December
2002/January 2003
A
More Perfect Union
By Martin Rowe
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In early November 2002, a low-key ceremony was held outside my office
on 14th Street at Union Square in Manhattan to celebrate the near-completion
of the renovation and expansion of Union Square Park. A motley group
of city and state officials, union members, a jazz band, a local school
choir, and various interested parties (including me) gathered to hear
the New York City Parks Commissioner, Adrian Benepe, tell us that although
the park was not quite finished (75 percent) and a little late (three
months) and somewhat over budget (a couple of million dollars), the
fact that the renovation project had got as far as it had and the park
looked as good as it did sent a message to terrorists all over the world
that New Yorkers weren’t giving up on their city anytime soon.
Hyperbole, to be sure. But this is New York—and after what’s
happened to our city in the last 15 months, New Yorkers, indigenous
or not, are entitled to talk a little large. On September 11, 2001 the
spot where we now celebrated offered a clear view downtown to the Twin
Towers as they burned and fell. In the following weeks, it became a
venue for hundreds of posters of loved ones and then thousands of candles
that illuminated vigils and spontaneous ceremonies calling for peace,
justice, and a hint of hope. On the anniversary of the attacks, it was
the place where you could write your thoughts for all to see on scraps
of paper that were pinned on boards that stretched across the lower
part of the park. And throughout all of this, the City dug up the road
(about five times) and put down tiles and expanded the garden dedicated
to Mahatma Gandhi, while the tree that had seen the garden it shaded
ripped out, abandoned, and then landscaped and replanted, lost its leaves
and grew them again and then shone a bright autumnal yellow as the dedication
ceremony I attended ran its course.
To the dismay of the attendees at the ceremony, Mr. Benepe told us that
the Square was named not after the Union soldiers who gathered nearby
before marching off to fight the Confederacy, nor even the union members
who held rallies and demonstrated for safer working conditions, women’s
suffrage, or civil rights. It was called Union Square, he told us, because
14th Street unites with Broadway—a prosaic reason that failed
to dim the lyricism of all the speakers who recalled Union Square’s
history as a place where people met to change things. The Commissioner
noted that all of the statues in the Park—Gandhi, George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, and the Marquis de Lafayette—memorialized people
who had fought (with sword or ideas) for freedom, in the face of imperial
hostility or the violence of their own people. Union Square, agreed
the speakers, represented the root of democracy—a space where
people could gather to exercise that most precious of rights: the right
to believe another world is possible.
Union Square is my beacon of hope in these dark days. In the course
of a year when liberty itself has seemed under threat, students have
gathered here to protest the war in Iraq, and Palestinians and Israelis
have separately voiced their claims to their respective states. There
have been protests against police brutality and for freedom in Tibet;
I have heard America the Beautiful and Give Peace a Chance, and the
square has filled with music from Mitzvah tanks, Hari Krishnas, Mennonite
choirs, the Salvation Army band, and the chants of Buddhist monks. The
Greenmarket has continued to sell its produce from local farmers four
days a week, the kids have enjoyed their playground and the dogs their
dog run, and the skateboarders have found new ramps to fly off—all
expressions of the plurality of life in this, my shaken, deeply loved
city.
The Old Man of Africa
At the end of August, my partner, Mia MacDonald, and I went to South
Africa to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD)
in Johannesburg. The Summit itself was a sad affair: a conference on
the environment that from the outset seemed an oversized and extended
negotiation session of the World Trade Organization. The U.S. was (justifiably)
vilified for its failure to agree to minimum improvements in various
environmental targets and the North was castigated by the South for
its refusal to lower tariffs to make Southern goods cheaper in Northern
markets. As with many of these large summits, however, the truly interesting
work was being done elsewhere—and various trade shows and NGOs
profiled innovative micro-enterprises and technologies that might perhaps
bypass government inertia and point-scoring to make a real difference.
What struck both Mia and me most forcibly, however, was South Africa
itself. The Conference was extremely well run and the people friendly
and inquisitive. Moreover, it was obvious to us that, in spite of the
huge difficulties facing the country (epidemics of crime and AIDS),
this was a place of enormous possibilities—possibilities that
for us were embodied in just one person.
The Old Man is what almost everyone calls him now. His hair is white
and he walks with a cane, yet, when Nelson Mandela came to a reception
sponsored by the World Conservation Union to announce a World Parks
Congress in Durban in September 2003, we could see that he had lost
neither his wit nor his fierce intelligence. “Big crowds don’t
fool me,” he told the packed audience after the applause had died
down. “You came to see what an old man without a job looks like.”
