Here are some links from around the web that we’ve been talking about.
How climate change can make you sick
Maine is featured in a Centers for Disease Control report about creative ways states are adapting to the challenges that come with climate change and protecting their residents from related disease. What’s Maine doing? Its public health workers are using a system to track extreme heat and tick-borne Lyme disease, and better target prevention education to those in riskier areas. — Erin Rhoda
The real reason college tuition costs so much
“ … far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education. If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.” — Matthew Stone
Tolls on the rise as highway funding dries up
More from Brookings, on proliferation of toll roads, interesting to highlight in light of perpetual discussions about either turning Maine Turnpike over to the Maine DOT or putting up tolls on I-295/other non-toll highways in Maine. — Matthew Stone
Transportation investment is a matter of (local) perspective
“In an era of federal legislative disarray, state and local investment levels confirm that our federalist laboratory is still healthy. And nowhere is that more true than surface transportation policy.” — Dan MacLeod
First-generation students unite
“On the nation’s most prestigious campuses, first-generation-in-college students … are organizing, speaking up about who they are and what’s needed to make their path to a degree less fraught.”
It turns out that Harvard’s tutor for first generation students is actually a Mainer from unorganized territory #60.
“‘Most people didn’t know I was first gen until recently,’ he said. ‘If you see someone who is at Harvard who is white, you assume their parents went to college, especially someone blond-haired, blue-eyed and plays a sport like rugby.’” — Erin Rhoda
The case for getting involved
“Refusal to participate is embraced not only as an admirably rebellious perspective, a strategy to be employed during uncomfortable family dinners and birthday parties, but as a marker of personal character — as though the person describing these feelings of disengagement is somehow better or more pure than others for having kept themselves away from the debate.” — Erin Rhoda
