The Pandering of Urban Conservation

A concourse of micro-climate windstorms, mist, and sunshine. Of hills smothered in asphalt and ship-filled oceans. And shops and people and people and shops. And parks, luscious, beautiful, perfect parks bisected by horns, exhaust, and more asphalt. 

And when I say perfect don’t I mean contrived, for what is perfection, but a man-made creation of straight lines, shorn grass, flowers and bushes placed neatly in 3-meter rows and lone trees overhanging like a centerpiece in a watercolor composition of green and pink, and bright and flowering. 

And urban conservation. 

I see education. But education as rarity, as exhibition, as optional and flamboyant and something to forget once you’re done drinking your fill of the life outside of your bustling city streets. Something to see on a weekend, to acknowledge, but only as long as it’s new.

I see access. But access to an extent, of course, for one must pay for it.

I see attractions. Gimmicks, themes, the planet cut down to fit the mold of human entertainment. How else will people engage?

I see snap shots of creatures found fantastical in a moment, never reminisced, never rewound, taken more for the memory of an experience, a person, than for the creature stuck behind our dirty glass and phosphorescent lighting.

Urban conservation makes a spectacle rather than an importance of nature; A zoo for the wildlife too simple to warrant the cheers and ogling of the exotic, manicured grandeur disguised as green space, a clear cage disguised freedom and learning.

I see a weekend activity more than a long-term investment. In the pictures taken, in the specific shape and curve of plants throughout a park so segregated as to feel like miles of faux greenery, of circus disguised as museums, fish shops and restaurants, of vendors and human disturbance.

I do see a try, a desperate, commendable try and yet a cloud of financial incentive, an attempt at controlled beauty as if this man-made persona could rival the fresh beauty of chaos, petrichor scents permeating an untouched landscape, and unbroken treescapes.

Urban conservation is a try in the right direction, a pitying attempt at order and cleanliness and first world privilege. And sadder even than the spectacle, is humanity’s contented-ness with the smallness and fake-ness of San Fran’s interpretation of our non-human world.