Mill Creek Park lecture

[Mary Krupa]

I attended today's lecture about national parks in central Europe. The speaker was a park naturalist who works for the Midwestern region of the National Parks Service. He did a very good job. The slide presentation photos were beautiful, too. He emphasized the strong heritage ties that the population of the Cleveland, Youngstown and Pittsburgh areas has with central Europe.

Featured in the talk were parks in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. He compared one park there with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  Apparently, this park runs on a budget of $30,000 a year and is 3 times the size of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park (CVNP). CVNP has a budget of $9 million a year!

He said that while the US is strong in educating the public, it is weak in the science area of running our national parks. Since the early 90s, the US has been exchanging ideas and personnel with these countries offering our expertise in the educational area. On the other hand, the central Europeans strongly excel (especially Slovak botanists) in the area of science and our parks people have picked up good information from them.

The CVNP has a sister park in Slovakia. For the past 8 years or so, The CVNP has hosted Slovak interns who then return to Europe and go on to complete advanced degrees and work in the parks. This sounds like a great cultural exchange.

There is also a huge international park that is part of Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. The park  actually is home to European bison, wolves, linxes, brown bears, etc.

The Czech Republic has one of the most advanced systems of trails of anywhere in the world and is a biker/hiker dream. Slovakia, roughly the size of Ohio, has 33% of its lands designated as parks. In comparison, Ohio has only 5% park lands.

I don't remember the speaker's name but as I indicated earlier, he did a really good job. I wish more people had attended this since there was so much more that I didn't write about here that he shared with us.

After the lecture, the Q & A period lasted a good half hour. Over 50 people attended.