Meaningful meetups: CNN Chief Medical Correspondent and keynote speaker Dr.Sanjay Gupta spoke on Lessons From the Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Next One, and about the healthiest people in the world, the indigenous Tsimane of the Bolivian rainforest, who take 17,000 steps a day and never sit down.
Dr. Temple Grandin, the world-renown designer of cattle handling systems, professor, best-selling author, and accomplished authority with autism, spoke on Inclusion for All Types of Minds and Bodies in Parks and Recreation. We spoke briefly about Asperger’s Syndrome while she autographed two of her books for me.
After six months of virtual interactive meetings, my mentee and I finally met in person over lunch. Despite holding the senior position in the relationship, I’ve learned a great deal from my new colleague and friend.
Outstanding observations: Phoenix is a good-looking city, surrounded by the barren teeth of spectacular mountains, and boasts a first-class convention center.
Yes, but it’s a dry heat. I quickly learned to walk on the shady side of the street. But scooting across town in a suit after dark in a 98° scorch was ridiculous.
I was invited to pose with some Pennsylvania peers who were recognized among The Best of the Best. And for the second time in my career, I accepted an award for something I didn’t earn. Standing in for the actual winner is an easy gig!
Best takeaway: It’s a fantastic privilege to learn and network with thousands of the best in the business!
Carol and I were very fortunate to meet Temple Grandin last week when she spoke at the National Recreation and Park Association’s Conference in Phoenix.
Dr. Grandin is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one-third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. In 2010, Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people.
She is also autistic and a strong advocate for those who think differently from most of the rest of the world. We have learned from her since our son was first diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome as he entered junior high school.
Temple spoke of her personal experiences navigating life experiences, and about the strength that diversity of perspectives and abilities brings to park planning—as well as all of life.
Her collaboration with the playground design firm Play & Park Structures is one of the first to address the needs of neurodivergent individuals and those with different minds who have different play needs and styles.
America’s first fully mobile environmental education facility
On this date 35 years ago I founded The Roving Nature Center, America’s first fully mobile environmental education facility. It conducted environmental education programs at all kinds of indoor and outdoor sites from Boston to Erie to Virginia Beach. It won national recognition in the Take Pride in America Awards program for its “commitment and exceptional contribution to the stewardship of America’s natural and cultural resources.” It provided jobs to nearly 400 people and sustained my family for 18 years before I sold the company in 2005. I remain very grateful to for the unique opportunities and blessings it provided me.
Of sky, sea, rock and tree, the natural beauty of Acadia National Park is astounding!
My family recently completed a trip to Acadia National Park in Maine; our first together since the kids were little and lived at home. Some highlights:
Our first ascent of Cadillac Mountain elevated us into the enveloping mist. No views today! But we did find a waterfall gushing off its side.
While blue skies make clear vistas, there’s something to be said about the moody beauty created by seafog.
We mistook directions of an easy trail for a difficult one, and accidentally climbed Acadia Mountain over angular chunks of granite as large as our car, inadvertently verifying that, yes, it was indeed difficult! In both directions! While we’ll never do that again, we’re glad to say that we did!
The scenic rocky coast of Maine absolutely commands your attention. As one co-admirer said to me, “It’s so beautiful, it’s ridiculous!”
Two hours before the diurnal high tide peak, Thunder Hole displays nature’s relentless force in a spectacular show as the in-rushing surf explosively expels air from a cave under the rock ledge.
We lunched at Jordan Pond (savoring its signature pop-overs!), ambled along its waterfront boardwalk trail, and soaked in the fabulous view of the looming Bubble Mountains.
A cruise through Frenchman’s Bay brought us delightful observations of harbor seals, harbor porpoises, and crowds of cormorants hanging out on Egg Island and its lighthouse. We cruised past a house on a rocky promontory that could be rented for just $25,000 a week (!), and around uninhabited Ironbound Island—so named because it can’t be accessed from a boat due to its sheer rock cliffs surrounding its entire perimeter—topped with a virgin fir forest.
