by admin | Jun 2, 2023 | What's New
I would say to anyone who says a paved path along Bolin Creek is going to improve water quality, you are mistaken. The path along Bolin Creek in Chapel Hill has been there since I moved to town in the early 1990’s. This section of the creek is still listed as a 303d impaired stream, defined by the Clean Water Act of 1972. So, paving along Bolin Creek in Chapel Hill has not improved water quality.
Rob Crook is a long-time forester and expert on urban forests. He has served on Carrboro’s Environmental Advisory Board and its Greenway Commission. He believes we can have a better vision for our future than deciding to pave over all the riparian zones along our creeks.
by admin | Jun 2, 2023 | What's New
First and foremost, the Carrboro Linear Parks Project is NOT a Town of Carrboro project.
It is a project pushed forward by NEXT NC, a political PAC associated with Triangle Blog Blog, along with the Democratic Socialists of America who seek to end our present form of governance and have a second constitutional convention, moving us to state control of all private endeavors.
NEXT sees its Carrboro Linear Parks Project as part of its new urbanist ideology.
Secondly, as a town citizen, I see this current effort to build linear parks as a result of our town being left with land unsuitable for building by developers. Such areas include floodplains and riparian areas that surround creeks, streams, and rivers.
I object on many levels to the phrase “Linear Parks.”
Creeks, streams, and rivers, along with their riparian areas, aren’t linear. They curve, they drop, they roll. They are the epitome of change, welded into our consciousness in profound ways.
As it is, we don’t have enough open space to allow people to interact with nature. With the climate crisis, moreover, nature is changing. Extreme weather events are already here. We need to leave nature alone or else restore what we have with truly soft green infrastructure, the kind that nature provided in the first place, to create more resilient communities. This is how we will absorb the energy of Cat 5 storms. This is how we will abide
One of the oldest phrases in Western Civilization is Heraclitus’ quote: “No human ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and they are not the same human.”
I could give you thousands of other examples. Suffice it to say, we seek non-linear environments, ones not built by humans, ones without straight lines and borders, ones that don’t restrict our conscious thought and our intuition, ones that allow us to go forward.
We can change because nature changes.
We are at our best when we seek to partner with nature, not when we try to tame it as when we slap our engineering selves on our back and tell ourselves what grand calculations that we have been able to achieve by altering nature dramatically!
Rob Crook is a long-time forester and expert on urban forests. He has served on Carrboro’s Environmental Advisory Board and its Greenway Commission. He believes we can have a better vision for our future than deciding to pave over all the riparian zones along our creeks.
