Dustin Valen
global indifference Climate change may be the next test of the extent to which people are willing to defend their parks against bad behaviour. Parks have become potent symbols of our environmental attitudes. New values placed on parks also challenge us to expand our understanding of bad behaviour as new forces both individual and institutional in origin threaten our landscape values. Climate change, the sum of many bad behaviours, impacts our public parks and their appreciation: invasive species perpetrate new kinds of vagrant activities, rising temperatures that affect precipitation in turn affects the migratory patterns of animals and shifts the geographical boundaries of many plant species. Warmer temperatures elevate the risk of attack by insects and pathogens: many northern tree species are becoming vulnerable to disease. Dutch elm disease, an infectious fungi spread by beetles who make their home beneath the bark, has devastated millions of hectares of Canada’s woodlands, including almost 80 per cent of Toronto’s street and park elm population. In Winnipeg’s historic Assiniboine Park, a 200 year old elm, affectionately known as ‘Grandma’ and connected to Lord Selkirk, was felled. In 2013 alone some 5,600 elm trees were destroyed across Winnipeg. Add to this devastation the damage wrought on Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park by Hurricane Juan in 2003, and to St. John’s Bowring Park by Hurricane Igor in 2010 where a century-old linden tree planted by the Duke of Connaught was torn from the ground—the effects of climate change on our public parks are difficult to ignore.
2014 was the warmest year on record. Rising global temperatures will increasingly bear on our landscape values. Although action has been slow, the ability of parks to mitigate the effects of climate change has also been recognised. In the six decades since Hurricane Hazel inundated much of Toronto, the re-naturalisation of the Don River Valley through a series of ecological parks has been made a priority to protect against future extreme weather events. the litmus of bad behaviour As surrogates for our social and sustainable goals, public parks are key players in the ongoing negotiation of our cultural and political values. By throwing a spotlight on these values, bad behaviour forces us to confront their instability and the often unseemly paradoxes of our actions and institutions. Bad behaviour and its consequences also assert the ability of landscape to affect social and political change. The merit of bad behaviour in public parks is that we must ask ourselves how we reconcile unlikable, challenging, dangerous, tragic intrusions? From High Park’s condom wrappers to Hurricane Juan, all bad behaviours that affect our parks should be recognised as signposts for change.
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1 Jay Appleton. The Experience of Landscape. New York: Wiley, 1975 2 Geoffrey Blodgett. ‘Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architec- ture as Conservative Reform’ The Journal of American History 62, no. 4,1976. pp 869-889 3 Dorceta E. Taylor. ‘Central Park as a Model for Social Control: Urban Parks, Social Class and Leisure Behaviour in Nineteenth- Century America’ Journal of Leisure Research 31, no. 4, 1999. pp420-477 4 Galen Cranz. The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Park in America . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,1982
S W: sites of transgression such as carnival are where individuals are given anonymity, either by mask or costume, to transgress social norms. These are licenced because they are in a festival. What is being proposed here is a continuous state of transgression in our
wilder the transgressive reaction. The Calgary Stampede comes to mind; not a public park, but a public event complete with costumes, the mythos of the lawless west borrowed from Hollywood, much bad behaviour all around - and this in very much a law and order city. St. Patrick’s Island, mentioned by Dustin, has been transformed into a riverine ecology centre: anywhere natural is increasingly groomed. I think the Stampede and its annual blow-out of bad behaviour legitimises the manicuring of nature throughout the city. Somehow the social
contract has been assumed to be broken. No longer are we allowed to live and let live, trusting that diversity in society is kind of self-regulating in terms of ‘bad behaviour’. Such regulation and indeed tolerance has been taken out of our hands and put into those of a police mentalilty.
public parks. The degree of
transgression, and this is from Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, has a direct relationship to the degree of oppression in general society: the more clamped down it is, the
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