“Cities recognize parks are good for their economies. They’re no longer a nice thing to have, but a must,” said Will Rogers, president and chief executive of the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group in San Francisco.
See the New York Times article, below.
The Reading Viaduct, an old elevated railway line in Philadelphia. One group estimates that it would cost less to redevelop the viaduct than to demolish it.
The High Line park, built on an elevated railway trestle in Manhattan, has become both a symbol and a catalyst for an explosion of growth in the meatpacking district and the Chelsea neighborhood.
Now cities around the country, including Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis, are working up plans to renovate their aging railroad trestles, tracks and railways for parkland. Cities with little public space are realizing they badly need more parks, and the High Line has taught that renovating an old railway can be the spark that helps improve a neighborhood and attract development.
The High Line’s first and second sections cost $153 million, but have generated an estimated $2 billion in new developments. In the five years since construction started on the High Line, 29 new projects have been built or are under way in the neighborhood, according to the New York City Department of City Planning. More than 2,500 new residential units, 1,000 hotel rooms and over 500,000 square feet of office and art gallery space have gone up.
“Cities recognize parks are good for their economies. They’re no longer a nice thing to have, but a must,” said Will Rogers, president and chief executive of the Trust for Public Land, a national conservation group in San Francisco.
The area around the park, sprinkled with small offices under 200,000 square feet, has become a draw for start-ups and creative companies.
“I think the High Line is a big attraction. It’s created a lot more buzz to the area,” said Matthew Bergey, first vice president at the commercial brokerage firm CB Richard Ellis in New York. “Like with any destination, people will come if it’s cool and has buzz.”
Though plans in many cities have a long way to go before becoming reality, a point in favor of reuse is that it can be cheaper to renovate old rail structures than to tear them down. The Reading Viaduct, an old elevated railway line in Philadelphia, would cost $50 million to demolish versus $36 million to retrofit, according to the Center City District, a business improvement group.
In Chicago, where a 2.65-mile elevated rail line slices through four residential areas, tearing down the line would be prohibitively costly. With 37 bridges and large earthen embankments, the Bloomingdale Trail, as it is now called, snakes east to west across Chicago and is simply too big to go.
“If you’ve driven around Chicago, you’ll have seen it,” said Beth White, director of the Chicago office of the Trust for Public Land, which is helping to build the trail.
As with other, similar rail lines around the country, passenger and freight trains have not operated on the Chicago line in at least 10 years. The only traffic most of these lines see is an occasional runner or bike rider, even though trespassing is usually forbidden.
The impetus for redevelopment has mostly come from neighbors rather than developers, because the vision is so grand and stretches across entire neighborhoods. “It’s hard for private development to be visionary unless it’s a large-scale development where you can create a community,” said Mr. Rogers, a former Chicago developer. “Instead, you’re responding to a small site and not a larger community.”
After years of grass-roots work, the Bloomingdale Trail is moving forward after Rahm Emanuel, who made completing the trail one of his campaign promises, was elected mayor in February. Over the next year, design concepts and engineering work will get under way. The Bloomingdale Trail will allow bikes and dogs, interconnect with new and existing ground-level parks and cost $40 million to $75 million.
In St. Louis, plans are in the works to renovate a 2.1-mile elevated rail trestle and turn it into a park as part of a larger waterfront revitalization project. The Iron Horse Trestle, estimated to cost $50 million, does not have a timeline. Organizers hope to have the first one-mile phase completed in five years.
“You have to be deliberate if you want this to last. It’ll reflect St. Louis and be unique to it,” said Susan Trautman, the executive director of Great Rivers Greenway District, a public group developing the Iron Horse Trestle.
Despite the High Line’s visibility and help in showing donors and residents nationwide what is possible with an abandoned trestle, most cities realize they cannot mimic it. The park runs through Manhattan, the most densely populated area in the country, and attracted large sums of money from celebrities.
“The High Line is not easily replicable in other cities,” said James Corner, principal of James Corner Field Operations, a New York architecture firm that designed the High Line with Diller Scofidio and Renfro. “It’s not just, ‘Build a cool park and they will come.’ It’s, ‘Build a cool park and connect it to a framework.’ ”
Developers are hesitant to rely on these potential parks as they assemble new projects. In October, Mike and Matt Pestronk pounced on a 10-story office tower next to the Philadelphia viaduct when it fell into foreclosure and bought it for $5 million. The brothers, who had been watching the building for years and waiting for its price to drop, bought it because it was a good deal. The developers plan to renovate the vacant office tower for $25 million and turn it into apartments.
