A_New_Park

Do you remember when you were a kid, and would go to the park with your friends and family, playing on the swings and slides, imagining that you were a captain on a big ship at sea, or was a King or Queen in your big castle' A lot of people grow up to have memories like that growing up in a big city like New York. Local officials are developing a parcel of land in our community. I’m requesting that this empty lot to be used as a public park. There’s so much that public parks can do for us, and in many ways too. Public parks are a great place for everyone and it can be useful in our community. While reading a speech by Will Rogers, I’ve read a lot about parks and its benefits to our community and the citizens. According to 19th Century Park Visionary, Fredrick Law Olmstead, parks are essential; you can’t have just streets sidewalks and buildings. For example, Central Park in New York is a response to basic human needs. It is stated that a great and livable city cannot function without a great park system. There are many benefits of having a park health wise. This includes not only our physical and mental being, but our environment, community and economy. There are many physical problems that most of us face, such as obesity, heart diseases, diabetes and hypertension. Exercise is the acknowledged prevention of physical problems in our community. It’s a fact that people who live closer to parks are naturally healthier, because they make use of a wide open, beautiful and clean park experience. Moving on to mental problems, E.O Wilson states that “Biophilia” is a hypothesis that suggests that there is a genetically programmed need in human beings that causes them to interact with species of nature. Maybe this is why hospital visits are shorter with a view of a fresh, calm park than a parking lot. It makes the patients think of life, which causes them to have a high recovery. It is shown that employee absentees are at an all time low due to office buildings having more natural sunlight rather than fluorescent bulbs hanging in a ceiling. Having park access rather than a backyard allows children and adults to connect with each other, and celebrate their community with their friends. Trees are a big environmental help, for they provide shade, save energy, filter air, capture carbon and mitigate our air as well as protect our drinking water. Its amazing how a park could benefit us in so many ways. A public park should be developed in our community, not only because of how much it helps us but it’s the fact that every human being needs a park. A perfect park is a park with equitable access. It is important that we have a comprehensive system that affects everyone. You can’t just have one big park in a good neighborhood, you need to have parks in the not so great neighborhoods as well, because there are children everywhere, and every child has the right to an outdoor space. For example, Chicago is half park, half commute, and is in danger of losing their feel of nature. This also causes us to lose our sense of responsibility for the natural world. Don’t you think that we would be more likely to recycle if we were connected to a park' If you only live in an area of commute while a couple miles away there’s a park, why would you care about going outside if you didn’t know what was out there' In Los Angeles and Chicago, there are children under 14 that have no place to play. Technology is the last resort to children if they live in a community that is so urban. This is called the nature deficit disorder, which is the border where everything breaks down. Without a connection to a park we will lose our connections to nature. If we want to prevent this then we should definitely turn this empty lot into a park that can accommodate more than half our community. As you can see, creating a park in this empty space in our community will change it together as a whole. It would help our city to be more environmentally friendly, our citizens to be healthier, and they would enjoy living in a place that is suburban as well as urban. We all need to care about our community nature wise to function as a society of human beings trying to create great living conditions that support our lifestyle. People who care conserve, and people who don’t know, don’t care. Many people today think that parks are a waste of time, somewhere to go when they have nothing better to do. It’s better to have people in our community to know about the benefits of something so simple as a park. After all, a city is only as good as its worst park.