There are very few parks that compare to a project like this. Imagine a 33-mile park that connects shopping districts, subdivisions and business districts.

In the past, our tradition was to rename parks only for an individual related to the life of the park.

We take too much of our heritage for granted. Harriman State Park is not Mt. Vernon. Nor is it Yosemite. But heritage cannot be measured on a scale...

[The marine park was established in 1979.] Many have marine parks, ... But Bonaire was the first island-wide marine park. When tourists came diving, they brought spear guns. We stopped allowing that. You either progress or regress -- there is no other way.

As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power.

A pretty face had been damaged by acne scars and she wore and extra forty pounds on her frame like a threat. Her eyes were dull with anger disguised as apathy. If she kept on her current path, she'd grow into the type of person who fed her kids Doritos for breakfast and purchased angry bumper stickers with lots of exclamation points. But right now, she was just another in a long line of pissed-off small-town girls with a shitty outlook.