They Paved Paradise

I've been reading Christopher Brown's Field Notes newsletter for a while now. He's a lawyer and science fiction author living in Austin, TX and his newsletter is focused on the environment and social issues in his area. His latest issue had a passage that resonated strongly with me after having to live with municipal and provincial governments that seem hell-bent on paving over every bit of green land they can get their hands on. 

Maybe a few neighborhood teens would have helped us back here in Austin Thursday, when our City Council granted final approval of the rezoning of the Borden Dairy site frequently featured in this newsletter’s rambles, where a local developer and the private equity funds that bought Borden out of bankruptcy propose to develop a giant mixed-use project on 20 acres, half of which are currently an empty lot, next to a 43-acre wildlife sanctuary on the Colorado River, with 120-foot buildings in a major migratory bird corridor. We had a dozen young people come out to testify at first reading in May, but their pleas fell on deaf ears, even before we learned we had been disenfranchised by a maneuver that compelled our district representative on the Council to recuse himself. The fight is not yet over, but the fix is in. Trying to persuade municipal officials that their imperative for growth and infill needs to be balanced against the protection of wild green spaces is a quixotic undertaking—just ask the hundreds who turned out last month in Atlanta to try to stop the razing of an urban forest to build a police training base.+

He also pointed out an article in TIME by another science fiction author, Jeff VanderMeer, whose books have a strong environmental focus. The article, Florida’s Environmental Failures Are a Warning for the Rest of the U.S., Brown says: "In a powerful, comprehensive, urgent and elegiac work of reportage, Jeff marries the lyricism of nature writing with deeply researched public policy journalism, and TIME gave him room to really tell the full story behind what the “secret history of loss” underway there and all over the country, and the planet—the destruction of wild life that goes on outside of our range of vision. Highly recommended."