Life Without Principle

We're sorry, but we didn't know that you went to that semi-wild park for fishing and hikes in the woods.  We saw it as the most awesome location for upscale properties. While you have spent time away from your favorite fishing hole and picnic area, we have moved in, subdivided and civilized your park. It was up for sale after all, didn't you know? Everything has a price. We can only see lakes and picturesque natural areas through the lens of a realtor, investment banker, landscape architect, and those dollar signs are the prettiest green.

There doesn't seem to be any outrage or notice of this happening. Some people might think that its equally acceptable for the parks service to carve up a park to subdivide and civilize the wilderness for easy access by cars. However, we can hike to the picnic area without needing a parking lot beside it. We can choose how deep into nature that we travel but it does not need to be by car. If we really need to bring a lot of our civilized world into the woods, then we can divvy it up or make extra trips, or maybe decide that we can enjoy the wild without so much of the city in bags or boxes carried in and out. Our wild and semi-wild areas are dwindling but not enough people see them as the treasures they are. Smaller urban parks often around or near a lake or recreation area are perfectly suited to a temporary establishment of home providing conveniences until the sun goes down and the bugs start biting, the air too cool for a dip in the lake.

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!”

Life without Principle by Henry David Thoreau - 1863

Sometimes a natural disaster causes enough damage to a semi-wild park that it opens the opportunity to redesign it with amenities sans wilderness, sequestered nature to the sidelines. This is understandable and acceptable but far from preferable, though to replant and landscape again to what once was would take time and money. Who wants to wait so much time when a new basketball court and volleyball court, and park buildings could be erected much quicker? This may have been a small piece of wild in the midst of former countryside that was civilized by suburbanites long ago. This small piece of wild was unlikely to last in its surroundings, they all eventually fall, for the right price.

It seems that the only hope for parkland amidst the urban jungle, is the humble (or not so humble) golf course. Although this is hardly a whisper of the wilderness that would exist if someone were to require that it remained untainted by "civilization." Is it really so impossible to preserve the wild and semi-wild? Must every unspoiled parcel become the ideal location of a dream home? Can there be grass that grows wild, unkempt and trees that fall in the woods that are unheard?

Preservation takes less time or money than restoration, and only nature knows how it once was. Before you begin to think that it cannot happen, take note of what already has happened. Look around you to where there had been trees or woods or wild places. Life must indeed be richer with less pavement and noises of industry, where there is yet a place to escape the city before there is no countryside. How can you be sure that after a time of not having visited that favorite swath of nature, that it remains as you left it, as you remember it, still there for you to share with others, children, family, friends?