There was laughter. “Well, this is it,” he said. He continued
by informing us that the parks of Africa were a mixed legacy—beautiful
and necessary to protect, yes, but also the creation of white colonialists
who had deprived the majority indigenous population of their land, setting
up an artificial barrier between the poor and the resources on which
they depended. It was a speech in line with current thinking (the kind
that dominated the Summit) that nature is nothing—indeed, will
come to nothing—unless the needs of people who live within it
are made paramount. The right of animals not to be hunted to extinction
and the value of preserving nature because it is valuable in itself
are not the way conservation is talked about these days, and the Old
Man was, as always, within the current of reasonable thinking.
His is a powerful, if depressing, argument for animal activists such
as myself, who look for a language that at least grants nonhuman animals
a place in the dialogue. Primatologist Jane Goodall came to WSSD to
announce the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP), a project organized
by the United Nations Environment Program , UNESCO, and the World Wildlife
Fund to gather information about the Great Apes—chimpanzees, gorillas,
bonobos, and orangutans—to find more effective ways to combat
their imminent extinction. It’s a noble mission, but the funds
pledged are paltry, and GRASP offers no concrete proposals on how to
stop the bushmeat trade, logging industry, population pressures, pastoralization
of forests, and diseases caught from tourists, which threaten to make
our nearest relatives in the wild extinct within 30 years.
The Great Apes now live in islands of forest that are, effectively,
their prisons. After the Conference, Mia and I visited another island
off the coast of Cape Town to see another jail, one where Mandela broke
rocks and planned for the future with other political prisoners for
18 of the 27 years he was a prisoner. In some ways, Robben Island is
a microcosm of South Africa itself—starkly beautiful, a home for
wildlife (penguins and birds), for many years a political prison and
a home for pariahs (it was once a leper colony). Our guide around the
prison and the tiny cells where Mandela and others lived was a former
prisoner himself. Remarkably, although not untypically, he expressed
no bitterness at his treatment at the hands of the whites and maintained
a staunch belief in the multiethnic future of his country. He knew,
as Mandela knew, that the prison, like South Africa, cannot be a museum;
like the country itself, it is a living testament to the possibility
of change for the better—a change marked by broken rocks and sweat
and an absolute focus on a different future. In spite of the compromises
and corruptions that attend South Africa today, the peril of all democracies,
Mandela’s life offers a reason to believe that a way forward that
protects people and the planet is possible. In the end, I feel the Old
Man is saying, we have to connect, reach out, and bring together. In
the end, no country, like no man, is an island; and no country can only
be a park. I myself dare to hope that other species are part of that
vision.
Looking Forward From Square One
On the way out to Robben Island, our boat showed a video of the history
of the place and, by extension, of South Africa itself. It climaxed
in the elections of 1994, when the pictures of Archbishop Desmond Tutu
literally jumping for joy at being able to vote brought tears to my
eyes. I heard an echo of 911—also an election day—and what
welled up in me was my belief that the world must unite around the right
to be free to express one’s opinion, gather together in one place,
and strive to reach Lincoln’s elusive goal of a more perfect union.
Tutu’s joy took me back to Union Square and strengthened my conviction
that if Tutu and Walter Sisulu and Mandela and our guide did not give
up hope, if Gandhi and Washington and Lincoln and Lafayette refused
to let despair destroy their vision, that if from the ashes of a wretched
and crushing regime a country could rise to be the hope for a continent,
then those of us who will never spend years in prison or be assassinated
have no excuse for despair, inertia, or fear to bring about the change
we want.
We are now on the verge of war. Our environment is suffering, our economy
is in shambles, our city is in debt, and the federal administration
is in the hands of the rich and powerful. It was ever thus. Yet, bought
up though it may be, stolen though it has been, hijacked and battered
and disregarded by the majority as it is, the public square is worth
preserving, refurbishing, and celebrating, because the statues I see
every day in Union Square Park and the Old Man with no job challenge
me to think of what would happen if I and others gave up. They tell
me to keep on quarrying, paving, planting my seeds, and waiting for
my season. They tell me that, like Union Square’s renovation itself,
the belief that change is possible may be costly and late in coming.
But, they tell me, it’s worth fighting for—and, these days,
that might the squarest deal on offer.
Martin Rowe is the founding editor of Satya
and the publisher of Lantern Books (www.lanternbooks.com).
He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