We attended a star gazing party on Sand Beach: our first with a completely obscured sky, save for Antares at the southern horizon. But the rangers nonetheless kept us entertained with interpretive tales of nighttime glories. (And in a Truly Small World case file, the one young ranger was from Stroudsburg, where I once worked, and another visitor was from Carol’s hometown of Perkasie, and had worked with her brother!)
We stopped by the much-photographed site of the Bass Harbor Head Light. And although the sky wasn’t clear again, we gained some appreciation of its importance on that rocky crag.
At low tide, Bar Island is connected by a land bridge to the town of Bar Harbor. We trekked over and back before being marooned for nine hours until the next low tide.
The sun did put in an appearance near the end of our week, and we took to the top of Cadillac Mountain once again for a panoramic view of the four Porcupine Islands (so named for their sloping backs prickled with firs) and the rest of Frenchman’s Bay out to the Gulf of Maine.
A Hadley Point visit capped on our last evening on Mount Desert Island with delightful west and east views of a down east Maine twilight on a late August evening.
And there was so much more we didn’t see. But of sky, sea, rock and tree, the beauty is both astounding and refreshing!
When planners and developers fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.
My daughter strongly recommended I read the bestselling book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez. She helpfully loaned me her electronic copy, and I learned so much from it I bought my own copy. And in turn, I recommend it to you.
Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez
In its pages, the author argues that the gender gap is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male. It was surprising to me (being exclusively male since birth), how widely and how often this bias crops up, and how it distorts the supposedly objective data that increasingly governs our lives.
She covers a lot of territory. The book’s six parts cover Daily Life, The Workplace, Design, Going to the Doctor, Public Life, and When it Goes Wrong; and includes such intriguing chapters as Can Snow-Clearing be Sexist, Gender Neutral With Urinals, and One-Size-Fits Men.
Of particular interest to park and recreation professionals is a section addressing city and park planning and use. She cites a 2016 article in The Guardian that asked why we aren’t designing places “that work for women, not just men” and cautions that the limited datasets that track and trend data on gender make it hard to develop programs and infrastructure that factor in and meet women’s needs.
For example, planners in Vienna found that the presence of girls in parks and public playgrounds decreased after the age of 10. They subsequently found, through collecting pertinent data, that single large open spaces were the problem, because they forced girls to compete with boys for space—who largely chose not to. But when the developers subdivided the parks into smaller areas, the female dropoff was reversed.
They also addressed the park’s sport facilities. “Originally these spaces were encased in wire fencing on all sides, with only a single entrance area—around which groups of boys would congregate. And the girls, unwilling to run the gauntlet, simply weren’t going in.” The simple solution? More and wider entrances. They also subdivided the open areas and sport courts. Formal sports like basketball were kept intact, but they also provided space for more informal activities, in which girls were more likely to engage.
In another example, Malmos, Sweden, discovered a similar male bias in the way they’d traditionally been planning urban recreation for youth. “The usual procedure was to create spaces for skating, climbing and painting graffiti. The trouble was, it wasn’t ‘youth’ as a whole that was participating… It was almost exclusively boys, with girls making up only 10-20 percent of those who used the city’s youth-directed leisure spaces and facilities.” So they began asking what the girls wanted—and the resultant new areas are well-lit and split into a range of different-sized spaces on different levels.
Such a gender-equitable approach doesn’t just benefit females alone, but extends to the economy. When sports funding goes mainly to organized sports, which is dominated by boys, that which was meant to benefit everyone equally, simply doesn’t. Sometimes girls’ sports aren’t provided for at all, which means girls must pay for them privately, or not participate at all. Such detrimental consequences then ripple into the present and future health of half the population, and the overall economy. One study concluded that a certain increase in the city’s support for girls’ sports could “lead to a 14 percent reduction in future fractures due to osteoporosis, and the investment will have paid for itself.”
