In 1950, John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated the land in question to the Borough of Alpine with instructions to ban development so the Palisades would stay "forever green".
Those wilderness designations, which ban development, were trumpeted by local lawmakers and welcomed even by those who worried about land sales.
What does not seem to be getting consideration, at least for now, is banning development altogether in the city's flood zones, humble or affluent.
In late May, the Bureau of Land Management (B.L.M ., a "multi-use" agency that manages two hundred and forty-five million acres of federal land, including forty-five per cent of sage-grouse habitat, announced a plan to ban development on about ten per cent of the B.L.M. property that contains sizable oil and gas reserves, in order to protect nearby leks and nesting grounds.
Such efforts go back a long way—hundreds of years, if you include monarchs' reservation of hunting areas such as Bialowiesa Forest in Poland, where King Sigismund I imposed the death penalty for bison poaching in 1538.Limiting or banning development in areas of great beauty or biological value is a newer idea.
The treaty mandated controlled increases, not decreases, in the Soviet arsenal, while failing to ban development of cruise missiles, space-based weapons, or the MIRVing of existing launchers by the United States or the U.S.S.R. Thus the superpowers sacrificed the right to defend their attack missiles with ABMs while failing to ensure the stability of mutual deterrence.
As a consequence of the destruction on the Don and other rivers, the provincial government of Ontario banned development on river floodplains.
Basement extensions will still be permitted but the new rules will restrict how far they can stretch under a garden, limit them to a single storey in most cases and ban developments under listed buildings altogether.
The competing initiative, Measure L, which is sponsored by artists and neighborhood activists, bans new development in parts of the Mission and South of Market districts, applies an indefinite moratorium on new development in two neighborhoods and other parts of SoMa, and bans so-called live-work loft construction, with far fewer exemptions from the annual growth limit.
The 1972 biological weapons convention, ratified by 143 countries, bans the development, production and stockpiling of bacteriological and toxin weapons.
