Do-Gooders, NIMBYs, and Other Insects

The fight over a proposed butterfly museum shows how nonprofits and neighborhood groups are driving this town buggy

A A A Comments By Matt Smith Wednesday, Apr 11 2001

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\rIf the legislation passes, the bug people won't be terribly happy. They'll have to put their museum elsewhere. And Eula Walters has told me she wants the parcels kept exactly as they are. She also has little use for Aaron Peskin, who introduced the legislation.

In fact, it's hard to imagine Eula Walters giving up her fight, even if she gets what she wants in spite of herself. I imagine she'll keep carrying her briefcase to committee meetings, complaining to her neighbors about development going up around Ferry Park, filling her assigned genetic role: a San Francisco version of the unique species of mite that lives only in the mandible of army ants.

Fred Harper

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Oakland, CA 94621

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"This has been a full-time job, just to keep up with the builders," Walters says. "I don't spend my time doing anything but saving this park. I'm specialized."

¹ Wilson is an entomologist who became reviled during the Margaret Mead-relativism of the 1970s for his tracts on biological determinism, and adored during the techno-enamored 1990s for his tracts on scientific unificationism (quantum mechanics explains heartbreak, etc.). ² While it's technically true that I fabricated this statistic, it is also true that one Web directory lists some 7,000 Bay Area nonprofits in the "progressive" category alone. ³ See Randy Shaw, et al.

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