Parks exist through active defense and embody resistance to extraction

Evidence

I grew up thinking that parks were somehow just “leftover” spaces, but I’ve learned that the story of any park or preserve is absolutely one of “redemption preserv[ing] itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.” So many parks had to be actively defended from a never-ending onslaught of private ownership and development, and many contain the names of enterprising individuals who fought to establish them. For example, when I lived in San Francisco, my usual trail in Glen Canyon Park was named after the “Gum Tree Girls,” three women who kept freeways from being built through the canyon, the one of the only places in San Francisco where Islais Creek runs aboveground in its natural state. Parks don’t just give us the space to “do nothing” and inhabit different scales of attention. Their very existence, especially in the midst of a city or on the former sites of extraction, embodies resistance. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 609

Categorization

• XREF: The Gum Tree Girls freeway-blocking example is a concrete instance of the place-based political care Odell is defending.
• ADDENDUM: The Gum Tree Girls vs. freeway builders parallels civic defense of place in the trees-as-infrastructure piece (‘Grafting & Growth’).
• CANDY: Three women nicknamed the Gum Tree Girls kept freeways from being driven through San Francisco’s Glen Canyon.