Eventually European investors were tapped for $58m£35m5m) – a paltry figure considering the project's ambition.
In 1991, Patrick Lannan, the president of the Lannan Foundation, visited, and was struck by the project's ambition and its prime mover.
The project's ambition and achievements are admirable, but its self-conscious architecture and idealism seem jarringly aspirational in a place that would simply settle for being functional.
Those involved say the key to the project's ambition and speed – four species introduced in less than a year – is the partnership between the privately run Rotoroa Island Trust and the public Auckland zoo.
Dan Gillmor, who runs a center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, praised the project's ambition, but suggested that MSNBC.com should encourage genuine collaboration with the people of Elkhart, perhaps by incorporating local blogs and videos more fully.
The project's ambition — to be a comprehensive database for the country — is hampered because slaves were often perfunctorily buried, and because of a historical quirk: headstones were a luxury in many Southern areas, and both enslaved and free people were often buried with plain stone markers or none at all.
Of course, at the moment it's only a little bit more real than fairy dust, and the idea that it will cost $75 in 2010 is laughable, but you have to admire the project's ambition.
The focus on policy change reflects the project's ambition to generate new theoretical and empirical insights into the way states and policies shape migration processes in their interaction with other migration determinants in origin and destination countries (de Haas 2011).
Robert Moses described the project's ambitions as "overwhelming", and remarked that Disney seemed on the verge of producing the "first accident-free, noise-free, pollution-free city centre in America".
Still others appreciated the project's creative ambition.
