At the heart of this effort is the wish to link people and information they are willing to provide about the life along a single parallel. This exciting web-based outreach program would highlight the natural history of all of the different parallels. People living along each particular latitudinal zone, a parallel, share the same day, and therefore the same exposure to the power of the sun. How remarkable it is then that such a diversity of climates, environments, habitats, cultures, and histories play out along each parallel.

Focusing on these simple geographic artifacts emphasizes a singular way in which people around the world are connected everyday, helping to explain similarities and differences while underscoring the forces that govern global and regional climate. The program begins with the Parallel passing through Los Angeles, the 34th. From the California vantage point, looking East, this parallel runs through Wichita Falls, Atlanta, Columbia, SC, Casablanca, Tunisia, Beirut, the middle of Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, through Kashmir, the Tibetan plateau, the Henan province of China the Korean Strait, to just south of Osaka, Japan before yielding to the expanse of the Pacific Ocean), which hosts a world of fascinating diversity.

The sources of rich biological and cultural diversity can be appreciated through understanding the forces behind climates, the nature of landforms, the ecology, biogeography, and biologies of plants and animals that inhabit each zone, and the history of human occupation and cultural evolution. Appreciating the similarities that connect plants and people along the different parallels, as well as the differences that have underwritten their individual character, is the educational mission of this program. Encouraging people around the world to communicate with each other based on a simple shared virtue inherent in the land they occupy might be the affective outcome.

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