Friday, February 24, 2012

Who cares what happens to Eagle Landing Park?  It's only six acres.  As I've said before, the larger biosphere would have been better off if the land had been converted to housing.  If the entire six acres were paved, top to bottom, with not a single tree left standing, it wouldn't make much difference to the Earth.  In my own community, even among people who visit the park regularly, fewer than ten percent of people who have heard of Eagle Landing Park take the time to appreciate it or help preserve it.  If they can't let their dogs run off-leash at ELP, they will just take them somewhere else.

Someone burned a Qur'an, I guess.  I don't know the details and I don't want to know.  Because one book was burned, thousands of people are rioting and eight or more have been killed.   The book wasn't the only copy of the Qur'an, or especially valuable in some way.  The book was a symbol.  If I had to guess at the psychology of the rioters, their reason must be something like, "If you attack this holy book, you attack us."  Well, that's how I feel about my park.  Not that I feel like rioting, since a riot of one just gets you thrown in jail, but I feel that if you degrade my park, you spit on me.

Why is it that so few people feel like I do?  Fifty years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring supposedly launched the environmental movement, why are environmentalists so complacent?  Certainly, our rivers are no longer burning, and we don't spray children with DDT.  What we have instead is the exportation of our environmental problems to China.  We also have the steady loss of canopy in cities like Seattle.  And in an insignificant park that no one has ever heard of, people degrade the environment on a daily basis, and their fellow citizens simply stand back and watch.

If it were just ELP, I guess we could write off one park, even if it is the home of my childhood memories and my environmental education.  The problem is that all neighborhoods have their own Eagle Landing Parks under similar assaults.  I have seen the degredation caused by drug use, off-leash dogs, inappropriate activities, and apathy in many other parks around the greater Seattle area.  Entire slopes are turned to mud at Carkeek and Dash Point by dogs and kids.  Westcrest Park has had a chronic problem with a section of the park being used for drugs and sex, to the detriment of the environment.  Hiking far away from the city, I've seen sections of the ground in public parks where bullet casings covered the earth.  If a group of believers can be incited to rioting over one book, but the global village can't be bothered about the slow and steady degradation of our shared natural resources, then there is no hope for humanity.  If Eagle Landing Park cannot become healthier, then it is very likely that the whole biosphere will become sicker, to the detriment of us all.

Why don't people care?  What would it take for people to start caring?  To take action?

Today I saw three people in the park.  A grandmother and two grandchildren walked down to the beach.  I heard screaming.  The toddler banged on things with a blue plastic rake and threw rocks in the water.  The tween girl stuffed her pockets with shells and threw rocks in the water.  If the grandmother made any effort to instill respect and reverence for nature, I did not see evidence of such an effort.  Why did she bother to go to all the trouble of bringing her grandchildren to this remote beach when they could have thrown rocks at home?  I guess Eagle Landing Park has a better selection of rocks.

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