Dear Readers,

It has been nearly nine months now since The Plymouth County Observer was born, back in the early Spring, when I started it as essentially an emergency measure in response to a confluence of crises: on the one hand, the assault on our common resources by predatory economic actors, seeking further private gain, at public — and posterity’s — expense; and, on the other, the decline of local news across our region.

( Forest Road, Myles Standish State Forest, Winter, 2022; photo credit — J. Benjamin Cronin. )

The project was given great impetus by three issues in particular: the threatened discharge of radioactive wastewater into our oceanic commons by Holtec, the owners of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station; the attempt by wealthy development interests to build a casino/race track in the Plymouth Woods, contrary to the will of the Town (and her neighbors); and the continued and grave threat posed to local communities and aquifers by deforestation and unregulated and arguably illegal sand-mining (that these activities frequently occur under the guise of agricultural or clean energy activity is an important, and deeply ironic, point).

Though I have some limited experience in journalism, I have primarily been an academic historian; and this is not — and with one person, cannot be — the equivalent of a daily or even a weekly newspaper. Rather, I would characterize it as a mixture of a college lecture, an opinion journal like The Nation or The New Republic, and an 18th century pamphlet — the last of these perhaps best captures the spirit of the project.

Even with these limitations, the response to this publication has been overwhelming, and, frankly, moving for me at a personal level. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to each and every one of you, whether a casual or regular, unsubscribed or subscribed or a founding, or any other kind of reader — thank you for being a part of this endeavor.

It has been a not insignificant effort, and I’m proud of the work that has been produced. Tomorrow, I hope to give my sense of where we are at a broader, strategic level in our various ongoing crises. But tonight, on New Year’s Eve, I did want to give a sense of what this publication has produced in its near nine-month run in 2022, starting on April 3rd: we have published sixty-two separate articles, totaling more than 72,000 words, or well over 300 pages in my word processor (in double-spaced, size 12, Times New Roman font, with spacing, page breaks, footnotes etc., added as well, but I’m sure with some excess space as well, it comes to 371 pages; so somewhere between the two figures, once formatted properly).

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That is a lot of writing, to be sure, but it is hopefully just the start; indeed, I’m very excited about some of the topics this publication aims to continue covering in the new year, including:

The threat by Holtec, owner of Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymourh, to violate Massachusetts and Federal law by dumping ~1.1 million gallons of radioactive wastewater into Cape Cod Bay;

The threat by wealthy casino developers and their allies, including in Plymouth County government, to build a horse track and/or casino behind Old Exit 5, at the northern edge of the vast Plymouth Woods, in explicit defiance of the democratic will of the Town and People of Plymouth;

The growing water crises that threaten the aquifers of the entire region, from a number of factors, including deforestation and unregulated sand-mining, including under the guise of both cranberry agriculture, and putatively, but not actually, “green” energy projects;1

The upcoming Annual Town Meetings and Town Elections across the region. Relevant Town Meeting articles in all of our towns are already on warrants, and there are candidates declared in a few Town races (in at least Duxbury and Plymouth, and probably elsewhere);

I hope also to expand our coverage. Here are some areas I’d like to explore:

I’d like to look at the homelessness crisis locally. There are tremendous efforts being undertaken to help deal with this growing humanitarian crisis. What are the causes of people going without shelter in our region? What are longer term solutions we can achieve? These are some of the questions I’d hope to ask in this area.
The upcoming debate in Plymouth on the proposed Town Charter that will go before voters in the Spring. This debate is quite literally a constitutional question, a decision about how Plymouth will govern herself going forward, and it is one of deep and last importance. I look forward to exploring the issue in depth, and talking to people of diverse, and indeed, conflicting, points of view on the matter.
I’m interested in focusing on local businesses. Thriving small and family businesses that are place-based, community-oriented, local institutions are an extremely important part of the social fabric in our communities, and getting to understand them better is to better understand our region (the ultimate purpose of this endeavor, after all);
I’ve been fairly remiss in my coverage of the local arts, especially since we have so many fine artists and friends of the arts not only in our Towns, but among the readership; I hope to remedy the situation in the new year;
I would also like to cover in greater depth some of the labor issues in our area. Workers at Sysco in Plympton struck for a more favorable contract for 17 days in October, and reports surfaced on social media of wildcat labor actions at local convenience stores and fast food establishments. If historical patterns hold, we are likely to see significant changes in the wake of the pandemic in terms of the balance of power between management and labor;

I recognize that’s a large task, but I am hopeful it can be done in at least some measure. ( In light of all that, if you’d like to leave a holiday donation/”tip,” the link to do so is here: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/plymouthcountyobserv )

Meanwhile, I still return to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1850 lines, on the changing of the year:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace….

