They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

The song Big Yellow Taxi, most recently heard from the Counting Crows, has inspired this post. Originally written and performed by Joni Mitchell in 1970, this song has as much significance today as it did over 35 years ago.

Let’s go through some portions of the lyrics:

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin’ hot spot
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

This sounds like Miami, especially with the pink hotel, boutique and hot spot! You’ll read about it in the papers, hear about it at commission meetings, and see it every day on your way to work: The developers vs. the environment. We’ve got no where to grow with the ocean on one side and the Everglades on the other. I do believe that we can grow the city in a smarter way. I know people are working on it. But I also believe that if even more people realized, "that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone," we’d be on a better road to the future.

More lyrics:

They took all the trees, and put em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them

I visited Fairchild for the first time recently, on the last day of the Chihuly exhibit. Fairchild has the world’s largest and most diverse palm collection. If that’s not a tree museum, I don’t know what is. And I paid a lot more than a dollar and a half to get in. But that’s not Fairchild’s fault. They are part of the solution. As stated in last week’s Miami Today interview with Michael Maunder, Director of the gardens, "We have some of the rarest plants in the world here in our collection – rarer than pandas and more difficult to breed, some of them." Some plants that supported a specific species of butterflies, for example, were all destroyed in the wild…so then what happens to the butterflies?

Lyrics:

Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT
I don’t care about spots on my apples,
Leave me the birds and the bees
Please

DDT, a pesticide now banned, is just one example. This section is really talking about organic. Now, up to even a year or so ago, I didn’t really care about organic. Here’s the thing. Pesticides are on our food. They also are in our farm land, which affects our water. They are extremely toxic to the people administering the chemicals. They also kill everything…and then we won’t know what we’ve got til it’s gone. When you buy organic, your veggies aren’t going to be flawless. That doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with them. In fact, flawless food should make you wonder what it took to get the food so perfect. Do you remember how good tomatoes used to taste? And how they taste now? Leave me the birds and the bees.