Park Fdn

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ignored my atta girl? preserving the commons, thus MOD, note new node civil society</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">women coup?  </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> (note that some CTT? ranted on years ago about donor intent to thwart the above)</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">officially a target after vitter report:</font>

<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>entine hit:</b> notice mirroring</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Is fracking safe? That depends on one’s risk tolerance.</span> While key opponents promote fears and “not in my backyard” protests, the federal government and most mainstream scientists believe fracking is no less safe than other forms of energy extraction as long as regulations are frequently updated. Scientists at many universities, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Environmental Defense Fund, and other organizations reject a black-and-white view of shale gas.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“At the EDF, we don’t pick fuels. We are realists; we recognize that fossil fuels will be around for a while,” says senior policy adviser Scott Anderson. Noting that most states have considerable experience in regulating well construction and operation, he says, “if wells are constructed right and operated right, hydraulic fracturing will not cause a problem.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But the emphatic message coming from the Park Foundation and its beneficiaries is that only a total ban on fracking is acceptable. Opposition to shale gas is being transformed into one of the ideological litmus tests of our time.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Park Foundation provided the funds for reams of anti-fracking articles, some of which are shown here.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Drilling for dissent</b></font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Over the past four years, a few researchers at Cornell University have emerged in the vanguard of activists challenging shale-gas drilling, and their alarms have found a worldwide megaphone in the New York Times. The Times helped transform Cornell marine ecologist Robert Howarth into a hero of anti-shale-gas activists. Within a few days in April 2011, the paper twice promoted stories on an academic brief that Howarth and co-author Anthony Ingraffea had just published in the letters section of Climatic Change.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The authors claimed that the extraction process releases rogue<b> methane gas [existential threat to clean claim] </b> that generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the production and use of an equivalent amount of coal would entail. Fracking could push the world over a tipping point, sending global temperatures irreversibly higher. Natural gas and fracking, they concluded, were a catastrophe in the making.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“All this talk that it’s a clean fuel, as some say, is not based on any scientific analysis,” Howarth told me. “There is a lot of money invested in shale-gas development. Our research is threatening that, which makes it political.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Howarth is a longtime <b>environmental activist. Until his controversial</b> letter he had never published any university-level research on natural gas. The obscure letter was initially ignored by scientists and the media until the Times featured it. It would be difficult to overstate the influence its coverage generated. It led to thousands of headlines around the world and was debated in the British parliament and the European Union.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">How did Howarth come to write what has become a seminal script of the movement against shale gas? Howarth told me he had been approached by the Park Foundation in 2010 to consider writing an academic article that would make a case that shale gas was a dangerous, polluting fuel. That led to the first of numerous grants from Park. Howarth has also said that his conclusion was not influenced by Park’s request: “$35,000 won’t buy my opinion.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">While the study and subsequent Times coverage generated thousands of media stories, the paper was widely criticized by scientists across the ideological spectrum. The Department of Energy’s <b>National Energy Technology Laboratory </b>reviewed the same data, concluding that natural gas, even from shale, results in far lower emissions than coal.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“His analysis is based on extremely weak data, and also has a severe methodological flaw (plus some other questionable decisions), all of which means that his bottom line conclusions shouldn’t carry weight,” concluded <b>Michael Levi, energy and climate-change scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations.</b></font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Scientists at<b> Carnegie Mellon University, in a study partly funded by the Sierra Club</b>, subsequently concluded that shale gas has significantly less impact on global warming than coal. “We don’t think they [Howarth et al.] are using credible data and some of the assumptions they’re making are biased,” Paulina Jaramillo, one of the lead researchers, told Politico[subscrition paywall]. The Worldwatch Institute reported, “despite differences in methodology and coverage, all of the recent studies except Howarth et al. estimate that life-cycle emissions from natural gas-fired generation are significantly less than those from coal-fired generation.”[can't find www]</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Howarth’s conclusions were sharply challenged even at Cornell. Professors Lawrence Cathles, Larry Brown, and Andrew Hunter combined their expertise in earth and atmospheric sciences and chemical engineering to pen a stinging response, calling the work “seriously flawed.” They wrote, “the assumptions used by Howarth et al. are inappropriate and…their data, which the authors themselves characterize as ‘limited,’ do not support their conclusions.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">When I interviewed Howarth at the time, he insisted that his analysis and conclusions were “solid,” the shale-gas disaster his models predicted was inevitable, and laggard environmental nonprofits like EDF would turn against shale eventually. “They’re still heavily invested in their prior statements that shale gas is a win-win solution,” he said. “It will take them some time to come to grips with the new data and move toward a new position. Science moves slowly.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Building a movement</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">While science was moving slowly, the Park Foundation moved quickly. By simultaneously funding an interlocking triangle of sympathetic scientists, anti-fracking nonprofits, and media outlets, Park helped move the idea that natural gas is environmentally unfriendly from the activist fringe to the mainstream.