Greenways are popular now for some very good and lasting reasons. They
remind us that our urban environment is not just a fume-choked freeway or
boulevard of billboards.
We may go out of our way to despise the city rather than see it as our own habitat, however unnatural. Here we work, consume, sleep—but we also grow, play, and learn. Few of us live near the rainforests or Arctic wilderness that attract so much environmental attention. We experience our lives as urban people—by the year 2000, over 80% of Americans will live in cities or suburban areas. And yet there is wildness,if not Wilderness by bureaucratic designation, in our urban areas.
As conservationists, greenways, as places where the natural world lives in the midst of cities, deserve more of our attention. Most of us have an image of a greenway as a river plus a trail. Those are the typical ingredients in greenway systems—some as large and complex as the Hudson River, others as small as the nameless creek through a townhouse project. Other greenway corridors include road and utility rights-of-way, abandoned rail lines, drainageways and canals.
All these combine the natural with the industrial, provide recreation and wildlife habitat, and link utilities and living streams. In short, greenways are linear parks that borrow the power in our minds of the River, the Forest, and the Journey.
The importance of greenways lies in this diversity. While greenways provide
some very tangible benefits to the urban world, they also make appealing
environmental projects....
—STUART MACDONALD, (Colorado State Trails Coordinator), Greenways: Preserving our Urban Environment, Trilogy, 1991
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