Preserve Bicentennial Park's wildness

"I for one will keep working for wildness day by day. "
-- Poet, essayist and activist Gary Snyder

By Bill Sherwonit
As one who writes about nature, conservation, and environmental issues, I've chosen to stay out of Anchorage's periodic frays over Far North Bicentennial Park and efforts to develop portions of it, whether for a Native heritage center, expanded ski area, or, most recently, Little League ballfields.  I normally go elsewhere to hike, ski, watch birds, or reflect, so I haven't developed a special attachment to this particular pocket of Anchorage wildlands; plus other issues already consume my time
as writer and occasional activist.  Still, I've closely followed this most recent battle, as passionately devoted individuals have worked hard to protect Bicentennial's natural character.

Now in the midst of reading Gary Snyder's book "The Practice of the Wild," I've been jolted from my complacency and reminded just how large a stake I have in preserving Anchorage's remaining parklands.  So does any resident who cares about nature and wildness.  Because what Snyder calls the Growth Monster is on the loose here.  Anchorage's open spaces, its small patches of woods and wetlands, are continually being gobbled by big-box stores, housing projects, and other developments.Sure, our city is bordered by wilderness.  But how many people can regularly escape into the Chugach Mountains or play along Turnagain Arm?  The farther we have to go to find wild nature, the easier we forget our connections to it.  We behave more carelessly, in ways that harm other life forms, when they are abstractions instead of flesh-and-blood neighbors.

During her 20 years in Anchorage classrooms, my wife, Dulcy, was continually amazed by the number of students -- and their families -- who've never left the Anchorage Bowl.  Municipal parks meet the needs of people who can't afford to go deeper into the wild, or are hesitant to do so.  Places like Kincaid and Bicentennial Parks remind us of our ties to the larger world.They bring nature's magic and mystery closer to home.  We must resist this chipping away of their edges, the notion that there's plenty left over.

The 25-acre Bicentennial woodland targeted for ball fields is an ordinary spruce-birch-cottonwood forest, bordered by suburban neighborhoods.  Yet it's a refuge for wildlife -- and for local residents who come here to walk, ski, ride bikes or horses, look for animals, reflect and temporarily escape the pressures of daily life.  On a recent day there I saw a flock of chickadees and nuthatches and the dark form of raven; I heard the rasping of magpie, the sweet song of grosbeak, the chirping of redpolls; I noticed abundant tracks of snowshoe hare, moose and squirrel.  I imagine that lynx and bear and hawk sometimes pass here, hunting.  I also observed an informal network of human trails stamped into snow.  I saw a skier and a couple walking with a young girl.

If local decision makers won't recognize the importance of this forest for itself and the animals it harbors, can't they at least see its value to the many sorts of people who come here year-round?  These woods attract old and young, athletes and not, stay-at-home parents with pre-schoolers, business people needing a break. If you want to "lock up" a place, diminish its diversity and value to the larger community, then convert these woods to ballfields, where a small slice of Anchorage's population will play sports for a few months every year.  I regularly drive past ballfields at O'Malley and Lake Otis; for most of the year it's a vacant dead zone, used by no one.  What's especially saddening is that there are other ballfield options.  Yet politicians will destroy 25 acres of woodland refuge because it's easier, and I suppose cheaper, to do. More than ever, our city's credo seems to be "Develop, develop, develop."

More of us need to raise our voices in a different sort of creed: "Stay wild, stay wild, stay wild."

Bill Sherwonit is a nature writer who lives in Anchorage.