“The rents we project are that it doesn’t happen,” said Mike Pestronk, principal of Post Brothers Apartments in Philadelphia, referring to the viaduct project. “If it does, it’ll help us get higher rents.”
Still, the brothers are trying to improve the area and have done some “guerrilla improvements” to the viaduct, such as weeding and putting down plywood to cover holes, and installing artwork and live video projections on two sides of their building.
Plans for the viaduct are slowly moving ahead after nearly 10 years of grass-roots work. By the end of the year, the City Council is expected to approve a neighborhood improvement district that, among other things, would help oversee construction and fund-raising. As a first step, a small section of the trestle owned by a regional transportation authority would be redeveloped for $5.5 million.
“What we want to do is build the first phase, like New York, and have people say they love it and want to do the rest,” said Paul R. Levy, the president of the Center City District. “We do not need the Mercedes-Benz that they built in New York.”
The city is in talks with Reading International, a public company based in Commerce, Calif., that owns most of the viaduct.
James Corner’s firm is riding his New York success to other cities, even if their projects only marginally resemble the High Line. In Seattle, an old elevated highway that runs along the waterfront and is at risk of collapse during an earthquake will be torn down and replaced with a series of parks, open areas and new transit. Traffic will be routed away from the area. Final designs and a cost estimate will be ready by the middle of next year.
“We weren’t hiring them to come to Seattle to recreate the High Line,” said Steve Pearce, the project manager of Waterfront Seattle, a civic partnership. Our effort is to create a new front porch for the city, a social mixing chamber.”
Atlanta also hired Mr. Corner to help redevelop a 22-mile rail corridor encircling the city. In the next 25 years, Atlanta plans to add 1,300 acres of parks and green spaces, public transit and trails along the necklace, increasing Atlanta green space by nearly 40 percent. The project’s cost is put at $2.8 billion.
“The High Line is a park, and they made a conscious decision not to interact with private development,” said Ethan Davidson, a spokesman for the Atlanta BeltLine, as the rail corridor is known. “Atlanta is the kind of city where one project can transform a city. This very much knits the city together.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: August 2, 2011
Matthew J. Perry Jr., who as a young lawyer had to wait in the balcony of his segregated local courthouse before a judge would hear his case, then went on to win hundreds of civil rights legal battles and to become the first black federal judge from the Deep South, died on July 29 at his home in Columbia, S.C. He was 89.
His family confirmed the death.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Judge Perry handled cases for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that resulted in the desegregation of schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, golf courses, restaurants and beaches. He won rulings by the United States Supreme Court that overturned the convictions of more than 7,000 people involved in sit-ins.
The Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy said Judge Perry “helped create federal law that enlarged our liberty.” The judge’s cases, he said, are taught “in every law school across the United States.”
Morris Rosen, who years earlier unsuccessfully defended the city of Charleston, S.C., in a lawsuit brought by Mr. Perry, put it more simply: “He beat the hell out of me.”
In 1976, Mr. Perry became the second black and the first from the Deep South to be appointed to the United States Military Court of Appeals, a three-member civilian body that hears appeals of courts-martial. He was appointed by President Gerald R. Ford.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter named him to a new seat on the Federal District Court in South Carolina, making him that state’s first black federal judge.
The victories Mr. Perry won, often in collaboration with other N.A.A.C.P. lawyers, included desegregating Clemson University and the University of South Carolina; forcing South Carolina to reapportion its legislative districts to end discrimination against blacks; and winning the release of more than a dozen men from death row.
In 1955, Mr. Perry represented a woman who had been elbowed by a bus driver for trying to exit through the whites-only front door. She lost her suit against the bus company, but Mr. Perry won an appeal in a case that had echoes later that year when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Ala.
Mr. Perry’s success as a civil rights lawyer was owed in part to his conscious effort to avoid provoking confrontations. When shepherding the admission of Harvey Gantt to Clemson, he “carefully scripted” every step of the admission process with law enforcement officials, he said in an interview in January in The South Carolina Lawyers Weekly.
In the early 1960s, a judge cited Mr. Perry for contempt because of his aggressive defense of a black teacher who had been charged with trespassing after sitting in a hospital waiting room designated for whites. He was permitted to return to the courtroom after assuring the judge he meant no disrespect.
