It turns out that Sunday, January 16, 2022, was a good day to find Santa Cruz County connections in The New York Times. In yesterday's blog post, I relayed an insight from Ezra Klein, a New York Times' columnist who spent two formative years at UCSC.
Today, let me alert you to the fact that The Times ran a special section, on January 16th, called "52 Places For A Changed World." Santa Cruz County features as place #44.
The Times' list of destinations suggests that readers should "visit ... spots where visitors can be part of the solution to problems like ... climate change."
The picture above accompanies the following text:
In 2020, wildfires across California threatened some of the world’s oldest forests, including at Big Basin Redwoods and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Parks in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Thankfully, most of the parks’ mighty redwoods survived the flames, and now hope — in the form of expanded green initiatives — is dawning across Santa Cruz County. While Henry Cowell is open, as is a small section of Big Basin, with more ambitious rebuilding planned, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County is developing new hiking trails, including in the 8,500-acre San Vicente Redwoods. On the North Coast, the Cotoni-Coast Dairies, a recent addition to the California Coastal National Monument, is slated to open within the next year, with nearly 6,000 acres of coastal terraces, redwood forests and sweeping views of the Pacific. The area’s designation as a national monument will help protect its rich ecology and cultural history, including ancestral sites of the Indigenous Cotoni people.
I think that this recognition in The New York Times is wonderful, and will probably help our local tourism industry - but let me put in a plug for a slightly different thought.
Instead of advising non-residents to visit Santa Cruz County to witness a "changed world," my advice is for the current residents of Santa Cruz County. Same words, more or less, but a completely different concept. Here is an activity that can be done right here, locally. No need to take a trip.
My thought is a political thought (more or less along the lines of what Ezra Klein was talking about in his Times' article on the primacy of local politics).
You can do it right here, right where you are. Think globally, act locally. And......
Change The World!
Image Credit:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/travel/52-places-travel-2022.html
Thank you so much for your article and for expanding awareness and sensitivity on this issue of extreme importance!!!!
ReplyDelete