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On Sunday April 21 at 2 p.m, actor Kaiulani Lee presented her one woman play about environmental writer Rachel Carson titled “A Sense of Wonder” at the Botelle School in Norfolk.
Lee has been performing “A Sense of Wonder” for the past twenty-six years at universities, high schools, the Smithsonian Institute, the Albert Schweitzer Conference at the United Nations, and at the Department of Interior’s 150th anniversary. It has been used as the focal point in conferences on conservation, education, journalism, and the environment.
Also a highly regarded stage, television, and film actress, Lee has appeared in The World According to Garp, Cujo, Before and After, A Bird of the Air, The Waltons, Law & Order and others. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a play for Kennedy’s Children and received an Obie Award for Best Performance by an actress for Safe House.
“A Sense of Wonder” was introduced by Pastor Erick Olsen of the Church of Christ Congregational (UCC). Olsen spoke of the play’s importance as a featured event in The Norfolk Earth Forum and Norfolk’s Earth Day weekend, which celebrates Carson’s legacy. Additional programming included discussion of “Crossings” by Ben Goldfarb; a lecture on Carson’s continuing influence in the modern environmental movement, and a children’s pollinator program. Sponsorship was provided by Botelle School, Aton Forest, Great Mountain Forest, Norfolk Conservation Commission, Norfolk Land Trust and the Church of Christ Congregational (UCC).
Lee then took to the stage and explained to the audience how the play occurs in two acts, the first part set at Carson’s summer cottage on the coast of Maine and the second part from Carson’s home in Maryland. Lee “removed the third wall,” which refers to when a character addresses the medium in which they are situated, by describing the layout of Carson’s cottage.
Act one opens with Carson writing a letter to a friend and shows her reluctance to leave the coast of Maine. Sick with cancer, she worries this may be her last visit. But she also describes her joy at seeing son Roger play on the rocks by the ocean and reflects on her lifelong desire to be a writer and how her love of the natural world and science ultimately became her muse. Carson expresses how her deep love of nature inspired her activism to write about the US government’s use of the pesticide DDT and its devastation of the environment.
In act two, Carson is visibly weakened by cancer and arthritis, but urgently brings her message to Congress and the American people. She recounts the backlash she received from the petro-chemical industry, efforts to discredit and label her as “alarmist” but is steadfast in her beliefs which are founded in her love of nature.
After finishing her performance, Lee invited the audience to ask questions. She provided additional historical context, namely how the success of Silent Spring inspired President John F. Kennedy to order the Science Advisory Committee to examine the issues raised in the book, which vindicated both the book and Carson. As a result, DDT came under much closer government supervision and was eventually banned.
Carson died from breast cancer in 1964, but shortly before her death remarked, “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. We are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
Bill Jeffway tells an anecdote to a capacity crowd at the Millbrok Library.
MILLBROOK — Last Thursday April 18, Bill Jeffway, Executive Director of the Dutchess County Historical Society, delivered a lecture titled “Town of Washington: Antebellum Free Black Community” to a capacity crowd at the Millbrook Library.
A graduate of Wesleyan College, he is the author of “This Place Called Milan and Invisible People, Untold Stories: Voices of Rhinebeck’s Historic Black Community.” He writes regularly for the Northern Dutchess News.
Jeffway, who is a dynamic and improvisational lecturer, offered many asides and anecdotes. Jeffway teaches a course on Living History at Marist College.
The Living History movement emphasizes the voices and perspectives of people from the past through letters, postcards, deeds, court records, and cemetery stones.
In 1776 slavery was banned in Dutchess County, yet the ban was not strictly enforced. It took about twenty years for the Dutch and British to divest completely. Even some Quakers were slow to relinquish slaves, despite the strong opposition to slavery among most Quakers.
Abused white women sometimes took refuge in the Black community. In 1782 Mary Mott married at age sixteen; she left her husband in 1809, staying at first with various friends. She eventually was given long-term secret shelter by a Black couple, working as a seamstress.
Jeffway noted that many free Blacks, as well as slaves, lived in Poughkeepsie where there were eight Black Churches, due to its prominence in river commerce and travel. There were local instances of Southerners boat-kidnapping free Black youngsters. An important free Black boat captain worked the Hudson River around this time.
On the eastern border of Dutchess County, slaves worked on some farms. In the Smithfield Valley, according to a letter, Mrs. Smith had at least three personal slaves serving her at her wedding. Jeffway estimated about thirty agricultural slaves in that neighborhood in the early part of the 18th century.
Jeffway noted that there was a small Black cemetery in Lithgow, and in the 1870s there was a Black community in Clove Valley in northern Union Vale, just south of Millbrook. At that time Black women were predominantly the owners of land in the Black community.
Shortly after the appearance of the automobile, Mr. Collins, a Black man, ran a successful taxi and bus transportation service between Millbrook and Poughkeepsie. His wife ran a laundry service, with washing machines in their backyard, for the wealthy ladies of Millbrook.
Manet Fowler (1916-2004) was the first Black woman to acquire a doctorate in cultural anthropology. The U.S. government assigned her to survey Dutchess County on the “readiness” of people of color to serve in World War II.
By 1944, inspired by Lincoln, the Millbrook Black Republican Club was formed.