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The foundation has continued to provide numerous grants (in the range of $50,000-$60,000) directly to Howarth and his research colleagues. And the Howarth argument, despite its dismissal by scientists of various ideological stripes, has taken on immortal life among many progressive organizations that are supported by Park.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The foundation’s mostly unknown ties to scientists, journalists, and activist groups were on display last September in the brouhaha over a methane gas and fracking study that contradicted Howarth’s claims. Researchers at the University of Texas-Austin released a study done in cooperation with the Environmental Defense Fund which found that the national rate of leakage of methane during natural gas production was equivalent to four tenths of one percent of total U.S. extraction, vastly lower than Howarth’s claims. This was the most comprehensive shale-gas emissions study ever undertaken, covering 190 well pads around the country.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Howarth and his co-authors denounced the UT/EDF findings, and other groups funded by Park joined in the criticism. Media stories quoted a heretofore unknown organization, Physicians Scientists & Engineers for Healthy Energy, portraying the university and the environmental nonprofit as shills. UT was quite open in disclosing that the study received industry support, but few noted that the physicians group, characterized as “independent” in many stories, had been recently founded by one of Howarth’s co-authors, Anthony Ingraffea, with Park Foundation money, specifically to promote an aggressive anti-shale-gas agenda.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">This script repeated itself again and again. In 2011, the New York Times began running a new series it called “Drilling Down,” billing it as an exposé of “the risks of natural-gas.” Over the next year and a half, the Times churned out more than a dozen scathing articles, such as a story asserting that many “insiders” in the natural gas industry harbored serious doubts about its long-term viability, but were keeping mum to cash in on the short-term exuberance over rapidly growing shale-gas reserves. The author, Ian Urbina, quoted Deborah Rogers—portrayed as a “member of the advisory committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas”—as saying “we have a big problem,” appearing to spill the beans on industry corruption.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Rogers, a former stockbroker for Merrill Lynch whose term on the advisory committee had expired, now raises goats and makes artisanal cheeses, and is also a community organizer</b> [dog whistles] and outspoken national critic of shale gas. Urbina failed to mention her longstanding involvement with multiple activist organizations, including Earthworks—an anti-fracking group that has received more than $300,000 in Park money in recent years. A careful review of Urbina’s articles finds no less than a dozen examples of interview subjects in his stories being portrayed as independent, aggrieved citizens while they were actually activists linked to organizations funded by Park.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The Times coverage was so widely recognized as blundering and biased that the paper’s public editor, Arthur Brisbane, launched an internal investigation[hmn] of Urbina’s reporting. In two reports, Brisbane warned that the stories painted a complex issue with “an overly broad brush and didn’t include dissenting views from experts who aren’t entrenched on one side or another of the subject.”[true, though "deeply sourced, 400 pp]</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">According to e-mails later produced by the Times at the behest of a Senate investigation[LOOKING INTO FRACKING, not NYT], Urbina’s stories relied on sources and background fed to him by the Natural Resources Defense Council—a group which has collected more than $350,000 from the Park Foundation for anti-fracking work.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Park-supported groups like the NRDC weigh in on many Park-supported projects. In February of this year, the Center for Public Integrity and InsideClimate News (ICN) teamed up with the Weather Channel to produce a series of reports on the Texan Eagle Ford shale formation.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“Their reporting now shows clearly that Texans in the area of Eagle Ford are having trouble breathing, and regulators are having trouble noticing,” said NRDC attorney Kate Sinding.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“People who suffer the effects of oil and gas emissions have few places to turn for help other than to the politicians and regulatory agencies that are often cheerleaders for, and financially beholden to, the industry,” said one ICN story.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The series was supported by a $25,000 Park grant “to report and publish articles on…air and water pollution related to hydraulic fracturing.” Many of the sources in the series, as well as the outlets promoting it (the Environmental Integrity Project, Earthworks, Public Citizen, the NDRC) also received Park funding.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“What they do is have one group write on an issue, another quote them or link to them, and so on,” Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center told the Washington Free Beacon. “It keeps going until they create this perception that there’s real concern over an issue and it bubbles up to top liberal sites like Huffington Post and from there into the traditional media.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Roy Park’s legacy</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Adelaide Park Gomer, and her daughter, Alicia Park Wittink, who is also on the Park Foundation board, are openly hostile to natural-gas development, and corporations in general. Today’s foundation has a very different profile from the one Roy Hampton Park left to his heirs upon his death in 1993. In his day, funding went mostly to education, religious organizations, public broadcasting, and conservation—all passions of the founder.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“None of the environmental grants were political,” says his son Roy Park, Jr. “We focused on animal welfare, rainforests, marine life, oceans—doing what we could to promote environmentalism. We didn’t focus on causes.”</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">But Roy Hampton Park’s will left no roadmap of his intentions for the foundation. Soon a rift developed between the younger Roy and his sister and niece. They were out to “save the world,” he says.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Roy’s mother, Dorothy Park, ultimately sided with Adelaide and Alicia, cleaving the Park Foundation in two in 2003. The bulk of the funds stayed with them, while Roy was given a third to start the Triad Foundation with his two children. Like the Park Foundation, it continues to fund education programs at Cornell, but also supports more traditional conservation efforts and some conservative causes, which he believes are more in line with his father’s wishes.</font></div>

