Opinion
Flames on the Plains
From Gazette editions of July, 1909:
Walter Cronkite: 1916-2009
Edmund Stevens’ letter in the Friday, July 10 Gazette, Great Pond Under Pressure from Pollution, demands a thoughtful response which I’ll try to provide. Yes, the Vineyard’s coastal ponds and estuaries are deteriorating, and they need our help, now. They are suffering, primarily from nitrogen enrichment, and it will be a long, costly and politically-charged and sustained effort to correct the problem. It will take an informed citizenry committed to investing in the restoration and protection of our ponds over many years.
Monday morning, just after dawn at Cedar Tree Neck Sanctuary. The dense forest canopy refracts the early morning sun into a thousand butter yellow shafts of light. The shards fall randomly and at odd angles in the hushed woodland, illuminating the gnarled ancient trunk of an elephant gray beech tree here, a patch of soft emerald moss underfoot there. The terrier races down the Irons Trail path, stopping to bury her nose in a muddy place by the stream, still fat and gurgling in a cool summer with so much rain. A blue jay scolds from overhead.
Lady Idina Sackville was born in the 1890s to parents who had married for convenience: he for money and she for his title of Earl De La Warr, one of the oldest families in Britain with few achievements to their 800 year-old name but the gift of it to the state of Delaware. The marriage didn’t last.
Summertime. It’s easy to forget in this lovely, windblown spot that even here, even now, children go hungry. In a startling story earlier this month, the Gazette reported that food-stamp use at Cronig’s Market increased by 500 per cent this year.
Reality is hard to escape. Out here in the cool Atlantic or in the most claustrophobic inner-city neighborhood, there are 36.2 million people in the United States who are hungry, 12.4 million of them are children.