More people, more scars upon the land

Most folks, I’m sure, have long forgotten him. But sometimes a story or happening stirs up the memory pot and it all comes rushing back to the fore.

An e-mail note from a longtime friend in Pennsylvania’s north country served as the stirring post for me in this bucket of memories.

It helped matters – a lot – that I just happened to be working on the Standard-speaker’s night Associated Press wire desk at the time. The job then and now, I think, revolves around selecting the key state, national and international news articles that ought to be in next morning’s edition, given their overall importance to the readership.

Among the news stories running on the AP wire that evening in 1997 was the obituary of singer John Denver, who had died when his private aircraft crashed into Monterey Bay, Calif.

Denver – the son of an Air Force fighter pilot – had many hit songs through his lengthy career and life. One constant in his work, though, was this: Denver often sang about the land – wild and natural land.

Veteran Pennsylvania conservationist and advocate for things wild and free, Ed Zygmunt, wrote this in response to a note I had shared with him and other friends: “This story brings to mind the lyrics from one of my all-time favorite songs, ‘Rocky Mountain High’ by John Denver: ‘More people, more scars upon the land’," Denver sang.

Here’s the note I wrote to which Ed responded: “As all of you know, I've been railing about the evils of sprawl development for a long time, as in decades. Well, it is true that I now live in a sprawl development. I cannot tell if Mountain Home [Idaho] is now a bedroom town for Boise (50 miles) or is simply growing to feed its own maw. In any case, I crossed paths yesterday with the real estate pro who worked with me to find my new home. Nice fellow. But as we're talking, he notes, with pride in his voice, that the 100-acre sagebrush steppe land across the main drag will be bulldozed starting next spring for more sprawl development. I didn't have the chutzpah to tell him that just days before I had spotted and photographed real live Sage Grouse on that same land.

“Little wonder that our natural heritage continues sliding down.”

Spend time out-of-doors and sooner, rather than later, you’ll see one of the scars upon the land that Denver sang about. Yes, Colorado, is a far hike from Pennsylvania, but the scars always have one thing in common: They degrade and destroy habitat needed by our natural heritage.

In my many years of transiting the Pennsylvania countryside between Hazleton and the suburbs of Wilmington, Del., on the way to Air Force Reserve duty at an air base in coastal Virginia, I passed many such scars: New roads, new subdivisions, new fast-food fry pits, new parking lots, new turf farms, etc. They all had this in common (and still do): Each meant wrecking a natural area to make way for human progress.

Twenty years before Denver’s passing, while I was cub reporting for an Idaho weekly newspaper that today is long gone, the editor-publisher swooped into the tiny newsroom and proclaimed that singer Elvis Presley had just died. The date was Aug. 16, 1977 and I was just months away from starting my career in the Air Force.

Elvis sang about love and having a good time, but he didn’t sing about the land, as Denver did.

Our diminishing natural heritage needs more defenders and advocates in the mold of Denver.

'Sportsmen's' legislation

Dear Mr. Gregory:

Thank you for contacting me about the Bipartisan Sportsmen's Act of 2014. I appreciate hearing from you on this important conservation legislation.

The Bipartisan Sportsmen's Act of 2014, S. 2363 was introduced by Senator Hagan of North Carolina on May 20, 2014. This legislation represented a package of several bills that sought to expand conservation and sportsmen's opportunities on public lands. Key measures in the bill would have reauthorized programs that conserve wetlands to benefit of ducks and other wildlife and allow federal agencies to use revenues from land sales to acquire critical lands of higher conservation value. The bill would also allow recreational public access to federal lands for the use of hunting, fishing and recreational use and reauthorize funding for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a non-profit organization that matches public conservation dollars with private funds to preserve our nation's wildlife and habitats. While there is already access authorized for sportsmen on many of our public lands, the Sportsmen's bill would have helped to further prioritize access for hunting and fishing on these lands.

On July 10, 2014, despite strong bipartisan support for the underlying legislation and the widespread backing by numerous sportsmen's groups including the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation, the bill failed to garner the votes needed to move forward and overcome a filibuster in the Senate. I share your frustration with the process we confronted with the Sportsmen's bill, it is a shame that despite solid support from sportsmen across the country, the debate on this bill became weighed down by unrelated amendments and interests that undermined our chance to expand hunter access in some of our nation's most valuable federal lands.

Growing up in Vermont, I recognize how important it is to make sure that everyone can enjoy our nation's natural resources in their own way. Having owned firearms in my youth and enjoying target shooting with my friends and family, I understand the importance of Vermont's outdoor tradition of hunting and fishing and the enjoyment those around the country attain through the use of firearms in a safe and responsible way. As a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I have long fought to provide funding for natural resource management and protections. I remain committed to working to protect and preserve our federal lands so that generations to come can experience the rewards of stewardship and conservancy. 

