How Do You Want to Answer Your Grandchildren?
For 50 years, the Geauga Park District has utilized thoughtful, science-based analysis to remove nuisance plants and animals from the parks -- species or individual…
For 50 years, the Geauga Park District has utilized thoughtful, science-based analysis to remove nuisance plants and animals from the parks — species or individual animals that are injuring the infrastructure of the park or surrounding areas.
We were, therefore, appalled when at the most recent board meeting, John Oros, interim director and candidate for executive director said, if the board shortly approves, “There will be hunting and trapping in the parks . . . because some people consider it recreation.”
Let’s be honest, Mr. Oros and park board: Trapping is not a sport to get food for friends and family. You don’t eat beaver, otter, muskrat and fox. Trapping is a commercial enterprise.
Under this administration, soon a very limited number of individuals will be able to kill the animals you and your children go to the parks hoping for a glimpse of and skin them to sell their pelts, skulls and other body parts.
A small group will trap animals that we all own in common and sell them for their personal benefit. Instead of watching beaver swim across Lake Kelso on a quiet evening, perhaps the kids can watch the bubbles rise where an underwater trap is drowning a beaver.
In August of last year, Protect Geauga Parks said that the gutting of the bylaws would lead to this and other kinds of activities incompatible with the 50-year mission of the parks of protect, conserve and preserve the wildlife and wild spaces of Geauga County.
Everyone — Mr. Oros, the Park Board, Judge Grendell –?said that we were overreacting; that these were just words and nothing would change. Tell that to the next fox you see, off in a distant snowy sunset landscape caught in a leg hold trap.
It is not just the emotional response to this abrupt policy change that disturbs us. Each animal and plant in the park contributes or subtracts from the delicate network that makes the ecosystem what it is.
Otter were reintroduced into Ohio in 1986, after being trapped out of existence here, because of their contribution to clean water. Beaver are called a keystone species because they create wetland environments for waterfowl and other creatures. Fox, mink, weasels, yes, even coyotes, keep the rodent and rabbit populations in check.
Yet, without consulting experts, this administration is prepared to let people trap or hunt animals willy-nilly with no analysis of why it is appropriate or necessary or how it will impact other species in the parks. We should expect no better of a park administration that mows a monarch butterfly feeding area to put in a ball field, which appears to have never been used.
The park under this administration and this board has abandoned a long-standing set of standards for making these decisions, has shunted aside its own Department of Natural Resources and is making decisions without regard to the ecological integrity of the parks.
We oppose the trapping and hunting of animals and the destruction of plants and habitats for other than the overall sustainability of the parks and their environs. The substitution of expensive and unnecessary equipment, games and gimmicks is a poor substitute for seeing and touching the real world.
The parks, with their green spaces cleaning our air, with the head waters of the Chagrin, Cuyahoga and Grand rivers supplying us and our neighbors with fresh waters filtered through healthy soil, and providing us quiet retreat from our noisy, gadget-filled world, need us to defend, protect, and conserve them — for our good and for the good of those to come. This is an ethical obligation that some among us have forgotten.
Write, call and go see this park board, Mr. Oros, Judge Grendell, this newspaper. Try and make yourself heard to this so far deaf group of “public servants.”
Take the deeply flawed survey and define in the “comments” sections that recreation to you does not mean destroying what we treasure: beauty, clean air and water, quiet times with our families.
Be able to hold your head up and answer when your grandchildren ask, “What did you do when you first heard that our parks were being thoughtlessly destroyed?”
On behalf of Protect Geauga Parks
Protect Geauga Parks Steering Committee:
Kathy Hanratty, Chardon; Ed Buckles, Troy; Ron Kimmich, Chardon; Barb Partington, Chester; John Augustine, Parkman; Sandy Buckles, Troy; Shelley Chernin, Russell; Tony Festa, Russell; Kathy Flora, Thompson; Frank Gwirtz, Middlefield; Katherine Malmquist, South Russell; Dave Partington, Chester; Tim Snyder, Burton; Kathleen Webb, Chardon.
