EDITORIAL
Hahamongna Watershed Park on Dec. 15, 2018 (Photo – arroyoseco.org).
Why does progress always seem to come with a sigh?
By Garrett Rowlan
Seeing the destruction being done in Hahamongna Watershed Park, one is immediately confronted with contradictions that don’t seem readily resolvable, except in the gouging of a once-pristine trace of land in northwest Pasadena when the only spin in one’s thoughts is, I hope it works out in the end.
Despite the protests of environmental groups who defended this bucolic stretch, the program goes on. It has succeeded only in a slight reduction of the Los Angeles County’s determination to reduce the buildup of sediment that prevented the Devil’s Gate Dam from being fully and efficiently functioning. Despite the tagline of restoration, there is one bald-faced fact which must lie behind this decision: trees can’t sue, people do, and if the specter of negligence should follow some catastrophic rain event—a possibility, no doubt, owing to the atmospheric whims of global warming—and the resultant flooding causes damage, the possibility of some vast, class-action lawsuit must be avoided, above all else.
And yet what is being done to the park—those pristine trees now wiped away to create an image suggestive of some landscape ravaged by strip-mining, one has to sadly laugh at the promise of “restoration” that has the hollow ring of something “being destroyed to save it.”
Like so much of change in today’s world, the future sometimes seems like a zero-sum game.
Garrett Rowlan is Political and Social Justice writer at ColoradoBoulevard.net. He’s also the Senior Editor of Greater Pasadena Area Guide of the Print Edition.
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