It has been more than a month since my last post and, due to papers, tests, and presentations on isotopic fractionation and water quality in Arkansas (it isn't great and doesn't seem to be getting much better), I still don't have anything prepared to blog about. While I hope to improve on my blogging frequency once the semester ends and summer begins, here are a few interesting items to tide you over:
First, I want to thank everyone who came to my talk at the Arkansas Literary Festival. The festival was a great success and I recommend checking it out next year. My talk went well (at least in my opinion!) and we had a great discussion afterwards on parks and trails policy and how to move forward.
I've written a few pieces on master plans, planning, and ideas for future trails in Arkansas, but Mason Ellis over at Life in the Rock, recently wrote a much better and incredibly interesting piece on Little Rock's current and historical parks master plans. I encourage you to check it out. It has great maps and some images from John Nolen's 100 year-old master plan for the city, which I frequently cited in my presentations on Fourche Creek as evidence that the city has repeatedly missed opportunities to preserve, and utilize as greenspace, Fourche Bottoms and the rest of the city's creeks and associated floodplains despite being told to do so a hundred years ago. Roughly five years ago, Little Rock assembled a committee to draft an Open Space Policy Initiative. The draft and comment area are now gone as far as I can tell, but you can still see what the city was thinking about at the time at: http://www.littlerock.org/ParksRecreation/blogInformation.aspx
As far as I know (please leave a comment or let me know if I'm wrong!) this draft never got its day in front of the board of directors and never was voted on.
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