Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in 21w755's LiveJournal:

Saturday, May 13th, 2006
9:13 am	The question of audience For the two essays I wrote this semester, I have somewhat different audiences in mind, so I will discuss them in turn. The first essay was a personal essay about my experience moving to a big city, so I had a pretty broad audience in mind. In many ways, that essay was a little story about a particular time in my life, and so I think it is of potential interest to almost any human, as a story. That being said, I had an ideal subaudience in mind when writing it - anyone who lives or has lived at some time in a big city. I was really hoping that the essay would resonate with such people. And within this audience, I was interested in the people who had moved to the city from rural or suburban areas, like me, separately than I was interested in the people who had grown up in the middle of New York and always lived there. While I hoped the resonance would be very strong for people in the first class, I am secretly more interested in the second audience. Does the essay resonate even though they didn't experience the contrast I did? I hope my essay can bring their life into sharper definition by making them more aware of the experience of living in a city. I want it to inspire them to pay more attention to the plants and green spaces within a city, to mimic the experience of living in the subarbs or a rural area. The second essay was more directed, I had a more specific audience in mind, and am more focused on an agenda. I consider the second essay to be like a battle plan proposal for others on my 'team'. I don't intend for it to be 'preaching to the choir' because I think I'm saying something new, but I do want to be talking to the 'choir'. With it, I want to convince other people who are also concerned about the environment, about how Americans face the environment, and about how these relationships develop into the future, that urban parks are an underutilized but potentially very powerful weapon that the environmental movement should really be using. Again, I think this essay is of some interest to most Americans - urban parks are certainly an important feature of cities, and I think most urban dwellers have some interest in thinking about what the purpose of the parks should be, and what features can be added or modified, as well as in the history of the park system. For this general audience, I'd like them to read my essay and afterwards notice features of urban parks when they visit, and then to evaluate those features internally, and begin to develop a feeling for what they want from such parks. For the more specific audience, I want them to become convinced of the power urban parks can have as a strategy for the environmental movement in this country, and moreover, to take steps to develop it as such. The first step is making this a circulated idea, to have it slowly seep in within the ranks. The second is that after a critical mass is reached, the growing stream of emails and phone calls to park supervisors across the country will begin to leverage the system and change the way park administrators think about the purpose of parks, and change the services parks provide so that a lot more environmental education and nature experience is offered within the park system. Writing this, I see that my writing this semester had a theme tying it together - I want to influence people to notice more of their surroundings, be more perceptive and aware, and then think more about the environment they find themselves in, and whether there are ways in which it should be changed. In the first essay, I came at this topic in a more relaxed way, using my own story as a foil against the reader can see their own. In the second essay, I came at the theme with a more specific agenda, and a particular idea about how _I_ think our environment can be changed. I did the kind of thinking that I am encouraging, and the second essay is my response to it, and I want others to adopt its point of view. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 7th, 2006
3:28 pm	Kennedy School of Government and Boston Parks I've seen some interesting information about both the park system in Boston and air pollution since the last time I wrote... I highly suggest the Kennedy School of Government's page about the Boston Park system: http://ksgaccman.harvard.edu/hotc/index.htm. This page is the first I've seen addressing the right questions about the Boston park system. It does several interesting things - firstly, it contains a list of public spaces in Boston along with a map, and it classifies these spaces, ranging from 'urban wilds' to 'greenspaces' to 'playground area'. When you click on the link for any particular place, it brings up an article about the location, with a bar on the side with links to problems specific to the site, and photographs of the site. Several major problems surface as I look through their entries on several of the parks, including the two largest: Franklin park and the Arnold Arboretum. The first is poor public transportation to these parks, which is greatly exacerbated by poor signage from the closest T stops to the parks. This seems to be quite universally true of parks in the Boston system, and the website includes several testimonials of individuals describing that the public transportation to the parks is slow, does not get one very close to the park, and lastly, is unclear leading some people to not even find their way to their destination. I feel particularly for this problem, as in a previous essay I asked what it means if living in the city means you require a car to see nature. This is a problem both because it is unacceptable for access to nature to have such a large economic barrier around it, and because of the irony of requiring one to generate automobile emissions in order to enjoy nature. Another major problem is that those who live closest to the parks (and hence would not need to use private or public transportation to get to the parks) seem not to know