Let me express once more my gratitude to all of you, and my fond wishes for a Happy New Year.

1

If we are to have a Green transition, one of the key things we must be diligent about is that it actually has to be Green, at the level of material fact, rather than simply green-washed, at the level of self-serving corporate propaganda. If it is simply the same extractive interests slapping a “green” label on the destruction of vital carbon sinks and globally rare forest ecosystems, that is not, I would suggest, in fact “green.”

The corollary of this is that those who advocate for a sustainable and sane transformation of our life-ways in order to prevent the further heating of the planet must acknowledge that the demand, the taxes put upon the Earth’s resources by the modern, upper middle-class consumerist lifestyle, will also have to be reduced; we cannot simply wish away the fact that even if we, against all probability, have a wildly successful Green New Deal in the next decade that enables a full transition away from fossil fuels, we will still have to abandon the current consumerist model, whereby new models of automobiles are manufactured every year, regardless of actual need; whereby new models of electronic consumer goods are manufactured irrespective of necessity every year in East Asia, and shipped, using carbon, over the seas, to be bought by Western and other consumers; who in turn use these electronic devices to document their carbon-intensive flight to Bali, and so on. I think it is incumbent to recognize the reality that we simply lack the planetary resources to continue our present rate of consumption. Especially if we are going to ask people to engage in large and transformational political projects, an honest reckoning of what it will require, including what sacrifices must be contemplated, is necessary.

It is my firm belief that the material regime described above is going to have to be abandoned, and that we are likely to see, of necessity, a return to notions of limits, of the economy as ordered liberty, as per [correction — this originally read “pace” — that, however, is the opposite of my intended meaning. I am arguing on the same side of the question as Burke, not in any way contradicting him here. My apologies for the confusion!] Burke, and contra an economy that is understood as a Hobbesian war of all against all. Indeed, it seems that elements of that material regime are in the process of disintegration before our very eyes (see, e.g., the cascading failure of Southwest Airlines over the last 10 or so days; the lists of systems that are either failing or badly creaky is very long, and this is true across a number of advanced societies).

While this notion of a return to limits may be interpreted by some, and decried by certain interlocutors, as an extremely left-wing idea, I would argue that, if anything, the opposite case could be argued: a respect for limits, after all, is associated with the tradition of various figures usually associated with a conservative view of the world — with Edmund Burke, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Burke famously viewed society as an organic entity, with roots in the past, and extending through the present, toward posterity, a compact between generations to preserve what we hold dear and what is essential in our societies. “To make us love our country,” he wrote, “our country ought to be lovely.”

Solzhenitsyn, meanwhile, is worth quoting at length on this subject; the following is from an essay published in late 1993 in The New York Times:

“The time is urgently upon us to limit our wants. It is difficult to bring ourselves to sacrifice and self-denial, because in political, public and private life we have long since dropped the golden key of self-restraint to the ocean floor. But self-limitation is the fundamental and wisest step of a man who has obtained his freedom. It is also the surest path toward its attainment. We must not wait for external events to press harshly upon us or even topple us. Through prudent self-restraint we must learn to accept the inevitable course of events.

When a conference of the alarmed peoples of the earth convenes in the face of the unquestionable and imminent threat to the planet's environment, a mighty power, one consuming not much less than half of the earth's currently available resources and emitting half of its pollution, insists, because of its own present-day interests, on lowering the demands of a sensible international agreement, as though it did not itself live on the same earth. Then other leading countries shirk from fulfilling even these reduced demands. Thus, in an economic race, we are poisoning ourselves.

And yet, if we do not learn to limit firmly our desires and demands, to subordinate our interests to moral criteria, we, humankind, will simply be torn apart, as the worst aspects of human nature bare their teeth.

Today, self-restraint appears to us as something wholly unacceptable, even repulsive, because we have over the centuries grown unaccustomed to what for our ancestors had been a habit born of necessity. They lived with far greater external constraints and had far fewer opportunities. The paramount importance of self-restraint has only in this century arisen in its pressing entirety before mankind. Yet taking into account even the various mutual links running through contemporary life, it is nonetheless only through self-restraint that we can gradually cure both our economic and political life, albeit with much difficulty.

We were recently entertained by a naive fable of the happy arrival, at the "end of history," of the overflowing triumph of an all-democratic bliss; supposedly, the ultimate global arrangement has been attained.

But we all see and sense that something very different is coming, something new and perhaps quite stern. No, tranquility does not promise to descend upon our planet and will not be granted us so easily.

And yet, surely, we have not experienced the trials of the 20th century in vain. Let us hope. We have, after all, been tempered by these trials, and our hard-won firmness will in some fashion be passed on to the following generations.”

(Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “To Tame Savage Capitalism,” The New York Times, 11/28/1993)

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