新视野大学英语听说教程2 01b（在线收听）

Green Spaces in Cities

Where do children play? Years ago, any open field, any vacant lot, any group of trees — these were the places where children played. As families left family farms, small towns, and the countryside, and moved into cities, the places for their children to play in became rarer. Children in the cities had few options, fewer choices of places to play.

In fact, all people's lives change a lot when they move to the city. In cities, homes are built on top of one another — in enormous apartment buildings. The feeling of private space and ownership no longer exists in houses literally piled one on the other.

Psychologists have been studying the changes people experience when they leave rural areas and move into urban environments. One clear finding from their studies is that people need green spaces for better mental health. Children can play on paved playgrounds. That's true. However, they just don't have as much fun as children in small towns. Without grass and trees and bushes and, yes, dirt and mud to get dirty in, children miss an important part of childhood. The human soul, it seems, needs to stay close to its roots.

Adults can plant lots of things like bulbs in window boxes and large containers. However, tending window boxes isn't the same as being an amateur gardener and growing peas, tomatoes and salad greens in a backyard garden. The lack of green space is now recognized and understood as a problem.

City planners — the people who design neighborhoods — have begun to work on a solution. They want to build more parks, but land in cities is quite costly. So they look for land that no one else wants. Along rivers, under power lines, near ditches and highways — these are the spaces that no one uses and they are everywhere. Why not use these unused spaces for green areas? Neighborhood groups have coordinated their efforts to clean up the trash or garbage. Soil from new building projects in the city has been trucked by lorries into these areas. This soil has been dumped along the sides of rivers, and strong walls have been erected to hold it there. Trees and bushes have been planted; the roots of these plants will hold the soil, too, and the green leaves make the area beautiful.

"People in and near cities have little opportunity to experience parks or unprotected open spaces, and that's becoming a problem," says Mister Ernest Cook, a senior vice president of the Trust for Public Land (TPL). This organization was started over twenty-one years ago. Its purpose is to protect land and public resources for people. In the past nineteen years, TPL has completed up to a thousand conservation projects in Canada and the United States.

In Portland, Maine, the land along the old train tracks near the coast has become a green belt of trails between areas characterized by housing developments and those characterized by downtown businesses. To Mister Charles Jordan, the director of the Portland Parks and Recreation Department, it's just a beginning. Jordan has plans for an environmental university — a huge urban park (5,000 acres ). It will include different environments, from canals and wetlands to forests. Jordan's plans include a network of trails and paths for people to use for excursions all over the city. He also wants to build a green belt from Portland, across Canada and the United States, all the way back to the Pacific Ocean. Communities across the continent could be connected by such a green belt.

Other cities have comparable projects. In Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, the sides of the Salt River bed that have washed away are becoming a park. In Baltimore, a long strip of land (which was used for dumping garbage) is becoming a series of biking and walking trails. These trails will link a dozen neighborhoods and the downtown business areas. In some cities, the bicycle paths connect every area to every other area. In Flagstaff, Arizona, a thousand miles of bike trails lead into the San Francisco Peaks, the highest summit in the state.

In other areas, planners have made places for bicycle trails and playgrounds, for public gardens and private garden plots, and paths for walking and running excursions. The costly result is a growing greenness in the cities and a healthier environment for all the civilians who live there.
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