AN OPEN SPACE IN THE WOODS

I attended a barbecue the other evening in a nearby town. Before dark, our hosts took us on a tour of the “trail” their city had just installed near their home. A mile-and-a-half asphalt ribbon wandered along a streambed, weaving its way between massive Fremont Cottonwoods (Populus fremontii), the region's largest deciduous tree. The evening was beautiful, and the atmosphere festive. Families strolled together. Children rode by on bicycles. A pair of teenage girls passed us on horseback. Dusk was falling as we made our return, and all the guests were chatting happily about what a lovely spot the municipality had built for the community. It would have taken an insufferable killjoy to spoil the moment with a dissenting opinion, so I bit my tongue. But only for a second.

Actually, my friends were justified in talking as though that forest never existed until the city paved a footpath through it. Projects like these have become as common as horseflies around here, and the hype surrounding them always treats them as conservation efforts. Sure, there are benefits to these “open space” schemes. Urban folks who live pathologically removed from the natural world are given a little taste of a vital element otherwise lacking in their lives. Parcels like this little woodland are now safer than before from larger developments that might have obliterated them. But the immediate effect on the riparian community is negative. It is stressed by increased human traffic and removal of understory vegetation. I have grave concerns about the laying of asphalt so close to a creek, and the application of powerful and persistent nonselective herbicides like Prometon that precedes it. Reasonable people can disagree over whether or not the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, but to call these projects conservation is disingenuous. Here in Utah, 70% of the land belongs to the Federal Government, and 8% belongs to the state, so conserving a given ecosystem should be easy; it should require simply doing nothing. Conservation, like love and tomatoes, is best when it's free, and that's a problem for a political system that measures everything in dollars and cents. In order to protect a given spot, a financial benefit has to be shown, or invented, with the result that conservation efforts more often than not wind up benefiting an economic community instead of an ecological one. Here in the contemporary American West, that is largely manifested by the reins of land control being passed from the ranchers to the recreationists. Land once degraded by livestock is now degraded instead by mountain bikers.

This morning I took a walk through Hidden Hollow, an "Open Space" project near my home. In an area of about one third of a city block, a bedraggled stand of native trees clings to Parley's Creek. A once vacant lot in the heart of the Sugarhouse business district has been planted to represent different local ecosystems in three discreet gardens: the Piñon/Juniper community of the highlands to the south and east, the Gambel's Oak community of the surrounding hillsides, and the Rabbitbrush steppes that once dominated this very spot. Several signs stand about the gardens with information about the basic ecology, and, of course, the biggest sign of all stands at the front, listing the contributors. It's a nice little development in the midst of urbanality, and an amenity for the community, but it's still a development, and nothing more.
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upper: RED-TAILED HAWK & GRAY SQUIRREL (1996) acrylic 16" x 28"
lower: Photo of Hidden Hollow taken by CPBvK 8-24-'06