Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Planningand
Developmentofa
DesertWetlandPark
intheUnitedStates
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CONTENTS
Introduction............................................................................................................ 219
People, Paper, Places.............................................................................................. 219
Clark County Wetlands Park: The Place ................................................................ 222
Integrating People, Planning, and Design.............................................................. 222
The “New” Place.................................................................................................... 224
Implementation ...................................................................................................... 225
Acknowledgment ................................................................................................... 226
References.............................................................................................................. 226
INTRODUCTION
Deserts are some of the most romanticized and mythologized of all landscapes, and
as a result they, and especially their associated oases, are becoming popular tourist
destinations (e.g., chapter 7). Significantly, tourism, if approached sensitively with
respect to both the physical and social environments, has the potential to play an
important role in the sustainable development of desert communities (chapter 16).
The transformation of the environmentally degraded Las Vegas Wash (chapter 8)
into the award-winning Clark County Wetlands Park (France 1999, 2011) is one of
the most successful examples of how tourism can be a positive agent for social and
ecological change in arid regions, and one that may offer lessons for plans to convert
a portion of the restored Iraqi marshlands into a national park at some future date.
PEOPLE, PAPER, PLACES
Restoring, preserving, and protecting special landscapes in ecosystems are not just
about the environment. Becky Zimmerman (2004) believes that careful integration of
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Adapted by Robert L. France from Zimmerman, B. 2004. Clark County Wetlands Park: A restored
desert wetland. Paper presented at the Mesopotamian Marshes and Modern Development: Practical
Approaches for Sustaining Restored Ecological and Cultural Landscapes conference, Cambridge,
MA, October.
219
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