Tompkins Conservation strives for biodiversity in South America

Oct 222012
 

Doug Tompkins founded The North Face. Kris Tompkins served as a long-time CEO of Patagonia. It seems as likely a pairing as any.

Now that the two have left the outdoor gear industry, they’ve dedicated themselves to a plethora of conservation efforts in South America. And those are all featured at a new, content-rich hub: Tompkins Conservation.

Kris and Doug Tompkins are working for a new economy.
Photo: Tompkins Conservation website.

Tompkins Conservation initiatives range across a wide spectrum, from park creation to restoration, ecological agriculture to pure activism. All of it is meant to shift the globalized economy towards many place-based, local economies that reflect balanced relationships between humans and nature.

Create

In 1991, Doug purchased the Reñihué Ranch in Chile, with the intention of setting aside 42,000 protected acres. This conservation effort grew over several years into the creation of Pumalín Park, a public-access 800,000-acre nature reserve.

In 2000, Kris founded Conservacion Patagonica, which is working to create Patagonia National Park and has purchased 200,000 acres in the Chacabuco Valley.

South America’s Patagonia is one of the last wild places on earth.
Photo: Conservacion Patagonica.

The Tompkins’ Conservation Land Trust, in partnership with American philanthropist Peter Buckley, purchased 208,000 acres along the Chilean coast, south of Chaiten, in 1994. The parcel expanded and by January 2005 it became the largest privately-owned land to be donated to Chile’s National Park System. Along with surrounding territory, President Ricardo Lagos designated the wilderness as Corcovado National Park. It is currently Chile’s 6th largest park at approximately 726,000 acres, and contains 86 lakes.

Conservation Land Trust has also been working on a proposed Great Iberá Park in Argentina, which would link multiple reserves together to support the region’s ecological integrity. The area abounds with ecotourism opportunities to ensure sound economic gains for the local population.

This map indicates protected areas from Tompkins Conservation efforts.
To learn more about each region, visit the “All Protected Areas” tab of their website.

Restore

Tompkins Conservation identifies the loss of biodiversity as the greatest crisis of our time and emphasizes its undermining of the planet’s ecological health. To tackle these issues, Doug and Kris’ programs have been involved with numerous species and plant restoration projects such as reintroducing locally extinct fauna like the giant anteater, the tapir, the collared peccary, the pampas deer, the ocelote, the giant otter, and the jaguar within the proposed Great Iberá Park.

The Conservation Land Trust is working to reintroduce jaguars within the proposed Great Iberá Park.
Photo: Iberá Project website.

Grow

Other environmental concerns for Tompkins Conservation include the need for pure water, soil care, and investment in local, renewable energy. Agricultural programs in Chile and Argentina involve raising sheep and cattle, producing native forest honey, and growing fruit and vegetables for local consumption.

Act

Along with writer/activist Jerry Mander, Doug established The Foundation for Deep Ecology in 1990, which is based in Sausalito, California, and supports education and advocacy for the natural world through campaigns, publications, and grants.

The Tompkins stress that beauty is intrinsic to our understanding of the natural world. Through recognizing the beauty of natural landscapes, well-designed buildings within parks and communities can be aesthetically pleasing, ecologically responsible and continually inspiring.

FoodHub spreads the love of local food across the Pacific Northwest

Aug 082012
 

Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub

For those of us who live here, the oft-celebrated agricultural productivity in the Pacific Northwest provides residents with some of the best fruits, vegetables, meats and dairy to hit our plates and palates. In Portland, legions of adventurous eaters flock to restaurant tables and farmers markets hoping to find local food and connect with the people who grow it. Still, despite a growing interest in knowing where our food comes from (sometimes too much interest), individuals don’t often have the buying power it takes to keep more local foods within state lines.

Even in a metropolitan area that boasts more than 40 farmers markets, only one to two percent of Portland-area growers sell their products at those markets. Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub –Ecotrust’s online networking tool for wholesale food buyers and sellers — reminds us that in order to support regional agriculture, we often have to scale up.

It’s caterers, restaurants, bakeries, and other wholesale buyers that can underwrite a even stronger local food scene because their purchases of meats, dairy, eggs and produce in bulk often leads to more lucrative relationships for local farmers, ranchers and fishermen. FoodHub facilitates the connections between local growers and large buyers — even larger institutional buyers, such as schools or hospitals, helping create substantive changes on a broad level.

In a recent interview with Metroscope’s Ted Douglass, Oborne discusses the role FoodHub is playing to shift the agricultural landscape across the Pacific Northwest. While the site is certainly a boon to locavores’ bellies and tastebuds, Oborne also highlights the impact of local agriculture on the job market and the region’s overall environmental health.

