Good weather to get out?

Sunday looks like a great day to clean up in the park - 47 degrees!

So head down to Jamesburg Park and spend a couple hours helping make the park look better.

Ahwahnee Hotel name

The fight over the name of the Ahwahnee Hotel is not over yet.

Top 10 issues for the Lower Raritan

At Rutgers, we famously sit "on the banks of the Old Raritan." So it has been great watching the university become increasingly interested in the river over the past decade.

A great place to start is this list of the Top 10 Environmental Problems facing the Lower Raritan Watershed in 2019. The list is written by Heather Fenyk, President of the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership. Her list is great because it integrates scientific issues like biodiversity with institutional issues like the inability to develop a regional planning framework.

the food state we're in

Michele Byers writes a regular column, published in a variety of New Jersey papers, called The State We're In. Foodies will find her latest column interesting as it links regenerative agriculture with other topics including climate change and human health.

True costs of online mapping?

In a piece on The Medium, Jason Voiovich asks whether the utility of Google Maps is worth the hidden costs. Google long ago moved past being a search company and is now an information broker. But his reminder of how much of that information we provide was a good read at the start of the semester.

Post needs a map

This post of 10 Cultural Landsmarks in Section would be great if only it had a map. And maybe came with a plane ticket.

The power of where?

Shimonti Paul writes in "Maps define ‘The Power of Where’" about myriad ways that GIS and maps are serving people, ranging from basic public uses to advanced applications for emergencies. You can use a red flag to mark the spot where they call it utopian, but the piece has some nice quotes that make it worth a read.

Use at your own risk?

National Parks have always been a little dangerous. That is part of their appeal. But, while the park rangers are furloughed, some people are still using National Parks. And, explains the Washington Post, for at least three different visitors it has turned deadly.

“A casual cross country skier would want to go to Tower Falls” in Yellowstone, Wenk said. “If they suffer a heart attack — every year you have that — we wouldn’t be able to quickly respond. You might be dramatically delayed. It’s correct, people die in national parks all the time. If you can attribute [the shutdown] to people not being able to get to them for an hour and a half, that’s another story.”

Rough headline

The AP starts the new year with this rough headline:

Garbage, feces take toll on national parks amid shutdown