fences thistle and counting crows at albany bulb

 

 

They built the fence enclosing the 8 acre 'burrowing owl habitat', which by the way, the crows totally love, and the area around it has been flattened in preparation for the 'official' paved trail; they built a fence around what is euphemistically called the Berkeley Meadow, and which no-one visits anymore; they have

constructed vast fences around the 10 acre Tom Bates Regional Sports Complex, named in honour of the Berkeley Mayor who stole 'free' newspapers which endorsed his opponent in 2002, and put in an obscene amount of tarmac to accommodate the private cars which will have to transport the eager little soccer players back and forth because there is no friggin' public transport to the waterfront; they constructed new sports fields in my neighbourhood and put in a brand new fence and a list of rules so long, you wonder whether there was ever any intention of letting local kids use it. There is a whole load of fencing and barricades surrounding the old oak grove which UC Berkeley is going to decimate in order to build a new - you guessed it - sports complex. I don't have a problem with sports or efforts to encourage kids to exercise more. I do have a problem with the obsession with keeping people out of their urban parks.

I don't like fences.

Signs hang from the fence telling us not to enter, as if some sort of secret weapons testing were going on behind the metal gates. Small bunkers of sand have been created which presumably are very popular with little mammals which the burrowing owls like to eat. Except there are no burrowing owls. They are in San Jose apparently. But there are an increasing number of black crows, who seem to love the new habitat. Crows are actually a pretty cool bird, with strong 'family' relationships. But err...they are not endangered. And they are one of the birds most easily infected with West Nile Virus. So, that's cool, huh? In a state that is pretty scared of this disease, we may have created a habitat where it can thrive.

What I find worst about what is happening at the Albany Plateau and Bulb is that people are being disengaged from caring about their park, areas of communal meeting have been destroyed, and where groups of friends would once meet up to walk together with their dogs, picking up garbage and dog poo as they went, the perimeter trail discourages congregation and becomes more like a running track. Paper and plastic debris now blows under the fencing and the Park District has to send a staff member into the locked area to pick up garbage which we, dog walkers, used to pick up as a matter of course during our meanderings. Worse is the way in which 3 months after they locked us out of our park, yellow star thistle, a pretty nasty invasive weed, is beginning to overrun the area.

About four years ago, a group of us, including amazing Park District board member, the late Jean Siri, started pulling the yellow star thistle and collecting it in careful piles for staff to remove when they came to empty the garbage bins - which by the way were first provided by park users, not the park system. For 3 years we have had no yellow star thistle in 'our' park. Elsewhere in the Park District, the bright yellow flower with the jagged minty green stalk is a constant threat to native plants, even causing the district to place signs about the problem. But not in our park where Jan and Sue and the other whippet owners, and me with my brood, used to spend hours carefully controlling it. Not now. The fences now keep us from the places we used to walk.

Does all this sound petty to you? To me, it is about what happens when people no longer feel that they are part of a solution, when 'ownership' and 'investment' in our own neighborhoods, parks, political process is grabbed from our hands as surely as this little 8 acre piece of landfill has been. But I'm sure the Park District and the bright lights who came up with the burrowing owl habitat have already worked out that the fruit fly is a natural predator to the thistle, so probably they are importing a bunch of those while I write this. That'd work, right?

When we started a group called Albany Let It Be to encourage the State Park planners to just let this organic wonderland of a park continue in it's self regulation, we were begging the 'managers' to do what are incapable of doing - to stop trying to manage everything. We failed. But the real failure here is that this is part of a larger process of disenfranchisement. From the very quality of our lives.

Comments

[Deb in Minnesota]

Jill, I look differently at the park spaces in the Twin Cities after reading your blogs about the Albany Bulb.