Thank you for contacting me. Please keep in touch

Sincerely,

PATRICK LEAHY
United States Senator

Fighting blight, the Vermont way

Note: This column of mine was published in the Hazleton, Pa., daily five years ago, but its message remains meaningful.

The state of Vermont recently celebrated a major anniversary, and it had nothing to do with the construction of a professional sports arena, subdivision, airport or other land-consuming project.
Vermont, in 1968, said “no” to the placement – anywhere in the Green Mountain State – of new billboards, those oftentimes mammoth placards atop steel posts that scream to passing motorists, urging them to buy this product or that service.
Although several states have followed Vermont’s lead, the Green Mountain State was the first to outlaw billboards and enact a set of stringent rules regulating all kinds of other signage. The 1968 law prohibits privately owned, off-premise signs and restricts the size, height, and distance from roads of said signs. Signs also aren’t allowed to have moving parts or flashing lights. All signs are forbidden on the legal right-of-way. Communities may adopt laws more stringent than the state’s.
Proponents of Vermont’s billboard law point with pride to the state’s scenic, uncluttered roadsides as a key attraction for visitors, especially the thousands-upon-thousands of “leaf-peepers” who visit Vermont to view the bright foliage of autumn. (These same roadsides benefit from the anti-litter campaign launched when the state began requiring sellers of many canned and bottled beverages to pay a 5-cent deposit per container to customers returning them.)
"Whereas, billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising are becoming a matter of increasing concern to many residents . . .”
So began the joint resolution of the Vermont State Assembly in 1967, when it created the Committee to Study Outdoor Advertising, which included future U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords.  It held public hearings, conducted research and reviewed the relevant law on outdoor advertising.
The committee's report, in part, stated: "Our scenic resources . . . have contributed much to our economic development by attracting tourists, . . . residents, and new industries and cultural facilities. . . .[T]he scattering of outdoor advertising throughout the state is detrimental to the preservation of these resources, and consequently to the economic base of the state."
So, in the following year, Vermont prohibited new billboards and provided an amortization period of five years to remove existing billboards.  By 1974, Vermont had felled its last billboard.
In 1997, the state commissioned an independent study of outdoor advertising to review the success of the billboard ban and to assess other forms of advertising.  Public opinion polls and studies echoed the 1967 report.  The study stated that traveler information solutions must maintain Vermont's quality environment, continue to prohibit billboards, and prevent sign clutter.
Businesses still receive the state government’s help through the posting of small chest-high signs devoid of accouterments which simply identify its name and travel distance.

Some Googling turned up choice statements like this one attributed to former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm: "Billboards contribute a minuscule amount to our economic well-being, but they impose a high cost.  They detract from Colorado's attractiveness to tourists and from the pleasant surroundings for our residents."

At the municipal level, more than 700 communities nationwide prohibit the construction of new billboards.  Why? Because billboard control improves community character and quality of life – both of which directly impact local economies. In fact, despite billboard industry claims to the contrary, communities and states that enact tough billboard controls have actually enjoyed strong economic growth (the current recission aside).

While some signs are necessary to provide directions to travelers, most billboards merely contribute to visual clutter – also known as “blight.”  For example, on one section of road in Hampton, Va. (and I have driven this very stretch), there were so many signs that a driver going 45 miles per hour would need to read 1,363 words per minutes just to understand all the information.  That is five times the normal reading speed of a stationary person.

The billboard industry often claims that controlling outdoor advertising will, over time, create economic ghost towns.  In fact, the undeniable aesthetic improvements to a community that come from controlling billboards actually helps its economy, notes Scenic America, a non-profit organization founded, in part, on the strength of Lady Bird Johnson’s campaign to beautify America’s roadsides.

Billboards are both a symptom and cause of urban blight. And the presence of fewer signs actually signals a community’s economic health.

Mull this tidbit from Scenic America: Communities can thrive without billboards, because most billboards have no connection to the local economy.  They advertise either national brands or out-of-state products and services . . . Billboard industry naysayers claim that businesses such as gas stations and eating and drinking establishments would be financially hurt by reducing or eliminating their outdoor ads.  On the contrary, in cities and towns such as Williamsburg, Va., Raleigh, N.C., and Houston the period following implementation of stricter billboard controls and/or bans on new billboard construction was marked by steady growth of sales in those industries.

Consider what happened in Raleigh: Sales for eating and drinking establishments rose from $243 million in 1989, before billboard control, to $307 million in 1992, after controls were introduced, a rise of about 20 percent.

