Empty, Undeveloped, Weedy

It’s All How You Look at It – Or Who’s Looking at It

In a recent story in the San Mateo Daily Journal about a hotel development in nearby Half Moon Bay, a member of the California Coastal Commission referred to the parcel as a “developable piece of empty land”.

I am always struck when a parcel to be built on is described as “empty” or “undeveloped”. Better would be to say “empty of human development.” If you’d look closely, you’d see plenty of life and activity filling up that “empty” space: birds, beetles, butterflies, bees; grasses, bushes, perhaps some trees. No weeds, though, for weeds are only what we humans hubristically call living plants that, in our opinion, don’t belong there. Come to think of it, it is they who may consider us weeds.

An earlier version of this post appeared in the paper today as a Letter to the Editor. I took the above photo a couple of years ago of an “empty” plot of land in downtown San Mateo. A former gas station awaiting human redevelopment. Meanwhile, non-humans are filling it with thriving life.