This article gets at some of the most important issues facing RI.  

It warns against magical thinking that the economy is going to return to rapid growth.  

It is especially important for places like post industrial Rhode Island as the trends are furthest along here.  

To me that means we need to think about development in new ways, mostly in terms of resilience and justice. 

I would appreciate your thoughts on this, but would appreciate even more if you added the issues raised here to your agenda rather than simply insisting the growth will return if we improve the business climate. 

The world has changed our responses must take into account new realities.

Greg Gerritt
Founder  
ProsperityForRI.com

Foreign Policy in Focus - The Institute for Economics and Peace has calculated that war and violence worldwide has a net 11-percent drag on the global economy. The IEP’s Global Peace Index ranks countries based on their peacefulness, and the correlation between peace and prosperity is almost absolute. GDP per capita rises by approximately $3,000 for every ten places higher in the peace index. The data indicates a clear correlation between peacefulness and prosperity. With the exception of a few statistical outliers, peaceful countries are prosperous and countries mired in violence are not.

The United States ranks 99 out of 162 countries in the 2013 Index. The low status is due to internal factors such as violent crime and the world’s highest incarceration rate, as well as external engagement in warfare and high military spending. As a prosperous country, the United States is among the few exceptions to the peace and prosperity correlation, but we could do better on both counts. The IEP publication Violence Containment in the United States concludes that “If policy makers clearly understood the economic burden of non-productive violence containment, then improving the levels of peacefulness would be seen as central to long term structural reforms.”

Greg Gerritt
Founder  
ProsperityForRI.com

Yesterday I attended a statehouse presentation coordinated by the RI Bays, Rivers, and Watersheds Coordination Team reviewing the shoreline special area management plan, the Beach SAMP.   

The speakers, primarily from government agencies, spoke on climate change induced sea level rise and what it means for Rhode Island.  All well and good, but it was infused with a great deal of magical thinking about keeping intact our shoreline communities with private control of access to the shore while expecting public subsidy in order to safely keep them there.  There was a stunned silence after I finished my question about magical thinking, though eventually the speaker representing the Real Estate industry mouthed some platitudes.  

In this age of austerity, in an age of shrinking livelihoods for many Americans, in an age where the rich demand that we cut their taxes and kowtow to their every whim, while they suck up all the money and insist that free enterprise is the way to the future, we need to call out the hypocrisy of the owners of the shore line when they demand that we either publicly fund the infrastructure they need to maintain their houses and lifestyles and allow them to violate environmental rules and common sense, while they fund climate deniers and demand that the poor be abandoned.   

The sea is coming.  The issue is not how long can we hold it back for the benefit of home owners, it is how do we adapt to rising sea levels and the slow disintegration of our economy as the climate creates disaster after disaster.  We can not allow rebuilding along the cost, we need to engineer a retreat while we create much larger coastal ecological buffers that will reduce our carbon footprint, and improve our feed security.  

Recycling the materials in coastal properties, especially the copper, before it falls into the sea is much better for all of us than waiting for the next storm.  If the rich insist on waiting it out until the sea comes for them, they should pay the cost of their own stupidity and not expect the rest of us to rescue them and bail them out.

Greg Gerritt
Founder  
ProsperityForRI.com

This video project is part of the evolving Wildlife of the North Burial Ground project of Friends of the Moshassuck funded by the Rhode Island Rivers Council.

There is one full time pond in the NBG.  When i first started paying attention about 5 years ago on the sunning log you would see up to 6 turtles at a time. This past summer there were 14 after several years of growing a bit each year.  Painted Turtles.  There is also a snapping turtle in the pond most of the time, but I rarely see it and have never captured it in pixels.

Turtles are but one attraction in the pond.  I have video of fish, insects, muskrats, various birds, and various life stages of the Bullfrog from the pond all posted on this channel.

Turtles are hard to film.  They ought to be relatively easy.  They are largish, relatively slow moving.  I am still learning to make videos and had great difficulty getting clear pictures.  Besides the murky water that makes in water shots difficult, on the sunning log the intense reflection from the low morning sun off of the shells and heads means i rarely get clear pictures or good color.  Hopefully I will figure out how to deal with that eventually as I learn how to use the camera better.  And learn how to edit.

There is only 1 log to sun on in the morning in the pond and when it gets crowded it is hard to find a place to climb on.  That provides the bulk of the  action in the video.  I do not think watching a turtle repeatedly try to climb out of the pond onto the log and keep falling back in can hold a viewers attention for very long, so i experimented with speeding it up on occasion.  I think if the camera man had a steadier hand it would work pretty well.  So watch for it in 2014 as the season progresses.  And enjoy my first years efforts here.

