November 2nd, 2024
A Speech on the Subject to Combatting Climate Change through the Preservation Green Historic Places.
Last month I was surprised and flattered when I received a letter dated September 13, 2024 from Bénédicte de Montlaur, President and CEO of the World Monuments Fund, which read as follows:
On behalf of the World Monuments Fund (WMF) it is my honor to invite you to participate in our annual World Monuments Fund Summit taking place on Saturday, October 26, 2024, in New York City.”
The World Monuments Summit brings together WMF’s global team of experts, partners, thought leaders, ad guests for an afternoon of discussions on cultural preservation at Rockefeller Center, home of WMF’s headquarters. The 2024 Summit will include three to four panel discussions, each with distinct guest speakers and topics. We would be honored if you would participant in a panel exploring climate resiliency of historic parks and gardens, sharing your thoughts on how these green spaces can serve as tools to help the communities associated with them adapt to and mitigate the impacts of climate change.
As a leading environmentalist and landscape preservationist with a deep commitment to the significance of place, your insights would be an invaluable addition to the conversation. Your groundbreaking work to revitalize and preserve Central Park would also illustrate the importance of cross-sector collaboration and stakeholder engagement in securing the future of historic parks and gardens around the world.
It would be a privilege to spotlight your work and include your voice on this panel. The discussion will be moderated by author and art historian Caroline Weber; other guest speakers we are reaching out to include Meredith Wiggins, WMF Senior Director of Climate Adaption, garden designer Madison Cox; and Julia Watson, a leading expert on Indigenous nature-based technologies.
We hope you will join us. Please contact me if you have any questions and accept my gratitude for your consideration.
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Blushing with “Who-me?” surprise, I was happy to accept Mme. Montlaur’s invitation, but knowing practically nothing about climate science, I was in something of a quandary when it came to connecting the amelioration of global warming with my favorite topic – Central Park as nature, art, and landscape design. Nevertheless, I persuaded myself that it was worth a try and accepted Mme.de Montlaur’s invitation and set about composing what I hope to be a reasonably appropriate speech for the occasion.
Unfortunately, I found myself indisposed on Friday and was dissuaded by my daughter Lisa who thought that I should not go out in public the next day. I then called Ms. Anne-Julie Revault, the organizer of the event, which was being held at the World Monuments Fund headquarters located on the 25th floor of 600 Fifth Avenue in Rockefeller Center, and she graciously accepted my unlucky last-minute regrets.
When I woke up on Saturday feeling chagrinned about missing what promised to be an interesting learning experience for me, I began to think of what I might have been able to contribute to the colloquium and sat down at my computer to write the words I could imagine myself saying if I had been one of the speakers as planned. An hour later when I had completed expressing the thoughts that I had been turning over in my mind in anticipation of sharing them with an audience, I took consolation in the notion that I, in fact, enjoy something better than a temporary audience: the one-hundred friends who are my regular journal readers! Below, therefore, is my speech on the WMF’s assigned topic of combatting climate change through the preservation green historic places. When you have read it, should you wish to do so, please respond by email with any observations or questions you may have, and I will attempt to keep a dialog between us alive.
For now, please pretend with me that you were sitting in an auditorium on the 25th Floor of 600 Fifth Avenue in Rockefeller Center at 2:00 PM last Saturday, October 26, and listening to the World Monument Fund’s Senior Director of Climate Adaption and colloquium chairman Meredith Wiggins’s opening remarks:
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“Good afternoon. The Institutions that are represented today in this panel, related to the preservation of green historic spaces, are vital to fostering an ethos that mandates conservation practices and management modalities capable of redirecting the scientifically anticipated effects of climate change on the nature of all places. They serve as role models in the preservation of all of our world’s great green places as well as the smaller ones that are collectively vital to life on the planet. Here are the words that Betsy Rogers would have spoken had she been able to be with us today.”
Now, dear reader, please welcome me as I take my place at the fictive podium and glance down at my script for the following speech, which begins with a reiteration of the first two paragraphs of my September 6, 2024 journal entry.
