Your blog project was simply amazing, not least because of your readily visible mastery of the blog format. It was immediately apparent that this blog was vastly different from the others, with yours being the only blog that was formatted differently. The rest of the blog did not disappoint, as it was vastly informative about your chosen topic. The background page in particular provided detailed information, as was the ‘Mapping the Corazon’ page and its subpage. Your analysis was particularly insightful as well, pinpointing the problems with the Corazon project. My only real concern with this otherwise flawless blog was the fact that your bibliography was split into two sections. I’m not really sure why you did that, and to my way of thinking, you could probably have merged them. Other than that negligible concern, your blog is exemplary of the possibilities of blogging as a format for the dissemination of information about environmental issues.
Thanks for your comment! Our “Sources” and “Works Cited” tabs were differentiated intentionally. The “Sources” tab is aimed to present readers with a full listing of all available online resources to the project, even though we did not quote all of them in our research. The “Works Cited” section literally lists the works that are cited in the text of the pages. If you’ll notice, the text on the “Source” page tries to clarify that, where it says:
“Click here [links to Works Cited] to view the bibliography of works cited within this blog.
Below you will find a listing of outside resources related to the Corazón Transboundary Biosphere Reserve Project:”
I really enjoyed your blog and I think you did a great job. The amount of time and hard-work you put forth to research, organize, and analyze the subject matter is both obvious and enduring. The impressive and thorough solutions provided by the "Strategies for Improvement" page were especially awesome. I do have a couple of suggestions which may have added to your presentation.
First, there is substantial discussion on the consequences of weak/corrupt national governments and the potential instability they can cause for such large, transboundary projects like the Corazón TBR. Despite these issues, have there been any tensions between Honduras and Nicaragua over the project itself and their commitment to implementing it? For example, have these states received the same amount of funding and invested interest from the international organizations, such as the World Bank or the UNEP, or have there been tensions regarding these or other issues? Perhaps, there haven't been any such conflicts, but I think that a short discussion explaining any issues or the lack thereof would help to expose the reality of both the history of the situation and its current status.
Second, you pose the possible solution of using "eminent domain", as in the case of Natura 2000, to possible solve the implementation deficiencies of the project. While I agree that this an incredibly effective way to implement environmental conservation, does the lack of an organized, influential supranational organization like the European Union matter in the Latin American context? Would the involvement of such an organization with the power to declare "eminent domain" work in conjunction with with your assertion of the need for direct contact between international donors and the local community if it created a middle man?
In class, we spoke about the relativity of space. The section labeled "Miscommunication, Oversimplification, and Misrepresentation in the Corazón" in the blog clearly demonstrates the subjectivity and intricacy of geographic locations. An area like the Corazón does not mean (i.e. represent, encompass, or delineate) the same thing to all of the different groups associated with it. To the locals, it is a home; to the national governments, it is a resource and a political game; to international donors it is a preservation and an investment. With lengthy descriptions and well-informed analysis, the blog group outlines the difficulty and messiness of such a situation as biological corridors.
The group quotes that "in Latin America, one of the main challenges is that environmental resource management has traditionally been the preserve of national governments'–a trend that is in tension with the €˜classical dilemma€¦that environmental problems do not respect national borders" . This tricky statement leaves the reader with a question of weight. Does the physicality of the state become irrelevant when dealing with ecological issues, and if so, how far away are we from challenging the very legitimacy of the state itself?
Overall, this is a very thorough, well-formatted blog which raises multiple questions (in addition to the aforementioned one, who should be in charge if there is "a great deal of administrative inefficiency implementing the project"?; Can unstable governments hope to be successful in a transboundary effort if they cannot manage to keep their states secure?).
Brilliant approach to presenting what could have a drastically broad topic. My first impression of the blog was caution as to how little you guys had on the introduction page but in retrospect I can appreciate it compared to a couple of others which essentially fail to state the purpose of the blog which you guys did concisely. I have to wonder what criteria you used to cut down this rather broad concept into Miscommunication, Oversimplification and Misrepresentation? It makes sense in the broader context of the class especially when considering the concepts of overlapping culture and perception as different things mean different things to different people as do the concepts of space and territory. Just a thought. I particularly appreciated the very last section of the strategies for improvement section: incorporating local participation. I do agree that in keeping in mind the need for acknowledging the importance of stratification and scale is crucial to the advancement of the government as a whole but I also think grassroots efforts should be given far more consideration through the development of more opportunities. However I would have also liked to hear more of your personal perspectives on the strategies for improvement section mainly because it seemed to round up the project pretty well and it would have been more benefitial to the reader to get less quotations and more analysis.
