I walk the same wooded path with my dog, Ivory, five mornings a week. Since we all started Sheltering In Place, Ivory and I are seeing a LOT more people on the trail every morning. Usually, we’d see one other person with his or her dog; occasionally, a couple of hikers; and very, very occasionally, a bicyclist or horseback rider. Often, we’d see no one at all on that trail.
These days, we’re seeing 10 to 14 people and six or so dogs every time we go out.
So that’s good, right? Now that people have more time at their disposal, they’re getting out into nature and moving their bodies.
Honestly, it’s complicated. The trail we walk is usually pristine—no trash, and people tend to pick up after their dogs. This morning, we saw a ton of dog doo on and near the path; two empty Gatorade bottles; a plastic bag that used to hold 500 paint balls; and the blue detritus from some of those 500 balls.
It’s got me remembering some things, and thinking some things:
*Years ago, before I had children, I used to go to Warm Water Cove Park on the far eastern side of Potrero Hill, basically in Dogpatch. Punk bands would play midnight concerts in that park, which at that time, didn’t bother anyone because nobody lived around there. There was a freestanding wall on one side of the park made out of concrete blocks; I have no idea what its purpose was. But over the years, it provided a wide-open canvas for a lot of graffiti artists. It was colorful and vital, and if you visited the park during the day, your eye would be pulled to the wall, and that would be a good thing.
Anyway, at one point, more than twenty years ago now, Warm Water Cove began to get some attention, and civic efforts coalesced to “clean up” the park. The midnight concerts got shut down. I went to the park one afternoon after the major “clean-up.” There was a mother in the park with her young child. They were both eating brown bread sandwiches on a brown plastic table. The colorful, graffitied wall had been painted over in prison-block gray. It didn’t really look like a win to me, but I guess it’s nice that somebody wanted to picnic there, despite the grim palette.
It was my first introduction to how a civic triumph for one group of people can mean an irretrievable loss for another group of people.
*Years after that, I was writing an Urban Ecology column for Potrero Hill’s neighborhood newspaper, The Potrero View. McKinley Square Park sits at the very top of the western side of Potrero Hill, overlooking much of the city. The park became a flashpoint of neighborhood conflict, and I wrote about it in my column. McKinley Square Park includes a playground, a dog run area, a community garden, and some open space. Some neighbors had gotten together, pooled their money, and bought fruit trees that they had planted in the open space area. They were taking good care of the trees, and had a vision of a kind of community orchard where, eventually, people could visit and enjoy fresh fruit from the trees. Their undertaking of the project was not impetuous or irresponsible, and they had been caring for the trees—including regularly handwatering in the hot season—for months.
Another stakeholder—a Parks and Rec ranger—was diametrically opposed to the fruit tree project. He wanted the space to be planted to native habitat—at the time, it had some eucalyptus trees that would need to be removed—so it could serve as a welcoming pit stop for migrating birds. Clearly this was another, perfectly fine idea for the space. But because of the size of the space (not that big) and the very different visions for it, the conflict felt like it would inevitably end with one of these two sides being shut down, basically having their vision nixed. And that’s how it played out. There may have been some way to broker a win-win—in fact, I want to believe there was—but it wasn’t apparent to me, or any of the players at that time.
Like the Warm Water Cove anecdote above, this “conflict” was the result of people wanting to be outdoors in a particular kind of way, and there not being enough outdoors to accommodate all of those different ways. We saw this over and over again on Potrero Hill, which doesn’t have a lot of greenspace: Dog walkers want something from open space; parents of young children want something else; teenagers want something altogether different; and even the various adults in a given urban neighborhood will have a lot of different ideas for best use of those postage-stamp-sized greenspaces.
*That’s what’s going on right now in the park that I walk in with Ivory most mornings. The Paintball People want a nice outdoor space to do their thing. I don’t appreciate the plastic Gatorade bottles and paintball bags, and honestly, at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I don’t want to see that kind of plastic blue waste that I saw today, which appears to be what results when people play Paintball. I liked my experience of the path before, when I passed one, two, or zero people. I like being able to listen to the forest sounds, and really see what’s around me. So I think our visions for the space are quite different.
*So we clearly need to create more open space, and I think some spaces should have dedicated uses, e.g., I think the Paintball People should probably have a dedicated space. Because, even with people’s schedules loosening up this little bit—it’s been a bit over a week now that we’re Sheltering In Place—I’m experiencing the path as a lot noisier and busier. The punk rockers should have somewhere to go where they can be free to have their outdoor concerts. (The area that includes Warm Water Cove Park is now very populated, and it could probably never be resurrected to that purpose.) And the parents of young children should be able to take them to outdoor spaces that aren’t full of doggie doo or worse.
*So how do we do THAT? I.e., create more open space? Many years ago, I read a book called Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler. I remember a number of ideas from that book, including the author’s discussion of the modern builders’ model for developing a large parcel: The tendency is to carve, for example, a multi-acre former ranch, into one- to five-acre lots, each with a house plunked in the middle of it. Kuntsler recommended, alternatively, that the houses be clustered together on a large parcel, with the rest of that parcel remaining open space. So that different way of thinking about building on a large piece of land provides one way to free up open space from what would otherwise be private lawns or RV parking space or whatever.
In the urban environment, I think cities need to rethink how space is dedicated. In San Francisco—and I wrote about this in another of my Urban Ecology columns—25% of the available space is devoted to cars—their storage, maintenance, beautification, movement, repair, etc. With a viable public transit system that people could actually rely on, and an infrastructure that made biking and walking safer, could we possibly cut that total in half, to say, 12% of available space given over to cars? Could we then morph that 13% of space we would gain into greenspaces? There’s a permaculture garden on a single lot at the corner of 18th Street and Rhode Island on Potrero Hill that really provides a fantastic model for how restorative a well-designed, lushly planted little greenspace can be. My point: I think we could do a lot in this arena if it became a civic priority. If it were a priority, we’d also generate a lot more good ideas about how to move in this direction.
I realize I’m talking about spending $$ here, but honestly, it seems like it would be money well spent. It’s natural that humans long to be outside, in various ways and for various reasons; the outdoors was our primary habitat for most of our species’ existence. More trees and plants mean cleaner air; better mental and physical health for residents; and the possibility of beginning to address people’s diverse needs for different kinds of open space.