Photo Essay: The Capitalism of Public Parks
Public parks are truly a curious part of urban life.
We like to think of them as little slices of nature, as beautifully preserved pieces of land left to flourish on their own, or sections of the natural world that organically formed in a way welcoming to humans. But, they’re not.
Parks are once healthy sections of land abused and sickened with refuse used as an incentive for traffic. They’re developed to convince people to get into their cars and drive to the park in town, fit with many shops and other activities, all in the name of gaining as much money as possible. Public parks are pawns in the Capitalist game of exploiting the aesthetic of nature in its purest form to lure human beings into consuming more and more — all while pumping even more exhaust into the air.
Our culture’s mistreatment and exploitation of nature in this way is the result of our Capitalist culture, as it tends to commodify, to strip something down to its most sellable parts so it can be repackaged and sold for profit. It’s objectifying, the act of boiling the worth and value of something (often a living being) down to only how it can be of service to the system at large. Sometimes said profit is indirect, meaning the flow of revenue comes not from the commodified thing itself, but what it can do to advertise what surrounds it. This phenomenon is especially common with nature, where vast pieces of land housing hundreds of species — an entire ecosystem, is divided, trampled on, and encroached upon for humans to use as they please, typically to make into a public park.
Take Glenwood Park, a small lot of land that sits right next to the Erie Zoo. While it’s currently closed due to the pandemic and thus rather empty, the typical amount of attendees fill the place almost to the bursting. As the number of people visiting increases, more trash and litter will fill the area, and more run off from the sewers will filter into the small river that lies next to the park. The bigger the crowd, the more nature is treated as an object owned for our pleasure and not a nurturing system teeming with life.
To further examine human impact on this park (and many pieces of similar land), we can focus our attention on a specific example: the ways that polluting the water of Erie’s streams and rivers have wreaked havoc on the environment. In 1979, “raw sewage from unknown sources was entering [Millcreek Stream] (Zagorski, 1979),” and in the present, even swimming in the water of Erie’s beaches can cause illness (Deemer, 2019). As the city of Erie, and the owners of any other public or private park, make money from the tourism that their park draws, the water that feeds the life residing within it is being poisoned.
We as a community, beyond just the boundaries of Erie, Pennsylvania, or even the United States, have to start regarding land as a living being of its own; a living being that deserves to exist without being sold as a commodity to satisfy an unfeeling and profit-obsessed system.
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Sources:
Zagorski, Stanely J, et al. “A Bacterial Analysis Of Millcreek Stream In Erie, Pennsylvania.” JSTOR, vol. 53, no. 1, 1979, pp. 61–64., www.jstor.org/stable/44112594.
Deemer, Ashleigh. “Beach Alert: Swimming in Pennsylvania’s Polluted Waters Can Make You Sick.” PennEnvironment, 23 July 2019, pennenvironment.org/news/pae/beach-alert-swimming-pennsylvania’s-polluted-waters-can-make-you-sick.
Sound Credit:
LIGHT BREEZE WIND SOUND // SOUND EFFECT (Timelapse 1)
Car Passing by Sound Effect (Timelapse 1)
Ambience Kids Playing Sound Effects (Timelapse 2)