Impact Per Acre on Real People (IPARP)

Sep 13, 2010 by steve

It’s our metric. This will be how we measure success.

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What draws me to works like Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods and the part of his message that resonates with me is that the analysis is about the impact that our de-natured existence has on our children; that it has had on us; and that it will have on future generations.

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We need the conversation to continue to be relevant to everyone: to those in dense metropolitan areas, areas of urban blight, suburbs, farmland, and rural and wild areas alike.

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To me, the crisis is for everyday people going about their everyday lives. It’s about the individual human experience and the loss of opportunities to interact with nature. Little nature as much as big nature.

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Ours is a grass-roots effort because it’s a grass-roots problem and a grass-roots opportunity. From the standpoint of what we pursue (as opposed to how we pursue it – a post for another time) we distinguish ourselves from the Trust for Public Land, the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund because we don’t just want to pursue grand plans to save substantial areas of habitat for the sake of nature – we want to preserve nature for the sake of individuals with the most to gain and the most at stake, beginning (but not ending) with geographical proximity: The lot next door, the patch of woods down the street, the hiking trails around the corner, the meadow near the highway as well as the vistas in the mountains.

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In prioritizing our program initiatives, the analysis will begin and end with the question: What is the impact of this effort on the every-day lives of real people? What is the IPARP?