“The judge did a remarkable thing,” Judge Perry told The New York Times in 1976. “He apologized to me. He said he had observed that if he were of my race, he would represent the causes I did with even more vigor than I did, and that he hoped I would accept his apology.”
In the book “Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy,” edited by William Lewis Burke and Belinda Gergel, Robert Carter, himself an important civil rights lawyer and later a federal judge, wrote of Judge Perry in an essay, “He is the only militant civil rights figure I know who seems to be loved by both racial groups while still engaged in the struggle.”
Matthew James Perry Jr. was born Aug. 3, 1921, in Columbia, where he grew up. His father, a tailor, died when he was 12, and his mother went to work in New York City as a seamstress. Matthew lived with a grandfather and helped support the family by digging ditches and doing odd jobs. He was drafted into the Army and served in an all-black unit during World War II.
“I accepted our plight as a fact of life,” he said of the segregation in an interview with The Spartanburg Herald-Journal in July, “and yet I knew it wasn’t right.”
A pivotal moment in his racial thinking occurred when he was home on furlough from the Army. He was forced to order his lunch from a restaurant window. Inside he could see Italian prisoners of war being served by waitresses.
He studied business administration at what is now South Carolina State University, a historically black institution. He then enrolled in its law school, which had been created after the University of South Carolina’s law school resisted pressure to admit blacks.
One of five members of his law school’s second graduating class, Mr. Perry went on to practice law in Spartanburg, S.C., where he was the only black lawyer. If he believed in a case, he might charge nothing, or accept fresh vegetables and home-baked pies as payment. In the mid-1950s, he became chief counsel of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the N.A.A.C.P.
Mr. Perry was sworn in as a federal judge by Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court. Three decades earlier, Mr. Perry had been inspired to pursue a legal career after watching Mr. Marshall argue two civil rights cases in Columbia.
Mr. Perry’s nomination to the military appeals court was pushed by Senator Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican, even though Mr. Perry was a member of the Democratic National Committee. Political analysts at the time suggested that Mr. Thurmond, a staunch segregationist, backed Mr. Perry to win votes from a growing black electorate.
On the military appeals court, Judge Perry gained a reputation as thoughtful and “unflappable,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a lawyer who argued before Judge Perry and now teaches at Yale.
In 1974, Mr. Perry was defeated as the Democratic candidate for a seat in the United States House of Representatives; Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, visited South Carolina to campaign for him. When Mr. Carter became president, he appointed him to the lower federal district court.
Judge Perry never retired. He continued as a senior judge and was working on the day he died. He is survived by his wife, the former Hallie Bacote; and their son, Michael.
In his hardscrabble years as a young lawyer, Judge Perry was rejected by potential black clients because they feared he might irritate a white judge. On out-of-town cases, he was barred from motels and had to drive home to sleep, no matter the distance. And while awaiting his turn to appear before a judge in his hometown courthouse in Spartanburg, he, along with other blacks, was restricted to the balcony.
In 2004, the federal courthouse in Columbia was named after him.
COLUMBIA, S.C. - Matthew Perry, a civil rights lawyer who went from sitting in the courtroom balcony waiting for his cases to be heard because he was black to having the federal courthouse in Columbia named in his honor, died Friday. He was 89.
Mr. Perry first made his name in South Carolina with civil rights cases. That included successfully representing Harvey Gant, who became the first black student to attend classes at Clemson University.
In 1975, Mr. Perry became the first black judge in the state named to the federal bench at the US Court of Military Appeals. Four years later, he became a US District judge.
Throughout it all, friends said, Mr. Perry kept the same warm spirit that endeared him to many and defused his critics. Both his friends and his adversaries say it was that kindness that helped South Carolina integrate with less violence than nearly every other Southern state.
“He is the only militant civil rights figure I know of who seems to be loved and respected by both racial groups while still engaged in the struggle,’’ wrote Robert Carter, a US District judge in New York, in the book “Matthew J. Perry: The Man, His Times, and His Legacy.’’
Mr. Perry was born in Columbia on Aug. 3, 1921. He was raised by his mother and grandfather after his father, a tailor, died when he was 12.
After high school, Mr. Perry enrolled at South Carolina State University. But World War II interrupted his schooling and led him to dedicate his life to civil rights.
