You like poo-water?

Let me ask you a question readers, if you go to the Parkway, to Cedar Beach, to Trout Creek Parkway, to Jordan Park and really take a look at what is going on around you, can you honestly say to me that fixing the horribly eroded creek banks that are actively felling healthy trees shouldn’t be a priority?  Shouldn’t native vegetation be allowed to grow to help deal with excess nitrogen runoff? The EPA thinks so, I linked to Federal guidelines for that very issue yesterday.

I am not on a fringe environmental soapbox here folks. I have seen the Lehigh County Conservation Maps rating our stream health (crappy) and our buffer presence (really crappy). I have done water samples in Cedar Creek and I know many others who have as well.  The test I ran at Cedar Creek came back with ridiculously high amounts of coliform bacteria presence and 7 other tests confirmed it. 

It was poo-water folks.

Realize, that is what we are talking about here:

Cedar Creek is becoming a nitrogen filled, oxygen barren, biomass empty, fish absent, channel of poo! 

Is that the idyllic park vision so often spoken of here in Allentown, you know, the one General Trexler saw in the distance, past the edges of his flat brimmed straw hat?

I don’t freaking think so. 

The places for people who want completely manicured vistas designed to look pretty are called gardens. 

The places in our parks, with running streams, are active ecosystems that we have endangered.

You want a future of poo-water and drainage ditch canals where streams once flowed?  Really?

I fully understand that any future rain garden won’t stop upstream runoff and the many sources of pollution outside the boundaries of the park.  I do know, that in whatever space of garden construction, a small difference will be made.  That difference, even if it is one butterfly, one bee, one snake, one trout is worth the work. It will help stem the development of a high quality low temperature stream into poo-water.

Drop the nostalgia act folks.  Envisioning a candy land of manicured parks where people frolic freely enjoying the distinctions between mowed grass and willow trees is a waste of time.  That time wasted, should be spent working to do whatever you can to help turn the tide of environmental ignorance that is widespread here in Allentown and begin the work to try and reverse years of ecological damage in our park system. Understand also, that our parks should have a contrast between open space and "grow zones". I am not advocating the entire re-naturalization of our parks. It is not wilderness, it is a park and people belong in them. Aesthetically, there will still be contrast and no beauty will be lost, only gained.

I would be the last person on this planet to say we should ignore beauty. In fact our lives depend on it.