So, apparently, yesterday was blog action day. I was pretty busy during work when I found out, but had every intention of posting something about it when I got home. Needless to say, that didn’t happen either. Better late than never, right?

So we’re supposed to share a personal experience dealing with nature or the environment, but I live in the downtown of a major city…so I don’t see much of nature. One thing we do have, though, is an abundance of mini-parks or green-spaces peppered throughout the city. One thing I noticed about them is that a few don’t allow walking on the grass, or are separated by some kind of barrier, so you wouldn’t be able to walk on them anyway. I find this completely ridiculous. I can understand it from the standpoint of “landscaping costs money, don’t mess up my landscaping” but I feel like it defeats the purpose of these places. Living in a city it’s often very easy to forget about environmental issues, or even how good it feels to get out and walk around in the woods, or in a field. I think they help a lot of people reconnect with the environment, at least on a very subconscious level. By only letting people observe and not experience, I feel like it separates that 1-1 relationship of man and nature. It makes it seem like this thing that is “someone else’s job” to maintain. Which I think, on a very basic level, can spread to other areas of environmental protection, and ignoring environmental issues is something that the world is constantly struggling against.

Now, I’m not saying that letting people walk or sit on the grass everywhere is going to magically open people’s eyes to the need to help the environment, but maybe it can remind some people how special it is to be able to just law down in the grass for a little while.