It’s ironic, I suppose, that I feel closest to my fellow citizens, living or long dead, when I’m in a park. Public green spaces, after all, are where we typically shift our focus from human affairs to the deeper rhythms of the natural world, not places where we reflect on our ties to the social order. They may be oases of quiet, but America’s parks are also resoundingly clear statements of democracy in action. Large or small, national or municipal, every park is a declaration of mutual dependence, a shared gift we make to ourselves, to each other, and to every succeeding generation. Parks belong to all of us, and they exist because we, or our ancestors, made a conscious choice to set them aside for the common good.
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The common good is under attack in the current political climate. We are awash in a flood tide of selfishness and expediency, but even the most cynical politician could hardly deny the mutualism that has underlain our life as a nation for the last 250 years. Our founders fervently believed that government should never be a sandbox for special interests or a source of grease for the gears of the free market. Government, they insisted, is everyone together, all working for each so that the greatest number might prosper.
Parks are a critical component of that prosperity. Charles Whitnall, the Socialist who guided the development of Milwaukee’s stellar park system, was a devout believer in the critical role of public green space. “We are seeking,” he wrote, “to conserve not only God’s country but Humanity.”
That’s why, whenever I’m pedaling down the Oak Leaf Trail through the necklace of parks on Milwaukee’s South Shore or looking out over Green Bay from the bluffs of Peninsula State Park, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. What a wonderful thing our ancestors did for us, and what a sacred obligation we have to protect and preserve their priceless democratic legacy.
