ECOCRIITICISM: OTHER PERCEPTIONS ON NATURE ECOLOGY ENVIRONMENT AND LANDSCAPE

DISGUSTED with the perception, invisibility of our ecology, environment, landscape and nature for many years, I suspected there must be other views from other places that would help explain/understand the hilarious, improvised, self congratulatory, posing, useless, dull, lacking aesthetics/imagination landscape maintenance and installation in ISLA ESTRELLA, formerly Puerto Rico, USA.

It goes beyond turf, palms, Ficus, the dominant trend in that area. It includes the other fads in  water-soil, garbage collection twice a year segments of the environmental niches in the concrete/asphalt isle.  The organic agriculture, urban chickens, are in the same bag. It seems  that all these groups pretending to be useful are just trying to make some money selling whatever they have at hand and/or obtaining federal grants for the heck of it.

It is hard to believe that in 2013, no private/public group,  any government agency has any knowledge/notion of one group of people in the USA, getting rid of turf/lawns in every possible, imaginable space such as highway medians/sidewalks with tons of money saved in one hand.  On the other, the substitution of grass with ground covers, self seeding plants requiring mowing twice a year or none at all.

The elimination of tractors, mowers, trimmers, blowers with gas/oil/fumes pollution, labor is also another gain when one eradicates grass from spaces in which sports are not practiced.

The carnival of garbage collection twice a year is not the only way one could be useful in terms of our urban context, nor it is planting clams/oysters to filtrate water in Condado lagoon, or  giving away and planting trees in the wrong places as every other tree planted between the University of Isla Estrella in RIO and the Nechodoma Episcopal church.

The blind fools in charge of these groups have never noticed the undulating or broken sidewalks, the mutilated branches near the electrical wires on the Ponce de Leon avenue and every other street in the metro zone.

Most people create groups with some faint idea of what ecology, the environment is, creating more problems than solutions.  Facebook has plenty of young adults with the enthusiasm of elementary children and the principal, planting in sterile/compacted soil for example, or planting this or that for profit, including earth worms, pretending to be serious about ecology, nature, environment but motivated by profits and posing in front of the little or big hole, spade in hand.

To be continued

The Ecocriticism Reader

Landmarks in Literary Ecology

Edited by Cheryll GlotFelty & Harold Fromm

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