Baoshan, China On Sept. 30, 2009, Anne Castellina fielded an e-mail from Doug Morris, a fellow US National Park Service retiree. Did the former Alaska park superintendent, Mr. Morris wondered, feel like flying to China in November as a volunteer consultant? ‘Sure,’ Ms. Castellina said. In October, she drafted a lesson plan about ‘park interpretation’ modeled on consulting she’d done for the US National Park Service (NPS) in Zambia. Five weeks after their initial communiqué, Castellina and Morris arrived in Baoshan, an untouristy Chinese city in western Yunnan Province. The retired Americans had come to advise senior managers of Yunnan national parks and nature reserves. For two days, they taught park-interpretation skills at an upscale Baoshan hotel. Then they boarded a bus to Gaoligong Mountain National Nature Reserve, a UNESCO-recognized protected area on the border between China and Burma (Myanmar), where they supervised a two-day outdoor training. Castellina and Morris were the first representatives of Global Parks, a Virginia-based nonprofit that sends retired conservation professionals to protected areas around the world. Launched in January 2009, Global Parks markets its projects as complements to consulting sponsored by the NPS’s Office of International Affairs. Todd Koenings, […]
BP Plc’s oil spill may drive down the Gulf Coast’s shore-area property values by 10 percent for at least three years, according to CoStar Group Inc. Losses may total $4.3 billion along the 600-mile (966- kilometer) stretch from the Louisiana bayous to Clearwater, Florida, the property-information service estimates. ‘It’s just another blow to an already depressed real estate market, Norm Miller, CoStar’s vice president of analytics, said yesterday in a telephone interview from San Diego. ‘The best thing you can do if you’re in real estate in this area is bide your time, don’t panic and don’t try to sell in this environment. Falling real-estate values are one consequence of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history as oil keeps gushing from a BP well once pumped by the Deepwater Horizon rig. An April 20 explosion there killed 11 workers. Oil washing ashore will further harm property values in an area where Moody’s Economy.com estimates prices fell as much as 34 percent from the peak of the U.S. residential real estate market in 2006. The median U.S. home price was $173,100 in April, down 25 percent from July 2006, according to the Chicago-based National Association of […]
On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid. Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war — the best kind — and pushed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish line. Or so I thought. Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious. ‘Boys,’ he told a few of us aides in his suite after the news conference, ‘if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here.’ But I wasn’t listening. America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power […]
Whites are on the verge of becoming a minority among newborn children in the U.S., marking a demographic shift that is already reshaping the nation’s politics and economy. The Census reported Thursday that nonwhite minorities accounted for 48.6% of the children born in the U.S. between July 2008 and July 2009, gaining ground from 46.8% two years earlier. The trajectory suggests that minority births will soon eclipse births of whites of European ancestry. ‘The question is just when,’ said Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. He guesses the demographic milestone will be crossed in the next few years, and could happen as early as 2011. America’s changing face has transformed race relations from the traditional divide of black and white to a more complex mix of race, language and religion. There are new strains on schools and social services, while immigration has emerged as one of the nation’s most contentious issues-as evidenced by Arizona’s recent law that makes illegal immigration a state crime. A number of forces are pushing the U.S. toward a ‘majority minority’ future. The median age of the white population is older than that of […]
Austerity is a word much found on the lips of politicians and economists at the moment; but it is seldom heard from technologists. And although the idea that ‘less is more has many adherents in architecture, design and fashion, the technology industry has historically espoused the opposite view. Products should have as many features as possible; and next year’s version should have even more. As prices fall, what starts off as a fancy new feature quickly becomes commonplace-try buying a phone without a camera, or a car without electric windows-prompting companies to add new features in an effort to outdo their rivals. Never mind if nobody uses most of these new features (this article is being typed into word-processing software from 1997, for instance, but it seems to work perfectly well). In an arms race, more is always more. But now there are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatigue among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
