A modest proposal for vacant lots

 What little education I have comes from books and libraries.

And I can remember a bit about the book I read, in the seventh grade, that made me look at distressed properties and vacant lots in a new light. I don’t remember the name of the book or its author. But in the appendix, the nameless book with the green cover had this suggestion:

• Go to a place with a 6-foot bit of string, attached to a nail.

• Fix the nail into the ground and inscribe a circle.

• Count the number of different kinds of plants (and insects) you find.

I would later learn that this was called an interdisciplinary project. If you remember how to calculate the area of a circle and do some arithmetic involving ratios, you can calculate how many different plants you’ve found per 100 square feet.

You can make comparisons by repeating the procedure in different places.

It’s been 55 years or so, but I remember the stark difference in diversity between a school lawn and a vacant lot.

Yesterday’s note was about distressed properties. If I could encourage my neighbors to pass a law, I’d ask them to make all distressed properties and vacant lots public land. They’d be used for the education of naturalists young and old.