Thursday, February 26, 2015

Connecting dots

I first used the term, "connecting dots," in 1997. At that time, we'd just daylighted the salt marsh for the Ghost Nets site. For the first time in 100 years, fresh water was meeting salt water.

The line of rocks in this picture was the highest known storm surge line, noted from a 1994 flood. When the Ghost Nets estuary was daylighted, I marked the line to track the effects of sea level rise.

More recently, on the www,gulftogulf.org website, we've been creating a map that has entered some sites that have been restored and discussed on the website. These have been intermixed with some of the locations of our Gulf to Gulf guests. http://www.gulftogulf.org/map/ That is another kind of connecting the dots.

Screen shot from the www.gulftogulf.org website locating some of the webcast participants https://vimeo.com/111373730 and some of the restored sites.

Each restored site reconnects habitat. But when we start restoring more sites, we can reknit entire bioregions. The dots that I can see connecting include, restoration locations, people active in restoration issues, virtuality, which allows us to talk to each other and generate new ideas, without adding air travel to global pollutions. These purple dots are only a handful of those locations. If you go to the site and click on each dot, more information will come up. I hope for a day when this pale green map turns purple.