Listen here :

  
(or download the mp3: Amanda Oborne’s Metroscope Interview)

Software for 21st-century decisions

Jul 102012
 

How will we all thrive on a densely populated, rapidly changing planet?  For over twenty years, Ecotrust has been tackling this question, through the creation of innovative mapping and software solutions that bridge different perspectives on land and ocean use.  These tools empower people to understand complex information and solve problems collaboratively.

One thing we have learned is that one-size-fits-all software solutions often fall short, especially when it comes to supporting a complex decision-making process.  Instead, the most successful solutions provide carefully chosen features that are tailored to the specific goal, process, audience, geography, and culture.  This takes time and often multiple iterations to get right.  As an organization that creates many of these decision support tools each year, the question we faced was how to make this process more efficient.  The answer we found was to distill our best practices and most popular software features into a modular framework that allows a developer to choose only what they need for the problem at hand and to customize it quickly.  We’ve refined this framework over many projects this last year and in the spirit of sharing good ideas, we are now proud to announce the release of Madrona, a software framework for effective place-based decision making.

Madrona provides software developers with a set of building blocks that can be mixed and matched to create cutting-edge, web-based tools for decision support and spatial planning at any scale.  It can be used in sectors ranging from natural resource management to ocean and land-use planning, urban and community planning, energy, transportation, health care and more.  These building blocks have evolved through extensive work with project partners, including our award-winning work with the MarineMap Consortium designing marine protected areas in California, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identifying conservation priorities in the coastal rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, and in helping regional leaders around the world visualize future vulnerabilities and resilience-building opportunities.

In partnership with The Nature Conservancy, Madrona tools are supporting ocean and shoreline planning in Washington.

Conceptually, you can think of Madrona like you would the materials and plans for building a house. There are core materials that form a strong foundation (group collaboration, a spatial content management system), various rooms and options to choose from (2D and 3D mapping, scenario planning), and the flexibility to make your own additions and alterations.  Ultimately, how you build it is up to you. The goal of Madrona is to let you focus on the bigger picture and not get distracted by all of the nuts and bolts.

To learn more visit madrona.ecotrust.org.  We offer case studies, step-by-step tutorials, generous open source licensing, a community forum for asking questions, and a full range of consulting services.  We invite technologists from around the world to use Madrona and contribute to its ongoing evolution.   Together we can achieve a larger global impact through improved decision making.

 

Going local in the Gorge

Jun 292012
 

While the Columbia Gorge is rich in orchards and wheat fields, local food makes up only 1% of the diet of residents in the five-county area straddling the Columbia River between Hood River, Oregon, and Goldendale, Washington. The majority of the region’s bounty flows out of the Gorge via commercial packhouses and semi trucks. The nonprofit Gorge Grown Food Network aims to change that. Mobilizing farmers, food producers and community members using the slogan “20 by 2020,” Gorge Grown’s goal is for 20 percent of the food eaten by Gorge residents to come from local farms and ranches by the year 2020.

Stevenson, Washington hosts a farmer's market as part of the Gorge Grown Food Network. Photo by Jan Sonnenmair

Through small grants, a Mobile Market, and the cultivation of strong food communities in small towns up and down the river, Gorge Grown strives for a future where more of what is produced in the Gorge is eaten in the Gorge. Edible Portland documents Gorge Grown’s trajectory over the past six years in our summer issue—but we didn’t have room to include this great story by Kerry Newberry about the birth of the Mosier, Oregon farmers’ market:

While Gorge Grown was building its program and establishing the Hood River farmers’ market, residents of Mosier planned their own local food revolution. During the winter of 2010, ten Mosier residents took part in “Menu for the Future,” a reading course sponsored by the Northwest Earth Institute. They were inspired to do something to connect residents to their food and farmers. As was true with Gorge Grown Food Network, the group considered a number of options and decided to start a farmers’ market.

The market kicked off the first week of July 2011. Through advertisements and word of mouth, the group rounded up about ten farmers and other vendors to set up on Mosier’s main drag. Their chief obstacle was figuring out how to close the street for a safe pedestrian market space. Mosier officials had never dealt with street closures before, and the market’s planners quickly became discouraged.

As small town luck would have it, the volunteer fire department was called out the afternoon of the first market. On the way back from the call, one of the firemen recognized the market’s need, and voluntarily pulled the fire truck up to the street, effectively closing it to traffic and starting a tradition that continues today. During the high desert’s summer heat, the firemen set out their portable water supply as a wading pool for kids to splash in.

Emily Reed, one of the market’s founders, says the Gorge Grown Mobile Market became “the anchor store” of Mosier’s market. About 200 people attended each farmers’ market—a considerable number, considering that Mosier’s total population rings in at 421. Between 10 and 14 vendors regularly set up booths.

