“Environment: the social and cultural forces that shape the life of a person or population.” – dictionary.com

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So this is what you should do, wrote Walt Whitman, you should love the earth, and the sun, and the animals.

Every single human being who loves any or all of these things has a personal stake in the outcome of the struggle of the New York Carriage Trade to survive in New York.

It is a horrifying thing when we have to fight  our own government to save the environment, that is the new chapter in the agonizing and profoundly unjust assault on the New York Carriage Horses, the people who live and work with them, and the environment of New York’s Central Park, the crown jewel of the city’s history and one of the world’s great examples of preservation, urban design and civic vision.

The mayor of New York has asked the City Council  to ban the carriage trade and send the horses out of New York City. He says carriage work for horses is immoral and seeks to replace them with expensive and very large vintage electric cars, which he claims will be better for the environment than horses. In fact, the coalition of animal rights organizations seeking to ban the horses have claimed that the horses damage the environment because they slow traffic when they walk through the streets – this, they say, adds to global warming, and because they drop manure on the roads in Central Park.

The City Council has scheduled hearings on the proposed ban in June, and is expected to vote on the ban in July. The fate of the ban proposal is uncertain, the carriage trade lobbyists feel the ban would fail if the vote was today, but the mayor and his aides are intensely lobbying for their ban, and the uncertainty and fear that has hung over the carriage trade for many years is likely to continue.

As required by law, the mayor has appointed an environmental review study of the proposed ban – what would the environmental impact be if the horses were taken from the park? He shocked and enraged the carriage trade and many City Council members by appointing a long-time animal rights activist – one with close business ties to the millionaire who has been lobbying for the ban for years, to head the commission.

Of all the curious twists and turns of the carriage horse controversy, none is stranger than this idea that banning the horses and removing them from the city is somehow good for the environment. There is nothing more natural than animals living and working with people, it is seminal part of the history of the earth and of human life. Animals have enriched human lives since the beginning of recorded time, if you look at the faces of the children who see the carriage horses for the first time, you can see that they still do.

I know of no legitimate environmentalist who believes that vintage electric cars – the one meant for Central Park cost more than $500,000 for a single prototype – is more eco-friendly than a horse. The cars will have engines that generate heat and will require a substantial amount of steel, rubber, vinyl and other materials to build.

The horses do drop some manure, but the carriage trade has, for years, employed people to clean it up and remove it from the park. The horses have been dropping manure for 150 years with no record of having harmed anyone, the many thousands of motorized pedicabs, cars, trucks and other vehicles pouring through the park each day spew tons of carbon and fumes into the air. It defies any idea about common sense to claim the cars are more eco-friendly than the big draft  horses.

Then there is the environmental history and vision of the park. Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of the park, wrote that he designed the park so that people of all classes and incomes could see the carriage horses streaming through the park on paths and bridges he specifically designed for them.

Thomas Kinney, “an associate professor of history at Bluefield College in Virginia  –  wrote a book about the horse-drawn carriage trade. He told the Wall Street Journal that “Central Park was created as a venue for the carriages … It was a chance for people living in crowded urban areas to go for a drive in the country without leaving New York.'”

The 1974 Central Park Designation Report, which accompanied the decision to landmark Central Park, describes the “picturesque serpentine carriage drives” where a “brilliant array of carriages drawn by horses . . . were a conspicuous feature of the afternoon drive when New Yorkers turned out in force to see and be seen,” and notes that “some of the many footpaths which laced the park . . . followed the drives at certain points so that the pedestrian could also have a good view of the passing parade.”

The horses are as much of the park’s history and design as the fountains and flower gardens and paths.

There is also the issue of animals and the environment. The carriage horses are the last domesticated animals to live and work in Manhattan or almost all of New York City. If you believe animals are important to human history and human life, it is time to pay attention to the New York Carriage Horse controversy, a significant escalation of the national movement that is replacing concerns over animal welfare with legislation supporting animal rights. In New York, the animal rights movement finally elected a mayor who was one of them. He said his very first act would be to ban the carriage horses, he failed in that promise, and may fail again in a few weeks.

