In Conversation: Promoting & Protecting Green Spaces

Meg Daly, is founder and president of Friends of The Underline, a non-profit organization leading the initiative to transform the underutilized land below Miami’s Metrorail into a 10-mile, urban trail and linear park. The Underline has partnered with Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces and Transit Departments. A 30-year sales and marketing veteran, Meg is also chairperson of the Coral Gables Cultural Affairs Board, a member of the Bike305 Executive Committee and has served on numerous philanthropic boards. For her love of community and desire to serve others, she was recently named one of Miami’s Angels by the Miami Herald.

Charles A. Flink, an award-winning author, planner, and landscape architect, is a leading authority in greenway planning, design, and development. He is founder and president of Greenways Incorporated and professor of the practice in landscape architecture at North Carolina State University. In The Greenway Imperative: Connecting Communities and Landscapes for a Sustainable Future (University of Florida Press), an eye-opening journey through some of America’s most innovative landscape architecture projects, Charles Flink shows why we urgently need greenways. He takes readers to some of the projects he has been involved during his 35-year career such as the Grand Canyon National Park, suburban North Carolina, and the banks of the Miami River. Open green spaces are increasingly critical today, he says. Greenways conserve irreplaceable real estate for the environment, serve as essential green infrastructure, reduce impact from flooding and other natural disasters, and boost the economies of cities and towns. Rails-to-Trails Conservancy noted that in The Greenway Imperative, Flink not only discusses “what a greenway is and how these corridors can be used to help solve a host of challenges that communities face.” But “Demonstrate[s] how anyone can become involved in the greenways that shape our communities, our regions and, together, even our world.”