The 10th Annual Horseshoe Crab Festival, organized by the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service (among others), took place in the shadow of one of Robert Moses’ pet-project bridges, along the jagged, brackish edges of one of his uncapped landfills. It was, as many outcroppings into Jamaica Bay are, stunning: fields of wildflowers, vibrant tidal pools, and swaths of scurrying sandpipers ebbed and flowed in stark contrast to the stoic, blue-hued background of Downtown Manhattan, miles away. At Sunset Cove Park, the air buzzed with the sound of kids, thrilled at the opportunity to see and handle living fossils up close, as their parents gathered in small battalions of parked strollers, socializing and crisping under May’s tough sun. Parks Department employees demonstrated Horseshoe Crab banding to groups of onlookers, carefully drilling white, plastic plates with serial numbers into the empty shell space along the side of the crab’s shell. The water gleamed, the many volunteers tending their tents glibly smiled and conversed, and the dozens of wild horseshoe crabs we were all gathered to celebrate dragged themselves slowly back towards the bay.
More citizen everything. I’m currently trying to figure out how to get more people in my area editing openstreetmap. It’s such a hopeful project but after years of editing like mad I’m starting to lose hope for quick progress. It’s awesome that everyone can work on whatever they want but I think we may need community and comradarie based goals for progress.
too many people have the attitude of “why contribute to something when X corporate service works fine”
but more and more, with these companies giving less and less of a fuck and relying on stale and outdated knowlege calcified in training data that itself didn’t represent the real world as well as they think, the information we share with eachother for the love of sharing will become more valuable