Conservation will fail unless it is better connected to people

"Conservation will fail unless it is better connected to people," says Rochester native Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist and Director of Science at The Nature Conservancy. Eden Home agrees. He says "the obvious connection between conservation and people comes from the benefits nature provides people - everything from clean water and flood control, to fiber from forests, and fish from aquatic ecosystems. The scientific and practical challenge lies in developing credible tools that allow routine consideration of nature's assets [or ecosystem services] in a way that informs the choices we make everyday at the scale of local communities and regions, all the way up to nations and global agreements." Amazing! Research on this approach is being conducted as part of a collaboration between World Wildlife Fund, Stanford University and The Nature Conservancy in the form of the Natural Capital Project.

spring song

Spring ~ christinelikecamera ~~ Spring video

Highland, Genesee Valley and Seneca parks

Soon the snow will be gone and we can visit our favorite parks without boots just as spring rounds the corner. According to Rochester's Landmark Society, Rochester is one of just four cities nationwide with an entire park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of the landscape architecture: Highland, Genesee Valley and Seneca.

Talk about foresight, in 1888 Rochester's Board of Park Commissioners created open space for the first parks according to the Landmark Society.

Olmsted's three major parks in Rochester each represented different landscape styles: Highland Park, created on land donated to the city by horticulturists George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry, is an arboretum of plants and shrubs emphasizing vistas both internally and for a hundred miles to the Finger Lakes. Genesee Valley Park was designed in classic pastoral style along the Genesee River. Seneca Park's rugged terrain north of the falls inspires. Thanks for the history, LS.

flowers by christine

varieties : flowers a collage by Christine

ten reasons for winter in march blizzard

March 6, 2011 Blizzard in New York

1. "Snow Falling on Cedars" because it's the perfect image
2. anticipatory spring fever ~ crocus, daffodil have already poked out
3. the coffee smells intoxicating
   
4. rhododendrons, cedar, hemlock are green against the white
   
5. the silhouette of maple, oak, ash branches on a blue-gray sky is for watercolorists
6. reruns of film noir are on TCM
7. you can see the wind in snowspouts
   
8. it's not Siberia
   
9. there's nothing like a group of people pushing someone out of a snowbank for happy comradarie
   
10. it gives you time to think . . . think about spring.
    

Spring Summer Fall Winter . . . and Spring

April 22 2011 ~ Earth Day

Coming up is Earth Day, quite a big deal these days, but in 1970 [April 22, 1970 to be exact], it was virtually ignored. It was an environmental teach-in sponsored by then Wisconsin Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson who died in 2005. Not only did he launch the first Earth Day, but he was the first senator to call for hearings in Congress on the safety of birth control pills which eventually led to the presence of side-effect inserts in packaging.

Earth Day falls in the Spring welcoming longer and longer days.

The Greening

About forty years ago - 1970 - a book hit the best-seller list. It was called the "Greening of America" by Charles Reich, a professor at Yale. It was a book about how we see ourselves. He argued that 19th century farmers and small businesspeople were replaced by large corporate institutions in the mid-20th century. He described a backlash to institutional impersonalism, the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, as a force to be reckoned with.

He said that the values of the 60s came out of suburbia - a resurgence of individualism in order to open up people's tolerance and acceptance of things that are different.

Read this CBC report on Reich today.