“Pave Our Lake.” That was a bumper sticker you saw in the 1990s — a joke, of course, popular with proto-hipsters feigning weariness with the environmentalist campaign to “Save Our Lake.”

“Pave Our Parks.” That could be the message of an ironic bumper sticker campaign among today’s (land use) hipsters. Only this time, it wouldn’t be a joke.

Unless the City Council takes action — perhaps as early as this Thursday’s meeting — you’ll likely be seeing a lot more pavement in local parks, along with restaurants, “amusement facilities,” and other intensive uses. And the public, the Planning Commission and the Council will only be able to stand by and watch as a bunch of fat cats and political appointees decide what goes where.

It’s time to send a message to the Council: Don’t let Ron Forman and his understudies write the Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance now verging on final approval. Instead, as the slogan goes: “Fix the CZO.” Don’t pave our parks.

It’s not as bad as paving paradise to put up a parking lot, as in that old Joni Mitchell song, but New Orleans’ City Park is taking down 110 trees to make way for a new golf course. The course has been in the works for a decade but only recently attracted attention and controversy now that land clearing has begun.

The park once was home to four golf courses. Now it has one. The second one — the controversial one — will be a “championship level” course, which puts it in a different class from what City Park has had in the past.

At a groundbreaking ceremony this past February in City Park, shovels dug into earth that the wildlife of Southeast Louisiana had been steadily reclaiming for nearly a decade. Public officials swinging golf clubs provided photo ops, marking the start of construction on a $24.5 million golf course on 250 acres of public land. Following the flood of 2005, the area had served as a beloved nature preserve for the city of New Orleans. The erection of a construction fence around the vast swath of land has led to outcry from city residents and last-ditch efforts to save something that will not be easily retrieved once it’s lost.

In spite of continued protests, construction hasn’t halted. At a City Park Board of Commissioners meeting this past March, Bob Becker, City Park’s CEO, opened the session by stating that the contractors working on construction of the park’s new golf course were on schedule. He also mentioned that Lloyd Boover—a New Orleans activist who had been protesting the project by sitting for twelve straight days in a tree positioned in the course’s construction zone—had fallen from his perch and was at University Hospital. As the meeting was taking place and concerned citizens waited to voice their objections to the destruction happening in their public park, the large cypress tree Boover had occupied was razed.

City Park already has a 5,740 yard, 18 hole golf course. There are a number of reasons for New Orleanians to be upset about the development of a second course. Environmental damage in a region already extraordinarily susceptible to harm is unsettling; that this damage is intentional makes matters that much worse. New Orleans City Park Improvement Association (NOCPIA) is the organization responsible for approving the park’s master plan. Requests to NOCPIA’s Board of Commissioners to reconsider their decision have been met with indifference. In spite of the Board’s claims of transparency in their operations, many feel ignored. Some question the prudence of moving forward on a project marked with evident intimations of failure; others assert that the operation is illegal. All told, what those in opposition to the golf course are rallying against isn’t the sport of golf but rather a defective case of systematic post-disaster restructuring.

If anyone was going to protest the clearing of trees to make way for a golf course at City Park — and do it by sitting in one of them for days on end — it was Jonathan “Lloyd” Boover.

The Gentilly homeowner is an old hand at sleeping in trees, having initiated the habit a few years back while touring the country on his bicycle. “I needed some air and space in my life and so decided to do it on my bike,” he said, describing an eight-month journey that took him to Washington, D.C., Washington state and down the Pacific Coast Highway.

In treeless territory, he would sleep underneath roadways in metal drainage culverts. But, he said, “Whenever there was a really great tree, I’d climb up with my hammock and mosquito net. It’s the best thing in world, bonding with nature.”

Last month, Boover ended up in a tree for a very different reason, as part of small uprising against City Park’s golf course plans. He spent 12 days there before taking a spill and a trip to the hospital. An ally, identifying himself only as “Beaux,” spent three days in a similar perch last week.