A Cool Refreshing Coke

Efforts to reduce, mitigate, and plan for the effects of climate change have been hampered by intense political debates that often seem to have very little to do with the topic itself.  Yet, we ignore the issue at our peril.  It is telling that many corporations such as Coca Cola (as this article in the NYT  describes: http://nyti.ms/19Rp18y) are increasingly concerned about the impact climate change will have on their businesses.  For these companies, climate change is not an ideological touchstone but rather a tangible threat to their shareholders that they feel obligated to plan for and to help minimize.  The broader global society would do well to follow their lead.

Free Park

Creating conservation areas that have more restrictive resource use regulations, limit the types of permissible activities, or limit access has become a very commonly used resource management tool around the world.   But creating a park is easier said then done.  This New York Times article describes the troubled effort to create a National Park in Maine: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/01/10/us/MAINE-2/MAINE-2-master675.jpg

Many of the pitfalls that have arisen in that case are all to common around the world.  Also, actually getting a park to fulfil its intended goals can also be just as challenging as creating a park in the first place.  Many conservation areas around the world exist as meaningless lines on a map where the rules designed to foster conservation and sustainable management are ignored, not enforced, or remarkably in some cases not even created or articulated.

The topic of parks as a land management tool is complex and there is a rich and  active and debate about their design,management, and use.  One bit of consensus that has emerged is that in order to be successful parks need to have a lot of support and buy-in from the people who live in and adjacent to the park or whose lives may be influenced in some way by its creation.  You can see the need for that reflected in he NYT article.