While on leave, Mr. Perry stopped at a restaurant in Alabama. He had to order his sandwich from a window outside the kitchen while Italian prisoners of war were served inside.
“You have no idea the feeling of insult I experienced. As I say, that one reverberates,’’ Mr. Perry had said about it.
After the war, Mr. Perry enrolled at South Carolina State’s new law school and became its first graduate to pass the bar.
At the urging of his colleagues, he moved to Spartanburg to practice law because the area had no black attorneys. He quickly became known for his thorough preparation and willingness to take any case.
But judges and other lawyers never let him forget he was a black man in the South in the 1950s. Mr. Perry sometimes had to sit in the balcony with other blacks until his case was called. If he couldn’t stay at the home of his client, he had to drive back home, no matter how far, because most motels wouldn’t allow black guests.
Mr. Perry kept fighting. His civil rights wins were renowned. Along with integrating Clemson, colleagues estimate he got convictions reversed for hundreds if not thousands of people arrested for civil disobedience during the fight to end segregation. Some of them could pay only with baskets of homegrown produce or homemade cakes and pies, offered after Mr. Perry had already waived his fee.
“Matthew personified the black lawyer of the 1950s and 1960s: courageous, articulate, and persuasive,’’ said a former state chief justice, Ernest Finney, who graduated from South Carolina State’s law school three years after Mr. Perry.
In one of his last cases as an attorney, Mr. Perry opened the door of the State House to blacks, forcing South Carolina to adopt single-member House districts. In the next election, nearly a dozen black lawmakers were sent to Columbia.
He retired from the full-time bench in 1995, but kept hearing cases.
In 2004, the new federal courthouse in Columbia was named in his honor, his name etched high above the columns of the $40 million building. A statue of Mr. Perry sits in the courtyard. His only complaint about the building was that his office didn’t have enough shelves for his massive personal law library.
The star of South Carolina’s civil rights movement occasionally wondered if he could have been a show-business sensation. But those who know Mr. Perry say he fulfilled his destiny as an attorney and a judge.
“He just loves the law,’’ his fellow US District Court judge Cameron Currie said in 2004. “This is his life. This is his hobby, and it’s his love.’’
You’ve got to hand it to controversial St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR (formerly known as “DAVID HOAR” before he changed his name).
Our St. Johns County Sheriff has a wicked sense of humor. Sheriff SHOAR proved that for all time on March 30, 2011 (when April Fool’s came early this year).
Sheriff SHOAR is one politician who keeps his promises. For example, SHOAR promised WILLIAM B. HARRISS that he would have a job with the Sheriff’s office whenever HARRISS retired as St. Augustine City Manager – a “golden parachute,” in corporate law terms.
Keeping his promise, SHOAR has hired controversial former St. Augustine City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS. Kudos to you, Sheriff Shoar – at least you Republicans take care of your own. Too many times, we Democrats “throw our own to the wolves.” (Ask Nancy Pelosi. Ask Lani Guanier).
HARRISS was most noted for his neglect of two African-American communities -- Lincolnville and West Augustine -- and for his environmental crimes, including dumping 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir.
On June 30, 2010, WILLIAM HARRISS “retired” from the City of St. Augustine. He is not missed. Of course, the St. Augustine Record and the Sheriff’s friends’ faux news site both sang his praises.
We sincerely hope that HARRISS was the last in a long line of Caudillos who ran St. Augustine’s City government into the ground.
St. Augustine’s City government is now blossoming as a true democracy, with the current group of City Commissioners actually listening to one another, and working with City Manager John Regan to make our City a better place. Commissioners and City staff no longer fear management by blackmail. Commissioners and City staff no longer fear new ideas.
Watching City Commission meetings, you can tell they are no longer rehearsed and no longer the fruit of the poisonous tree of Government in the Sunshine law violations. (Once upon a time, in 2006, I was waiting for a special City Commission meeting to start and Commissioner Donald Crichlow walked in, seeing no one else. He asked where everyone was. I said “they’re upstairs at the rehearsal.” Crichlow nodded knowingly, never denying it.
Erstwhile City Manager HARRISS, like other local unaccountables, was in the habit of “polling” Commissioners, a violation of the Sunshine laws. This led to dull meetings, where everyone knew what everyone thought in advance, and everyone knew the outcome of every proposal – no need to hold a Commission meeting when you’ve already broken the Sunshine law (which is a crime that is hardly ever punished or reported in St. Johns County).