Perez concludes that when planners, developers and programmers “fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.” This is not a niche concern: “if public spaces are truly to be for everyone, we have to start accounting for the lives of the other half of the world.” It’s not just a matter of justice: it’s also a matter of personal health, welcoming placemaking, social equity, and simple economics. And it starts with collecting meaningful gender-sensitive data.
I’m grateful for many healthful recreational and cultural opportunities this summer.
We’ve enjoyed a couple of healthfully engaging days lately, as we continue to recover from the strains and fatigue of long-covid.
a smattering of engaging summertime pursuits
On the professional front, each third Friday in July is National Park and Recreation Professionals Day, and my office was quite busy sharing the various promotions, tributes and recognitions across the state, as we honor the many behind-the-scenes workers who keep our parks and public facilities clean, safe, and ready to use. Now in its fourth year, and celebrated by thousands of colleagues nationwide, it is quite gratifying to see the worth of my original concept embraced by so many park lovers throughout the country.
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of Arts returned to town and campus with a big welcome after a two-year pandemic hiatus.
Carol and I attended a community sing-along in which Poppa & Picker, a guitar-banjo duo, accompanied the crowd in such old favorites as In the Good Ol’ Summertime, The Happy Wanderer, This Land is Your Land, Let There Be Peace on Earth and many other timeless tunes of generations gone by. And when we picked up on You Are My Sunshine, two little preschool girls in the audience, in all their youthful zeal and abandon, lustily belted out the song they apparently knew so well, enhancing the evening’s entertainment! The Orpheus Singers punctuated the singalong with a few of their own special selections.
(I noticed that the 20-something sound tech guy wearing his ball cap backwards, didn’t sing, but kept his face and lips pressed in a slightly amused arrangement, alternating with a thumb-tapping duet on his smartphone. He did, however, suggest we sing Will the Circle Be Unbroken.)
We just missed getting the last seats for an Improv Comedy show, but did attend the Essence 2 choir concert, strolled through hundreds of artists’ booths admiring their attractive wares, and enjoyed some Peachy Paterno ice cream from the Penn State Creamery. We took in a bit of a tour of the known universe with a planetarium program and stargazing on Davey Lab’s rooftop observatory.
We dined downtown amid the crowd of collegians and soon had our fill of them. One observation I wasn’t looking to make (but regretfully have): College women’s summer fashion can be described as revealing as much of the 4 Bs as possible—breast, belly, back and bottom.
We attended a State Theater screening of the highly entertaining 1920 silent adventure film The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks, accompanied by live musicians. The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra is the world’s only year-round, professional ensemble re-creating the syncopated sounds of early musical theater, silent cinema, and vintage dance. The director encouraged the audience to interact with the show the way our young grandparents did—hissing the villains, oohing the flirting romance, and cheering the appearance and ultimate victory of Our Hero! Upon the conclusion, the audience was “kindly invited to perambulate to the Egress” during the exit music.
Speaking of the arts, I was recently able to pick up an old pastime of mine: leathercraft. On Saturday, I finished refurbishing my father’s old axe. I replaced the broken handle, buffed off the rust, sharpened the edge, and constructed a custom leather sheath. Now to fashion one for its smaller version, my old Boy Scout hatchet.
We planned to attend the Cardboard Regatta at Welch Pool, just a walk down the trail from our home. Unfortunately, the race proceeded more quickly than our arrival, as the fun flotilla of 50 colorful cardboard crafts didn’t float for very long. We did witness the soggy remains, however. (Photo courtesy of Centre Region Parks and Recreation.)
Other honorable mentions from the weekend include, but without photo coverage, are the high drama of a pair ruby-throated hummingbirds duking it out at our feeder, and witnessing a sharp-shinned hawk raiding what appeared to be an owl’s nest, and carting away a squeaking morsel in its clutches.
The lawn is crunchy in our current dry spell, but our tended-to flowers are displaying their best blooms to the mid-July sun. And we’re grateful for the physical and mental health benefits, and the life-enriching cultural opportunities that public recreation offers us this summer!
