A selective and inexplicable blindness to environmental injustice currently afflicts most of Boston. Perhaps the problem is too close to home to be seen clearly by those outraged by injustice abroad.

The city’s largest park – a Boston Landmark and a masterpiece of landscape design – provides a place of natural refuge and community socialization that is vital to the emotional and physical well-being of the most underserved populations of the city.

And yet Franklin Park is where a group of wealthy investors would like to install a professional sports stadium and entertainment complex that will draw a large, mostly white and suburban clientele.

For decades, city officials have watched and done nothing as White Stadium, in the Playstead section of Franklin Park, fell into disrepair. Built to serve the public schoolchildren of Boston, the stadium has served generations of student athletes and continued the original mission of the Playstead: to provide a place for the city’s schoolchildren to play.

The rehabilitation of the building – and of the park landscape as a whole – is scandalously overdue. But Mayor Wu has decided that this investment can only occur if a for-profit professional sports organization privatizes the stadium. Schoolchildren will use it only when their activities do not conflict with professional practices and games. Concerts and other events would also be likely, as the investors are a for-profit group.

Officials describe the proposal as a great benefit to the neighborhoods around the park. After all, the stadium is in disastrous condition and the city’s public schools deserve better.

But city officials and private investors have not acknowledged or presented the true and extensive impacts of the proposal, and they have evaded the required state environmental reviews. Nor have they explained why the city is willing to spend $50 million on the project, but only if the professional sports team moves in.

The strongest – and remarkably cynical – argu- ment for the White Stadium project is that it is the only way the city will ever spend money to improve Franklin Park.

The proposal is a throwback to the mid-twentieth century, when institutionalized racism led officials to devalue Franklin Park because mainly Black and immigrant communities used it. In 1949, the same year that White Stadium first opened, the city transferred the land for the Shattuck Hospital at the edge of Franklin Park to the state. In 1958, the state also took over the Franklin Park Zoo. Its managers subsequently fenced the zoo and started charging admission.

The changing demographics of the neighborhoods around the park led officials to see it merely as an available site for redevelopment. Public-private parnerships facilitated reduced maintenance budgets at a time when political will to invest in the park for the people who used it had evaporated.

Some things don’t change, at least in Boston.

Just imagine if a mayor of New York proposed a professional sports stadium in one of Olmsted’s other two great urban parks (Central Park and Prospect Park) and held park budgets hostage to coerce public approval. In 1968, Columbia University proposed building a gymnasium in another Olmsted landscape, Morningside Park, which served the neighborhoods of Harlem. Protesting students, joined by members of the Black Panthers, occupied Hamilton Hall in a violent reaction that doomed that ill-conceived plan to usurp public land.

The Playstead is the heart of the true public use of Franklin Park, as it has been since the 1880s. Today it is fair to ask: Where is the outrage? Where is the Boston Landmarks Commission?

The current failure to see the unique and irreplace- able value of Franklin Park is particularly jarring because an excellent Action Plan to guide the park’s rehabilitation was recently completed and approved by the city. That plan, guided by years of successful community engagement, makes no mention of a professional sports team.

Failure to recognize an environmental injustice, in this case, has been joined by a refusal to acknowledge the extensive impacts that the operation of a professional sports stadium inevitably would have on the Playstead landscape, and on Franklin Park as a whole.

Parkland is a finite resource. A public park, especially one that is vital to the environmental justice communities of Boston, is no place for a private sports arena.

Ethan Carr is a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His most recent book is “Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City” (Library of American Landscape History, 2023).