No longer is there a cognitive miser in the City Manager’s chair, bullying and bossing City employees, Commissioners and citizens alike, like the very Republican lord of all he surveyed.
Such was not always the case.
I’ve lived in St. Augustine since 1999. In April 2005, the first time I ever attended a St. Augustine City Commission meeting, HARRIS came up to me after the City Commission meeting and said, “I could have you arrested for disorderly conduct.” HARRISS did not introduce himself. HARRIS was never friendly. HARRISS would never even shake my hand.
After the meeting in April 2005, WILLIAM B. HARRISS’ knickers were apparently in a twist because I raised concerns about the City’s refusal to annex West Augustine neighborhoods, stating that it violated the Fifteenth Amendment for the City to annex all-white areas repeatedly, at the behest of developers and not annex a low-income African-American neighborhood. Committing truth about racism in St. Augustine did not exactly endear me to HARRISS, but I did not cower to power. I wore HARRISS’ scorn as a badge of honor. It took five years, but HARRISS left, angry as ever, taking a fat retirement pension with him (along with the memory of the nature he destroyed and the developers to whom he was a lickspittle).
My parents taught me that are not put on Earth to bow and scrape and beg government officials to obey the law – we have a right to expect democracy.
But under the twelve-year reign of error of our unreconstructed, undemocratic Caudillo -- WILLIAM B. HARRISS -- Lincolnville, West Augustine and other working neighborhoods were treated with disdain and disrespect. That was true both publicly and privately, and particularly at St. Augustine City Commission meetings. In four decades of government-watching, I’ve never seen a more intriguing rogue – he reminds me of James Michael Curley, the longtime Mayor of Boston (model for Frank Skeffington in Frank O’Connor’s political novel, The Last Hurrah). HARRISS did things his way. In a way, I can relate to that. But HARRISS forgot about the rule of law.
HARRISS forgot about humility and honesty.
HARRISS forgot about the duty of government officials to be “just stewards,” protecting our nature and history for future generations.
Thus, under HARRISS, foreign-funded speculators and developers like ROBERT MICHAEL GRAUBARD got whatever they wanted from HARRISS, including City Commission votes allowing destruction of a 3000-4000 year old Native American Indian village next to St. Augustine High School and a 75-year old Donald Ross Ponce de Leon Golf Course teeming with wildlife, adjoining the Intracoastal Waterway.
St. Augustine City Manager WILLIAM HARRISS, his longtime SAPD Police Chief DAVID SHOAR and other autocrats intimidated, coerced, restrained and retaliated against First Amendment protected activity in the City of St. Augustine. Their First Amendment violations are a stench in the nostrils of the City – something we’ve hopefully left behind in the City of St. Augustine.
From inside his City Hall office, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS helped raise money for SHOAR’s campaign. On the loooooong list of SHOAR’s contributors, HARRISS is the second person to give SHOAR a check (SHOAR raised more than $250,000 when he ran in 2004).
SHOAR desperately needs another political apparatchik as he faces re-election next year. It is estimated that SHOAR may raise as much as half a million dollars to be re-elected as Sheriff next year.
SHERIFF DAVID SHOAR’s Environmental Crimes unit never prosecuted HARRISS for his pollution crimes, but neither did anyone else.
Our Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) lived true to its nickname – the late David Thundershield Queen said DEP means “Don’t Expect Protection.” Our Environmental Protection Agency likewise failed to prosecute HARRISS for his intentional environmental crimes.
It seems that whenever governments commit environmental crimes – from Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear bomb factories’ mercury pollution to the City of St. Augustine’s illegal dumping – other government agencies go all soft and squishy. When a government commits an environmental crime, other governments habitually refused to enforce environmental crime laws against other governments. Present and former EPA and other environmental regulatory enforcement officials confirm this ineluctable truth.
Due to desuetude (nonenforcement) of environmental criminal laws under the Bush II administration, HARRISS was able to laugh at us every time we talked about his illegal dumping of solid waste (and the City’s emission of hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw sewage in our local rivers).
Twice the St. Johns River Water Management District informed WILLIAM B. HARRISS he could not dump in the Old City Reservoir without a permit -- once in-person at the site, once by certified mail. WILLIAM HARRISS dumped anyway.