about/use the parks. This fact has racial and socioeconomic undertones, as those who live closest to franklin park and the arboretum tend to be poorer and African American, compared to the rest of the city. Moreover, dumping is an issue in the urban parks of Boston. Dumping of all kinds, ranging from chemical dumping, to furniture dumping (more common), to dumping of dead animals (less common again). It is expensive to clean, but more upsettingly, it really undermines the philosophy and environment of the park setting. The encouraging thing about the website is that these are all problems that are reasonably fixable. Yes, they require money, and will require intelligent management and efforts, but they are not insurmountable problems. Improving signage to the parks is likely the simplest thing to fix. Estimates for the costs and benefits of a shuttle service to the parks has also been undertaken. Lastly, through improved education (/propoganda) it is probably feasible to decrease dumping into the parks, and it certainly can be cleaned to a large extent. There are also some interesting facts buried in the site. For example, there are comparisons on the number of acres of green space per person in different neighborhoods: While the city average was ten acres per 1,000 residents, in 1999 Roslindale had 25 acres of greenspace per 1,000 residents. Jamaica Plain had 16 acres per 1,000 residents. Roxbury had ten acres per 1,000 residents. Mattapan had eight acres per 1,000 residents. And Dorchester had six acres per 1,000 residents. Historic changes in park usage are also hinted at: the history of Franklin park is particularly instructive in this regard. In 1886, average summer Sunday attendance is between 11,000 and 15,000 people. Then a long bleak period seems to set on about a hundered years later. The timeline for that period reads as folows: 1977 - The City describes Franklin Park as being underutilized, having poor security, and being a source of negativity from citizens (1977 Franklin Field Neighborhood Report). 1978 - Franklin Park Coalition is incorporated. 1980 - Franklin Park made into a Boston Landmark. - Three rapes occurred on Glen Road. - Nine holes are unusable at the golf course - Master Plan for Franklin Park completed. - Stone railroad causeway removed when the Elevated Railway is demolished. Franklin Park Coalition receives 4,000 feet of granite blocks and uses the stone to block vehicular access to Franklin Park. 1981 - Proposition "2 1/2," which limits municipalities' ability to generate taxes for uses such as park maintenance, is passed. Mayor Kevin White reduces the Parks Department budget by 60% to $5.5 million. - Franklin Park Coalition hires summer work crews consisting of local youth to make improvements in the park. - Boston Police Department study shows that crime in Franklin Park is not higher than other Boston Parks and that crimes take place in the late evenings and early mornings. - Parks Department closes Glen Road to all traffic and puts in more stone blocks to block vehicular access. The zoo in 1988 has 35,000 visitors, compared to 2 million in 1920. Given this context, the current situation seems encouraging in that matters seem to be on the upswing. I feel strongly that the accesibility of parks to city dwellers will be an important issue in the new millenium. That our future attitudes and practices toward the environment as a species will largely be driven by how close or far city dwellers feel to nature. Compared to the way things were 30 years ago, it seems that the steps suggested by the Kennedy school of government are a strong first step toward rebuilding the park system here, and that if the rate of improvement remains as it is now, that Boston may, once again, have a park system which achieves to some extent the purpose of keeping city dwellers engaged with the environment. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 26th, 2006
7:13 am	Trash Yesterday I was walking in Caspers Wilderness Park outside Los Angeles. It was very nice - green, quiet, open. But there were two things that it took me some time to notice. More accurately, I noticed there was still more that was unusual, but it took some time to put my finger on them. 1. The air smelled completely different than in the city. 2. I did not see a single piece of trash on the ground. These last two more subtle factors were as important to me as the first more obvious features, in feeling like I had indeed arrived 'in nature'. Thinking that I can smell the difference between 'city air' and 'country air' sometimes makes me feel like I'm crazy, but I do in fact think that its true. I think that the difference can be roughly described like this: take out all the gasoline and exhaust smell, add some notes of honey and sagebrush, and there you are. But actually, you also have to remove some now non trivial amount of ozone and sulfur dioxide, as well as a host of other industrial by products... I do really wonder if one can smell those things too... As to the second, I think that the trash all over the parks and greenbelts in Boston is one of the primary reasons I have trouble enjoying them as natural places. For example, the Cambridge bank of the Charles river: there is on average a 15 foot border of grass and wildflowers between the street and the water, and a row of boulders right along the shore for I suppose flood protection, and enormous amounts of trash embedded in the grassy border, and hiding (not so subtly) between the rocks. The result? One cannot look anywhere and not have civilization staring you in the face. Worst, if you do look at the 'nature' that has been placed, or preserved, along the river, you see the worst face of it. Junk cans, fast food trash, lost clothing, scraps of metal, they all sit decomposing in the places one should be seeing life and growing and the world before humans. Its so bad that I don't even try to pick it up, there is simply too much of it. On the other hand, when I go hiking in relatively clean places, if I see trash I will pick it up. The end of the hike is