Eco-Project Would Waste Our Green
Their hearts are as pure as a Rocky Mountain shower. Their motives are clean as the crisp runoff from a glacial thaw.
It’s the judgment of these two women that’s all wet.
Lucy Gurnea and Judy Laddon dropped by the other day, seeking my help in promoting a “feel-good” program that supposedly will make Spokane more environmentally aware.
They won’t think visiting me was such a hot idea after they read this, but here’s what these two eco-warriors are planning:
First, an army of area schoolchildren will be recruited to paint hundreds of drawings with environmental messages.
According to samples, the artwork could contain such profundities as “Farmers care about the air, land and water. Do you?” Or the always in-season “Keep Earth Green.”
The kids can create poems, essays or virtually anything else as long as it stays within the enviro context.
Next April 20 through May 20, the laminated projects will be hung on a giant mesh maze to be erected in Riverfront Park. Birds and airplane passengers flying over will note with delight that the maze is designed in the shape of a chinook salmon.
People will be invited to peruse the outdoor gallery at no charge.
“This will be the opportunity to take part in a project that has national implications,” says Gurnea, who has helped put on annual environmental forums for business at the Spokane Convention Center.
Jaded adults walking the maze “can’t help but be changed by these messages from the mouths of babes,” adds Laddon.
Far be it from me to pour toxic sludge over such sweetness and light, but I see a major hiccup interrupting these good vibrations:
Gurnea and Laddon want $40,000 to pay for it. They say they’ll settle for 20 grand for now, but the goal is 40K.
According to their budget, $17,000 is needed to pay a bureaucrat to direct this project and another $5,000 is needed for a consultant. The maze material needs to be shipped, of course. Ka-ching! Another $5,000, please. Bringing four maze experts here from St. Louis will eat up $8,000. Whatever’s left - supplies, materials, expenses - that’ll all be covered by a $5,000 miscellaneous fund.
What a global waste of money. Spending 40 grand on a kiddie maze is a lousy way to save the planet.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for kids getting in touch with the Earth. But how about letting them pick up litter along the roadways?
Or the kids could do all of the above artsy stuff. I’ll bet they could hang the artwork in office buildings all over town. For free.
Gurnea’s costly Enviromaze idea comes from Nancy Joyce, a St. Louis woman who has been constructing elaborate ecological-themed mazes for 10 years. This year she made the Guinness Book of World Records by creating a five-mile, 400,000-square-foot maze.
Joyce wants to add the Spokane maze to hers in Washington, D.C., next October.
Joyce told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter she hopes the mazes “will teach people about getting along with one another and finding environmental solutions.”
Whoop-de-do. Such symbolism over substance is very popular these days. But does any lasting good ever come from these “We are the world” spasms? I doubt it.
Remember “Hands Across America,” when do-gooders linked hands from sea to shining sea to aid the homeless?
Remember the “Harmonic Convergence” when New Age flakes gathered to channel world enlightenment?
This is the dawning of the Age of Asparagus …
These touchy-feely outbursts sure solved our problems, didn’t they?
The notion that giant mazes covered with simple-minded platitudes will help end pollution is equally goofy.
I hope Gurnea and Laddon can raise $40,000. Then they can give it to some truly worthy causes such as the Children’s Museum of Spokane, the Spokane Food Bank or the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery.
Leave the mazes to the lab rats.
, DataTimes