After All Things

Climate miscalculation

Another Bridgeport city council member was referred to Connecticut prosecutors in connection to an absentee ballot scandal. Sunrise Wind construction is underway. New York officials say the state lags in its energy goals. Connecticut farms look for more sustainable solutions. And you know what they say -- one man’s trash is another man’s art!

Duration:: 14m
Broadcast on:: 17 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: other

Bridgeport City Council member Anita Martinez was referred to Connecticut prosecutors in connection to the 2023 absentee ballot scandal during the mayoral election. William Smith is a lawyer with the State Elections Enforcement Commission. The Commission authorizes council to refer this matter for consultation to the office of the chief state's attorney and forward any evidence of possible criminal violations related to potential election law violations. Discovered in the course of the Commission's investigation, Martinez is the second City Council member to be referred to state prosecutors. She's also running for state representative Martinez defeated incumbent Andre Baker for the Democratic nomination. You're listening to, after all, things WSHU's daily news and culture update from the Long Island Sound region. Sunrise wind construction is underway. New York officials say the state lags in its energy goals. Connecticut farms look for more sustainable solutions. And you know what they say, one man's trash is another man's art. Those stories and more are ahead. I'm Sabrina Garon. Construction is now underway on New York's second and largest offshore wind farm. Sunrise wind will generate enough clean energy to power more than half a million homes in the state. WSHU's Desiree Diorio reports. State and local officials broke ground Wednesday on the 924 megawatt project located off the coast of Block Island in the waters south of Rhode Island. The wind farm will create over 800 union construction jobs building around 80 turbines and bringing power to shore below the beach at Smith Point County Park on Fire Island. Doreen Harris is president of the state's energy research arm. I call this our summer of shovels. We literally are building projects. And that's what I believe to be most important, is that we are making progress. We're demonstrating that these projects can exist and thrive and benefit folks on Long Island. There's more to come. On the same day as the groundbreaking, Harris announced the state's fifth round of solicitation for more clean energy projects off New York's coast. Desiree Diorio, WSHU News. An audit released today from New York state comptroller, Thomas Denapoli, blames poor planning for the state's lagging green energy goals. WSHU's Shelley Hasman-Katish reports. Denapoli says regulators used outdated data and wrong calculations to assess the risks and challenges to meet the targets in the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. The legislation passed in 2019 requires the state to get 70% of its electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030. The audit also says the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority have failed to develop a backup plan. Denapoli recommends that the Public Service Commission be transparent about the cost of transitioning to renewable energy and account for the impact of growing electricity demand on the power grid. Regulators cited in a recent report that some global conditions such as increased demands and dwindling supplies of renewable energy may create barriers to reaching that goal. Shelley Hasman-Katish, WSHU News. One Massachusetts artist engraves maritime scenes on plastic trash recovered from the ocean. That story is coming up first, a message from our supporter. Local support comes from Hartford HealthCare, the only health system in the Northeast, with all its hospitals receiving a grades for safety from the LeapFrog group, the nation's leading independent safety watchdog group, HartfordHealthCare.org. US Deputy Agriculture Secretary Torres Small is touring Connecticut's farms to highlight improvements financed by federal grants. Scott and Becky Popusha own Running Brook Farm in Killingworth, which grows plants and herbs. They were awarded over $400,000 from the Renewable Energy for America program for two energy projects. We're really proud of the fact that these grants enabled us to install a solar array as well as upgrade our lighting so that we are pretty much completely energy self-sission. And the grants enabled us to basically run off grid because we also hear our buildings with firewood. So it's been tremendous in terms of both cost savings as well as feeling like we're building the business in a way that's in partnership with the community resources and the land in all our environmental goals. Connecticut has around 5,000 farms that contribute $4 billion to the local economy. Energy costs are one of the biggest expenditures for the industry. 17 Connecticut cities and towns will receive $12 million in grants for public transportation and safety improvements. The funds are part of the State Department of Transportation's sixth round of grants from the Community Connectivity Grant Program. The towns are Riverhead and South hold joined together this week to debate agritourism resorts. Riverhead officials plan on establishing agritourism laws to allow local farms to use 70% of their land for agriculture, while the other 30% could be used to develop resorts. The potential resorts are expected to bring more jobs to Riverhead and help out with tax revenue. The New Bedford Wailing Museum is home to the largest collection of scrimshaw in the world, but recently the museum on Massachusetts South Shore acquired a piece that bends the rules of this folk art tradition. Instead of using the customary whale bone, the artist Duke Riley engraves maritime scenes on plastic trash recovered from the ocean. Ben Burke has the story. The scrimshaw gallery at the New Bedford Wailing Museum is dark and cool, like a ship's cabin. The atmosphere gives the objects on display a warm glow. There's musical instruments, there's clocks, there's miniature dressers, there's jewelry boxes, and just goes on and on and on. Chief curator Naomi Slips says the museum's founders began collecting scrimshaw from locals in 1903. Not long after petroleum and electricity replaced whale oil as America's main sources of artificial light. Slips says scrimshaw wasn't considered fine art back then. It was something deck hands made with the bones left over from butchering whales. Slips says this hobby only started to take on more elite connotations in the 1960s because of John F. Kennedy. So JFK was a lover of scrimshaw and a collector of scrimshaw and the sort of mania for the Kennedys meant