24/16 and Making It At Home Thursday?edition, 1/28/2016.

Always eager to start some new long-term monitoring project, Im now keeping track of the number of conversations I have about the weather. Im planning to henceforth keep tabs on with whom, when, and for how long we chatted. Im already certain one thing will be constant: the changing weather will be discussed in only the most general, equivocal, unchanging terms. You and I will talk about the weather, my friends, but we will say nothing new.