Participatory Planning for a Promised Land: Citizen-Led, Comprehensive Land Use Planning in New York’s Adirondack Park

New York’s Adirondack Park is internationally recognized for its biological diversity. Greater in size than Yellowstone, Everglades, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Park combined, the Adirondacks are the largest protected area within the Northern Appalachian/Acadian Eco-Region and within the contiguous United States. Ecologists, residents of the Park, and others are concerned about rapid land use change occurring within the borders of the Park. Almost half of the six million acres encompassed by the Park boundary is privately-owned, where 80% of land use decisions fall within the jurisdiction of local governments. The comprehensive planning process of one such local government, the Town of Willsboro, New York, was the focus of a Participatory Action Research (PAR), single case study. Using a PAR, mixed methods approach, community-led comprehensive planning integrated natural science, technology and citizen participation. I evaluated the role of PAR in helping to transform conventional land use planning practice into a more democratic, environmentally conscious, and durable civic responsibility. Stakeholder viewpoints about the local environmental setting revealed deep connections to nature. Findings of the research indicate that comprehensive land use planning capacity increases when citizens increase their scientific and ecological literacy, especially when tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are used for data collection and analysis. Applying ecologically-based comprehensive planning utilizing a PAR framework improved citizen’s confidence in land use decision-making and also expanded science literacy. PAR holds great promise as a methodological framework to bring together ecologically-focused natural science with citizen-led collaborative land use planning. Areas of further research identified during this study include assessing age-specific gaps in stakeholder participation, evaluating the relationship between plan recommendations and regulatory implementation, and investigating factors that contribute to a culture of community engagement. Local land use planning decisions have important cumulative impacts on protected area land development at the local and regional scale. A comprehensive plan can reflect an emergent process, where the primacy of community self-determination and consensus-building yields recognition of the link between, and sanctity of, nature, home, and homeland

Spotlight on Construction: Expansion and Renovation of Georgia Southern University’s Henderson Library Spurred by Quintupling of Student Body

The article reports on the expansion and renovation of Georgia Southern University\u27s Henderson Library. The Zach S. Henderson Library has been the hub of academic life at Georgia Southern University for more than 30 years. The library has been the focus of an extensive expansion and renovation to help meet the needs of the university\u27s growing student body. The first phase of the $22.75 million project opened on October 1, 2006. The original building included 109,515 square feet of space. The additional building will feature seating on the first, second and third floors and a balcony on the fourth floor that looks down on the third floor and through huge windows

Is there a link between the divorce revolution and the cohabitation boom?

Over the past decades, divorce and cohabitation have increased dramatically throughout Europe. Divorce has fundamentally altered the institution of marriage from a life-long union to one that may dissolve. Cohabitation allows couples to live together without undertaking the vows of marriage, but also allows couples to avoid the potentially higher costs of divorce. Thus, divorce and cohabitation seem to be intrinsically linked. Here we theorize how the increase in divorce may be linked to the increase in cohabitation on the macro-, meso-, and micro- levels. Using focus group data from 8 countries, we explore how divorce may have changed attitudes and beliefs concerning marriage and cohabitation. We then investigate whether survey data and official statistics in 16 countries provide evidence consistent with a link. While exogenous factors have been important for the increase in cohabitation, we argue that the divorce revolution has been a catalyst for the cohabitation boom

Department of Pathology History

This departmental history was written on the occasion of the UND Quasquicentennial in 2008.https://commons.und.edu/departmental-histories/1105/thumbnail.jp

Brain-stem serotonin transporter availability in maternal uniparental disomy and deletion Prader–Willi syndrome

Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) is a rare condition because of the deletion of paternal chromosomal material (del PWS), or a maternal uniparental disomy (mUPD PWS), at 15q11-13. Affective psychosis is more prevalent in mUPD PWS. We investigated the relationship between the two PWS genetic variants and brain-stem serotonin transporter (5-HTT) availability in adult humans. Mean brain-stem 5-HTT availability determined by [123I]-beta-CIT single photon emission tomography was lower in eight adults with mUPD PWS compared with nine adults with del PWS (mean difference −0.93, t = −2.85, P = 0.014). Our findings confirm an association between PWS genotype and brain-stem 5-HTT availability, implicating a maternally expressed/paternally imprinted gene, that is likely to account for the difference in psychiatric phenotypes between the PWS variants