This is a description of walking the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park and adjacent properties. The primary route circumnavigates clockwise the entire area without ever walking on an auto road. Diversions from the circumnavigating route are included for those ambitious to reach every overlook, peak, and the Pogue. Many places to enter or exit for a proper road are given.  The official National Park Trail Map is only partly helpful as it is mostly restricted to the Park. Thus, “Park” here means the entire area bounded by proper roads. For persons new to the Park, the guide may help them explore […]

By Peter Rousmaniere pfr@rousmaniere.com Vermont , USA At 10 AM on the 11th of March, 2020, Anand Krishna Argawal came to my hotel, right at the Assi Ghat, the most southern of the 80 plus sets of stairs that (built as long ago as the 18th Century) descend in open air down to western bank of Ganges River.  We took a cab to Sarnarth. Some six miles away, it took us 45 minutes working through the dense fruitcake of Varanasi’s streets, with taxis, tuk-tuks motor bikes, hand – hauled carts and pedestrians heading every way. Sarnarth is one of the […]

By Peter Rousmaniere pfr@rousmaniere.com Published August 7 2019 by workerscompensation.com Mark Walls and Kimberly George are on to a good idea. They say we should be aware of how personal predicaments influence recovery from work injury.  In May they said that “social determinants of health [of the injured worker] have a significant impact on the healing process and a worker’s ability to return to work.”[i] They are referring to the worker’s nutrition, her health fluency, physical living constraints, poverty.  They give a few examples of how a targeted intervention beyond the normal scope of injury benefits can remove a barrier […]

By Peter Rousmaniere Published in 2018 by Risk & Insurance Magazine Shipbreaking is a common developing world way of describing the total dismantling of ships. To avoid work safety and environmental regulations in the developed world, many owners sell their old ocean-going vessels to recycling companies in India and Bangladesh, delivering them onto beaches at high tide.  See through Google Images their marooned hulks, picked apart by workers. I visited India last year for a closer look. The work safety standards have improved recently. Ten years ago they were virtually non-existent. Employers are still not required to report deaths and […]

Peter Rousmaniere pfr@rousmaniere.com published 9/18/19 by workerscompensation.com Workers’ compensation is a safety net which helps people after an injury at work. For the worker, the originally expressed purpose was to fairly compensate them for their injuries.  More recently the system has focused on the best outcome: bringing the worker back to productive and earning capacity.  Employers want a system that is affordable and manageable. The safety net overall was created in the 1910s, drawing upon European models. Each state is responsible for its own program.  Despite occasional calls for federalization, the system remained steadfastly state-run.  The federal government has one […]

Peter Rousmaniere pfr@rousmaniere.com 802-291-3843 Published May 2019 by the New Hampshire Business Review The internet tracks and predicts my behavior.  Artificial intelligence may know more about me than I do myself.  Yet I still love computers.  And I’ve found that many other do as well. I recently asked about fifty friends, family members and work acquaintances about their lifetime experiences with the digital world. Their responses form a collective, personal diary of the digital age. My fifty people are virtually all are college graduates and hold down middle-class jobs or did before retiring.  Almost all are white, and most live […]

© Peter Rousmaniere published by Workerscompensation.com July 7, 2018 The Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center blasted thousands of tons of asbestos into the air, exposing rescue, recovery and cleanup workers at “the Pile” and in Lower Manhattan to glass fibers, pulverized cement, diesel exhaust and heat so intense that it often melted rescue workers’ rubberized boots. I personally viewed Ground Zero in early October from blocks away, a plume rising above it. And I have devoted many hours since then to understanding the cracks in the country’s disaster response and compensation systems. […]

© Peter Rousmaniere published by WorkCompCentral August 3, 2015 America, you need to see this from my point of view: a dark red Flame Seedless grape. I know how nice humans are, but they can do strange things. I was born in the spring of 2015 in the city in Coachella, east of Palm Springs, California. I had as sunny a childhood as a table grape could have with my bunch of siblings, fattening in temperatures that soared above 100 almost daily in June and July. Lucia was my first human friend. She was from Michoacan, Mexico. She and her […]