This past week, I attended a Rose Cafe talk with a speaker who works for the Finger Lakes Land Trust. His work mostly pertains to buying land that is rich in natural resources and deserves protection from civilians and selling them another piece of land with comparable value. It was a field I honestly knew nothing about walking in and the speaker did a good job of giving a lay of the land for his job. One of the interesting things he talked about is how this field is really only found in America. This is because in America, there are protections against the government confiscating land that other countries don’t have. So while countries around the world will use the government to buy land off of civilians for protection, land trusts were created to do just that in America as a private entity. I think this is a good thing, as private entities have more incentives to create a mutually beneficial transaction than the government.

The speaker also talked about some environmental issues pertaining to Ithaca, mostly tying back to water treatment. Whether it be the need to reduce the use of salt to melt snow and replacing it with sand or cleaning up cyanobacteria from Cayuga lake, there are more issues than I would have thought regarding Ithaca’s water sources. I guess not realizing the sheer number of potential issues is a good sign that the Finger Lakes Land Trust is doing a good job at keeping our natural resources safe.