Posts Tagged ‘National Park’
“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water”*…
The pillars of smoke from the Bel Air fire were visible around the city, and as the firefighters struggled through the canyons, most people could simply watch and worry. But Ralph Parsons, the wealthy founder of a wildly successful international engineering firm, was trying to end the Southern California drought — forever.
It was 1961.
The solution Parsons devised, a continental-scale plumbing project called the North American Water and Power Alliance, or NAWAPA, was never built, but it’s never quite gone away, either. Today it persists as a fantastical vision that could have been, and might in some form still be…
The North American Water and Power Alliance was an audacious proposal to divert water to parched western states that would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars and pissed off Canada. The abandoned plan that aimed to save America from drought: “Pipe Dreams.”
* “Noah Cross” (John Huston), Chinatown
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As we contemplate the commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1832 that an act of Congress created Hot Springs Reservation, protecting the site’s thermal waters to be “preserved for future recreation,” in Arkansas. Established before the concept of a national park existed in the U.S., it was the first time that American land had been set aside by the federal government in this way, and so is considered by many to have been the first National Park. It officially became a National Park in 1921.
Pool of hot spring water in Hot Springs National Park
“In a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder”*…
An ancient bear skull sits on the floor of Hoyo Negro, a flooded cave on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula
Some 13,000 years ago in what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a deep pit inside a cave became the final resting place for a menagerie of exotic animals.
Now, their exquisitely preserved bones, trapped for centuries under water, are offering some of the first solid clues to how large Ice Age beasts were mixing and migrating between North and South America after the Isthmus of Panama connected the two continents.
“We’re going to go from a place with no records to having the best records for a lot of megafauna from Mexico, Central America, and northern South America,” says East Tennessee State University’s Blaine Schubert, who presented the findings this week at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Calgary.
The animal bones are also painting a more detailed picture of the strange world inhabited by Naia, an Ice Age girl found in the cave who is the oldest, most complete human skeleton yet discovered in the Americas…
A remarkable discovery sheds new light on the exchange of life that occurred when the Isthmus of Panama rose from the ocean to connect two continents that had been ecologically separate for tens of millions of years: “Ice Age Predators Found Alongside Oldest Human in Americas.”
* “In other studies you go as far as other have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
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As we re-trim our family trees, we might send illuminating birthday greetings to Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden; he was born on this date in 1829. Trained as a physician (who served with the Union Army during the Civil War), Hayden was a practicing geologist and paleontologist noted for his work in the Badlands in the mid 19th century– it is believed he made the first North American discovery of dinosaur remains (1854)– and for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains later in that century, which helped lay the foundation of the U.S. Geological Survey. Hayden is credited with having the Yellowstone geyser area declared the first national park (1872).
“I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins”*…
The abandoned Hachijo Royal Hotel on the island of Hachijojima
Japan is in some sense uniquely blessed as a land of ruins. Its rapidly aging population, low birth rate, urbanization and lack of immigration have left a legacy of ghost towns and more than 8 million abandoned homes, or akiya. That tally could hit 21.5 million, one-third of all residences nationwide, by 2033, according to the Nomura Research Institute.
Abandoned homes are ubiquitous in rural Japan, posing health and safety hazards to locals, but they can even be found in central Tokyo, vacant edifices that for whatever reason owners refuse to demolish and rebuild.
In addition to the scourge of abandoned homes, Japan is dealing with lingering effects of the asset-inflated bubble economy of the 1980s and 1990s that saw the construction of numerous hotels, theme parks and other leisure facilities that went bust when the bubble burst. Some money-losing facilities, including the ill-fated Canadian World in Ashibetsu, Hokkaido, themed on the popular “Anne of Green Gables” novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery, were rehabilitated into public parks. But in all too many cases, others were left to rot…
More on the “ghost towns” of Japan at “The lure of Japan’s mysterious ruins.”
* Heinrich Heine
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As we keep our ear peeled for echoes, we might we might send majestic 100th birthday greetings to the U.S. National Park Service; it was founded on this date in 1916.
The Land of 10,000 Logos…
Designer Nicole Meyer has set herself a heroic– that’s to say, Herculean– task:
Lake logos have a tendency to be, well, fairly ugly. This project was created to rethink what they could be.
One Minnesota Lake. One Logo. Every day.
Should only take a little over 27 years to hit ’em all.
Check in on her progress-to-date at Branding 10,000 Lakes.
As we chose our vacation spots, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 that avid outdoorsman and staunch conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon a National Monument. Land and mining claim holders blocked efforts to reclassify the Canyon as a U.S. National Park for 11 more years. But Grand Canyon National Park was finally established as the 17th U.S. National Park by an Act of Congress signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in early 1919.
TR on Jacob’s Ladder, Bright Angel Trail (source)
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