04-10-21

Stormwater Pond

I was working on a restoration project at the time

At the meeting today, W told me that homeless advocates (likely advocates for homeless people) superglued shut the city park office locks and doors, among graffiti and other forms of expression. I am reminded of why I initially refused to complete the volunteer hours of my stewardship training. Under the guise of stewardship and environmentalism, cultivation and maintenance of natural spaces covertly enforces colonialism and inhumane oppression.

How, then, do I execute my interest in habitat restoration? Or better yet, from which biases do my education and intuitions as a so-called restorationist come?

Colonizers taught me to restore land for use. I have been taught the marketability of environmentalism and palatability of restoration, centered on parks and pavement, trails and tree-planting photo-ops.

I feel like in a system of housing inequity, I contribute to anti-homeless infrastructure by building parks and supporting governmental environmental entities that endorse homeless dehumanization.

As a left-aligned ecologist, I feel a severe conflict of interest by participating in city parks.

I'm anxious. I feel like a traitor. I am internally against parkification if an undisturbed wild space could be rehabilitated. I know this project got argued back from housing development, but... I'm just in a tight spot. I feel like I'm tangentially working against hypothetical comrades. Why is it that I am only good at colonized things?

I pity the English Hawthorns that I condemned today. That doesn't remove my condemnation I guess... but they didn't know better than to grow they way they do. Neither did I. But I am pruning my self ("with the pruning the branch is stronger/I will learn to love the shears") and the Hawthorn grew mighty.