The Elery Hamilton-Smith travel journal has begun on the NCKMS 2005 site, with notes and photos from the first few days of the trip. http://www.nckms.org/2005/index.html
Pat Seiser will be posting the cross-country lecture tour by Elery Hamilton-Smith, which is being sponsored by The National Cave and Karst Research Institute and the Northeastern Cave Conservancy. The tour culminates at the 2005 National Cave and Karst Management Symposium in Albany, NY, at the end of the month.
Visit the Web site often as he visits caves, universities, and other venues across the country, speaking to groups and sharing his thoughts and knowledge on caves and karst conservation and management.
Elery Hamilton-Smith is Chair of the Task Force on Caves and Karst for the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Commission on Protected Areas. Elery's program and informal discussions will revolve around cave and karst management issues and cave and karst education and information
exchange. Some of the areas to be discussed may include:
*Thinking about Karst and World Heritage
*Reviewing Changes in Nature Conservation
*Karst and Caves of the Western Pacific
*Australia Down Under
*Groundwater: Its travels and adventures
*Education and Research in Karst
Hamilton-Smith is a sociologist who has been a conservation activist and
scientist for over 50 years. He is currently professor in cave and karst
management at Charles Sturt University, Albury, New South Wales, Australia.
He has the parallel responsibility of being chair of the World Conservation
Union (IUCN) World Commission on Protected Areas Task Force on Caves and Karst. Also, he is a member of the IUCN Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy as he has very considerable experience and expertise in advising governments on social policy. Right now, he is deeply involved in the implications for protection and conservation of land tenure policy debates in the Pacific region.
Elery has worked to champion world heritage status for caves and karst
features. Currently Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and Carlsbad Caverns are the only caves included on UNESCO's World Heritage List in the United States (see http://whc.unesco.org/en/list )