You can listen to me read this post:
Elusive Bows
First this…
I am realizing that I have so many things I want to write about and my self-prescribed focus for this Substack – nature-based learning – feels like it’s limiting me a bit or making me try to tie bows that don’t fit in the scope of a 6-9-minute-read newsletter. So, while nature-based learning will continue to be a dominant theme, I think I’ll be expanding my writing. Sometimes I might just write about being a mom or about living in Kenya or about other life musings. Mostly I’ll still stay on brand. Consider this fair warning that sometimes the only direct thread to nature-based learning will be that these things all relate to me – and nature-based learning is deeply connected to my professional identity and there’s a straight line relationship between more-than-human nature and ALL of my identities.
This little update or acknowledgement is a bit overdue. I suspect any nature-based learning purists might have already unsubscribed when I’ve gone all personal with some squinty-slant-rhyme connections to nature-based learning over the past few months. Anyhow, that’s that. Eventually I’ll get to updating the “about” sections and welcome email and other things. For now, I’ll leave the title the same because the writing here will still be all about learning – and somewhere, somehow, it all connects with more-than-human nature, even if the connection isn’t 100% clear on the page (or in my head and heart for that matter).
Ok…now onto the main topic for today:
Letter to the Editor:
The notes from Public School 130 students about saving Elizabeth Street Garden from an affordable housing development for senior citizens made my heart lurch. From “free air” to “homes for animals” to a “place for hide-and-seek” to avoiding “taking away years,” children’s understanding of the value of human connections with more-than-human nature leaps from these messages. Imagining 575 students who lack viable green space at their school on the brink of losing their beloved neighborhood garden, classroom, and refuge is tough to bear.
I have dedicated my career to connecting humans and nature, especially in schools. In 2022, in Leadville, Colorado, I advocated to our affordable housing committee to avoid building on a forested site adjacent to a school, citing study after study showing routine nature connections improve quality of life, physical and mental wellbeing, and provide academic and planetary benefits. That forest still stands, affordable housing rising elsewhere. In New York, it’s time to look for alternatives, or for Mr. Carrión, Mayor Adams, and other decision-makers to co-create the housing development’s publicly accessible “beautiful new green space” with these discerning students and their teachers — perhaps a garden in which seniors and children sow connections with nature and one another together.
Sincerely,
Me
Paved Paradise
👆🏻This is the letter to the editor I wrote to the New York Times on our August 9th flight back to Kenya. It was never published. I read the article about Elizabeth Street Garden – a community garden and defacto outdoor classroom-oasis for students at New York Public School 130 that is slated to be demolished to build affordable housing.
My heart raced. My mind flipped back to Leadville (my Colorado hometown for 15 years) where there was recently a proposal to turn the forest adjacent to Lake County Intermediate School into an affordable housing development.
I remembered sitting in a session at Children & Nature Network’s Inside Out Conference in 2022. C&NN’s Executive Director, Sarah Milligan-Toffler moderated a session with Georgia Senator Rahman. I don’t remember the session title, just that the discussion was about how children and nature connections are a unifying, non-partisan, hopeful, and human cause.
As I listened, I was thinking about this parcel near our school – and how affordable housing vs. green space felt like a really terrible and false dichotomy – and I hadn’t figured out just how to sit comfortably in my strong convictions about both issues.
I asked panelists about making an argument for tree preservation in the face of an affordable housing crisis – exactly what’s happening with Elizabeth Street Garden in New York City. One of the panelists answered. And then, almost as an aside, Sarah suggested going directly to the folks asking for affordable housing to share about what was at stake. On the plane home from the conference, I wrote a letter (seems a bit of a habit for me!) to our local affordable housing coalition and then presented at their subsequent meeting.
I shared information about the value of trees for human health and quality of life in general and about the forest as a learning space (remember, this plot is adjacent to a school) and the academic, social-emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing benefits. About how frequent nature experiences foster emotional – HEART – connections with our non-human planet.
Once it’s gone and housing takes its place, I told them, the forest – as a space for learning and respite and wonder and awe – cannot be replaced. As long as there’s a school there, the value of that parcel left as a forest exceeds any gain in a few affordable units. I am in favor of affordable housing, I explained, and we must look elsewhere. Yes affordable housing. Yes forest. People and trees. People and gardens.
I didn’t actually say these words, but in my head I heard Joni Mitchell1 singing:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot
The coalition members were super receptive. And, as it goes, I didn’t know if anything would come of it.
A few months after I presented, and just days before our family moved to Kenya, I ran into the affordable housing coalition’s facilitator and she said one of the landowners of those exact forested parcels adjacent to the school had reached out offering to clear cut (!) the whole area in preparation for development.
The affordable housing coalition said, “No!!!”
Obviously Leadville, Colorado – a rural mountain town – and New York City are about as different as one can imagine. Still, the fundamental question at stake – the false, either-or choice between nature and affordable housing – is the same.
In New York, the planned development is for affordable housing for seniors living on less than $60,000 a year and some who were formerly homeless.
Developers are levying accusations of “NIMBYism” (Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ism) to those advocating to preserve Elizabeth Street Garden.
Developers ask: Do you care about people or do you care about plants?
When I first hear this question, my heart races and I start to sweat. YES! I love people so much. I love plants so much. Yes. Both.
And then, I steady my breathing.
I cry “Foul!”
We must be able to see the forest for the trees – or the garden for the flowers, as it were.
The members of the Leadville-Lake County Affordable Housing coalition – all the way up in the nose-bleed altitudes of a tiny Rocky Mountain town – were able to look past the false people-or-plants choice set. They now say: People AND plants. People FOR plants. Plants FOR people. And they come up with alternatives.
Garden ‘Loraxes’ Unite
Right now things look pretty grim for Elizabeth Street Garden. In the face of widespread resistance – even with the likes of Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, and Patti Smith adding their voices to the thousands of students, teachers, and community members – AND a detailed counter proposal to create more affordable housing units while preserving the garden – the courts have ruled in favor of developers. Eviction was scheduled for September 10th.
There’s still hope though. As of Elizabeth Street Garden’s most recent newsletter, the garden is still standing. Add your voice to the chorus with a letter to Mayor Adams (it’s easy) or make a donation.
This garden needs as many of us Loraxes as possible.
And, although I opened by saying that I wouldn’t always tie nature-based learning bows on my newsletter pieces from here on out, I will this time.
575 students at New York Public School 130 – and their teachers – and all the students and teachers who pass through the school in years to come – deserve – NEED – an outdoor space to learn and grow and build empathy and discover themselves and connect with others and be healthy and wonder and dream and explore and be curious.
For my part, Good Natured Learning will donate a Teaching Outdoors Training to empower all of the teachers at P.S. 130 to teach their students in the garden when it is saved.
❤️,
B
Lyrics from Joni Mitchell’s famous song Big Yellow Taxi.