Greg Gerritt: Cemeteries as refuges for wild animals

Coyotes are among the wildlife in Providence’s North Burial Ground that Greg Gerritt has photographed and videotaped.

— Photo by Greg Gerritt

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

PROVIDENCE — I started hanging out in cemeteries when I was in graduate school, sort of a reasonable place for an anthropology major, but also a reasonable destination for someone who needs to be around trees. I returned to spending much time in cemeteries when I moved to Providence more than 20 years ago, walking in Swan Point Cemetery within four days of moving here.

I still walk in Swan Point at least weekly, the magnificence of the 170-year-old forest along the river matching any of the famous people buried there, and demonstrating greater diversity. But much more of my time is spent in the North Burial Ground, which is on my side of the hills and ridges that make up the spine of the East Side.

Shortly after I convened a delegation to visit the city’s Parks Department to unlock the walk-in gates of the North Burial Ground and let the community in, I found a thriving toad population breeding in a small wetland. The Fowler’s toad tadpoles were rather photogenic and within a couple of years I found myself in the middle of a long-term project to document the lives of the wild animals that live in the North Burial Ground.

The Moshassuckcritters YouTube Channel is a project of the Friends of the Moshassuck, the local watershed group. Eventually, this work became connected to other people working to bring notice to other aspects of the North Burial Ground, and we jointly founded the Friends of the North Burial Ground and Randall Park.

While this journey has been interesting, what I want to focus on here is the need for all of us to better understand cemeteries as critical ecological habitat for wild things and to recognize that as an important part of what cemeteries do in a community.

I think of it as cemeteries as refuges.. Even the tiniest of urban cemeteries have a few trees, some squirrels, small birds, insects, and who knows what else. But larger urban cemeteries, especially if they have trees and water, can support nearly everything that lives in the bioregion

Some of the extraordinary features of larger cemeteries are the easy digging soils — sometimes they smartly locate cemeteries in areas of easy digging and good drainage — which encourage all sorts of burrowing creatures; lack of street lighting, allowing darkness to reign at night; and lack of automobile traffic after dark, allowing all of the wild animals to move around much more safely at night. This is especially important for amphibians — one of the most endangered group of animals on the planet — as they mostly breed at night in places where breeders congregate from all over the area.

Many places where they have to cross roads to get to the breeding sites can become kill zones. Many a night I have watched Fowler’s toads and gray tree frogs safely hop across a cemetery road to get to the breeding pool and hop back to the surrounding hills after the frolic.

I also want to put in a plug for thinking about stormwater management in cemeteries — in a new way, more in keeping with cemeteries and refuges for both people and wild things. Standard stormwater management techniques want to whisk water away as soon as possible. But wildlife needs pools of water for drinking, breeding, and feeding, and open waters, moving or ponded, are critical habitat.

Cemeteries have less need to get rid of water fast, water providing a relaxing and calming vista for those visiting the deceased, and with few nighttime visitors, less of an urgency to remove any place mosquitos might breed, especially as this also provides habitat for mosquito predators, which will keep mosquito populations in check most years

I have looked around for partners to further the discussion and practice of cemeteries as refuges, but other than Friends of the North Burial Ground and Randall Park I have had found few enthusiasts. If this interests you, please contact me and hopefully we build the movement.

Providence resident Greg Gerritt won an Environmental Protection Agency Merit Award in 2012 for his work raising awareness about the importance of composting. He is the founder of Friends of the Moshassuck, and runs the blog Prosperity For RI. He can be reached at gerritt@mindspring.com.

Greg Gerritt: Give up on economic growth

 

Via ecoRI News (ecori.org) Editor’s note: The following speech was given by Greg Gerritt, founder of the think tank ProsperityForRI.com, at a March 3 discussion, held at Brown University and co-sponsored by Main Street Resources and ecoRI News.

I have been asked to provide a bit of context and contrast this evening about the economic environment we find ourselves in.

Economic growth is dead in the old mill towns of the industrialized West, and it is never coming back. There will still be economic growth in the tropics and Asia, the places there are still untapped natural resources and indigenous communities to plunder, and the cities are swelling with people streaming out of the countryside. But in the eastern United States and western Europe what passes for growth is simply the financialization of the economy that is letting the 1 percent scoop up all of what is called growth, while everyone else gets poorer, ecosystems collapse and infrastructure fails.

On Jan. 31, the entire front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review section was devoted to three books exploring the end of economic growth. It is time for those working in economic development to understand the new environment better and to prepare plans that match its opportunities rather than repeat the old stories. Don’t try to spin the growth machine faster, that makes it worse for most of us. We must adapt Rhode Island economic development to the low-growth environment and work to create a more widespread prosperity through reviving ecosystems and economic justice.

The Brookings report offers Rhode Island jobs for 20 to 25 percent of the population, with no plan on how to create jobs in the neighborhoods that need jobs at a living wage. It promises riches if we take orders from the Koch brothers, underfund our infrastructure and our schools by cutting taxes, and bet on industries that are harmful to the community or make jobs disappear. We are admonished to follow the dictates of the business climate indexes, but there is no correlation between a state’s business climate rankings and the health of its economy.

While simple and efficient processes are important, the history, resource base and culture of a community are much more important than the business climate in determining economic success, and there is no evidence that lax environmental, public health and safety standards improves the economy in our neighborhoods any more than subsidies to the 1 percent to build baseball stadiums.

Our response to climate change is much more important than the business climate. Our willingness to end the use of fossil fuels, create zero-net energy buildings, generate electricity from the sun and wind, grow much more of our own food, and sequester carbon in the soil will determine our fate.

As growth and jobs fade into the sunset, reducing inequality in the ownership of assets becomes much more important. As (French economist Thomas) Piketty notes, the growing inequality in and of its self is grinding down the economy. An economic plan offering subsidies to the rich for industries that are shedding employment, and chock full of subsidies to the real-estate industry is one that leaves our communities behind.

I would like to have more time to devote to the relationship between what is happening in the forest and what is happening in Rhode Island. The World Bank says that keeping the forest in the hands of the forest people, and assets in the hands of the poor, gives better outcomes than any other strategy for development, and may be the only chance we have to stop climate change.

This information needs to inform how we redevelop our old riverine neighborhoods. The disempowered, disenfranchised and marginalized people of our environmental-justice communities mirror many of the problems rainforest people have in dealing with development, and the solutions in the forest work here, too. Build economies from the bottom up, not the top down.

A holistic approach to the health of our communities — reducing pollution, reducing harms, good nutrition — serves our communities better than our current obsession with using high-tech biomedical businesses to grow the economy.  Here is one little fact: It is absolutely impossible to have affordable health care for all if you use the medical industrial complex to drive economic growth. When the healthcare industry grows faster than our wages, the industry draws investment while most of us still cannot afford to go to the doctor.

Finally, pay attention to the resistance. It is global, and brings the wisdom of the world to your neighborhood. Building more fossil-fuel infrastructure such as gas pipelines and power plants will create stranded assets, pollute vulnerable communities and add to the climate disasters.

We can live in Flint, Mich., we can live in Ferguson Mo., or we can have prosperous communities that heal ecosystems and practice justice. It’s your choice.