Thursday 10 July 2014

Crimes Against Civilisation


By the edges of the Ring Road and in between Cooper Street lies Biodiversity Business Park, one of the new development areas taking over the vacant land and converting it into prefabricated concrete slab factories.
The land was a former quarry zone, brick-works, and part of the farmland quickly disappearing from this area - converted into industrial estates and sprawling suburban growths.  It is land not indistinct from most of the north western zones, short stunted eucalyptus taking hold in the land that was probably once vast food-stores for the Kulin. 
The crime in the title refers to the naming of the business park as Biodiversity.  Maybe I'm naive but the smug concealment of a development of land into concrete and asphalt with a few token natives isn't what biodiversity is.  Maybe they are referring to the combination of humans, rats, wasps ants, feral cats, foxes, miners and few bugs that will co-exist in the new zone, that will lodge themselves in the few crevices in these fresh concrete structures.
To call something like this Biodiversity is like calling a mass murderer a humanitarian.  An abuse of language in the first degree and a token of the developers attempts to chew into the fatty rewards of Green movements conversion of sustainability into a trendy badge and reflective of the discerning individual/business.  It is not a new phenomenon but that still does not make it any less inappropriate. 
An analogy would be calling Guantanamo Detention Center; Paradise Mews or Sunny Haven.
Fat trucks spew dirt around the manicured roads all white lines and smooth concrete, grass over the old clay and combed topsoils.

Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't language designed to signpost us towards understanding along commonly accepted truths.  To inject words like this into something that is quite the opposite serves to de-empower words and almost mock us with the audacity of the author.  Do the really expect us to believe that this park is a biologically diverse environment.  With the myriad of native flora and fauna iradicated under the wheels of progress the last thing needed is to call it a natural wonder. 

Please save your cheap tricks for the magic show CBRE so at least we can clap at the end of your charade.
















PS. The unchecked sprawl of Melbourne's suburbs into the distant horizon is probably also in order of receiving a crimes against civilization tag, what with all the good and intelligent design around we are still developing plots of land into closed suburbs and with black tiled roofs no less.  Foolish humans, I'll save some fervour for a not so distant post.

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