that other people became really interested in scrimshaw and kind of maritime material culture. Here, scrimshaw became part of a preppy, coastal aesthetic recognized across America. So it feels a bit subversive when you see the latest piece that Slips put on display in the Wailing Museum's scrimshaw gallery. It's a plastic bottle of engine cooled, painted and waxed to look like bone. Near the screw on cap, the words New Bedford are written in an old timey script. Beneath that is a scene of a factory with a pipeline dropping what we would assume to be kind of pollution or waste into the water. Further down the bottle, a drawing of a scroll unravels bearing the names of two local electronics manufacturers, Aerovox and Cornell Dubelier. There's also more script spelling the name of a highly carcinogenic chemical those companies used to coat their electronics with polychlorinated bifinal. That's the long name for PCBs, which are the main polluter in New Bedford Harbor. Aerovox and Cornell Dubelier dumped so many PCBs into New Bedford's harbor. It became a super fun site that's cost the EPA more than a billion dollars to clean up so far. The dirty plastic scrimshaw dramatizes this environmental tragedy using traditional maritime art. But Slips says purists wouldn't consider this a real piece of scrimshaw. Technically, scrimshaw is strictly defined as work made by whalers on shipboard on the byproducts of whales or marine mammals in general. By those standards, scrimshaw is a lost art we can't practice anymore. The last whale ship left New Bedford 99 years ago. Whalebone itself is illegal to buy our cell unless it's a certified antique. But the artist who made the plastic scrimshaw says he aligned himself with tradition by making it on a boat, which he happened to receive for free. Yeah, I mean, you know, free boats are never free, but it's still pretty good. Duke Riley is 52 years old. His work hangs in famous museums, and he's got a big studio in New York with a few full-time assistants. In the summer, he leaves all that behind to live in the cramped quarters of a modestly sized sailboat. So, like, why would I sit in the studio all day when I can sit here and, you know, I just get up in the morning, I go for a swim, put a fishing rod in the water, and then sit down here, and I work until it gets dark, and that's it, you know. The boat's more than Narragansett Bay. Duke makes a lot of fishing lures here out of toothbrushes, syringes, and tampon applicators. His materials are pieces of trash picked up from local beaches. Duke doesn't fish for compliments about making an environmental impact through art. He actually says the process of picking up plastic feels syssophia, meaning by the time he's done cleaning a beach, it's already filling up with plastic again. But one day, while Duke was picking up trash, the inspiration for a new type of scrimshaw washed up at his feet. I found a piece of plastic on the beach that when I went to go pick it up, I actually thought I was picking up a piece of bone. It was a deck brush. Duke says the act of engraving a whaling scene onto something that looked like bone was instinctual. Growing up in Massachusetts in the 1980s, Duke says his grandma took him to a lot of maritime museums. By the time he was 10, Duke says he was helping his uncle work as a fish broker on the piers of New Bedford, Gloucester, and South Boston. I think just going to dive bars with my uncle, that kind of general aesthetic was sort of like everywhere, and I think that was sort of what I absorbed. That was what I knew art to be. Another constant in Duke's work is using materials from environments that other people ignore or find repulsive. When Duke attended the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1990s, he says he lived in the cupola of an old house in Providence, which he shared with a flock of pigeons, and I was trying to use like pigeon egg yolk to make the paint and then making all my own pigments. I was kind of taking green from the copper flashing on the roof and grinding up eggshells to make white and stuff like that, grinding up brick. After art school, Duke moved to New York City, where he earned a living as a tattoo artist. He also built up a reputation outside the tattoo parlor as a resourceful artist who hung up by the shore and threw great parties. In 2006, he built a tavern under a waterfront highway using driftwood. He served the alcohol out of antique glass bottles he dug up in the sand. A year later, Duke built a replica of a wooden submarine used during the Revolutionary War. As he rode his egg-shaped vessel toward a British cruise ship, Duke says a current pulled him within 100 feet of the U.S. Coast Guard. They boarded the submarine and arrested him. Duke appeared on the front page of the New York Post the next morning under the headline Submoron. I wasn't actually trying to get caught. I was trying to get away with it and prove that I could do it, but certainly when I did get caught and it ended up all over the international news, it caught people's attention more. Duke was becoming a legendary badass in the New York art world. The submarine wound up in an art gallery in Chelsea, and within two years, Duke was showing work in museums. He got a bigger studio and hired a staff to pursue larger, more intricate works of art. For a landmark show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2022, Duke's team made an eight by eight foot mosaic with shells and little bits of plastic trash. Guinness World Records later certified it as the largest sealer's valentine in the world. Selling a single piece to the New Bedford Wheeling Museum isn't a big payday for Duke anymore, or a token of prestige that'll advance his career. But Duke accepted the commission anyway. I was incredibly honored because it was this museum that I was probably my favorite museum in the world. Duke's ivory colored engine coolant bottle is now part of the Wheeling Museum's permanent collection prominently displayed in the center of the Scrimshaw Gallery. Surrounded by whale bone, it's a reminder that today plastic is as much a part of our oceans as organic materials. For the New England News Collaborative, I'm Ben Burke. For the latest news from Long Island and Connecticut, you can listen on the radio, stream online at WSHU.org, or download the WSHU app after all things is supported by Hartford HealthCare. And whether it's news, classical music, or podcasts like this one, they're all made possible with support from our listeners. So if you like what you hear, you've been listening for a long time now, please consider making a donation to WSHU. All the info on how to do that is there for you on our website, which again is WSHU.org. I'm Sabrina Garon. Have a great rest of your day. I'll talk to you tomorrow. [Music]