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Back Yards and Vacant Lots
Have you recently returned to your childhood home and tried to locate
your old favorite play areas? On our last visit to my parents' home
in Salt Lake City, I noticed that my three favorite vacant lots had
homes or apartments on them, with concrete drives and well-kept lawns
and flower beds. Very nice -- but where do the neighborhood children
go to dig holes and find rocks? Where are the old boxelder trees for
climbing and finding good sticks? And where are the red ant hills upon
which so many experiments were conducted with the brown ants? Where is
the deep green grass of early summer through which you could crawl like
a snake or simply hide for hours? (A good bunch of that grass, complete
with root system, may on an unconservation-minded occasion, have been
vaulted at the enemy!) But all is gone now; so where can a child go to
experiment with or explore nature?
The young person's important work in the soil and weeds may be exasperating
to the mother, who must wash the clothes and find room in the home for
pretty bugs and lucky rocks with white lines around them, but isn't that
better than hours of "Captain Goony" on TV? Isn't it better than hearing
"What can I do?" hundreds of times over, from the young folks?
The loss of "empty and green places" in our cities is indeed a great loss.
However, our cities keep spreading and consuming valuable agricultural
land; the garbage dumps and the automobile graveyards cover once beautiful
fields; and the super highways destroy city parks and scenic canyons.
Unless something is saved soon, this great land of ours may one day be
like some of our big cities are now, and the adults and children alike
will be viewing documentaries on TV on what the face of the land used to
look like.
It won't be many years before most of our cities will have doubled in size.
What plans have been laid in your community for preserving some groves of
trees, or springs and open green places? As housing tracts move further
up the foothills, are the streets being laid out on grids irrespective
of natural contours and water drainage? Are real estate planners being
forced to reserve some land just because it is beautiful the way it is now?
Even our small semi-rural communities ought to have some long-range plan
for orderly growth lest they be consumed by the asphalted, bill-boarded,
glaringly unorganized urban sprawl.
Let us dedicate ourselves to the proposition that an open green place for
a child to find rocks, sticks and bugs, is just as important to a
community as a new shopping center -- perhaps more so!
-- by Paul C. Burgoyne
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