generally a little sad when I unpack the front pocket of my backpack and find that I have, indeed, picked up quite a load of trash, but it is also nice to know that the forest is a little cleaner than it was before, and that the next person walking down the path won't see any of the trash that I had seen. So, it is ok. Times when its not ok: when I come across dumps of beer cans - usually at the end of a short little trail, by some ashes too - where it looks like local kids go to drink and night, and then just dump all of their trash. When I come across pieces of trash too large to carry - car, couch, tire. When I am faced with the reality that I cannot pick up all of the trash, that there are people who really don't care at all, that as soon as I'm gone, they'll be back. When hopelessness strikes. Overall, I would say I'm pretty pessimistic about the whole thing. I rather think its only a matter of time before even those trails I love now accumulate enough trash along the sides and ground into the dirt of the trail itself that I cannot remove an appreciable amount there either. But it makes me so mad - why do people fill every nook and cranny of the planet with trash? I wish they could want the earth to be clean just a tiny bit - just the bit that it takes to motivate someone to put the wrapper in their pocket instead of on the ground, until they come to the next trash can. We do, after all, have an extremely sophisticated trash removal system for taking all the trash that people make and concentrating it into some very nasty but still contained places called landfills... Maybe if we could take all the trash of the next year and instead of putting it in landfills let it fill the city two feet deep, then people would learn something. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 25th, 2006
5:07 am	Urban parks and air pollution In my last essay, I argued for the importance of green places within a city. I had not considered the possibility that cities would not support forests and plants, or that any attempt to create such spaces would be severely crippled by the citified environment around it. This recent article in the Boston Globe has made me rethink myself. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2006/03/23/foresters_ask_help_for_franklin_parks_woods/ It explains that Boston's Franklin park, which Olmstead had intended to be a preservation of a slice of Massachusetts country within the city, was in danger of losing its canopy of oaks, never to be replaced. The oaks are facing a premature death - at 150 years instead of 300. The posited cause? Air pollution, poor soil, insect attacks. Moreover, invasive species - not native to Boston - are crowding out the saplings which would otherwise replace the current oaks. Looks like Olmstead's vision is cut short: 2006. But Olmstead's vision was my vision. I refuse to consider building cities without green spaces - without real trees and open ground. However, my aims seem simply impossible. I also cannot imagine a city without air pollution, ground pollution, water pollution. It seems the inevitable consequence of masses of humans living under the conditions that they currently demand. Or even remotely near the conditions we currently find ourselves in: the hundered thousand conveniences we simply take for granted. At this point, I throw up my hands. I've overconstrained the system, and see no resolution. It is the point of the I, robot story where the robot is being faced with conflicting data and inconsistencies, simply cannot take it any longer, and then simply explodes in a whizfizbangle of metal. The article ended sedately, resignedly. "In Frederick Law Olmsted's original design," she added, ''this was supposed to be a very natural environment, an organic environment where nature does most of the work and benign neglect is how it has been managed." "[But now] this is an urban forest; it's not an arboretum," she said. I am not exactly sure what that means, I think because I don't want to hear it. But it sounds like Boston is going to be among the first cities to ditch the idea of having natural spaces within the city. From here on out, it is just one long slide down. First we manicure the last remaining "wild place" within the city. Then comes the engineering of which species are to live and which to pull. Pretty soon, the place is not a natural space, but an artifice. Not a slice of nature, but another human construction like all the others in the city, except the lego blocks now aren't bricks, they're trees. Pick your favorite colors, fit them together, take it apart again and reform it when it gets tiresome... I do think we're in bad shape now. The proposed green spaces I want are too threatened by the city around them. Bounded by roads on all sides, city noise, traffic (dangerous to the wildlife, you know), and on top of all this, air pollution digging its nefarious tentacles into the very heart of the park. How bad is the air pollution in Boston? According to the EPA, the levels of air toxins in Boston and Cambridge are 200-300 times "safe levels" - "safe levels" being that at which one in a million people contracts cancer as a result of air pollution. Perhaps we should be taking a hint from the trees, reallly - if they cannot live in such an environment, maybe we have no choice but to abandon the comforts, conveneinces, pleasantries of the city and move to a healthy, or at least non-noxious place. The most immmediate effect on the cities green places, however, will be the replacement of pollution sensitive trees with more pollution tolerant trees. A trip to http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/nursery/430-022/430-022.html informs me of which trees fall into each category, and explains why we see and will continue to see more dogwood, maple, and ginko trees, and fewer oak, pine, sycamore, walnut, willow, and tulip trees. I can see where we're headed at the rate we're going now. Unfortunately, I don't see how to resole the situation in any satisfactory way. Maybe thats a task for another day. (Comment on this)