I think your blog was very effective in relaying some great analysis, and I know this is a *huge* topic, but here are some things I think would have been extra additions to your analysis: Excellent linkages between Sletto’s ideas about boundary making and the process that is developing in the Corazon. However, I think this analysis could have been deepened by an investigation of the individual actors and the extents to which they tried (and were successful) at staking their claims to power within the framework of the project. This knowledge could additionally have allowed for an analysis of the extent to which this model of regionalism is effective in balancing the international/national/subnational concerns and further supported your claim that “the corazon is an example of how regional integration has been slowed at the national level/” I’d also be interested in knowing how you thought this could be tied to Dickens’ claims about State power. I did not feel that I knew enough about the individual actors in this environmental effort to either agree with Dickens’ claims that governments are maintaining a different sort of power, or (as I suspect you would claim) that this environmental effort has failed due to a lack of national power, and nations’ ability to interact on a supranational scale effectively.
This is such a fascinating topic, as so many things need to happen on every level in order for the corridor to be completed. What I find most troublesome about this project is the lack of communication between the stakeholders and the lack of proper education about the intricacies of the project. As we discussed in class, many local indigenous peoples have little idea of the repercussions or projects that are being planned in their area; likewise, stakeholders on the national level are ill-informed of the number of tribes and people affected by their actions. As you mentioned the discrepancies in the map, there is clearly a lot more coordination and agreement needed to be arranged before the next step can be taken. This dilemma brings to mind Perreault’s article on Ecuador’s indigenous peoples networking with regional, national, and international institutions. If they are to get over this developmental hitch, they should employ the strategy of jumping scales. While this will only help heal one of the three problems you mentioned, it will surely bring the finish line closer in sight.
Recently, I just returned from abroad in the Daintree Rainforest in Australia. There they have just recently begun to build two biological corridors to connect two parts of the rainforest that had been cut off completely from the rest of the rainforest, due to agriculture. The two ecological islands were not very large, but are home to some of the rarer species of the rainforest, as well as are important breeding and feeding grounds for the endangered, flightless cassowary bird. Similar to the MBC, the project, while young, hopes to establish a pathway that the animals can use to commute; however, problems have arisen already. Because the corridor is so narrow, poachers have an easy target for where to find expensive traveling species. Dogs, too, have been a problem, because humans live right along the corridor and their dogs chase and kill much of the endemic animals, which do not know how to handle attacks from invasive pets. That case makes me wonder, if this project does get over its standstills and ever comes around to its completion, what kind of human impacts we still will have on the ecology of the rainforest. In my beliefs, while completion of this project may bring Honduras and Nicaragua closer, there is little chance that the benefits to the natural environment will outweigh the costs to the cultural environments found here.
Your blog project was simply amazing, not least because of your readily visible mastery of the blog format. It was immediately apparent that this blog was vastly different from the others, with yours being the only blog that was formatted differently. The rest of the blog did not disappoint, as it was vastly informative about your chosen topic. The background page in particular provided detailed information, as was the ‘Mapping the Corazon’ page and its subpage. Your analysis was particularly insightful as well, pinpointing the problems with the Corazon project. My only real concern with this otherwise flawless blog was the fact that your bibliography was split into two sections. I’m not really sure why you did that, and to my way of thinking, you could probably have merged them. Other than that negligible concern, your blog is exemplary of the possibilities of blogging as a format for the dissemination of information about environmental issues.
Thanks for your comment! Our “Sources” and “Works Cited” tabs were differentiated intentionally. The “Sources” tab is aimed to present readers with a full listing of all available online resources to the project, even though we did not quote all of them in our research. The “Works Cited” section literally lists the works that are cited in the text of the pages. If you’ll notice, the text on the “Source” page tries to clarify that, where it says:
“Click here [links to Works Cited] to view the bibliography of works cited within this blog.
Below you will find a listing of outside resources related to the Corazón Transboundary Biosphere Reserve Project:”
I really enjoyed your blog and I think you did a great job. The amount of time and hard-work you put forth to research, organize, and analyze the subject matter is both obvious and enduring. The impressive and thorough solutions provided by the "Strategies for Improvement" page were especially awesome. I do have a couple of suggestions which may have added to your presentation.
First, there is substantial discussion on the consequences of weak/corrupt national governments and the potential instability they can cause for such large, transboundary projects like the Corazón TBR. Despite these issues, have there been any tensions between Honduras and Nicaragua over the project itself and their commitment to implementing it? For example, have these states received the same amount of funding and invested interest from the international organizations, such as the World Bank or the UNEP, or have there been tensions regarding these or other issues? Perhaps, there haven't been any such conflicts, but I think that a short discussion explaining any issues or the lack thereof would help to expose the reality of both the history of the situation and its current status.
Second, you pose the possible solution of using "eminent domain", as in the case of Natura 2000, to possible solve the implementation deficiencies of the project. While I agree that this an incredibly effective way to implement environmental conservation, does the lack of an organized, influential supranational organization like the European Union matter in the Latin American context? Would the involvement of such an organization with the power to declare "eminent domain" work in conjunction with with your assertion of the need for direct contact between international donors and the local community if it created a middle man?
