Urban Open Space Doesn’t Always Put Nature on Display

Entomologist Larry Orsak, leading a presentation on the butterflies of Orange County at a recent natural history symposium, showed a slide of Eisenhower Park in Orange.

When he was growing up in the 1960s, Orsak said, the neatly manicured expanse of green was little more than a weed-filled vacant lot.

And it was there that Orsak’s love for nature germinated. In his view, if the park had been developed when he was in the eighth and ninth grade, “I wouldn’t be an entomologist today. In fact, I probably wouldn’t even be in natural history.”

To Orsak, the property was an accessible corner of wilderness where nature held out against the surrounding development.

“My friends and I loved to go there and look at lizards and collect butterflies,” he recalled. “It was the only place I could go anywhere near my home that had a lot of wildlife in it.

“Now, it’s got nice green grass. It’s got nice eucalyptus trees. And not one bush will be planted because that just requires extra maintenance. And so, I would say that any butterflies that are there are just passing through, trying to find something other than a desert.”

Henry David Thoreau wrote of his youth in Concord, Mass., “I was born in the most favored spot on Earth, and just in the nick of time, too.”

Orsak, like Thoreau, and naturalists and conservationists from John Muir to Annie Dillard have traced their love for the wilds back to childhood experiences, to the sense of unsupervised discovery that often accompanies being out in nature. What worries Orsak, and some local environmental educators of today’s youngsters, is the growing sense that opportunities for those kinds of experiences are dwindling in Orange County.

When open spaces are penciled in on city plans, they are often carpeted with homogenous green lawns. As Orsak put it, “Planned communities never have planned vacant lots.

“It seems obvious that even the planned development, and the planned use of urban parks, isn’t providing the type of ecological experience that was provided to kids in the past,” said Harry Helling, director of education at the Orange County Marine Institute in Dana Point.

“At the Marine Institute,” Helling said, “we run a residential camp up in the mountains. We run a floating lab program. We run intertidal excursions and lab programs and they all have one thing in common, and that is it gives students a first-hand exposure to the natural elements.

“It gives them the time to follow an ant to and from its destination, or to sit on a mountaintop and watch the mating ritual of a hawk, or to hold an octopus. All of which were experiences that were readily attainable by youths of the past.”

It should come as no surprise that Willick, Orsak and Helling all praise the concept of leaving some urban park areas undeveloped. Orsak has written papers on how to make suburban gardens more attractive to native wildlife by turning away from what he calls “yuppie landscaping,” with low-maintenance plants like ivy and juniper, to plants that provide food and shelter to butterflies, birds and other animals.

“There’s a lot of talk about the ramifications of not having wilderness or natural areas accessible to the public,” said Helling. “How much do you really need to know about the outdoors? What sort of a need does it really fulfill to be off by yourself and see these things, to feel you’re part of a larger ecosystem?

“There are questions about whether it affects your mental stability. Most naturalists will argue, and I tend to agree, that it’s essential for mental survival. . . . Wilderness is an excellent teacher.”