Conservation Outreach: Saving The Nature That Lies Between The Parks
Teatown is rapidly developing a reputation as the foremost environmental organization in the Hudson Hills and Highlands, providing conservation leadership to this bioregion, which encompasses most of Westchester and Putnam Counties, and parts of Dutchess, Orange and Rockland Counties. Teatown takes an active role in state, county and community efforts to protect open space and natural areas.
Through sponsorship of the Hudson Hills and Highlands Environmental Leaders Learning Alliance (ELLA), Teatown provides assistance to civic leaders in crafting practical solutions to environmental issues and helps land owners and residents become more “nature friendly between the parks.” ELLA’s mission is to bring together town-appointed members of environmental commissions from across New York’s Hudson Hills and Highlands to strengthen environmental protection at a regional level, through environmental training, sharing lessons learned, and fostering collaboration. Launched in 2008 under a multiyear grant from New York's Department of Environmental Conservation, the Alliance has good representation from the several dozens towns and villages whose conservation advisory council members are the principal beneficiaries. At each ELLA workshop, citizens who serve on their town or village’s environmental review committees receive training and insight into specific local challenges such groups face each month. For example, ELLA workshop topics have included background of locally invasive species, and detecting and protecting vernal pools. ELLA members have access to a resource library.
In 2008, Teatown and the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference established a partnership on a new effort to provide assistance to local trail programs in Putnam and Westchester Counties. Launched in July 2008, the “Hudson Hills and Highlands Community Trail Program” is one part of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference’s larger effort to expand its reach east of the Hudson River from New York City to Columbia County. For nearly 100 years, New York-New Jersey Trail Conference volunteers have helped public agencies provide safe and responsible access to open space from New York City west to the Delaware Water Gap and north to the Catskills.
Read more about this topic: Teatown Lake Reservation
Famous quotes containing the words conservation, saving, nature, lies and/or parks:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community.”
—Marita Golden, educator, author. Saving Our Sons, p. 188, Doubleday (1995)
“Since everything in nature answers to a moral power, if any phenomenon remains brute and dark, it is that the corresponding faculty in the observer is not yet active.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Here lies my dear wife, a sad slattern and a shrew.
If I said I regretted her, I should lie too.”
—Anonymous. From H. J. Loaring’s Curious Records (1872)
“Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)