In Europe, trepidation over Trump

In this past week's Maine Sunday Telegram, I have a commentary piece from my trip to Europe last month sponsored by the German Marshall Find of the United States.

In the audiences Sewell Chan and myself spoke with in Brussels, Paris, and Belgrade, concern was focused on the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency, a potentially cataclysmic event they'd previously been assured could never occur, just as American experts had told them the New York billionaire could never win the Republican Party nomination.

What were their specific concerns and what feedback did I have? It's all in the piece.

My last story from Europe was this POLITICO Magazine piece on Viktor Orban's Hungary.

(Art (c) Portland Press Herald, and created by staff artist Michael Fisher.)

Canada's new government unmuzzles scientists

In today's Portland Press Herald I have a follow-up to "Mayday," our six-day series on climate change and the Gulf of Maine.

While researching the series, my reporting efforts were repeatedly interfered with by Canadian officials tasked with preventing government scientists from freely communicating information about their research with journalists. The controversial policies -- implemented by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper's administration -- had been condemned by the scientific community at home and abroad and had become a campaign issue in this October's federal elections.

Harper's party was humiliated in a landslide election Oct. 19, losing every single seat in Atlantic Canada to the Liberals, whose government was sworn in a few days ago. As I report today, within 48 hours, incoming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's appointees reversed the policies, directing scientists to speak freely with the media.

Before the changes, I spoke with CBC-New Brunswick about my experiences trying to report the series in Canada.

Last week I also also the guest on the Michelangelo Singnorile show on Sirius XM radio, talking about the series. When it posts online, will add a link.

Climate Change and the Gulf of Maine, Parts 1 & 2

For the past ten years, the Gulf of Maine has warmed more rapidly than anyplace else in the world's oceans, save for a section of the Kuroshio Current northeast of Japan, with 2012 the hottest year on record since observations began in the Civil War era. The effects have been manifold and sobering, particularly when you consider that even at the more gradual projected warming rates, 2012-like conditions will be the "new normal" by mid-century.

For the past few months, I've been at work on a multi-part series on this issue for the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where I'm a staff writer. The resulting series -- seven stories over six days reported from across the region -- kicked off in this week's Telegram.

The first story provides the overview, along with a sidebar on how, under outgoing Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadian officials interfered with my attempts to communicate with government scientists there about their research.

Today's story -- Part 2 of 6 -- is on concerns over how warming will effect the sort-of "krill of the gulf", a copepod species that most everything else int he food chain ultimately depends on. Puffins and right whales are among our canaries.

"Mayday" has its own landing page where the additional stories will be posted as they come out.

Readers of the series may also be interested in my first two books, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas (which looks at the global crisis) and The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier (a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine.)

I'll be speaking on Ocean's End at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, Maine November 19th.

[Update, 11/20/17: Two years later, the state has done very little to address the problem.]

Too many towns? Lessons on consolidation from the Maritimes

For decades, Mainers have debated whether our "home rule" system of strong, usually tiny municipal government is holding the state back. Here every one of our more than 400 towns is a small republic unto itself, with broad powers that in southern or mid-Atlantic states would lie with counties. The vast majority have such small populations -- often less than 2000, and not infrequently under 1000 -- that they retain the town meeting form of government, a pure form of democracy where the assembled citizens vote directly on measures by a show of hands. But, critics say, perhaps a state of just 1.3 million can't afford such a system; thus calls to merge towns or to confer some of their powers on Maine's counties, which currently have hardly any at all.

I wrote on this topic a few months ago in the Maine Sunday Telegram, and in the process became interested in the experiences of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canadian provinces very similar to Maine in physical size, population size, economics, environment, and culture. Both provinces have worked to consolidate municipal government -- "amalgamation" is the word Canadians use -- for decades, but with mixed success. In Nova Scotia, counties have generally assumed powers of towns that find they are no longer viable, while in New Brunswick there was a campaign to force towns to merge.

How did it all turn out? While in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick earlier this summer, I looked for lessons for Maine. What I learned is in this piece in this week's Maine Sunday Telegram. Here's an excerpt:

“Most of the arguments about efficiency don’t really pan out,” says James McDavid of the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who studies municipal mergers. “You might get some efficiencies if you talk about amalgamating infrastructure like roads, sewer and water, but the argument falls off the rails when you’re dealing with functions involving human beings interacting with residents.” That’s because wages and benefits usually rise after a merger, especially when unionized police, fire or public works departments are involved.

Enjoy the piece.

[Update, 8/12/15: The Portland Press Herald editorial department came out with this editorial based on the piece.]