In class, we spoke about the relativity of space. The section labeled "Miscommunication, Oversimplification, and Misrepresentation in the Corazón" in the blog clearly demonstrates the subjectivity and intricacy of geographic locations. An area like the Corazón does not mean (i.e. represent, encompass, or delineate) the same thing to all of the different groups associated with it. To the locals, it is a home; to the national governments, it is a resource and a political game; to international donors it is a preservation and an investment. With lengthy descriptions and well-informed analysis, the blog group outlines the difficulty and messiness of such a situation as biological corridors.
The group quotes that "in Latin America, one of the main challenges is that environmental resource management has traditionally been the preserve of national governments'–a trend that is in tension with the €˜classical dilemma€¦that environmental problems do not respect national borders" . This tricky statement leaves the reader with a question of weight. Does the physicality of the state become irrelevant when dealing with ecological issues, and if so, how far away are we from challenging the very legitimacy of the state itself?
Overall, this is a very thorough, well-formatted blog which raises multiple questions (in addition to the aforementioned one, who should be in charge if there is "a great deal of administrative inefficiency implementing the project"?; Can unstable governments hope to be successful in a transboundary effort if they cannot manage to keep their states secure?).
Brilliant approach to presenting what could have a drastically broad topic. My first impression of the blog was caution as to how little you guys had on the introduction page but in retrospect I can appreciate it compared to a couple of others which essentially fail to state the purpose of the blog which you guys did concisely. I have to wonder what criteria you used to cut down this rather broad concept into Miscommunication, Oversimplification and Misrepresentation? It makes sense in the broader context of the class especially when considering the concepts of overlapping culture and perception as different things mean different things to different people as do the concepts of space and territory. Just a thought. I particularly appreciated the very last section of the strategies for improvement section: incorporating local participation. I do agree that in keeping in mind the need for acknowledging the importance of stratification and scale is crucial to the advancement of the government as a whole but I also think grassroots efforts should be given far more consideration through the development of more opportunities. However I would have also liked to hear more of your personal perspectives on the strategies for improvement section mainly because it seemed to round up the project pretty well and it would have been more benefitial to the reader to get less quotations and more analysis.
I think your blog was very effective in relaying some great analysis, and I know this is a *huge* topic, but here are some things I think would have been extra additions to your analysis: Excellent linkages between Sletto’s ideas about boundary making and the process that is developing in the Corazon. However, I think this analysis could have been deepened by an investigation of the individual actors and the extents to which they tried (and were successful) at staking their claims to power within the framework of the project. This knowledge could additionally have allowed for an analysis of the extent to which this model of regionalism is effective in balancing the international/national/subnational concerns and further supported your claim that “the corazon is an example of how regional integration has been slowed at the national level/” I’d also be interested in knowing how you thought this could be tied to Dickens’ claims about State power. I did not feel that I knew enough about the individual actors in this environmental effort to either agree with Dickens’ claims that governments are maintaining a different sort of power, or (as I suspect you would claim) that this environmental effort has failed due to a lack of national power, and nations’ ability to interact on a supranational scale effectively.
This is such a fascinating topic, as so many things need to happen on every level in order for the corridor to be completed. What I find most troublesome about this project is the lack of communication between the stakeholders and the lack of proper education about the intricacies of the project. As we discussed in class, many local indigenous peoples have little idea of the repercussions or projects that are being planned in their area; likewise, stakeholders on the national level are ill-informed of the number of tribes and people affected by their actions. As you mentioned the discrepancies in the map, there is clearly a lot more coordination and agreement needed to be arranged before the next step can be taken. This dilemma brings to mind Perreault’s article on Ecuador’s indigenous peoples networking with regional, national, and international institutions. If they are to get over this developmental hitch, they should employ the strategy of jumping scales. While this will only help heal one of the three problems you mentioned, it will surely bring the finish line closer in sight.
Recently, I just returned from abroad in the Daintree Rainforest in Australia. There they have just recently begun to build two biological corridors to connect two parts of the rainforest that had been cut off completely from the rest of the rainforest, due to agriculture. The two ecological islands were not very large, but are home to some of the rarer species of the rainforest, as well as are important breeding and feeding grounds for the endangered, flightless cassowary bird. Similar to the MBC, the project, while young, hopes to establish a pathway that the animals can use to commute; however, problems have arisen already. Because the corridor is so narrow, poachers have an easy target for where to find expensive traveling species. Dogs, too, have been a problem, because humans live right along the corridor and their dogs chase and kill much of the endemic animals, which do not know how to handle attacks from invasive pets. That case makes me wonder, if this project does get over its standstills and ever comes around to its completion, what kind of human impacts we still will have on the ecology of the rainforest. In my beliefs, while completion of this project may bring Honduras and Nicaragua closer, there is little chance that the benefits to the natural environment will outweigh the costs to the cultural environments found here.