When we speak of “a sense of place,” what does this mean? What is it exactly that we sense? How indeed do we sense a place – its nature, its character, its genius – and how can we make sense of that which we perceive with our senses?
From these questions spring others: How does geography – topography, climate, vegetation, and natural resources – confer collective and personal meaning on place? There is something intangible and atmospheric that one can sense in the earth and sky. Mountains, plains, oceans, rivers, vegetation – these geographical features are primary determinants of place-consciousness. Climate, too, is a principal source of place-impression. Its modulations by technological means are minutely local, constituting only small atmospheric modifications within a macro-environment that is much grander, less predictable, and more difficult to control. The duration and intensity of summer and winter, the character of vegetation, the levels of precipitation – these environmental givens form a vocabulary of seasonality that is a crucial part of our sense of place, which is why the weather is always newsworthy.
Now, for my further thoughts on the subject, please bear with me as I change from the voice of a characteristically positive-thinking public speaker to one of journalistic candor as a purveyor of personal opinions within the context of a website posting of a straightforward thematically conceived entry.
Central Park has a cachet that is perhaps an even more potent identifier of New York City than the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and the 131-foot-high Central Park Tower at 217 West 57th Street, now the second-tallest building in New York City and the 15th tallest building in the world. The scroll-down photographic online sales pitch on the part of the broker for the real estate developer of this 2020 addition to New York City’s Billionaires’ Row, is not simply the splendor of its penthouse apartments’ high-story sweeping views of all of Manhattan and a significant slice of the Hudson River and New Jersey but also includes, through a rehearsed series of video images where scrolling film footage shows the opportunities the park offers at ground level for a handsome jogger to run across the Bow Bridge and a pretty young woman to bike down the middle of the Mall. how fortunate one is to be able to enter Central Park at the Seventh-Avenue-and-Fifty-ninth Street entrance and in a few self-propelled movements be biking alongside a large lake, bird-watching in the woodland known as the Ramble, and walking up the steep slope of a the second-tallest rock outcrop in the park to enjoy the view from the Belvedere of Turtle Pond, the Great Lawn and several handsome apartment buildings along Central Park West.
Such recreational opportunities, of course, are not singular privileges for the sky-high dwellers in the condominium apartments of Central Park Tower, since Central Park’s forty-two million visitors per year include, in addition to tourists, the residents in the neighborhoods on the east, west, and north sides of the park, many of whom spend time in the park on an almost daily basis and are thereby classed as “regulars.”
One of the notable aspects of being a Central Park regular is being physically aware of the effects of the weather, as the seasons shift and the park changes from being a getaway from the hot streets during a summer heatwave to a “don’t-forget-to-wear-your- mittens” walk on a snowy day.
Few people realize that the weather as experienced in Central Park on any given day is the weather for the entire metropolitan area of New York that has been foreseen and recorded in the national weather forecast, which has been the case ever since 1919 when Central Park has had installed within its confines instruments that take readings, which are relayed to New York City’s official National Weather Service station, which is located on the grounds of Brookhaven National Laboratory on eastern Long Island. With gauges for taking continuous measurement of weather conditions located in equipment atop Belvedere Castle and a fenced compound a few feet south of its surrounding terrace, together with current communication technology, the park contains the means of tracking over time the aberrations in the weather that are some of the effect of climate-change fostered by such factors as greenhouse gas emissions and non-renewable energy sources such as fossil fuels. This, however, is not as relevant to the conversation we are having today about how humans as sentient creatures with social and political goals can, through education and a commitment to a particular place such as Central Park, expel the serpent from the Garden of Eden by the elimination of atmospheric carbon dioxide caused by coal, oil, and natural gas plants. Nevertheless, it is the sense of the preciousness of a particular place occupying the human soul that fuels the minds and hearts of Central Park lovers and prompts the executive officers, management staff, and, most significantly, the Central Park Conservancy’s zone gardeners, and volunteers, to pursue a best-practices management ethos as taught by the Conservancy’s Institute for Urban Parks Institute.
