the importance of natural beauty to urban planning

[John Zeger]

"Howard Frumkin summarized the research in the April 2001 issue of American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 'Certain kinds of contact with the natural world may benefit health.' Frumkin asserts, with due scientific caution. He cites studies that demonstrate how contact with animals and plants, certain landscape preferences, and wilderness experiences bear our E.O. Wilson's and others' biophilia hypothesis: that humans have an innate affinity with the Earth. Contact with the natural environment soothes and heals, makes people happy, helps them kick addictions, and promotes better overall health.

Most of us would acknowledge that beauty makes us happy; that our sense of beauty is tied to nature; and that happiness makes us healthier and better behaved. Turning this into science is not a simple proposition, and science is needed. But turning it into practice need not await the science. ...

But scientists and activists alike shy away from discussions of beauty and aesthetics. Beauty has come to seem a luxury, a frill.

Beauty embarasses us because emotions embarass us, and that is a legacy of our rationalist culture. Beauty stirs that subtle emotion the aesthetic response, but it also leads to the larger emotion of love. Love is no frill. [Psychologist James] Hillman contends that beauty is an urgent matter because it ties us to the natural world, which, in its present state cries out for our help. He writes:

'Our love has left the world. . . For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less. If love depends on beauty, then beauty comes first."

Beauty can be a guide to how we make places for ourselves in the world, what work we do, how we shape the work, the very art of our living. Aesthetics and ethics, the exercise of moral duty, are not far apart, as Hillman implies. We would do well to experiment, now and then, with starting with beauty and trusting beauty to lead us to, and show us, the good. We may even trust beauty to make good."

Nancy Myers, "Love of the Beautiful" The Networker (Science and Environmental Network), Jan. 2004
www.sehn.org/Volume_9-1.html

How does all this apply to urban planning in Kelowna? The policies of the planning department and city council of promoting high-rise buildings along the waterfront and elsewhere throughout Kelowna will obscure our views of the lake and mountains which are an important source of natural beauty for residents. If our politicians and beaurocrats are successful in pursuing this policy which they term "smart growth, " it will impact us all in that it will diminish our happiness and mental health and will deprive us of an essential connection to natural beauty which evokes feelings of love for the natural world.

[Rick Shea]

Isn't it ironic, then, that the city's website contains this:

(http://www.kelowna.ca/CM/Page698.aspx)

"PARKS DEPARTMENT GOALS

The Parks Division is dedicated to achieving the following goals:

# making Kelowna the most beautiful City of it’s size in Canada
# making Kelowna the City of Choice for the quality and variety of our outdoor spaces, amenities and activities
# to enhance park program opportunities that cater to a wide range of interests, demographic groups, socio-economic groups and levels of ability
# promoting community development by enhancing community input and participation so that parks remain the focal point of neighbourhood activity, pride and personal interaction
# enhancing the ability of our parks to respond to and sustain a variety of outdoor events and festivals"

There's much more, of course, and there are comments about green space and the fundamental importance of trees and so on at other parts of the city website.

Yet here we have a council promoting the destruction of Kerry Park in order to erect a monolithic highrise complex.

They paved paradise....

[John Zeger]

With beauty before me, I walk
With beauty behind me, I walk
With beauty above me, I walk
With beauty below me, I walk
From the East, beauty has been restored
From the South, beauty has been restored
From the West, beauty has been restored
From the North, beauty has been restored
From the zenith in the sky beauty has been restored
From the nadir of the earth beauty has been restored
From all around me beauty has been restored.

Navajo prayer

[John Zeger]

There was a time when
meadow, grove,
And stream,
The earth, and every
common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness
of a dream.

William Wordsworth

[Rick Shea]

I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.

Ogden Nash

[John Zeger]

The beauty of the trees
The softness of the air
The fragrance of the grass
Speaks to me.

The summit of the mountain
The thunder of the sky
The rhythm of the sea
Speaks to me
And my heart soars.

Chief Dan George

[Rick Shea]

O sweet spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
purient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
oftn have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

e.e. cummings

[Rick Shea]

They Will Say

OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,
To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted
For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Carl Sandburg

[John Zeger]

rickshea said:

O sweet spontaneous

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
purient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty .how
oftn have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

e.e. cummings

Awesome. How Zen!

[Rick Shea]

John comments that

Our feelings are a kind of intelligence as well that guide us towards what is good and right in the world.

It would be most interesting to do a study to measure the aesthetic sensibility and emotional intelligence of the planners in Kelowna, and of the prodevelopment crowd.

I suspect that we would find that they are less interested in the abstract, and much more interested in the concrete (pun definitely intended).

Now, there's a nice Master's thesis for some university student!

[John Zeger]

Since Feeling is First

by e. e. cummings


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back into my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

[John Zeger]

Beauty saves. Beauty heals.
Beauty motivates. Beauty unites.
Beauty returns us to our origins,
and here lies the ultimate act of
saving, of healing, of overcoming
dualism. Beauty allows us to
forget the pain and dwell on the joy.

Matthew Fox
Original Blessing

[John Zeger]

"We can see that much of the current cultural breakdown can be understood as a failure of vision with regard to beauty. Imagine: if the mind of the politician and developer could awaken to the ancient integrity of landscape, it would become more and more difficult to damage the beauty of nature. If architects and planners could recognize how ugly surroundings damage and diminish the mind, then building might recover a sense of beauty."

John O' Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

[John Zeger]

"Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted."

Lyndon B. Johnson

[John Zeger]

"We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Aldo Leopold