This is what I know, having heard it through the Vitis vine: on Wednesday at 7pm, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden fired six members of its science department, wiping the department out. By e-mail. What a classy move! The Metropolitan Flora project has been suspended. The head of the community-building GreenBridge was axed. The herbarium has been put into storage. This is a body blow to all efforts to green the city, deleting both research and resources vital to us all.
Coincidently, or not, the department was located across the street from the garden itself, and now the BBG doesn’t have to worry about moving a whole department should they want to sell the real estate to the developer of an apartment building.
Naturally, finances are being blamed for the department’s termination. The elaborate new entrance way to the Garden couldn’t have turned out to be a boondoogle, could it? Why is it that employees always pay for management’s fuck ups? Also, what’s all this about City Council money given to BBG with stipulations that there be no-lay-offs there. True?
Another legacy of the Bloomberg Plutocracy has been the steady corruption of non-profits into acting like for-profits, with all the nasty ruthlessness that presumes. Starving nonprofits of public funds means not only must they scramble even more for private funding, but they must follow the nation-wrecking dictates of the Market über alles, breaking unions, screwing retirees, and yoking themselves to the ruling elites for crumbs. The situation is analogous to the public sector, as in Prospect Park, where plutocrats get to decree what their money will buy, as with Central Park Conservancy’s enormous wealth while parks in the Bronx shrivel, as in the hotel/condos (the “Flood Plain Estates”) being built in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
Backyard and Beyond 
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