NAC Team Members Attend Brownfields 2006 Conference

BOSTON, MASS. -- Three members of the Not A Cornfield team have just concluded attending the Brownfields 2006 conference. The annual gathering was co-sponsored by the federal EPA and the International City / County Management Association (ICMA). The Not A Cornfield team was invited to attend by a representative of the latter organization; she'd visited the NAC project grounds last year, during the Blue Phase. The NAC team was given a booth in the trade show portion of the event; and team members introduced and exhibited a pair of NAC short films created by our colleagues from the Echo Park Film Center. Afterwards, audience members with questions came to the front of the screening (or, really, conference) room and fired away. One woman wanted to know where she could purchase the videos. Another man wanted to talk about a different film, entirely. And a third gentleman, a Manhattanite, approached the team and asked, you name it, what can I do to help?

The NAC team attended Brownfields 2006 for the following three, among perhaps other, reasons:

1. To connect with municaplities, institutions, and others doing like-minded ecological, philanthropical, sociocultural and political work;

2. To Seek out other brownfields in the United States -- particularly in park-poor and underserved inner city areas -- in which to take on other large-scale, site-specific, imaginative brownfield-to-greenfield remediations and transformations; and

3. To gather addresses and maps of brownfields nationwide.

How'd all that go? What else did we see, and whom did we meet in Boston? And most importantly, what is the TerraSirch 300?

Check back with this blog in the coming week.** Right now, we're off to take a nap. Conventioneering can take a lot out of a blog.

**Update: We're awake now, but we're still absorbing some of what we saw, and learned. For more about what when on at the conference, the official web site should be useful.