When a developer announced plans to build nearly 1,000 homes across 2,200 acres of open space in a rural Hudson Valley town, I asked the conservation biologist at Scenic Hudson, the group I head, to conduct an ecological study. He concluded the project would so fragment the site’s fragile ecosystems that many of its amphibian and reptile species would be wiped out. Our work supplemented and supported a massive and effective effort by a local grass-roots organization opposing the oversized project on roughly a dozen other grounds -- traffic, cost of school expansion, visual impacts, among others. Shortly after these findings were made public, the developer announced it was going back to the drawing board. It has promised to make protection of the site’s natural resources the beginning point and focus of revised plans. Time will tell whether these plans achieve this laudable goal.
Scan the Web site of any land preservation organization and you’re likely to see the word “contiguous” before you read too far. It’s not enough that we safeguard America’s fields and forests, mountains and marshlands; it’s crucial these open spaces be connected. In other words, it’s far better to conserve one 100-acre plot than to protect 50 unlinked two-acre parcels.
Why? For one thing ...
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