Against the peace and dignity of the State of Florida, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS ordered solid waste put in our Old City Reservoir – HARRIS wanted it brought back to Lincolnville so that he could call it a “park.”
From 2006-2008, City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS smirked time every concerned citizens spoke about his illegal dumping in the City Commission, never answering our questions and always affecting unconcern, insouciance and effrontery. HARRISS long enjoyed the support of a majority of prior St. Augustine City Commissions, and in 2006 Commissioners actually voted him an atta-boy plaque in the midst of a pending environmental crimes investigation, expressing their “confidence” in HARRISS< which could be construed as an overt act of obstruction of justice intended to signal City employees to shut up and not cooperate with pending criminal investigations.
HARRISS massively resisted FDEP’s orders to put the waste in a Class I landfill, instructing City lawyers never to agree to it, spending $200,000 on the AKERMAN $ENTERFITT law firm’s effort – HARRISS’ “massive resistance” to environmental laws showed disrespect for two African-American communities – the one where the waste was illegally dumped in the first place (where he wanted to return it) and the one where he had it illegally dumped in the Old City Reservoir.
WILLIAM B. HARRISS goaded City Commissioners to refuse to pay for the Civil Rights Foot Soldiers Monument, insisting the community raise funds, delaying it for six years.
WILLIAM B. HARRISS arrogantly condemned ACLU protesters on anti-artist and anti-entertainer ordinances, claiming they were trying to give the City a black eye. HARRISS gave the City two black eyes, a broken nose and put its foot in its mouth with his Philistinism.
HARRISS goaded Commissioners not to allow Rainbow flags on our Bridge of Lions for Gay Pride, resulting in a Federal Court Order requiring the City to fly them July 8-13, 2005. United States District Judge Henry Lee Adams found our City violated our First Amendment rights (once again).
HARRISS never once had a performance appraisal, encumbering the position from April 13, 1998 until June 30, 2010.
Double-dipping Republican that he is, WILLIAM B. HARRISS is receiving a pension from the City while working for the Sheriff’s office.
According to the City Clerk’s office, WILLIAM B. HARRISS receives a retirement check from the City of St. Augustine of $9,367.46 monthly ($112,409.52 per year). SHOAR’s fundraiser, MICHAEL GOLD, reports on his Historic City News website that HARRISS is a “certified law enforcement officer,” works part-time, does not receive a salary, but could be paid for special events.
Sheriff DAVID SHOAR and his publicist, Sgt. Charles Mulligan, are “mum” on HARRISS. They have not responded substantively to an E-mail requesting HARRISS’ job description, hire date and salary information. Two telephone calls to Mulligan have not been returned. It is now past 5 PM on Friday, August 5, 2011.
People are already saying that ST. JOHNS COUNTY SHERIFF DAVID SHOAR’s political patronage machine knows no shame: SHOAR hired WILLIAM B. HARRISS, one of the most shameful people ever to a hold public office in St. Johns County – as lugubrious a goober as ever made a chair squeak.
Pray for them!
Pray that SHOAR and HARRISS will learn from their mistakes and start treating citizens with dignity, respect and consideration.
PRAY that HARRISS is not a bad influence on SHOAR (who scarcely needs any more of them).
United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis put it best when he wrote that when "government becomes a lawbreaker," it promotes disrespect for the law, and anarchy. Expect more lawbreaking as long as DAVID SHOAR is Sheriff, assisted by WILLIAM B. HARRISS & Co.
With Sheriff SHOAR relying on former City Manager HARRISS for advice, don’t be surprised if there are more false arrests, more civil rights violations and more attacks on First Amendment protected activity.
Watch DAVID SHOAR and WILLIAM HARRISS. Be true to our American Founding Fathers, who wrote in our Declaration of Independence of the need to resist arbitrary power and oppression with “manly firmness!”“Mental slavery is mental death, and every man
who has given up his intellectual freedom
is the living coffin of his dead soul."
(Robert G. Ingersoll, 1833-1899)
(Thanks to National Park Service Ranger
Jeff Edel from his National Park Service
Castillogram newsletter for the gnarly quote above)
Despite rapid and substantial growth in the amount of land and sea designated as protected habitat over the last four decades, the diversity of species the world over is plummeting, a new study has found.
