With the hustle and bustle of North and South Carolina’s major city’s citizens, The Foundations For the Carolinas along with 40 business leaders came up with a vision to provide an area where these busy Carolinians may relax. What is this vision? The Carolina Thread Trail. This trail is expected to connect Charlotte and 14 other counties and nearly 2 million citizens with natural greenways and nature preserves. This is one of the largest projects this region has encountered, with about $2 million dollars invested into this project. With this vision, The Foundations For the Carolinas hopes to encourage people to be active while appreciating the natural environment that surrounds our large towns and cities. The leader in this vision is the Catawba Lands Conservancy who gained support from Duke Energy, providing access to land and funding for this project. The Trust for Public Land also plays a key role in this vision by reclaiming and preserving river corridors and creating greenway systems.
Many citizens and leaders believe that this vision holds many promising benefits for the Carolinas. The Carolina Thread Trail will promote physical activity, encouraging people to get outside and hike the trails provided by the nature preserves. “A NC State study in Cary, NC found that 72% of respondents indicated it was
likely a potential trail would provide a place for them to exercise and 57% said
they would exercise more if the trail were created.” The trail will also improve physiological health as well as improving health from air pollution. It has been studied that being surrounded by nature reduces ones stress and being away from smog-ridden cities will improve the physical health of citizens as well. The trails will also promote less vehicle usage, encouraging citizens to use bikes. Lastly, the trail will reduce vehicle-pedestrian accidents. The greenways will provide paths that bikes and pedestrians may travel on, reducing the need to take routes with vehicles that impose a danger to pedestrians and bikers.
I believe this vision would be a great addition to the Carolinas. I also believe that the creation of this trail may encourage other states to create greenways similar to this one. Not only would physical health and environmental activism improve in the Carolinas, but across the United States as well. This trail is an important step to creating more land for recreation along with preservation and I support the vision for the Carolina Thread Trail.
I agree that the path seems like a pretty low-impact addition to the area that has the potential to have many positive impacts for the inhabitants. I found it very interesting how you mentioned that contact with nature can have profound and positive impacts in the one's overall quality of life. You might be interested in this study:http://wilderdom.com/theory/NatureTheory.html. It talked about "The Nature Theory", which advocated building low impact ways to make nature more accessible to humans in order to improve their overall quality of life.
ReplyDelete-Lauren DiRenzo