Reed is documenting Mosier’s experience with the farmers’ market, and she has presented the results of the market’s first year at the OSU Small Farms Conference. She reports that other Oregon towns are eager to read about their market and replicate its success.

Read more about Gorge Grown Food Network, the Mobile Market and the Gorge’s new crop of farmers’ markets on p. 26 of the summer issue of Edible Portland.

Transport revolutions: Viva Las Vegas?

Jun 272012
 

Editor’s note: Writer and urban planner Tim Sullivan traveled the West this spring by bike, bus, foot and several other non-auto modes, as part of a journey to discover how revolutions in transportation are changing the region. He’s at work on a book on the subject. In this scene, he looks for the future in Las Vegas, of all places.

By Tim Sullivan

I had spent the morning walking around North Las Vegas in the zip code of 89031, which in early 2012 was named the foreclosure capital of the United States.  Nearly one in 100 houses in the zip code was filing for foreclosure. It was a microcosm of the breakdown that occurred throughout the brand-new, fast-growing West.

The houses in 89031 looked like average stucco boxes, but you could see the cheapness in the streets that were supposed to connect them. Like many other places that had experienced sharply declining real estate values, the design of the new subdivisions of North Las Vegas restricted its residents to driving and lacked quality public space. Las Vegas had been called the city that started the 21st century, but the reality was that it had driven the auto-centric model of the 20th century into the ground.

The person who had been showing me around in North Las Vegas, a retired planner, pointed out how outdated design standards had led to minimal five-foot treeless sidewalks blocked by utility poles, and politics had led to walls around every subdivision with few entries.

You likely couldn’t walk out of your subdivision here, and if you could, you couldn’t walk side by side with another person. These were traffic sewers. We had stood in one of the empty wide roads between the subdivisions with a view of unbroken walls and a dead-end into the desert.

But before we parted, she offered some hope. She mentioned there was new blood in the ranks of the engineers who ran the Las Vegas valley’s public works departments. They were beginning to shake up the standards and confront the politics.

A few hours and a long, sweaty bike ride later, I walked in downtown Las Vegas with one of those engineers. Jorge Cervantes had come to the City of Las Vegas as an assistant traffic engineer and had risen through the ranks, recently becoming the city’s public works director. As a young engineering student, Cervantes had been taught that a roadway existed to move vehicles.

But as he saw the results of his work, Cervantes realized that he couldn’t eliminate congestion – one of the traffic engineer’s primary charges – simply by adding more lanes. Like some others throughout the profession, he realized that streets were for moving people, not cars.

Now Cervantes was building over the wreckage of the real estate crash. He believed that rethinking streets as richer places that moved people rather than cars could provide the foundation for reclaiming Las Vegas’ future. He had led the changing of the rules that governed how the city’s streets were built. And then he started to build.

The new Casino Center Boulevard.

We walked until we came to what had become the centerpiece of the City’s downtown streets: Casino Center Boulevard, which swept through downtown Las Vegas in an alternate vision of the future. Instead of the monolithic asphalt, there were red-painted bus lanes running down the center, islands of meadow grass, wide sidewalks and palm trees, and animated transit stations punctuated by repurposed neon signs.

The asphalt auto lanes that usually dominated American streets were pinched to one each way, just a piece of a larger, richer picture. Where most streets in Las Vegas and the West felt like autoways that happened to allow people, this felt like a street for people that happened to allow buses and cars to move through. Where most western streets left people one option, this gave them many.

Its design was a revolt against a hundred 20th century engineering notions, each of which was a point of contention between Cervantes and the “old-school engineers” in his shop. The first was a Robin Hood capture of two traffic lanes taken from the car to give to the Regional Transportation Commission’s bus rapid transit system. This was engineer heresy – Cervantes consciously created more congestion. “Even if we lost capacity it was worth the trade,” he said.

Then there were smaller things. The engineers gave the street corners a smaller radius, which gave more space to pedestrians while forcing cars to slow down before they turned. They colored the bus lane concrete a ruddy red to communicate that the space belonged to transit. They made the sidewalks as wide as the vehicle lanes.

The new street had confused drivers initially, but it had drawn and inspired those who began to rebuild Las Vegas. We walked through a budding arts district, where two business owners stood outside a shop. “Hey Jorge,” one of them said to Cervantes.

This street had the same width as those I had seen in North Las Vegas, but Casino Center created a different world within it. Whereas most new streets in Las Vegas Valley had been hastily crammed through new subdivisions during the good times, Casino Center had been thoughtfully crafted amid vacant lots in bad times.

Unlike in the rest of the city, the street would lead the way forward, not be dragged along by the whims of the market. It announced that being a street in a new American desert city didn’t necessarily mean a bleak tunnel of asphalt. The humanity and personality of this one street gave a hint of what a future less focused on the automobile might look like.

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