Turning car parks into parks
“My favorite parks are car parks
Grass is something you smoke”
– Pulp, I Spy
“They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot”
– Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi
As the UK’s hopeless, moronic ‘leader’ Boris Johnson continues his “Build Build Build” campaign and ‘Build Back Better’ programme (including £100m for more roads; okay, to be fair, there’s also some money allocated for schools and hospitals), and wants to unprotect protected animals such as great-crested newts (“newt-counting delays in our system are a massive drag on the productivity and prosperity of this country” – funny, I thought it was middle-management), red squirrels and adders so developers can build faster – this, when 75% of insects have disappeared, when 40 million birds have disappeared, when biodiversity is massively depleted, when thousands of kilometres of countryside is torn away every year to make way for ‘new housing, mineral extraction, golf courses and wind farms’, indeed, when the UK has ‘led the world’ in destroying the natural environment (which sort of makes me worried about the upcoming Climate Change Conference, where all eyes will look to Britain – and Johnson, who didn’t understand climate change until recently, and even now doesn’t seem that concerned. Building roads and backhanders are more important. I will exit this life utterly bewildered that complete fucking twats are allowed to destroy this planet*)., well, I then take some pleasure in the smaller projects trying to make a difference**.
The Kerdroya Project, when completed next summer, will be one of the biggest labyrinths in the world. It is currently being built on a disused car park near the A30 on Bodmin Moor, next to Colliford Lake (yes, that Colliford Lake). The labyrinth is being created from Cornish hedges – one of the world’s oldest man-made structures still in use today, they are traditional stone and earth walls rich in wildlife, containing hundreds of trees, plants and flowers and thousands of insects. They are an ecosystem in miniature, and the last bastion for many wild flowers and insects.
Golden Tree Productions, the Redruth-based company behind the award-winning Man Engine project, is responsible for the Kerdroya Project, which will include distinctive hedge styles from 12 different Cornish areas. There are various ways to become involved in the project – all of which cost a lot of money (I literally thought they would pay me to help construct a wall but it’s the other way around).
(This is all happening, of course, when miles of long-established hedges are being destroyed, along with hundreds of trees, to make room for widening the A30 so more moronic tourists can overcrowd the county. Sigh. Roads are never the answer. They interrupt the flow of biodiversity, destroy communities, etc.)
After all my ranting, you know what, I probably see more birds in car parks than anywhere else: starlings in Newquay, pied wagtails in Pool, turnstones in Penzance and seagulls everywhere. But you know what also, it’s all our fault.
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*Connor Schwartz, the climate lead at Friends of the Earth, said: “If the government wants to show they respect the world’s leading scientists on climate chaos, they can start by cancelling the Cambo oilfield, scrapping the coalmine in Cumbria, and ending UK funding for the mega-gas project in Mozambique; they can do that today.”
**Well, sort of. I would prefer a moratorium of any kind of building altogether (a concept I first mentioned almost a decade ago. No one listened. Instead, since last year, human-made crap – concrete (the most destructive material on earth), steel, plastic – now outweighs the earth’s biomass.)
Previously on Barnflakes
Stile over substance
In the Guardian: ‘We can’t build our way out of the environmental crisis’