Over 100,000 so-called "protected areas" representing some 7 million square miles of land and nearly 1 million square miles of ocean have been established since the 1960's, noted the analysis, published Thursday in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
And yet, according to a widely cited index used to track planetary biodiversity, the wealth of terrestrial and marine species has seen steady decline over roughly the same period, suggesting that simply protecting swaths of land and sea -- a common conservation strategy worldwide -- is inadequate for preventing the steady disappearance of earth's creatures.
"The problem is bigger than one we can realistically solve with protected areas -- even if they work under the best conditions," said Camilo Mora, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and lead author of the study. "The protected area approach is expensive and requires a lot of political and human capital," Dr. Mora continued in an email message to The Huffington Post. "Our suggestion is that we should redirect some of those resources to deal with ultimate solutions."
The steady loss of biodiversity -- defined roughly as the rich variety of living things -- can, in turn, have profound implications for human civilization, which relies on healthy, variegated ecosystems to provide a host of ecological services from water filtration and oxygen generation to food, medicine, clothing and fuel.
The precise value of such services is difficult to quantify, but one economic analysis estimated they were worth as much as $33 trillion globally.
While the study concedes that individual protected areas that are well-designed and well-managed can be successful in preventing the imminent extinction of species and ecosystems, a variety of other forces conspire to further reduce biodiversity overall.
"Protected areas, as usually implemented, can only protect from over-exploitation, and from habitat destruction due to exploitation and other direct human actions within their borders. They are a tool for regulating human access and extraction," said Peter F. Sale, assistant director of the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, and the study's co-author. "Biodiversity loss is also caused by pollution, by arrival of invasive species, by decisions to convert habitat to other uses -- farms, villages, cities -- and by various components of climate change," he told HuffPost. "None of these are mitigated by the creation of protected areas except, possibly, the removal of habitat to other uses."
In other words, the researchers, who based their analysis on a broad range of global data and a review of existing literature, suggest that the implementation of habitat protection is unable to keep pace with other stressors contributing to species loss overall.
This is partly due to lack of enforcement. Only about 5.8 percent of terrestrial protected areas and 0.08 percent of marine sanctuaries see reliable and consistent enforcement.
Further, the authors note most research suggests that between 10 percent and 30 percent of the world's ecosystems need to be protected to preserve optimal biodiversity. But despite what appears to be a rapid increase in protected lands, the pace is too slow to achieve those targets anytime soon. On land, the 10 percent target, under the best of circumstances, would not be reached until 2043, the study estimated. The 30 percent target would not be achieved until 2197. The same target percentages for marine sanctuaries would be reached by 2067 and 2092, respectively.
And these projections are almost certainly too optimistic, the authors note, because the rate of establishment of new protected areas would be expected to slow considerably as conservation efforts runs up against the needs of a rapidly expanding human population.
From the study:
[D]emand on marine fisheries is projected to increase by 43 percent by 2030 to supply ongoing food demands, while projected CO2 emissions by 2050 are expected to severely impact [more than] 80 percent of the world's coral reefs and affect marine fish communities globally, causing local extinctions and facilitating invasions resulting in changes in species composition of up to 60 percent. On land, the growing human population and demand for housing, food and energy are expected to substantially increase the intensity of stressors associated with the conversion of land cover to agriculture and urbanization, e.g. the release of nutrients and other pollutants, climate warming and altered precipitation. In short, the extent of coverage by [protected areas] is still limited and is growing at a slower rate than that at which biodiversity threats are developing.
Global population is expected to pass 7 billion in October, according to new estimates from the population division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations. That's an increase of 1 billion people in about a dozen years.
Other challenges include the size of protected areas -- which are often too small for larger species to survive -- and the lack of connectivity between protected areas, which is needed for healthy genetic dispersal.
The authors of Thursday's analysis suggest that reversing biodiversity losses will require a vast rethinking of conservation strategy -- one that redirects limited resources toward more holistic solutions. This would include efforts to reduce human population growth -- and its attending consumption patterns -- as well as the deployment of technologies that would increase the productivity of agriculture and aquaculture to meet human needs.
Also needed, the authors wrote: a continued "restructuring of world views to bring them in line with a world of finite resources."
Dr. Sale said, "In the final analysis, we have to recognize that we are pushing up against limits set by the way the biosphere functions. Biodiversity loss is one sign of this."
First Posted: 7/30/11 11:37 AM ET Updated: 7/30/11 01:32 PM ET