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Northside parking lot

7/29/2010: Stefan Verbano has a piece in the ODE on the new 153 slot parking lot UO will build to replace the space athletics took for the Jock Box. The city has decided to extend the public comment period another week:

The Campus Planning and Real Estate website lists the Urban Farm as a beneficiary to the construction on its website, saying that the construction will allow the farm to add native edible landscape and save apple and other orchard trees. But some of the farm’s volunteers wonder if the benefits will outweigh long-term ecological costs.

Katrina Simonsen, an environmental science major and one of the farm’s volunteers, said the opportunity to plant a native landscape along the lot’s western boundary does not justify the almost two acres of asphalt set to be poured close to where food is grown.  

“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Simonsen said. “I’ve read foraging books that say you shouldn’t pick food grown next to roads and cars.”

That was true back in the day. I think I read it in Stalking the Wild Asparagus. But it’s not a problem now that we’ve got lead-free gas – another of President Nixon’s great accomplishments. So forage away.

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