On Maine-New Brunswick border, a banner year for a newly liberated fish

I was in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick last week and learned that the St. Croix River's alewives -- which the Maine legislature banned from the river for 18 years -- are having a banner spawning run. Details are in my story in yesterday's Portland Press Herald.

The river's alewives have been at the center of a strange, science-denying political story for several years, one I visited in detail in this piece in 2012. I followed up on the story here, here, here, here, here, and here, and colleague Kevin Miller reported on a recent, unsuccessful effort by bass fishing guides to restrict the fish. [Update, 6/25/19: An update on the alewives story.]

 More stories from my trip East of Downeast are coming up.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part II

For those not sure how to spend the rest of the spring solstice and Father's Day, let me suggest a review of the memoir of the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary, Eleni Kounalakis.

Kounalakis served in Budapest for the first three years of Prime Minister Viktor Orban's rule, a period in which he's turned Hungary away from liberal democracy and towards something closer to Russia, Singapore and China. Her book is surprisingly frank and paints a disturbing picture of the direction of the Hungarian state.

The review, which appears in today's Sunday Washington Post, is my second piece this week on the situation back in Hungary, where I lived for more than four years between 1989 and 1996, and where I returned recently. The previous one -- on Orban's construction of what he calls the "illiberal state" -- appeared in Politico Magazine a few days ago.

My most recent review for the Post was of former Rep. Barney Frank's memoir.

Hungary's slide from democracy, Part I

I was recently in Hungary, where I lived for some five years between 1989 and 1996, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been making good on his promise to construct an "illiberal state" inside the European Union. In Politico Magazine today you can read my dispatch on the situation there.

A teaser: most worrisome is that the only effective opposition to Orban comes from the extreme right Jobbik Party, which are on the ascent despite not long ago maintaining a jackbooted paramilitary group that marched through Roma neighborhoods wearing uniforms and symbols reminiscent of the Nazi-era Arrow Cross.

A sad state of affairs for Hungary, which when I first moved there was leading the drive for democracy and independence in the Eastern bloc.


For those with a focused interest in Orban's rhetorical argument, reading his full "illiberal democracy" speech is clarifying.

More on Hungary coming soon.... [Update, 6/21/15: That was a reference to this review of former US Ambassador Eleni Kounalakis's memoir of her term in Hungary, which ran in today's Washington Post.]

Minneapolis Star-Tribune on American Nations, Woodard on popes

I was pleased to see the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's Sunday feature on my recent book, American Nations. Staff editorial writer Jill Burcum's piece, "The United States -- a nation of nations", draws on both the book and a recent interview.

Here's a snippet from the piece:

"Woodard's book is grounds for optimism. That we've stuck together for so long despite vast differences and previous secession threats (not just from the South) is remarkable -- especially now that we see how precarious the European Union is. What may make America truly exceptional is that our nations chose to weave themselves together relatively early in their histories. History shows that retrofitting unity onto nations with identities calcified for centuries doesn't work over the long haul."

The Star-Tribune, "STRIB" to its subscribers, also published my Bloomberg View essay on the 2012 elections back in November.

In an unrelated matter, I was surprised by the pope's announcement that he was resigning, as I thought that just wasn't done. Back at one point when John Paul II was thought to be dying, I went to Vatican City and filed this story on likely papal successors for the Christian Science Monitor. I'm curious how many of the names surface as successors this time around. (Notice Ratzinger didn't make the expert's short list, which shows how hard it is to read the intentions of the College of Cardinals.)

FDR's park and America's second "day of infamy"

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's life was changed forever one morning on Campobello Island, located a few hundred yards over the Canadian border from Lubec. He was at his summer cottage, in bed. He tried to get up, but his legs didn't work. The doctor in Lubec was stumped. Nobody in the Passamaquoddy region had ever seen polio -- which FDR contracted at a Boy Scout camp in New York -- before.

Today, FDR's cottage is part of a unique and incredibly beautiful international park, co-administered and co-funded by the United States and Canada. That park has also faced a major upset -- the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- and, like its namesake, it has had to refocus its energies to recover.

I revisited the park earlier this summer, and my feature on its foundation, its namesake, and its current struggle is in the Insight section of this week's Maine Sunday Telegram. Read and enjoy.

One note: I've received a number of e-mails and calls from recent visitors to the island who have been told by Lubec customs that they don't really need a passport to get back into the U.S., just a photo i.d. It's great that Lubec is taking a practical approach to Campobello's strange geography, but technically they're doing you a favor. Officially you really do need a passport.

