Finding the right balance

Total strangers tend to strike up conversations in the parks around here. A few weeks ago, an athletic sixty-something guy preparing to do a little fishing at one of the Blue Creek quarries did just that. When I mentioned my fondness for Lucas County's Metroparks, however, a rant ensued. My conversational partner had recently moved back to the area after a thirty-plus-year career as a biologist and assured me that he had never lived anyplace where people despised nature as much as they do in Perrysburg, Ohio. Never having spent time in Perrysburg, I could not evaluate my new acquaintance's opinion but was troubled by his assertion that the area's parks all needed to have the word "preserve" removed from their names. After all, the county Metropark system contains over 12,000 acres; the parks found in individual cities, towns, and villages add several hundred additional acres of green space and the state and other nature preserves found in the county an additional thousand or so--between 13,500 and 14,000 acres of preserved greenspace in a county covering 596 square miles. In contrast, my home county, at 640 square miles, boasts only 1000 acres of city, county, or state-preserved land, in addition to portions of a national forest.

As my new acquaintance's complaints continued, it became clear that his objection was to what he saw as the commercial development of the county's parks . The park system is now selling t-shirts, allowing visitors to advertise their favorite parks. The riverside and lakefront parks feature boat launches, and some now have kayak concessions. In addition to the camping that has been done for decades at Oak Openings, some recently-acquired land is about to be home to a tree house village for an Ohio version of "glamping," and a 12-mile mountain bike trail has been added. The park system even has its own page of YouTube videos.

So, I get it. These 13,000+ acres are not pristine wilderness, and the park system managers would like to encourage people from other parts of the world to travel here and spend their money and encourage area residents to recreate here instead of traveling to other places for all their outdoor adventure. They would like people to bring their children to the playgrounds and pack a picnic lunch while they're at it. The goal is to have a Metropark within a five-minute drive of all 440,000 residents of this nearly-600-square-mile county, and for the parks to get even more visits than the four million or so they got last year. There is a danger of parks being "loved to death."

And yet: these relatively few sites in a single US county contain nearly 400 species of birds at various times of the year. People from all over the world flock (pun intended) to the area every May for the spring warbler migration. The Oak Openings and the remnants of the Great Black Swamp are home to rare plant species as well as healthy populations of common ones like the hoary puccoon used in earlier centuries as a dye plant

and wild spirea, or meadowsweet, here hosting an ailanthus webworm moth.

The plant diversity of the park system's forests, prairies, and meadows hosts an enormous variety of insect life, including butterflies like this Polygonia.

Because several of the Metroparks are in fact inside Lucas County's cities and towns, someone visiting the library in Whitehouse can walk a few hundred feet and watch the sun set over the Nona France Quarry.

Wildwood Metropark is bordered by busy roads (which can often be heard despite the park's over 450 acres) on three sides, but its trails can give the wanderer a real sense of isolation, as can much of the Swan Creek Preserve, surrounded by some of the busiest roads in South Toledo.

If there is a more peaceful autumn scene on earth, I do not know where.

More good news is that forests in the park system are regenerating. While young oaks are being shaded out by maples and hickories in much of their range, some of the Metroparks are home to young oak trees like this baby along the grassland trail at Wildwood.

    
Metroparks are maintained and therefore not truly wild, though it is the presence of sun along a trail edge or in a maintained clearing that allows young oaks to grow. Portions of most parks have also been made accessible to people with mobility challenges, with paved trails available. Some parks are on bus lines, rendering them accessible to people who do not drive or do not own a car.

We need wilderness, but most people cannot (and arguably, should not) go there. Still, all people should have access to wildness, whether it is a field full of butterflies and finches, a mayapple wood, an urban river harboring ducks and herons, or a second-growth forest sporting the brilliant red of baby oak leaves. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that the construction of buildings with meeting rooms and modern plumbing in addition to their Windows on Wildlife and the building of trails that allow wheelchair users to get close to natural areas are a reasonable compromise between the needs of people and the needs of other species. People who never see wild things are unlikely to love them, and as Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum said fifty years ago, "In the end, we will conserve only what we love."

Perhaps helping people learn to love their  local (even semi-) preserves is the best way to foster a society that wants to preserve more of life on earth.