Greenprint: North Shore Community Continues to Keep the Country “Country”
With the help of the Trust for Public Land (TPL), the people of Oahu’s North Shore have found one more way to keep the country “country”. TPL, a non-profit land conservation organization and the North Shore Community Land Trust (NSCLT) are working together with North Shore residents to develop a “greenprint” community action plan that will guide future conservation efforts on the North Shore.
The greenprinting process invites input through community outreach events. “Land protection talk stories” have been held at outdoor markets such as the Waialua and Haleiwa Farmers’ Markets. At these events, residents were asked questions such as “What does the North Shore mean to you?” and “What should the North Shore look like in 20 years?” and were invited to complete “thought bubbles” to share their answers with the TPL and NSCLT.
In an interview with The Hawaii Independent, executive director of NSCLT, Doug Cole, reported that a few hundred people have participated in the process and submitted their thoughts on North Shore conservation through the outreach events. NSCLT has also begun interviewing community stakeholders.
The North Shore greenprint, the first of its kind in the state, will focus on “short term actions and long term vision”, providing documentation and Geographic Information System (GIS) based maps to guide the community in their conservation efforts and highlight the highest priority lands. Community involvement is vital to the success of the process and implementation of the goals, as Cole explained, “We want to make sure that the conservation opportunities we pursue are part of a well thought-out strategy that the community helped establish…Because ultimately, we will need community support in order to successfully convert such opportunities into completed conservation transactions”.
The greenprinting process is still underway and will take several months to complete, as TPL and NSCLT continue to gather and analyze community input, looking for common threads of hopes, values, and concerns.
Land conservation is not the only area of investigation for greenprinting. The greenprinting process may also involve “parks gap analysis” to determine which areas are in need of parks, “watershed protection” to identify where conservation efforts can preserve water quality, “fragmentation modeling” to discover which lands create natural resources, “trail linkage” to identify opportunities to further link trails, and “development forecasting” to show which lands are in danger of being developed. In understanding this information, the North Shore community will be better poised to make conservation-related decisions.
If successful, perhaps the North Shore can serve as a greenprint model to other areas in the state wishing to conserve our islands’ beauty and resources, and keep the country “country”.