On America's eastern frontier, a fight over fish, a river, and a Maine law

My story in today's Maine Sunday Telegram is on the fight over the future of alewives in the St.Croix River, which forms the boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.

The fish -- which serves as forage for most bigger creatures in fresh and salt water alike -- has been blocked from entering 94% of the watershed on orders from the Maine legislature because bass fishing guides fear their industry might be undermined by the alewives' spring spawning run. But environmentalists, lobstermen, the Government of Canada, and the Passamaquoddy Indians all now want that law overturned.

At stake: the ecological future of 1600 square miles of lakes and ponds and perhaps a far greater swath of the Gulf of Maine.

[Update, 6/25/19: An update on the alewives story.]

For Canada Day, a story from Canada

I lived for a time in the lower Rio Grande Valley, where a single culture is separated by an increasingly fortified political boundary. I was there on 9/11 in fact, and the aftermath complicated life in what had been for many on the Texas side at least a casually cross-border lifestyle.

Though it gets far less attention, the same is true of life on America's easternmost frontier, where residents of eastern Maine and Southwestern New Brunswick have shopped, socialized, married, and gave birth to their children without much regard for the international frontier. My story in today's Maine Sunday Telegram -- Canada Day as it turns out -- describes how the situation is playing out there, especially in light of a new U.S. tax law that's made many borderlanders anxious.

Europe:managing offshore wind conflicts with fisheries

The 2011 edition of Island Journal is out, including my feature on how various European countries have negotiated (or failed to negotiate) the inevitable conflicts between offshore wind farms and fishermen. It has particular valence for the Gulf of Maine region, where numerous offshore projects are in the works.

In short, the European experience points to the need to plan ahead and for potential developers to engage the fishing community early on, well before they start thinking about where they want to put their turbine arrays. Countries that haven't done this -- Germany among them -- have regretted it, while those that have (Denmark jumps to mind) have managed conflicts reasonably well.

The article isn't available online, but New Englanders can find Island Journal at better bookstores, or can order a copy from the Island Institute, which publishes it, as well as the monthly newspaper Working Waterfront, where my Parallel 44 column runs.

As an aside, I've covered wind energy for fifteen years now, filing stories from Denmark and Prince Edward Island along the way.

Australia: death threats for climate researchers

My latest story in The Chronicle of Higher Education is on a disturbing development in Australia, where climate scientists have been subjected to threats of violence and death against themselves and their families. Authorities there consider the threats viable enough to have relocated some researchers to secure buildings and cutting them off from unmediated contact with the public, students, and the press.

Fortunately the environment here in the U.S. has yet to turn so authoritarian and hostile to inconvenient data, as the article describes. The piece - which posted Friday - is online, but if you don't subscribe to the Chronicle, you'll be prompted to do so. [Update: 6/21/2011: It's now freely available.]

I've been a foreign correspondent of the Chronicle for twenty-one years now. My last piece for the paper was on alleged discrimination in Canada against graduates of that country's own doctoral programs.

Academe: does the pursuit of global "excellence" in faculty hiring have a downside?

I've been a correspondent of The Chronicle of Higher Education for twenty-two years now, covering research and university affairs from locations around the world. My latest story -- from Canada -- explores if there's a downside to the current trend in the globalized hiring of faculty, at least in regards to social sciences and humanities fields, where "local knowledge" can be critical to a university's mission.

Canada offers an interesting case study. It's a small country (30 million) that was once so concerned about having its faculty become dominated by Americans that it spawned a powerful "hire local" campaign, the Canadianization movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. But that movement has run its course, scholars argue, and there are some grounds for concern that important, Canada-specific scholarship may become impoverished as a result.

The story is behind the Chronicle's pay wall, so if you're not a subscriber, you might be prompted to pay up to read it.

As always, you can find all of my journalism articles posted at my website.

Canada: Despite Wikileaked cable, Canadian TV Producers say they don't hate America

Reading the U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, I've generally had the same reaction voiced by many commentators: they show U.S. diplomats to be capable, professional, well-informed and sometimes even witty.

So on a recent reporting trip to Canada, I followed up on one of them: a 2008 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa warning that the television dramas and sitcoms aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were engaged in "anti-American melodrama" and "insidious negative popular stereotyping" of Washington officials. This, the diplomats warned, either reflected or perhaps cultivated anti-American feeling in the Canadian public, with potentially serious long-term consequences.

Heady stuff. But, as my story over at The Christian Science Monitor reveals, largely off-base. (Headline: "Canadian TV producers: We don't really hate America.")

