This is the moment, Oak Park. The first leaves are beginning to fall. And perhaps you have heard that if a leaf falls in your yard, it may not, under any circumstances be raked into the street. You must take that leaf, and each one of its compatriots, and put it into a brown paper bag.
It has been so decreed by Oak Park’s village board in an action so politically clunky that Wednesday Journal had to cut down more trees to provide the paper for all the reader letters castigating village government for this action.
Collecting leaves each fall is a major project for any village. There are a lot of leaves. They don’t fall on a precise schedule or confine themselves to convenient spots. In Oak Park, and many other towns, homeowners traditionally raked leaves into the street — along with the rest of the summer garden detritus, which isn’t exactly kosher but is oddly satisfying.
Once they’re in the street there is the challenge of all the parked cars, rainy days and early snows that make for a sodden mess, all of which must be cleared by a combination of the village’s contracted waste hauler and the public works team, which unclogs the drains and sweeps the streets.
This is expensive for the village and while the cost is built into the garbage fee every homeowner pays, it all adds up, it is not climate-friendly, and generally doesn’t make much sense.
So Oak Park took decisive action which is often a good thing. But not in this case.
Meanwhile, over in Forest Park we presume its village government has the same midterm goal of ending the leaves-in-the-street tradition. But there village government is undertaking a soft-soap, cajoling-not-mandating effort to get Forest Parkers to think differently about those pesky leaves.
A town hall meeting was held last week and featured multiple public officials and a member of the village’s Environmental Control Commission.
“You might think about, you know, just consider, maybe if you want to, putting all your leaves in those big old paper bags and dragging them out to the alley. You know, it might be fun,” was the paraphrased message.
The secondary message was “Leaves are your friends. They grew on the trees by your house. Doesn’t it feel right that they should also end their lives there, decomposing, re-energizing the dirt, dust to dust and all that?!”
That, of course, is the right answer. Rake your leaves into your flower beds and make your own mulch. Or smash them to smithereens with your lawnmower and let them lay. Or, if you’re really modern, gather them up and compost them.
The wrong answer, on all fronts is to rake the leaves into the street, have expensive and gas-guzzling trucks push them into giant piles and then haul them to an unknown landfill, maybe in Iowa.
So credit to Forest Park for trying a less dictatorial route.
Americans have a fixed view of our lawns and gardens. When autumn ends, there should not be a brown leaf in sight. It’s a very limited take on nature, even on urban nature. But moving us past it might be better accomplished by Forest Park’s methods than Oak Park’s.