You do this job long enough and you turn into Andy Rooney, I’ve decided, which is to say that you slowly become some crotchety old guy who gets mad at the news and wants to tell everyone about it. I ran the theory by my partner and she suggested that maybe crotchetiness is instead related to the length of a man’s eyebrow hair – the longer it gets the crotchetier he becomes.
Whatever the case, there I was listening to the radio coming home from work the other day and this story comes on about the Coney Island boardwalk.
If you don’t have time to listen to the piece, the long and the short of it is that the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation wants to tear up the boardwalk and make a new one out of plastic and concrete. There’s a group called the Coney-Brighton Boardwalk Alliance that likes the wood part of the wooden boardwalk – they say there’s enough plastic and concrete in the city. Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver countered by playing the environmental card, saying tropical wood is expensive and bad for the environment. “We’re now dealing with the new reality of climate change that we did not deal with before. Superstorm Sandy was a wake-up call,” he argued, to which the Boardwalk Alliance guy said something along the lines of: then why not replace the trees in Central Park with plastic ones? Then NPR cut to a snippet of the song “Under the Boardwalk,” and I furrowed my brow and twisted my long eyebrow hair and commenced to getting mad at the news.
It’s appalling – right? – that a parks commissioner, of all people, wouldn’t acknowledge that there are trees and tree farmers and sawmills in the state he lives in who could provide sustainably harvested wood? (We can ONLY use ‘dees special boadwoak trees that grow in the tropics, but dey kill unicorns and use der horns to cut ‘em down, see...) I entertained the thought for a moment that maybe he really didn’t know – an honest blindspot-type thing – but judging from this snippet on the Boardwalk Alliance’s website, he’s heard it more than once (the bold is their emphasis):
“The choice is not between saving the rainforest and saving the Boardwalk – the correct choice is to do both! Stop the use of rainforest wood, and replace it with one of the available sustainable domestic hardwoods such as Black Locust or White Oak for the surface decking (the part that we all see and on which we walk). The support structure underneath should be made from recycled plastic lumber, which the U.S. Army has used to build bridges that support tanks and locomotives. This design would be both cost-effective and desirable, and, most importantly, would preserve the basic elements of what makes the wondrous Coney Island Boardwalk a boardwalk.”
How is that not a perfectly sensible solution?
I suspect that Silver’s real hang-up here is maintenance – he’s using the same logic people use when they replace the wooden siding on a house with vinyl. But if that’s the case he should say so, and have an honest debate about the economics. By playing the climate change card and implying that harvesting and using wood is bad for the environment he’s not only being disingenuous, he’s damaging the very environmental cause he’s pretending to champion.
I’m not even going to dignify the idea that plastic – the house guest that sticks around for thousands of years – might be better for the environment than wood. But on the off chance that Silver really doesn’t know the environmental footprint of a concrete operation, I’ve included above a satellite photo of one that exists in my town. Next to it is a satellite photo of the woodlot where I harvested the wood used to make the black cherry boards you see pictured here – would look good on a boardwalk, yes? Some people refer to this species as American mahogany.
The news story sort of made it sound like it’s too late to save the boardwalk, but if you’re a tree farmer or a mill owner in New York, you still might consider contacting Silver and letting him know you exist.
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