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Sunday, September 24, 2006
Develop or Die
From the New York Times, depressing news from my previous neck of the woods:
Rare Woodpecker Sends a Town Running for Its Chain Saws
BOILING SPRING LAKES, N.C., Sept. 23 (AP) — Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.
The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker.
The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions.
Hoping to beat the mapmakers, landowners swarmed City Hall to apply for lot-clearing permits. Treeless land, after all, would not need to be set aside for woodpeckers. Since February, the city has issued 368 logging permits, a vast majority without accompanying building permits.
What is the cost of development? From what I understand North Carolina has been exploding in terms of land development in the Raleigh area and now in the southeast part of the state. I remember when I was a freshman at UNC-Wilmington you could buy a lot of beachfront property at Carolina beach for a mere few hundred thousand dollars. Now many of the same lots are well over a million dollars, and that's just for the land itself. I mention this because it shows that people will pay absurd amounts of money to live in a beautiful environment. What many don't realize is that if development continues at the current pace and is left unchecked (indeed, promoted) by local governments then there won't be any beauty to enjoy anymore in North Carolina.
The situation in Boling Spring Lake is especially depressing because people are destroying the land preemptively; that is, landowners perceive a threat from the natural environment and are making sure it doesn't get in the way of any future plans they may have to further decimate one of the most ecologically diverse states in the country. I speak as someone who enjoys being among living things other than humans. But even from the uninformed point of view of the landowner who values a nice house over a nice view from that house, it makes no sense to slowly but surely chip away at their natural surroundings. The very reason they value their land in the first place is going to be the very reason that it's going to be an artificial wasteland a few decades for now. I've seen it happen firsthand in both my hometown and where I went to college and it's not a nice thing to think about.
The sad reality is that what is happening in Boling Spring Lake is perfectly legal, as evidenced by City Hall handing out hundreds of logging permits, seemingly unconcerned about long-term effects. The Fish and Wildlife Service is making it clear that development=no woodpeckers. Sure, it’s just a woodpecker whose numbers are dwindling, and it’s not really the woodpecker that I’m concerned about. It’s what the woodpecker represents that makes me sad. Humans have reached a level of unabated ignorance about the environment in exchange for big homes and even bigger cars. My hope is not that Americans return to their early history of living at one with nature (which is a myth, anyway) but that we simply turn our iPods off for a few minutes, unplug from the internet, step outside, and look around. We are literally killing our surroundings at a rapid pace yet we remain unaware of it. As with so many other issues affecting humans, education is the remedy. Learn that this earth is not here as a gift from God to us but a natural entity that we are a part of, not apart from. In terms of ecology, we are no more or less significant than a cockroach, a housefly, or a woodpecker. We each have a specific role to play and ours is not to eliminate the opportunity for other living things to carry out theirs.
Posted by Will at September 24, 2006 01:07 PM in In the News | Personal Reflections