I was out for a short stroll this evening, and I ran into a couple of people I know.

“We’re off to meet Fred Kalisz,” they said. It’s election season, and with nine mayoral candidates in New Bedford, this is the time of year when the candidates are all trying to meet the voters. “And after that, we have two or three more candidate meetings to go to,” they added.

That made me curious. Not many people would go to three meet-the-candidate events in one evening. It turned out that they are active in the “Friends of Buttonwood Park.” (For out-of-town readers, Buttonwood Park is a beautiful park just west of the downtown.) It’s an Olmsted-designed park, but it is not quite what it once was. Thus the “Friends of Buttonwood Park,” a non-profit citizen’s advocacy group, was formed to try to restore some of Buttonwood’s fading beauty.

The city has not been entirely responsive to this citizen’s group. Cities often seem designed for efficiency, not for higher purposes. Don’t plant more trees in the park because then you have to rake more leaves which costs more money. Yet Buttonwood Park was explicitly founded, not for the sake of convenience in raking leaves, but for the pleasure of workers who live in the city and need a place to go to restore their souls.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but I will have to tell these members of the “Friends of Buttonwood Park” about the concept of “ecojustice.” Ecojustice is shorthand both for economic justice and for ecological justice. For, you see, economic justice and ecological justice are so interwoven you really can’t separate them out. For example — we never hear about the problem of too many trees in the suburbs, and the wealthier the suburb, the more the trees, and the more leaves there are to rake. But you’d be crazy to complain about too many trees in a wealthy suburb. Yet for those who find it difficult to escape from the city, or who are bound to the city for most of the week because of their work schedule, trees somehow become an inefficient nuisance. Funny how that works.

You can think about the recent tragedy in New Orleans in terms of ecojustice, too. Notice how the poorest neighborhoods wind up in areas that are prone to ecological disasters like flooding (and toxic waste dumps, and major sources of air polution, and so on)? Funny how that works. Looks like economic and ecological justice really are linked.