Billboard control is especially key for communities that depend on tourism.  According to the Travel Industry Association of America, travelers spent $541 billion nationwide in 1999.  The President's Commission on Americans Outdoors reported that “natural beauty” was the most important criteria for adults choosing a site for outdoor recreation.  “The more a community does to enhance its unique natural, scenic, historic, and architectural assets, the more tourists it attracts.”

Back to the scenic vistas of Vermont: When the Green Mountain State took down its last billboard in 1975, the state’s tourism revenues increased by more than 50 percent in the following three years. The president of the Vermont Chamber of Commerce noted at the time: "Although there was some initial sensitivity that removing billboards might hurt tourism, it has had the opposite effect.  Tourism is up for all businesses large and small."

Many prime tourist nations prohibit new billboard construction even as their tourism revenues keep rising. The long list includes Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; Kitty Hawk and Nags Head, N.C.; South Padre Island, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Aspen and Boulder, Colorado; and Portland, Oregon.

Vermont is hardly alone at banning billboards statewide. The others include Hawaii and Maine and each continues drawing people from around the world to view their scenic wonders.

Remember these lessons from elsewhere the next time you’re motoring along a well-traveled Pennsylvania highway.

New images coming to Vermont conservation tags

A tag is, of course, a license plate. Putting new images on plates sold in the future is a nice idea, but event then, the revenue from the sale of "conservation" tags is chump change compared to what is spent on building roads and highways and streets and destroying Wild Nature in the process. It's a "feel good" gesture from the state transportation moguls in Montpelier, but in terms of generating significant revenue for non-game wildlife projects, it really is pretty lightweight. Here's the ins and outs.

'Biodiversity' makes it into a headline

That in itself is astounding, given the sorrowful state of most mainstream media outlets in this age of ambulance chasing and not much else. The truly sorrowful thing to consider, as explained in this article, is just how much of Delmarva's original hardwood forests have been lost; lost to road builders, lost to home builders, lost to sprawl, wrecked by ATV cowboys, etc.

What Pulitzer-winner Wallace Stegner said

I read Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Angle of Repose” way back in high school lit class. Other assigned readings then included Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and works by Samuel Clemons, a k a Mark Twain.

Stegner’s works came to mind at lunch today upon reading Essex, Vt., resident’s Bruce Post’s letter to the editor in Seven Days, a thick (and free) news weekly in the Burlington, Vt., area.

Post writes that Stegner “once wrote: “Namely, ‘that America’s whole history can be read as one continuous real estate transaction.’”

Post goes on: “Stegner, a defender of wild places, conservation and public lands, autopsied the West’s destruction by alliances of crony politicians and what he called land grabbers, boomers and busters. Later, he turned his attention to Vermont from his second home in Greensboro . . . Were he still living, I suspect Stegner would, on the one hand, nod approvingly about Vermont’s attempts to control development, but on the other, shake his head mournfully over much of what is happening as a de facto real estate syndicate devours our mountaintops and hillsides, neighborhoods and cityscapes. Of course, Stegner is gone, but fortunately his words linger on.

“We can learn a lot from one memorable phrase he used to color those intent on gobbling up our precious heritage for pecuniary gain. They were men with ‘itching fingers.’”

The target of Post’s ramble was Burlington Mayor Miro Wenberger and friends.

Stegner’s words, though, are more than appropriate when considering much of today’s development juggernaut.

A war story: My career as an Air Force Reserve officer first took me down Pennsylvania Route 100 through Lehigh County in 1992. That’s when I first journeyed to Langley Air Force Base, Hampton, Va., the U.S. having won the Cold War not too many months before.

Route 100 then, and now, runs through Macungie. On that first trip south I was pleased to see a downtown that was still full of life: Pedestrians, not cars, moving about, many of them coming and going from local eateries, shops, a jewelry store, a storefront for people with hobbies and crafts, a barber shop, etc.

Not too many more years ahead, though, that Norman Rockwell-like picture was long gone, replaced by a chain pharmacy and grocery, a collection of Big Box retailers, and sprawl streets of look-alike town houses. And there was lots of gas station-convenience stores to fuel the now car centric town.

Like much of Pennsylvania from the northern fringe of Philadelphia up to and past Allentown, the tale holds. I saw much the same in the Tidewater and Hampton Roads parts of coastal Virginia in October.

I’m not picking on Macungie; hundreds of other municipalities seem intent on growing into a look-a-like of the next town over and the one just beyond that and so on.

Pennsylvania, like Vermont and other states, has a strong land trust movement; non-profits that heroically save key natural areas. But just as Stegner lamented the land grabbers, the loss of America’s Wild Nature lurches on – pavers, graders, dozers, shovels, chainsaws and all the other assorted tools of developers chopping up our natural heritage; wet weather barely slowing the pace.

