Tuesday, March 6, 2012

In a nutshell, this is the problem we face.  Near Eagle Landing Park is a small post office.  About five hundred mail boxes are in the lobby.  Also in the lobby are two cans: one is a garbage can and one is for recycling.  The recycling can is clearly marked, and it has a slot in the top so you know it is only for recycling.  Right next to it, touching it, is a can that is clearly an ordinary garbage can, an iconic garbage can, and it is labeled, in big, bold letters, Garbage only, No recyclables.  Every day, the garbage can has more recyclable junk mail in it than it has garbage, and there is more recyclable material in the garbage can than in the recycle can.  Every single day of the year.

The people who come to this post office have been coming here for years, sometimes decades.  They are well-educated, on average, and judging from the yard signs in the neighborhood, mostly liberal.  They are middle to upper income.  They are the kind of people that you would expect to recycle.  The neighborhood has a higher than average number of Priuses.  Still, when they have the cloak of anonymity, when it takes no extra effort at all to recycle, a significant number of my neighbors willfully, deliberately choose to throw recyclable material in the trash can right next to the recycle bin.  When saving the earth would take no extra effort, they would still take steps to destroy it.

Eagle Landing Park faces the same problem.  For a significant number of park visitors, the function of nature is to be hunted, harvested, consumed, abused, or polluted.  That is how some people appreciate nature, by ruining it.  Think of the ultimate wilderness outing for a large number of people: fishing or hunting, with beer and a camp fire.  The thing most people appreciate about nature is that it is free for the taking.  Whoever gets there first has the right to despoil something.  The wilderness is where no one can tell you not to do something.

Even if that was the only way you could enjoy nature, by destroying it, it would make sense that you would want to leave a little nature around so you can come back and destroy it later.  Let's say you like beer.  Let's say, just for the sake of argument, there was a finite capacity to produce beer.  If people consume too much too fast, the beer production capacity will be permanently damaged, and eventually all beer production will cease.  You have a choice between drinking an unlimited amount of beer now, and having none later, or drinking a limited amount of beer now and having an assured supply later.  What would you do?  Well, most people would probably drink too much beer now even if it meant having no beer later.  That's just the way people are.  If you ask them to think about it, to plan for the future, they will just laugh at you.

I intend this biography of a park to be a snapshot of how things were at this moment, so that future generations can look back at the state of the park and see how much it has improved.  It is more likely that this is the golden age of Eagle Landing Park, and people will have only these pictures to see how beautiful the park was, before it was ruined. It takes a commitment from everyone to save nature, and it only takes a small minority to destroy it, if they go unchecked.

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