King's Park (Saturday --no, make that Sunday -- in the Park)

SOMETIMES, WE CAN BE A PRETTY QUIRKY, QWAZY BUNCH OF QUACKS.

We lament the loss of green space to urban sprawl in the major cities where, increasingly, more of us live.

We talk about the importance to the planet of oxygen-producing trees and how the destruction of forests is so terrible.

We whine about living in concrete jungles, those of us that do.

Well, I rode out on my bike to my closest nearby sizeable green space last Saturday (CORRECTION--SUNDAY!).

It's called King's Park (we're still SO colonial).

Pic No. 1 below is a Google Earth image of the park itself. Pic No. 2 is a Google image from farther away, with the little yellow pin marker on the left showing where I live.

It's about a 15-minute bike ride.

It's a gorgeous expanse of green. It's beautiful, it really is. Winnipeg has many beautiful green spaces and parks. But aside from one or two of those parks, I always come away from them thinking the same thing.

Why are so few people there to take advantage of them?

Only minutes from this greenery sit houses row on row, barely 15 feet apart. As urban neighbourhoods go, it's great...mature trees, not far from the Red River.

But all of the pix I'm showing here with people in them are pretty much the only people I saw on a sunny, warm Saturday summer afternoon.

Where are all the dog-walkers letting their pets run free on the off-leash area that's as big as 20 football fields? Not one.

There was one group flying kites. There could be hundreds.

There were scattered friends or lovers (or both) out to walk the trails.

Hey, maybe they were all at home blogging on their computers or out at the cottage or watching the latest instalment of How to be a top model or something.

Hey, people are going to do what they want.

But this is their tax dollars at work. As the world pretends it's trying to go green, it's very fashionable to talk about how to be green. All the polls say the environment is one of the public's top issues.

Ask Al Gore.

Meanwhile, though, the rivers and streams and trees and huge stretches of grass that are set aside for our public enjoyment just beckon us to be with them, and in large part, it seems, we ignore them.

And I'm among those people, far too often.

And I don't know why we do that AND complain about how our environment is crumbling into a brown, oil-laden, smog-filled atmosphere that will kill us.

Who knows, maybe that will happen eventually.

But for right now, there's all kinds of beauty out there to enjoy. And it's not that far away.