Abundance

Giving thanks is a sacred obligation in most religions. St. Paul, for example, exhorted the Thessalonian Greeks to "rejoice always," regardless of circumstance. Yet Thanksgiving also is a secular obligation. George Washington proclaimed the first formal Thanksgiving of the new American nation in 1789.The deist Thomas Jefferson, squeamish about religious overtones (giving thanks to Whom?), refused to proclaim a day of thanksgiving, and the holiday was observed sporadically, mostly by individual states, until Abraham Lincoln established in 1863 the tradition of annual Thanksgiving celebrations continued in George Bush's proclamation for today (excerpted on the page opposite.

State and federal biologists are urging a continuation of crabbing restrictions in the Chesapeake Bay, though a study found no evidence the bay's crab population is threatened.An 18-month study, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, concludes that Maryland and Virginia watermen and recreational crabbers have not put a big dent in the bay's crab stock, despite a five-fold increase in their effort to catch them over the past 50 years.Weather, rather than fishing pressure, is mainly responsible for the boom-and-bust gyrations in crab harvests from year to year, according to the study.

Paris -- One might have expected this year's to be a happy Thanksgiving, rather than the troubled one it proves to be. A year ago the United States was marching toward a war about whose costs no one could be sure.Today that is past, and the Cold War is over; and if the world remains a violent place, the United States now is mainly engaged as a peacemaker.The anxiety comes from within. Superficially it concerns the economy. Beyond that, however, is concern that other things in the country have been getting worse, including education, racial and minority relations, even relations between the sexes.

TO THE CASUAL television viewer, modern war looks like a crosshair-framed view of smart bombs finding their targets, interspersed with tracers glowing green in the night, and maybe a squad of high-tech warriors pounding across the dunes. War in person looks different. A man lies in a corner of a semi-destroyed hospital, shot through the neck, gasping, dying. A widow rides with her extended family in a tractor cart down a dust road, away from danger, replaying in her mind the deaths of her husband and sons a few hours before.

Noting an "abundance of new information," Howard County prosecutors agreed yesterday to the release on bail of three teen-agers accused of raping a 15-year-old girl last week in a boys' bathroom at an Ellicott City high school. Before a courtroom packed with the teen-agers' family members and reporters, Howard District Judge Pamila J. Brown reversed a decision made by another judge Friday -- at the request of the state's attorney's office and based on the severity of the allegations -- to hold the suspects without bail.

Paris. -- A proper Cassandra probably should not be quite as comfortably situated as Sir James Goldsmith is here in his house that once was home to a king's brother and later, and more impressively, to Cole Porter. But Sir James, 61, can't help being a billionaire and won't mute his political lamentation, which is nothing if not comprehensive. He has drawn an indictment against most of modernity.Shortly before the 1987 stock market crash he got out of the market, went to earth -- opulently, in several homes around the world -- and thought.

THANKSGIVING WEEK ushers in a holiday season in which Americans revel in abundance -- and, inevitably, are reminded that their good fortune is not shared by everyone.Although hunger in our own country is a blot on a nation blessed with affluence, it cannot compare to the starvation-level poverty that affects 1.3 billion people in the developing world. These lives are at stake as scientists, demographers and policy makers argue over whether the world will be able to feed the 8 billion or so people expected on the Earth by the year 2025.

Casco Bay, Maine -- Dawn came with an ominously heavy rain and we turned on the radio for word of Hurricane Bob coming up the Maine coast. What we heard, however, hadn't been predicted by even the most knowledgeable expert.There was news from the East. Winds of change. The Soviet Union was suddenly as unstable and dangerous as any tropical storm.In the cove, fishermen secured the last floats and dorries, working together in their deceptively unhurried way. On shore, we followed their lead, stashing the chairs and hammock in the barn, taping windows, pausing regularly to listen to the updates from Moscow as well as Portland.

Lawrence Murphy has been a waterman for 28 of the Chesapeake Bay's leanest years, but he still believes in a generous and forgiving Mother Nature. And this spring in the waters of Eastern Bay near Kent Island, he has been raking in a unique harvest that seems to prove him right:Baby oysters in amazing and mysterious abundance -- so many that 800 million of them are being gathered to help Maryland's Department of Natural Resources re-establish failing oyster...

Don't mess with oceans to produce more fishOne need not be an environmental Cassandra to quiver with fear after reading Dennis T. Avery's recent suggestion that the time is ripe to manipulate the oceans to produce more fish. His commentary (April 4, ''Should we fertilize the oceans for fishing?") relates to recent experiments in which the introduction of a half-ton of iron into the ocean resulted in a forty-fold increase in production over a 200-square-mile area.He proposes the application of iron to ''renew the oceans' abundance.