Showing posts with label urban greenspace preservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban greenspace preservation. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

The Story in the Garden

What does the phrase "distributional green equity" mean? Is it about equal space for different plants and grasses? Equal space for each blade in a lawn? 

No. It means that social groups called "marginalized" should have equal access to green urban environments -- although in urban settings "green" may have nothing to do with grass, trees or gardens. It may refer to electric charging stations, bike paths or playgrounds with plasticized ("safe") ground cover.

The equity part means that everyone can be equally deprived of nature space: everyone has equal access to universal paving.

Just as certain narratives are censored in today's media, there is a visual cancelling of gardens. A well-designed garden is a visual story. Strolling through it you become acquainted with plant-characters interacting, either calmly or boisterously, in weather-driven plots, each season a different chapter. 

Garden-stories come in different genres, some classic, some contemporary. Horticulture goes through historical phases, and a well-designed garden brims with references to various periods and styles, depending on the story it's telling. These are censored when a landscape is paved -- the back stories of plants erased, the histories they had bodied forth being cancelled when they convey something which culture warriors fear and want to suppress: the past. 

It's sad when books are banned, magazines shuttered, language policed and conferences picketed by silencers, but these things don't only happen in the verbal world. Horticultural stories and ideas too are lost when gardens are erased under equitizing regimes in planning. 

Crowded hyper-urbanized planning results from overpopulation, but it works in lock-step with cultural story-suppression. Heritage-garden storytelling has been declared "colonialist". When large masses are crowded together, many views, traditions and intentions rub up against each other just as people do physically on public transport, and high-rise towers do on the horizon of the city-scape. 

It's not only the oxygen, tree canopy, floral abundance and bird song we lose when space is over-crowded. Under a regime of equal-concrete-for-all we also lose, by design, the stories that gardens tell in botanical language.

Every tree we eliminate in pursuit of pave-and-build development, had a life story of its own. Every tree was an individual shaped by its biography: its limbs showed its relationship with light as it turned seasonally toward the sun over decades, and the birds, arthropods and lichens that lived on it were its life-companions. Much of its story took place underground where roots stretched toward water and interacted with fungi and micro-organisms in soil.

Together these individuals make a forest-family when left to their own lifestyles, and when we pick off their relatives and log away whole woodlands as building sites, we are destroying a tree-nation, we are committing genocide in the form of arboricide. 

Garden stories are linked to a past we are too-often told is "shameful", meaning we should be ashamed of private household gardens as something privileged. But instead of engaging in some sort of de-privileging exercise, why don't we privilege everyone equally? Why not give all urbanites and suburbanites access to life-giving green-space around their houses? 


Sit for a while at the feet of trees, and listen ...


Monday, February 6, 2023

What happened to the Emerald Necklace?

This is the linked chain of green-spaces snaking through a city's parks and private gardens. In Greater Victoria it was enabled by the Olmstead brothers, who created the green verdancy of the Uplands neighbourhood back in 1912, plus other neighbourhoods in Vancouver, Seattle and beyond. When the emerald necklace is paved and buildings are crowded onto the landscape, bird and wildlife habitat is lost, plus play space for kids and horticultural beauty for residents.

The emerald chain creates wildlife corridors on the ground and through tree canopy without which, when we look out our windows, we'll see no squirrels, deer or birds. Under the new Missing Middle / Muddle Regime we will see only  concrete and multiplex boxes. Will that create an enhancement of urban life? 

Think again Victoria. It's not built 'til it's built. In the 1930s, and post-WorldWar2, Victoria built houses with small footprints on surrounding garden space -- a section for each family. Yards for the kids, space for the veg bed. There's still time to make property "set-backs", Victoria, for both houses and controversial policies.  




Tuesday, May 31, 2022

A Setback For Privilege

 The words privilege and privacy have the same root, and they overlap in meaning. The "privileged" class within a town has historically meant those with homes set in garden space, under the shade of trees and behind discreet hedges. In other words, privilege means privacy. 

Naturally enough the folks who are crowded into dense housing crammed alongside public thoroughfares, subjected to prying eyes and other people's noise, resent those who have space and peace. Today, we talk about making things equitable. Regarding urban planning this sadly means densifying neighbourhoods and lowering quality of life -- but equally.

Quality of life is lowered when nature-space and green aesthetics are eliminated, gardens paved, the hedge replaced by the surveillance camera, the luxurious lawn criminalized. When this happens people's health suffers, physical and mental. They do less outdoor exercise and experience stress from overcrowding and noise.

Not only people but wildlife suffers: without gardens to forage in, pollinators (bees and other insects plus non-insect pollinators such as hummingbirds) decline -- over 30% of insect and bird species are now going extinct with the loss of plant diversity. And the big trees go; no room for them. Then drought and heat become extreme. The equitably-shared decline in quality of human life and health is also a setback for nature.

The current push for high-density multi-unit housing tightens this downward spiral. That other kind of "setback" -- property setback rules created by urban planners of the past which specified legal distance between houses, roads and other houses -- was meant to protect landscape and ecology. In our haste to undo the privilege of privacy we have taken away ambient ecological and aesthetic assets from everybody.  

To meet the need for housing we could either dampen demand (noting the "build it and they'll come" rule), or try to meet that demand (although we never will, given the above-noted rule) while retaining ecological and aesthetic values. In other words: privilege everybody. If we must endlessly build, we could at least maintain real estate setback rules around the multi-unit dwellings being proposed, leaving room for big trees, and not killing the pollinators. 







Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Big trees mitigate climate change, and big trees need big spaces











Top: Large mature trees hold carbon in their tissues. 2:Recently green space in Fairfield/Gonzales, now sacrificed to development. 3:carbon-holding tissue. 4 and 5: Big gnarled and abused old monarch in danger, Rockland area.


Some local politicians and mayors have said that despite the Harper government's non-signing of the Kyoto agreement, policies against global warming can be pursued at the municipal level. Let's hope they remember that that would entail first and foremost, massive tree replacement. Tree removal is a much bigger cause of global warming than is the transportation sector, and there is a danger that an uninformed public will be lulled into thinking that if politicians promote public transport, we're being virtuously "green" and can forget about Earth's tree cover.

This is irrational, but when something is repeated often enough people believe it without examining the facts. The boreal forest of Canada and Russia is the best carbon sink on the planet, but urban tree cover also plays a part, due to the fact that the sprawling paved "heat islands" called cities contribute most to climate change. If local mayors are serious about mitigating climate change at the local level, they will have to change the patterns of development and beef up greenspace preservation policies radically. The biggest trees do the best job of carbon absorption, naturally enough; the smaller trees that often replace them whenever someone deems one "sick" or "dangerous" (which is code for inconvenient, to someone) do not do as good a job. The row planted at Vic High, for example, to replace those destroyed this year during construction, will especially in their young years do a lot less for the atmosphere than their predecessors did.

Big trees need big spaces; houses packed closely together lead to much more global warming than cars do, and both are a result of uncontrolled population growth in already-crowded areas.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

The nature-rich school yard

Premier Christy Clark has just announced $8 million for upgrading school playgrounds -- wouldn't it be wonderful if "upgrades" meant not more plastic climbing things and swinging things, but a wider vision of what the grounds for children's play could involve? What if schools were to sponsor nature-based play? That would mean playing in meadows and woods, among bird feeders, tiny fish ponds and low labyrinths created by interesting varied shrubs. What if schools used their grounds not just for recess and sports (and for standing about shivering until it's time to go back in, which anyone has seen who has ever done playground supervision in schools), but for displaying urban/suburban plants, animals, and micro-ecosystems? For tracking and counting migrating and local birds and nests? For creating monarch butterfly waystations to help those beleaguered beings not go extinct? For planting new groves of trees and noticing what wildlife they attract -- the squirrels and blue jays that bury the acorns, the hawks that watch for baby squirrels, the lichen that creep along the branches, the insects that hide in the lichen? The wildflowers that grow in a long-grass mini-meadow, and the specimens students could find to look at under microscopes in the classroom. Think of what they could learn from outdoor thermometers and sundials, and from going out with collecting jars, sketching equipment and notebooks?

Some schools possess nothing but a playing field and blank flat concrete surrounded with a chainlink fence. As housing densifies and new parks fail to be created by municipalities, school yards become an ever-more significant portion of total urban green space. They should not be wasted by being black-topped. Much recent research also tells us (see Child and Nature Alliance: www.childnature.ca) that time spent in natural settings makes children more relaxed, focussed, refreshed for classroom learning. No urban space is a completely "natural" setting, but schools could do a lot better in becoming oases of green space in a too-concrete, too-artificial and indoor world. The Evergreen Foundation (www.evergreen.ca) has a "School Ground Greening" section which offers lots of tips and even funding to individual schools.

The BC Teachers Federation has pronounced the premier's focus on playgrounds "myopic," but in fact it could be the start of something big, something transformative both to landscapes and to kids' recreational lives, if only they could shift the emphasize from monkey bars to the benefits of nature-play.

B. Julian
(B. Julian is author of Childhood Pastorale: Children, Nature, and the Preservation of Landscape, available from local bookstores and libraries)

Friday, April 15, 2011

Paving of gardens cynically re-packaged in Oak Bay as "heritage revitalization"

,


"... legislation doesn’t require a public hearing for a heritage revitalization agreement," says Oak Bay Administrator Mark Brennan.

Translation of this remark made at the April 12th Oak Bay "Town Hall Meeting": we can destroy gardens to pay for the renovation of houses, whether neighbours like it or not, and even when these gardens too are "heritage" designated.

Oak Bay held an official "Town Hall Meeting" in response to a rally at the Municipal Hall in March, during which residents demanded a more responsive Council, more conservation and less development in Oak Bay's leafy heritage neighbourhoods.

At the Town Hill Meeting, councillors (presumably having decided together on a stance before-hand) mostly listened, answered few questions and made no promises. Participants meanwhile almost (but not quite) unanimously demanded protection for heritage gardens and tree cover, and the rejection of legal secondary suites and "monster houses." If any developers were present they too were keeping quiet, and allowing the people of Oak Bay to vent.

The problem with these exercises is that afterwards Council and developers feel able to say that residents had been "consulted," that they had "had their say." What they say, however, will be ignored unless they mount a very forceful defense against profit-making interests and the pressures of population growth. Much is made of the unaffordability of Oak Bay real estate but the wealthy population must be growing too, since expensive large homes keep being built on subdivided properties, and sold. Only a moratorium on further subdivision, in the interests of urban forest and landscape protection, embodied in a new OCP, would stem the tide of paving.

Council will air the "Blair Gowie" issue - the destruction of a heritage garden created by Butchart Garden relative Pam Ellis (see photo above) at the behest of local developers who call garden destruction "revitalization" - on Monday April 18th, 7:00 pm.