We have been blessed with good rain in Amman this year. Spring is all around us. Amman’s empty plots of land (and there’s many of those) are full of green life. Flowers, grasses, butterflies and bees are creating little heavens where usually you see urban rubbish.
The scene above is what I see everyday as I arrive to work.
But this morning, a nasty surprise was awaiting me..
A contingent of GAM workers was busy destroying the spring.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“This grass causes fire, so we’ve been ordered to remove it while it was still green”
It’s not the first time I hear this. Every year I witness how grass is pulled out from certain empty plots of land in the name of fire prevention or insect/snake fighting.
In summer, both GAM and private citizens start controlled fires on certain hill sides for the same reason, leaving ugly black landscapes behind..
“But what about all this building debris on this plot. Will you remove that too?”
“No,” one of the GAM guys answered, “we just remove the grass, we have nothing to do with debris”..
Well.. have a look..
And that’s how a beautiful spring scene gets removed, exposing ugly debris that been there for months.
I truly appreciate the amazing effort that the GAM workers, across Amman, have to put to keep the city clean. And I know that Amman’s citizens are often unappreciative of this effort. I also know that people keep littering the streets with no respect to the GAM workers or to the public spaces of Amman.
But we need GAM to be more sensible when doing this kind of spring cleaning. Removing beautiful spring scenes and leaving building debris lying there for months or years just does not make sense. This obsession with fires and snakes seems more like an enmity with nature to me and I hope we don’t see the senseless burning of hills this year.
Comments
2 responses to “What’s GAM’s problem with the spring?”
Not just grass, but they used to burn garbage too! Yes garbage.
Usually noticeable in Wadi Sagra, or what used to be Wadi Sagra
Thanks for the posting. Yes, it’s a damn good point that you raise here. We (all Jordanians) simply never enforce sound plans that would utilize these spaces and keep them pleasing to the eyes; yes we’ve talked about these plans forever but never apply or enforce them in full. And we don’t fine (after the culprits are identified) those that throw debris in empty lots or parks. Its high time that the Municipality or Government itself writes clearly and convincingly on the signs that the fines will be levied from any nincompoop that doesn’t heed the law; that polluting isn’t a laughing matter as many would do when their attention to littering is brought up. One sometimes is sick and tired of repeating such things so many times over the years and never seeing anything really changing qualitatively and quantitively.