I wonder again, just as I have for decades, what the salamanders, snakes, birds and the native plant friends think about it all as humankind swoops in to convert more natural landscape into parking lots, streets, and turf farms.

From the Clemson University Cooperative Extension comes this nice summation: “Every wildlife species requires a general environment in which to live. To properly manage land for the benefit of wildlife, landowners must be aware of those things in the environment that wildlife need to survive and reproduce. The environment or natural home where a wild animal lives is called its habitat.

“Just like humans, wild animals have specific requirements that they get at home. Habitat for any wild animal must provide: cover (shelter) from weather and predators; food and water for nourishment; and space to obtain food, water, and to attract a mate.”

Us two-legged competitors get along best in places with lots of green space, urban forests, unpolluted streams, and the hundreds of native plant species that Wild Nature put there.

The reasons are many, but one thing is for sure: This is not a good time to be logging trees and converting our natural heritage to deserts of “development.”

Let’s save more of it before it really is too late.

The suits and ties and real conservation

This is a recent newspaper column of mine

Being retired and not having to worry about setting the alarm clock at bedtime every night does indeed pay off when the yodel, “The bird walk starts at zero-dark-thirty,” sounds in one’s sleepy ear.

More noteworthy is this: Business suits, ties and slick-shiny dress shoes are out, and attire that goes with rambling in the out-of-doors is in.

The last time (or close to it, at least) I sat through the afternoon session of a meeting of the board of directors to one of our big national conservation clubs, the badge-of-honor very clearly went to those seated around the boardroom table who were clad in those very suits and ties. Their most recent outdoor experience appeared to be nothing more (or less) than the arduous trek from parking lot to receptionist’s table where, in turn, each attendee received their “hello, my name is . . .” lapel name tag.

But more importantly, the conversation I heard from the suits’ mouths that day wasn’t about conservation and the kind of set-asides our fellow inhabitants of Earth need.

No, it was all about money and how best to get it from Foundation X and Charitable Trust Y. It was, in short, a five-minute, well-rehearsed plea from a director. This fellow was a friend of Big Oil and, yet, here he was serving on the board of the National Audubon Society.

I had journeyed a couple of hours to the board’s meeting site at a ritzy Kitty Hawk, Outer Banks, inn at the invitation of a Pennsylvanian then serving on the national board.

The Big Oil apologist pleaded that day with his fellow board members for their support for the opening of the last-great-wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, northeastern Alaska, to oil drilling.

Most members of National Audubon and its state and local chapters are birders; the kind of people who’re quick with a smile and travel about with binoculars hanging from their neck and a tripod with spotting scope attached waiting for deployment from the trunks of their cars just in case a bird of prey decides to make an appearance by perching in yonder tree.

My attendance at this board meeting was made possible by the fact that I was already going to be at Langley Air Force Base near Hampton, Va., and motoring to the Outer Banks of North Carolina wouldn’t chew up too much of a weekend day.

I had another experience of similar likeness around the same time when I took up an offer to experience some of the big shindig meeting near Stroudsburg, Pa., (also in the early 2000s) of the board of honchos overseeing the Pennsylvania chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

I shook a lot of hands that day, having been honored by the Conservancy several years before as its volunteer of the year in science. But absent – again – were the weathered faces of field naturalists, botanists, birders and flat-out conservationists who hike around Wild Places, not sidle up to the buffet table while dressed in suit and tie.

In the room that day were good people, but they were persons picked to serve on a board due to their fund-raising prowess, not their skill at identifying the last Hobblebush plant in a given nature preserve, or noticing the demise of a colony of trilliums to whitetails hungry for a botanical ice cream cone.

I’ve had just the opposite experience of late; joining citizen members of the Rutland County Audubon Society, central Vermont, on monthly monitoring walks through the West Rutland Marsh next to the town of that same name.

Here are sweatshirts picked up as souvenirs from this or that national wildlife refuge. And many also wore a ball cap adorned with the logo of a birding hotspot or other place where, amazingly, Wild Nature still calls the shots.

Frumpy, wrinkled and frayed at the edges with 5-o-clock shadows perhaps, but these are some of the Americans who know the real value of a wetland, or creek, or forested mountaintop, or cattail marsh, or a forest of big trees, all of them native to the region.

These are the people who make conservation happen today. And you’re not very likely going to find them at the country club or sitting through an endless agenda marked by pleas to destroy wilderness with oil derricks.

They’re part of a vanguard of conservationists who know – personally – the difference between “resourcism” and a good pair of dirty hiking boots.