Thinking Allowed: Greenways

What I want to talk about is how glorious Canberras greenways are. But. Be warned. What I am going to end up talking about is the culling season.

Jakob and I walked through Greenbelt Maryland USA - a small planned town created as a public housing utopia with community cohesiveness and natural connectiveness in mind. Compared to the surrounding neighbourhoods it was very nice and had many adoring paths crisscrossing it's entirety. It also felt like it had moved from public housing utopia to intellectual upper middle class sanctuary. Nonetheless it's uniques concept appealed to me.

And now we live in our own planned city. Our own Burley Griffins (it was actually a couple), winners of the design the Australian capital competition were inspired by the garden city movement and set out to incorporate lots of natural vegetation in the design, utilise natural topography, and themes of hexagons, triangles and circles. From lofty ideals what resulted has been criticised endlessly. One prime minister went beyond the usual " several suburb in search of a city" quip to declare the capital a national Embarrassment. But in the Burley Griffins defence they achieved their goals. If you don't know your way around the city the circle theme comes back to haunt you. The main peaks in the cities core form a triangular defence of its innards and topography is used advantageously to make parliament seem more grand and important. And of course Canberra is a city riddled with greenways. You don't need to walk far to find yourself walking through fields of grass and eucalyptus. Neighbourhoods are designed with pathways so that no person will suffer from poor access to the commons. And man and animal can use the greenways at their leisure in various pursuits of survival.

A person could run endlessly in Canberra without ever realising they are in a city. I finally got to try this out myself and must have gone at least twenty five kilometres before I ran out of time. We live in the core part of town and Except for the start from my door to the Greenbelt I crossed only two roads. The Greenbelt system is so effective that Canberra has a thriving kangaroo population and is often cited as one of the highest density kangaroo centres in Australia. Actually, Burley Griffins were likely too visionary as the Greenbelt are so effective that the government feels forced to cull.

And here we are in culling season. Kangaroo populations are boom and bust and when things get too boomy we in Australia take it upon ourselves to be the bust. It seems to be agreed that death by hunter is not nearly as bad as death by starvation. Maybe this is true. I haven't experienced either so who can say though I am tempted to say that I would prefer to have a slightly worse death and know I died due to resource depletion than to know someone shot me when I was in full health lounging under a tree with my family. This year we will spend half a million dollars to kill over 3000 kangaroos in the Canberra area. For the next two months while we are cozy in our homes we can rest assured that a team of hunters are tending to the oversuccess that is the Canberra vision. There will be no great feast of our plunder. Happy reconciliation day everyone.