Elements of this lecture drew on the Millbrook Library’s Archive on African Americans in Dutchess County.
With the ban of DDT, the bald eagle has come back from 417 nesting pairs in 1963 to 71,400 nesting pairs and was removed from the Endangered Species List in 2007.
MILLBROOK — In today’s world of climate change worry, Peter Groffman, research fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, gave a lecture of hope for the future of the environment.
Groffman “studies urban ecology and how climate change alters microbial processes that support plant growth and air and water quality.” He is the president-elect of the Ecological Society of America and teaches at the City University of New York and Brooklyn College.
He began with the example of how the bald eagle has made a comeback.
Groffman said, “When I was a kid, there were no bald eagles.” In 1963, in the lower forty-eight states, there were 417 nesting pairs of eagles. That has grown to 71,400 nesting pairs.
The cause of the eagle’s dwindling population was traced to the pesticide DDT. DDT is not “directly toxic” to bald eagles, but when used to spray an area of mosquitoes to combat diseases such as malaria, it washed into streams. There it got on insects living in the water. These insects were eaten by bigger insects, who in turn were eaten by fish, who were then eaten by bigger fish, and these fish were eaten by bald eagles.
“In each stage of the food chain, the DDT is bio-accumulated,” said Groffman and in the eagles, the DDT caused their eggshells to be thin. So, thin that when the parent eagles sat on the nest, they crushed the eggs and the babies died.
“How did they figure this out?” asked Groffman. He said, “You need to know something about birds, something about fish, something about hydrology and microbiology, and you had to understand the connection between the different parts of the landscape.”
Scientist Rachel Carson (author of “Silent Spring”) put this all together and the solution was to ban DDT.
Groffman stressed the steps in solving any ecological problem: Identify the problem, find a solution, get the solution implemented (which is not always easy to accomplish), and track the success.
He said it was important that different branches of science work together and realize the “connectivity of soil, water, air, insects, fish and birds.”
Groffman talked about acid rain next. “Acid rain is a very clear success story.” Acid rain comes from “the burning of fossil fuels, particularly coal.”
When coal is burned it gives off sulfur and nitrogen which combine to form sulfuric acid, and this comes to earth in precipitation and makes streams acidic and has a “negative impact” on animals, plants, and fish. It can cause “dead lakes” where fish and vegetation die.
To solve this problem, he said, “an understanding of chemistry, fish, atmospheric chemistry and hydrology” was needed.
The solution was to “get sulfur out of coal” which happened with the Clean Air Act of 1990. In tracking this solution, scientists found that there is much less acidity in water and soil and plants and organisms are recovering.
Another area of success has been noticed with eutrophication of bodies of water. Fertilizers used to grow crops can wash into streams and pollute them. This can cause algae to grow, die and decompose. The bacteria causing the decomposition “sucks the oxygen out” of the water which then has no oxygen and fish and vegetation die.
Scientists found that phosphorus was causing this problem. The solution was the Clean Water Act of 1972 which “removed phosphorus from detergents” and helped manage “sources of pollutants in the landscape”.
The result is cleaner water in rivers, streams, and lakes.
Groffman stated they’ve learned that today’s problems require a new way of doing science in which “We need everybody on board.” As with the solution of the bald eagles, many disciplines of science need to work together.
Groffman explained that implementing solutions can be difficult. “If we propose solutions that are a real pain in the neck for people, they’re not going to do them. If they don’t do it, we back slide.”
In France, one of the leading nations in fighting climate change, there was recently resistance to a New Green Energy Tax on fuel. Yellow vest protesters took to the streets to make their displeasure known. Groffman said that “how solutions affect people is important to consider.”
Increases in the use of solar energy and wind energy in the last couple of decades are positive signs in the fight against global warming.
Groffman mentioned that there is criticism that the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and action on global warming were delayed by governmental agencies wanting more research done. The International governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been recommending actions such as lowering carbon energy use and behavioral and lifestyle changes since the 1970’s and in the 1990’s declared that action needed to be taken with no more delays.
The last stage in finding solutions to ecological problems is an important one: tracking the success for any “wobbles” or “squeals” which may indicate the solution is failing or having problems.
Groffman said that current challenges are climate change and Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products (PPCP’s). Drugs and microplastics in PPCP’s are dumped down drains, get into sewers, and into water systems. But he declared, “I’m going to argue that science is evolving to meet these problems.”
SALISBURY — The Planning and Zoning Commission (P&Z) will hold a public hearing Monday, May 20, 6:45 on Zoom on the Salisbury Housing Trust’s (SHT) application to build two affordable housing houses on town-owned property on Undermountain Road and Grove Street.
The commission received the application at its April 15 meeting.
The site is currently used in part for parking for employees of the White Hart Inn.
On Feb. 5, the P&Z determined that the proposal for affordable housing is in agreement with the town’s Plan of Conservation and Development (POCD). That was in response to the Board of Selectmen’s January referral of the proposal to the commission for an “8-24 review.”
This refers to section 8-24 of the Connecticut General Statutes, which requires that selling or leasing town-owned property be referred to the PZC to determine whether the proposed use is consistent with the town’s POCD.
The SHT application can be seen on the town website, salisburyct.us (click on Planning and Zoning meeting documents).
