REDEFINING NATIONAL PARKS AND FAMILY FARMS IN A CHANGING CLIMATE
This year, 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of America’s national park system, conceived of by naturalist John Muir and made a reality by a president that savored the outdoors, Theodore Roosevelt. Truly an achievement worth celebrating.
JOHN HART, Author, An Island in Time
“I think probably everyone here agrees with the idea of preserving nature,” said Hart. “When you unpack that it turns out to be a very, very complicated thing to do, with many different ideas about how to do it.”
JORDAN FISHER SMITH, Author, Engineering Eden
He cited Howard Zahniser, author of the Wilderness Act of 1964, who famously said,
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“we should be guardians of wilderness, not gardeners.” “I think that encapsulates a tension that runs through all of these fields, all of these struggles,” said Hart. “I’ve just realized that perhaps both gardening and being a guardian are appropriate at different times and places. And that they both are components of what we can simply call stewardship; stewardship being sometimes to back way off, and sometimes to wade in.”