By George Dusenbury, Executive Director, The Trust for Public Land in Georgia Not much happens in Atlanta without Marcia Bansley noticing. In the early 1970s, long before becoming the first executive director of Trees Atlanta, she saw bulldozers chewing through green hills on the south side of Interstate 285, making way for a new development. […]
Category: People, Places & Parks
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Who Is Your (Green) Hero?
Cox Conserves Heroes Award Celebrates Ten Years Tyrene Hodge, Senior Manager, CSR Environmental Sustainability with Cox Enterprises and George Dusenbury, Executive Director for The Trust for Public Land in Georgia Heroes don’t always wear capes. Sometimes they wear work gloves and carry shovels. Conservation heroes commit time and energy to advocating for parks and greenspaces […]
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Why Clarkston, Georgia Has Made Parks a Priority, and What Other Communities Can Learn from this Small City
By Ted Terry, Mayor of Clarkston, Georgia and George Dusenbury, The Trust for Public Land’s Executive Director in Georgia Tucked between Stone Mountain and Decatur lies the tiny community of Clarkston. Thirteen thousand people from more than 40 countries live inside this 1.4 square mile city, making it the country’s most ethnically diverse city and […]
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We’ve Come a Long Way — What’s Next?
George Dusenbury, Executive Director, The Trust for Public Land in Georgia Where will you spend the sunny, warm days of spring? I hope you will visit Atlanta’s iconic historic sites, relax in your neighborhood park or bike on the trails that traverse our city. Those amazing public spaces are the backdrop of our lives. Have […]
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Parks + the Resilient City Revisited
By Michael Halicki, Park Pride’s Executive Director Disruptive events – both man-made and natural – have become the norm. We need only look at the last year in Atlanta to know this is true: heat waves, snowstorms, floods, hurricanes, water main breaks, an interstate collapse, traffic gridlock, and most recently, a cyber-security meltdown. It is […]
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Collaboration is the Key to a Healthy World
by Tamara Barker, UPS Chief Sustainability Officer From our global headquarters in Sandy Springs, we can now see the traffic on 400. Although our LEED Gold-certified campus includes 33 acres of woods, when a wide swath of trees along the highway easement was cleared this past winter, our view changed radically. It’s a reminder of how […]
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Get Ready to Vote for the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Act
By Andrew Feiler Advisory Council Member, The Trust for Public Land in Georgia As the 2018 legislative session came to a close a few days ago, a bipartisan group of Georgia lawmakers passed the Georgia Outdoor Stewardship Act (GOSA). As a fifth-generation Georgian, long-time advisory council member of The Trust for Public Land and an […]
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Spring for Early Pollinators
By Teri Nye, Park Pride’s Visioning Coordinator and resident botanist Signs of spring are around us! Mayapples and bloodroot are pushing up out of the soil with leaves wrapped around should there be a chill. Dogwoods are unfurling creamy white bracts and redbuds are parading fuchsia flowers on each still-bare branch. What welcome sights! Once […]
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Georgia Could Become a Conservation Leader for the Rest of the Country
By Whit Fosburgh, CEO, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership Georgia is one of the most biologically diverse states in the nation, making it one of the best places in the country to hunt and fish. Hunters across Georgia – and the country – flock to the state because of its outstanding whitetail deer and quail hunting, […]
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Imagining the Future of the Chattahoochee River
By Walt Ray, Chattahoochee Program Director, The Trust for Public Land in Georgia I grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the Allegheny River serves as the backdrop for daily life. It is ever-present, ever-flowing. Everyone talks about the river. How high is the water level? What did you catch on your last fishing trip? How […]
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HARD WORK TAKES MANY HANDS
By George Dusenbury, Georgia State Director, The Trust for Public Land 2017 was a bit of a transitional year for The Trust for Public Land in Georgia. We spent a lot of time renewing ties with old acquaintances and building ties with new ones. As an organization, we have big dreams, and we know that […]
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The Importance of Vision
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Proverbs 29:18 By Michael Halicki, Park Pride’s Executive Director People often think of nonprofits as mission driven organizations. While mission is vital to defining what an organization does, it is the vision that defines what you aim to achieve. In these uncertain times, it is vision, not mission, […]
Posted inPeople, Places & Parks, Thought Leader, Uncategorized
Pursuing Resiliency on a Regional Scale
By George Dusenbury, Trust for Public Land A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the release of the City of Atlanta’s Resiliency Strategy. The City is to be congratulated for being named one of the world’s 100 Resilient Cities, and for having Otis Rolley of the Rockefeller Foundation calling Atlanta’s Resiliency […]
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The Future of Atlanta is Green
Since the Mayoral Forum on Greenspace, many of the candidates responded to a questionnaire with questions related to greenspace policy and what the future of Atlanta’s parks, trees, trails, and watersheds would look like under their respective administration. Read the candidates’ responses on Park Pride’s website, and vote for the greener good! Below is a column […]
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The Power of “We” Part 5
The Atlanta BeltLine Partnership is promoting solutions to Atlanta’s affordable housing needs via a series of articles from our public, private, philanthropic, nonprofit, and community partners who – through “The Power of We” – can help define a coordinated set of policies, programs, and resources that build and preserve affordable living opportunities for all. Recently, Enterprise Community Partners discussed the […]
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What Nature Gives, What Nature Needs
Over the next several months, The Nature Conservancy will share our thoughts on the critical need for adequate, reliable funding for land and water conservation in Georgia. We hope the ideas we present will inform the dialogue about why investments to create and maintain parks, green spaces and conservation lands are critical for economic success and […]
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9 Ways You Can Save a Tree
By Judy Yi, Director of Education, Trees Atlanta Why not 10 ways? Why not save a whole forest? We offer 9 simple ways you can save a tree as a reminder that protecting our urban forest does not have to be a perfect or complex solution. It just takes you and me doing what we […]
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CLIMATE CHANGE, PARIS ACCORD, AND ATLANTA’S TREES
By Joe Thomas, Donor and Public Relations Coordinator, Trees Atlanta In the wake of the federal government’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord—the historic worldwide agreement addressing climate change signed by then-President Obama — we have to get serious about the climate crisis at the local level. Now is the time for states, municipalities, and neighborhoods […]
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Green Return: How Investing in Trees Benefits Atlanta
By Dave Simpson What if Trees Atlanta gave a gift valued at $10 Billion to the people of Atlanta? By at least one measurement, we’ve done just that. A single street tree can provide over $90,000 of direct benefits over the course of its lifetime (Burden, 2006), and Trees Atlanta has planted and distributed over […]
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The Importance of Parks and Trails to Our Health
John A. Steward, M.P.H. John A. Steward, R.E.H.S., MPH, has been a member of the faculty of the School of Public Health of Georgia State University since 2006, and manages the Partnership for Urban Health Research, a university-wide initiative to encourage research into the health of people in urban settings. He has been a registered […]
