We Are Not Alone... (click here)

...and we're in pretty good company...


I felt a certain empathy with the exasperation expressed:

"He blithely says, 'I'm sure the trees will be replaced'. We are talking about a park which has very ancient trees, including the hollow tree where Elizabeth I played as a child. These are very important sites, and I am not sure that the Minister has grasped the importance of those trees. He seems to be too focused on the wood."

Nosing around some more, I've discovered that The Gadfly has a counterpart in London. I present The Greenwich Phantom, an anonymous blogger who reports on neighborhood doings. He (or she) has been at it for much longer than I, and seems to have a many more daily hours of free time, or a job that takes him everywhere (journalism?). Opinions and public comments worth reading by the Greenwich Phantom here. British subjects may sign the petition.


But we do see eye-to-eye on what he calls "vandalism," the cutting down of mature trees. They are up against the same fatuousness that we are. I see that educated Britons are just as careless in their thinking as Americans.

"I noticed one well-meaning peer (Lord Addington) suggesting that 'if we lose the odd tree, we plant two instead?'

Erm, despite numerous pleas by The Phantom, Homebase still doesn't sell 300 year-old trees planted by Charles II. I will continue to lobby Dobbies (nice rhyme, huh) to get some in stock, but until they do, that's going to be a problem. We're stuck with the ones we've got."

In the case of Greenwich Park, the trees are certifiably known to be hundreds of years old. Ours haven't been tested of course, and it was recorded that many of them were planted at various times in the 20th century. The fact that some of them were probably here when the Confederates were trying to thwart Geary's Union forces from crossing Peachtree Creek doesn't give them quite the historical cachet as little Princess Elizabeth playing beneath them in the 16th century. I suppose some of ours might have been nicked by minie balls, but those wounds are long covered over.

Two or three --or ten 3-year-old saplings are not the same as a 100-foot tall tree with a 30-foot canopy and corresponding root system. (Oh, those despicable tree roots! Some of the Path Committee won't grasp the simple idea that tree roots are not the result of erosion, tree roots are what hold the soil in place. If you cut into them or pave over them, the tree will be damaged, probably die and then the soil more easily erodes. Especially in a flood plain.) To suggest new plantings could possibly be "replacements" is moving from disingenuity to purposeful deception. If there's no intent to deceive, then I have to infer some kind of brain blockage in a failure to grasp the obvious.

Even our own City Arborist reported back in the 1970's,way before millions of acres of Atlanta's tree canopy had disappeared, when a proposed sewer project route threatened some trees in Memorial Park:

“...the trees involved were so large and many were of unique species that replacement would be impossible no matter how much money is available,” and “...the trees are irreplaceable and their value expressed in dollars is meaningless.”

Mr. Cartledge, our Association President, amazingly, is able to express the value of the trees which would be lost to the proposed paving in what seems to be c.1933 dollars, (the year of Georgia's Bicentennial, when the park was dedicated and the first 200 donated trees were planted) and he also must have the inside track on a source that not only sells mature trees at rock-bottom prices, but will transport and plant them for practically nothing, because none of the local nurseries or big box stores can match his flippant assessment as to how cheap and easy it would be to replace the 30-year-0ld trees lining Wesley Drive that are too close to the street to allow for any paving. Mr. Quillian lives in a world where those shiny new "replacement" trees will be of much more appropriate species than those varied and rare ones which were planted over the preceding decades. According to him, they ought to be placed more conveniently, I suppose out of the way of any future bulldozers.

Maybe we could have a Tree Ghetto where they all could be rounded up and kept, where they wouldn't annoy anybody anymore. (Or in that tree museum in the song?)

The New Buzzword

The Paving Committee has attached itself to a new word that is popping up everywhere these days, in a dizzying lack of logic and conflicting arguments.

"Marginal" is the word of the month.

"Any changes to the park would attract a marginal increase in usage." Can somebody tell me what "marginal" means? How many more people per hour? Twenty more? One hundred more? Will they arrive in cars? Or take MARTA? Carpool? How do they know? Have they done a study? Did they do a comparison with another park that made a change to their amenities?

OR did they just make this up?

Yes, I thought so.

Path Committee Member: " I think that it (paved sidewalk) could attract marginally (as long as it was “in scale” as we discussed) more traffic in a decidedly safer environment is better than marginally less traffic in a decidedly less safe environment."

What?

How does higher traffic make for safer streets? The paving proponents have ignored the unassailable fact that there has never been a pedestrian injury on Wesley Drive in its entire history, (nor even an auto accident in anyone's living memory) but that doing things to increase the traffic and parking on Wesley may definitely make it much more likely. Certainly making changes based on gut feelings (like the ill-conceived 3-way traffic stop which has turned out to have increased pedestrian danger) can have opposite the hoped-for effect.

And will we force people not to walk on the streets or cross the street once the paving is done? (Has anyone noticed that lots of people walk on the natural dirt path now and enjoy it just fine, by the way? Why is walking on a dirt path "a decidedly less safe environment?" )

But I digress.

Explain how we can make improvements that will most certainly be touted all over town, and on the internet-- City Hall parks site, tourist sites, jogging sites, Mom sites, dogwalking sites, Yelp.com (just see what's being said here!) and various others, word of mouth, and is literally across the street from the soon-to-be built Beltline, and yet that is only going to attract a "marginal" increase in traffic to the park?

The promoters of this project are either self-deluded, if they think it is only going to be known and used by the immediate neighborhood, somehow because it is "in scale," or they are trying to fool the membership in order to sell it.

Every day, people come to Atlanta Memorial Park from all over the area to use this relatively small park the way it is now. Possibly the attraction is limited to people who prefer a more natural, undeveloped setting, people who are willing to walk around a muddy spot or a bump in the path. Some of them do jog on the asphalt rather than on the softer dirt and grass. If they don't care for the "dangerous" street, why in Hades do they drive all the way here? They are adults, at least many of them. (The legal age for a driver's license in Georgia is 16.)

Chastain Park has a concrete path, and it is estimated to have more than 200 users per hour. (Apples to apples: They aren't coming to use the tennis courts or the golf course. They are joggers, walkers, baby strollers and bikers.)

"If you build it, they will come."