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<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">“My father’s legacy…what he worked for all his life, should not be ignored or refuted,” says Roy, mourning what he sees as the “erosion of his hardworking lifetime ideals” by today’s Park Foundation. “Despite the absence of his intentions for the foundation’s mission in his will, his philanthropic objectives…were evident in the previous 30-year history of its grantmaking.”...</font></div>

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<h1 style="font-weight: normal;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Board of Trustees</font></h1>

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<li style=" list-style: none outside url(http://www.parkfoundation.org/Assets/bullet.png); margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>Adelaide P. Gomer</strong>

<em>President

(Ithaca, NY)</em></font></li>

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<em>Vice President

(Ithaca, NY)</em></font></li>

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<em>Secretary/Treasurer

(Chapel Hill, NC)</em></font></li>

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(Linville, NC and Boca Grande, FL)</em></font></li>

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<li style=" list-style: none outside url(http://www.parkfoundation.org/Assets/bullet.png); margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>Jerome B. Libin</strong>

<em>(Washington, DC)</em></font></li>

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<li style=" list-style: none outside url(http://www.parkfoundation.org/Assets/bullet.png); margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 0px;"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><strong>Jay R. Halfon</strong>

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<h1 style="color: rgb(0, 95, 58); font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Founder, Roy H. Park, Sr.</font></h1>

<p style="line-height: 18pt; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Park Foundation was established by the late Roy Hampton Park, Sr. — founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Park Communications, Inc.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Roy H. Park was born in Dobson, North Carolina, in 1910. He graduated from high school at the age of 15 and entered North Carolina State University where he majored in journalism. While a student, he edited the school newspaper, The Technician. He worked his way through college by holding various office jobs, one of which was in the Associated Press Bureau in Raleigh where he made connections with people throughout North Carolina.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After college, he secured a public relations and advertising position with the North Carolina Cotton Growers Cooperative Association. He was later hired by H. E. Babcock, founder of the Grange League Federation (now Agway) to head the cooperative's advertising agency, located in Ithaca, New York.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 1949, Mr. Park launched a business relationship with famed restaurant expert Duncan Hines. The first product of Hines-Park Foods was the Duncan Hines Cake Mix, the first product of its kind and one that began a revolution in food preparation. Procter & Gamble purchased the company in 1956, and Mr. Park launched his second career — mass communications. Ultimately, what became Park Communications, Inc. acquired or built 22 radio stations, 11 television stations, and 144 publications of which 41 were daily newspapers.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mr. Park's influence in the communications industry was felt across the country, and his personal influence was especially felt in his home state of North Carolina — particularly at N.C. State University — and in his adopted home town of Ithaca, New York — especially at Ithaca College.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Out of his spirit of giving back, Park worked closely with the North Carolina Commission on Literacy, the North Carolina State University Development Council, and served as a Trustee of the University from 1977 to 1985. He was the originator of the New York State Publishers Foundation and served as President of the Board of Trustees of Ithaca College for many years. The Park School of Communications at Ithaca College was named in his honor.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to a memorial prepared by his alma mater, North Carolina State University, to honor his memory,</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Roy Park led his life by a simple tenet:</font></p>

<h3 style="color: rgb(0, 95, 58); margin-bottom: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; line-height: 18pt;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Look for opportunity more than security and stability. 

Consider the breadth of an opportunity and do your best."</font></h3>

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<h1 style="color: rgb(0, 95, 58); font-weight: normal;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Park Foundation</font></h1>

<p style="line-height: 18pt; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Park Foundation was formed in 1966. Its original focus was on education and grant-making in communities where Park Communications had interests. When he died in 1993, Mr. Park bequeathed more than 70 percent of his holdings to the Foundation.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Foundation is dedicated to the aid and support of education, public broadcasting, environment, and other selected areas of interest to the Park family. Scholarship programs have been established in Mr. Park’s name at the two institutions with which he was so close — Ithaca College and North Carolina State University. </font></p>

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