To understand why the Central Park Conservancy is has been the exemplar and thereby progenitor of several other public-private associations dedicated to place-based historic park preservation in general and the ongoing upkeep and visitor services provided by other remarkable urban parks, it is necessary now to give you a brief review the history of the Conservancy beginning with its birth in 1980 as an outgrowth of the Central Park Task Force, an earlier private not-for-profit organization I had founded to attempt to reverse the park’s dire condition caused by rampant vandalism, petty crime, and lax routine maintenance practices by Department of Parks employees at the time.
As my recent online journal entries give evidence, Central Park is a great work of land art that constitutes an open book of natural history as well as an important chapter in the annals of landscape design history. My source of greatest pride today as the founder of the Central Park Conservancy is that the organization became a role model for private citizen efforts to found public-private park conservancies in several other cities outside of New York. In Louisville, the Parklands of Floyds Fork is an outstanding example of how the seed sown by professional historian and business executive Dan Jones fostered established in 2004 following a meeting with me and staff members of the Central Park Conservancy. I am also proud to say that Alexandre de Vogüé, a scion of the French aristocratic family that still owns the chateau and gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte, a classified national monument in France, which each year attracts 300,000 visitors was also inspired by the example of the Central Park Conservancy’s public-private partnership model.
In terms of the energizing of programs and practices to control the rate and results of climate change, we can look to the National Parks Conservation Association, which rightly claims that it has been since 1919 “the leading voice of the American people in the fight to safeguard the scenic beauty, wildlife, and historic and cultural treasures of the largest and most diverse park system in the world” as an example of a not-for-profit organization that is engaging in projects that pave the way for present and future climate-conscious designs and management practices that constitute protection from deleterious climate futures.
The National Park Service also has a website that claims, “National parks are ideal outdoor classrooms for learning about climate change. They are living laboratories where scientific study can help better understand its impacts.
In some parks, the melting of glaciers and thawing of permafrost are visible. Along the coast, many parks grapple with sea level rise. And in many Western parks, tree mortality and wildfire activity are on the rise. Science helps document the many ways climate change manifests across the National Park System.
Every year brings new publications that improve our understanding of parks in a warming world. But science does more than just document change. It can also provide important insights on potential solutions for the future.
It would be difficult to offer any prescription that can be applied to retarding climate change by a park conservancy at the local level. I believe, however, that it was through the Central Park Conservancy’s success in combatting Dutch Elm disease, an insect infestation that was imperiling the elms lining the Mall and serving as shade for pedestrians on the park’s perimeter sidewalks when, with a scientifically certified medicinal mode of elm-tree protection, Conservancy’s arboricultural team was able to save these trees, help retard further fungal infestation, and promote the extermination of the rampant pest known as the elm-bark beetle. Hopefully, citizen support will continue to be developed worldwide to protect and maintain both urban and wildness parks. In fulfilling these objectives, it is important now to understand how such constituents of climate as sunlight, water, soil, air, and topography are affected by human actions and at what costs to future life on Earth. (For a “crash course” in climate science visit this website.) Enlightened national and local leaderships are necessary now, along with active citizenries that are willing in terms of financial support and physical stewardship to dedicate both their minds and their muscles to the protection of place, which with regard to climate change is nothing less than the great green places from wilderness preserves to urban parks in order to help save the Planet Earth and its glorious firmament.
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Addendum
The Arts and Antiquities division of the New York City Department of Parks is currently presenting a group exhibition titled ALTER ECO, featuring a group of contemporary artists who are evoking alternate environmental realities, using innovative approaches and materials to encourage environmental stewardship. Wielding technology, scientific research, and invention, these artists tackle one of the significant issues facing climate activists: inspiring care beyond one’s lifetime. To learn how the works in this exhibition help facilitate an alternate experience of our environment, allowing for deeper connections over space and time, you may wish to attend the group discussion being held on Wednesday, November 6, 2024 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in the gallery on the third floor of the historic Arsenal, the Parks Department’s headquarters opposite the corner of Fifth Avenue and 64th Street in Manhattan.
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