Will Sarvis - Omitted Photograhs

Omitted Photographs

In the editing process, I mistakenly removed too many photographs from Oregon, including those pertaining to three particular places that were vitally linked to the text. So here is the text from pages 46-48 with the relevant photographs re-embedded:

Among the more flagrant examples of fake Eden around Eugene include the Cheshire Prairie, Delta Ponds and the “natural landscape” feature at Lane Community College. The latter features irregular tree spacing and native flora species, without irrigation, mowing, or fertilizer. As a result, more trees than those in the forest just simply die. This is classic token environmentalism. Ignored is the ambient heat from abutting masonry buildings and the heat island effect of the campus in general. The soil configuration beneath the “natural landscape” was long ago disrupted when the area was logged, possibly farmed, and then radically altered (bulldozed, refilled, and graded, then seeded in grass) decades earlier to create the campus itself. Then there is the completely “unnatural” precipitation run-off from surrounding concrete and asphalt, air quality infected with tailpipe emissions, et cetera. And what natural state does the landscape pretend to represent? The pre-aborigine landscape? The pre-Columbus landscape? What about the pre- glaciation landscape of tens of thousands of years ago? Instead, this landscape is obviously contrived; neither “natural” nor cultivated by stewards, and thus the worst of all worlds. It is a fraud.

Above and below, the "artificial natural" area at Lane Community College (author's photos)

There are many other examples of fake-natural landscapes in Eugene, including Hendricks Park, an artificial creation admonishing against invasive species seeds. The west Eugene “wetlands” is actually a drained swamp, a result of the Army Corps of Engineering digging a massive trench to channel the Amazon Slough. The Cheshire Prairie features a patch of invasive thistles and native plants that accommodate homeless campers during the summer before late summer’s fire hazards apparently necessitate the city’s annual autumn mowing (with organic, solar-powered electric lawnmowers, as nature intended it before the white man arrived).

Above, mid-summer Cheshire Prairie in its "natural" state of thistles and weeds. Below, in late summer after city parks personnel mow the area. (author's photos)

But one of the more egregious examples of token environmentalism and a lost opportunity lies with the Delta Ponds. These are leftover human-made gravel pits adjoining the Willamette River that (ironically) came to function as valuable aquatic habitat. The river water feeds into the old pits through small, slow-current channels. This is one of the most obviously human-altered environments you can find around here, and yet now we are supposed to leave it “untouched,” as if it were a wilderness, as if it were Eden. Again, what we get is the worst of all worlds. It would be better to embrace the Delta Ponds as a human-created environment and proceed to make it into a park with features such as an arboretum, footbridges to islands, pagodas and tea houses situated along the existing foot trails, and any number of cultivated landscape features. It could become a jewel of the West Coast if only we would render Cosmos out of Chaos and stop pretending that a bastardized landscape constitutes some approximation of nature uncorrupted by human beings. Here, Eugene might take a cue from eastern Germany, where people are flooding former lignite mining pits in an effort to transform the place into a “lake district” for recreation.

Above, aerial view of Delta Ponds (Google Earth image). Below, pedestrian view of these former gravel pits (author's photo).