I think I now know much more about turtles than I did before I started this endeavor, but I suspect I will learn much more over the next few years of study.  Hopefully that too will inform future posts on this channel.

Greg Gerritt
Founder  
ProsperityForRI.com

After several years of observations, with a little funding from the Rhode Island Rivers Council I began a video project to record wildlife in Providence's North Burial Ground, with an emphasis on the tadpoles in a little drainage swale near the maintenance building.   The Misadventures of an Urban Naturalist tells some of that story. There is also a larger and permanent pond in the burial ground, and it may be the best wildlife watching place in all of Providence.  The Bullfrogs of the larger pond were always of interest, but in some ways I used them as a back up, something else to focus on in case the drainage swale went dry and produced no tadpoles.  As I noted above, the larger pond has an abundance of wildlife, 3 types of heron, ducks, geese, cormorants, kingfishers, and swifts, as well as songbirds in profusion, muskrats, occasional otters, a growing population (from 6 to 14 over the last few years)  of painted turtles, several varieties of fish, and bullfrogs.

The size of the pond, the inaccessibility of various parts of the shoreline, and the murkiness of the water means that unlike the drainage swale certain parts of the bullfrog life cycle are inaccessible.  The most obvious missing piece is that I have never seen, let alone filmed, the early stages of bullfrog tadpole life.  Fowler's Toads and Gray Tree Frogs complete their breeding cycle in one season.  They mate, the eggs are laid, the tadpoles develop and the frogs and toads hop away from the pond between May and August.  Bullfrogs overwinter as tadpoles the first year.  Bullfrogs mate later in the season, so the tadpoles are in the water from July until the following July.  I have never seen the newly hatched  tadpoles in the late summer.  They do not appear to swim near the surface close to shore, so I have no idea where they are.  

What I do see of tadpoles is the tadpoles that have overwintered in the pond beginning in May, once the water warms up.  They float near the surface, swim around,  jump out of the water, and are generally visible nearly every day.  What gets my attention is the jumping, and the video that accompanies this essay reflects that fascination with jumping tadpoles, including the use of slow motion so the motion can be seen a bit more clearly.

In the spring, in addition to the tadpoles, there are the frogs that have overwintered.  I have a collection of shots of the various frogs that have overwintered, the rogues gallery.  There is nothing systematic about these shots, I take them when I find a frog in range,.  I know there are not very many frogs in the pond in the spring, but it would take a much more scientific approach than I can muster to actually determine the population size.  

The transformation from tadpole to frog in early July is fast.  I have found only one shot that shows a Bullfrog tadpole with legs, in contrast to the abundance of footage I have of Fowlers Toads and Gray Tree Frogs with legs,   It seems like one day there is an abundance of jumping and milling tadpoles, the next day there are no tadpoles, but the shoreline of the pond is covered in small frogs.  To give some sort of reckoning of the new abundance I came up with the idea of capturing on film how many take off when I go near them.  I have shots from 2 locations, in the northwest corner of the pond near the outflow and looking north from the peninsula/point in the center of the pond on the western shore.  Slow motion is again used to show more details.

After the new frogs show up the herons become more common (Green and Night as well as Great Blue) and the population slowly dwindles under the predation until they go to sleep for the winter in the bottom of the pond, waiting for spring and the chance to do it again.  I retreat into editing, waiting for spring and a chance to see the pageant of life played out in a pond again. 

Greg Gerritt
Founder  
ProsperityForRI.com

On December 18, 2013 in a remarkable juxtaposition the Providence Journal had an article "Analysts say income gap impedes growth",  an op-ed by Steven Frias "Warnings of RI Stagnation go way back", and an op-ed by John J. Colby "Wage regulation okay for the well to do".  Mr Frias repeats the tired old cliches about the business climate saying that the only way to move the RI economy forward is to cut taxes on the rich and remove regulations that protect the public health and the environment.  

The problem with Mr Frias's argument is that there is absolutely no correlation between a good business climate and a healthy economy, and that if Rhode Island obeyed the business climate shysters what we would end up doing is increasing inequality further, which even economists and the pope are starting to realize harms the economy, as well as destroying democracy.  

Mr Colby points out just how inequality has harmed our economy, the poor are unable to be the consumers our consumerist economy seems to demand.  But considering the state of the Earth, and the likelihood that changes in the climate due to overconsumption are likely to overwhelm the effects of any boost the 1% will get from adopting the greed is good model, a model based on consumerism is unlikely to help our communities.  Even the World Bank knows that ecological healing and economic justice are likely to produce better economic results than anything else in marginalized communities.  Time for Rhode Island to learn that too.  

Greg Gerritt
Founder  
ProsperityForRI.com