I believe that human beings are broken without animals, to me, there are few issues affecting our social and literal environments than the need to keep animals in our every day lives. Alice Walker says that an animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language, the psychologist and animal scholar Boris Levinson wrote in 1963 if the animals disappear from the lives of people, then humanity will be broken, and will turn to pets in desperation to heal. This prophecy has come true. There were 15 million owned dogs in the United States when Levinson wrote “Pets And Human Development,” there are more than 75 million owned dogs in America today.

But the number of animals, as opposed to pets, is diminishing rapidly. The World Wildlife Federation estimates half the animal species in the world have disappeared since 1970. And it seems the animal rights movement is working feverishly to get rid of the other half, and claiming the mantle of speaking for the rights of animals.

The campaign against the carriage horses is an inversion of morality, it is an exploitation of morality. Work is not cruel for working animals. The carriage horses, far from being abused, are considered by behaviorists and horse trainers to be the luckiest horses in the world – they have food, medical care, shelter and stringent regulations governing their work and lives. The truly abused animals – those suffering in industrial factory farms – don’t seem to bother the mayor of New York as he sets forth his new national progressive agenda.

While many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, writes author Michael Pollan, “in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in our history.” And we are dooming many more animals than we save. People who say they support the rights of animals are quick to try and ban carriage horses from New York, ponies from farmer’s markets where they give rides to children, elephants from the circuses, where all their tricks are labeled “stupid.” Yet there is little real consideration given to where these animals will go, who will care for them and take responsibility from them once they are removed from the visible human world.

“The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality… the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals — and specifically the loss of eye contact — has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species,” writes Pollan in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma

We are confused. Our entire idea about animals seems to be centered on rescue and abuse, not reality or survival. We are  quick to judge circus trainers, carriage drivers, pony ride operators, but slow to take responsibility for what we are doing to our environment, and for our destruction of the natural world of almost all of the animals on the earth.

Will the environment really be helped or saved in any way by banning the horses from Central Park and replacing them with cars? The mayor’s stacking of his environmental commission with a well-known animal rights activist is a grotesque assault on the environment, and of the history and vision of one of the world’s greatest man-made creations: Central Park. If the horses are gone, our greatest city will lose any connection with the animal world, will break the ancient contract between people and horses that has been cherished and honored for centuries. It will also destroy the lives and figures of many hundreds of people who live and work with the horses and depend on them for their livelihood.

And there is this issue of joy, romance and magic. Imagine the park with no horses, filled with more big cars, pedicabs, taxis, bicycles? For generations, the horses have delighted children, tourists, lovers, residents, there is magic in them, they touch us, make us smile, envelop the park with a timeless sense of time and place. It is their home in so many ways, not ours, what a travesty to ban them and replace them with more cars, and then claim the environment is being helped?

In his dishonest and ill-considered assault on the carriage trade, the mayor has betrayed the horses, his promises to support the working class, and now, the environment as well.  Is it really progressive to remove animals from the world, put people out of work, pave the way for yet more development and towers?

Animals have always shaped the cultural and social forces of New York City and our world. They were – and are – the living soul of Central Park. The horses are the only animals left in New York who are not pets, the city could give them a better life if it wished, easily and economically. Banning them is an act of cowardice, cruelty and denial. It will mark the end of a way of life, a sacred connection between people and horses that helped define what environment means.

The mayor has seen to it that we will never see or read a real environmental assessment of their potential removal from New York, I imagine he would not care for an honest one.

But there is, I think, an awakening. Many people rallying to the side of the carriage trade, and to the excesses of the movement that claims to speak for the rights of animals. They dread a joyless world without animals, a place where people who call themselves progressive tolerate machines without limits but cannot find the money, room or soul to keep 200 carriage horses in their safe and protected world, where they walk right through the every day lives of countless people.