A few items that didn't make it into the story. In initial reports on this cable, many journalists mistakenly attributed it to then-Ambassador David Wilkins, whose name appeared at the end of the cable. Wilkins subsequently denied it, and experts pointed out that the name at the end of each State Department cable doesn't denote authorship, but rather the highest level official on station at the time the cable was sent. The real authors, Wilkins told CBC's As It Happens, were staff with "too much time on their hands."

Also, in the course of reporting the story, I got a chance to watch some of the shows in question, and to interview their creators. For American viewers: Little Mosque on the Prairie evokes Northern Exposure in both tone and its "fish out of water" premise. Intelligence - now available instantly at Netflix -- is a complex crime-and-espionage drama that's been compared to The Wire, with the refreshing twist of being set in Vancouver, and written with a Canadian audience in mind.

Canada's troubled nuclear plant rehab

If the world is to increase its reliance on nuclear power, finding a way to refurbish the world's older reactors is extremely important. But, as the people of the Canadian province of New Brunswick have found, manufacturer refurbishments don't always go as planned.

As you can read in my piece that just posted at Global Post, delays at the Point Lepreau nuclear power plant have cost the people of New Brunswick hundreds of millions of dollars, helping prompt provincial leaders to try to sell the plant and the public utility that owns it to escape a sea of debt. Unfortunately, the nuclear rehab problems also contributed to the collapse of that deal -- and probably to the federal government's decision to sell some or all of its stake in Canadian nuclear reactor vendor Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the crown corporation responsible for the delays.

[Update, 7/8/2010: An indication of AECL's standing in New Brunswick: the province just announced it is exploring the building of a second reactor at Lepreau with one of AECL's foreign competitors.]

In Canada, a fight over research dollars

Facing global competition, many countries have contemplated centralizing public funding for research in a handful of institutions, ensuring they have the resources to stand up to anyone. But what's that mean for the economies of regions and provinces that would be assigned a lower priority?

This is the subject of a heated debate in Canada, where the leaders of the five largest universities have called for greater "differentiation" between the missions of big research institutions (like their own), regional research universities, and what could become small undergraduate colleges. But what's that mean for, say, Atlantic Canada, a region that is home to exactly none of the so-called "G5"universities and where economic development strategies are tied to university R&D and innovation?

My piece from Canada on all this recently posted over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, which just launched a global edition.

Who rightfully owns the plunder of war?

In recent decades, there's been an upsurge in claims for art and cultural objects seized in past conflicts or by occupying armies. Northern European museums face claims on their antiquities from governments in southern Europe or North African. Native Americans want stolen objects -- even bodies -- returned. Germany wants art taken by the Soviets during World War II and vice versa.

But returning wartime plunder to its rightful owner isn't at all straightforward, particularly for objects seized in the distant past. Who the 'rightful' owner is seems to depend largely on your point of view, and international law doesn't provide much help prior to the 20th century.

This is the subject of my cover story in the new issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, out on news stands shortly and online now.

Has European "Socialism" helped in a crisis?

The last of my stories from my recent trip to Europe just posted over at Global Post. This explores whether the European model -- a social democratic system with universal health care, a more rigid labor market, and higher taxes -- proved more resilient in coping with the shock of the Great Recession than the American "free market" alternative.

The answer, as one might expect, is nuanced. The piece, filed from Austria with input from across western Europe, can be read by subscribers to the Post's Passport service. If you don't get Passport but care about foreign news, consider trying it. Where else are you going to find a prominent Czech economist describing the situation by use of metaphors from Lord of the Rings?

Europe watches as Slovakia implements anti-Hungarian language law

Another story from my recent trip to East-Central Europe is up today over at Global Post, this one on Slovakia's draconian language law.

The country's Hungarian minority is upset because, read strictly, it criminalizes the use of any language other than Slovak in a wide range of public circumstances. The government says they're overreacting, but the government also includes a far-right party whose leader calls the country's Hungarian citizens a "cancer" which must be wiped off the national map.

Slovakia's an E.U. state, right? So what can the union do about it? As you'll read in the piece, not much. (Like most of my Global Post stories, this appears in their subscription Passport service, so you'll need to login to read it. If you care about international news, however, it's well worth the price.)

While we're in the neighborhood, Hungary's own extremist party isn't doing much to calm tensions between the two countries and is poised to enter the Parliament after April 11 elections. Jobbik, which has its own jackbooted paramilitary, has been trying to charm the foreign press corps of late, hoping to receive sympathetic coverage of their proposals to, among other things, revisit the peace settlement that ended World War I and created Slovakia. I'm on their mailing list and I listen to what they have to say: it's not charming.

Map: Hungarian minority in Slovakia (majority areas in red), Courtesy Nationalia.