Date: 5/2/25 6:40 am From: Anita Schnee <000003224553d416-dmarc-request...> Subject: A provision win -- for the land, the wild ones, and the people.
Hello birder friends. Here is my very long report on last night's conservation win for the Brown Farm and surrounding area in east Fayetteville.
It was a close vote at the Washington County Courthouse last evening. But unity won, in a collective stand for peace, for nature, for one of the last stretches of open land along the county’s eastern edge. Standing up together, speaking out against a disastrous proposed development, was a smorgasbord of suburbanites, old-family Arkansans, transplants, three women lawyers, and counter-culturites, all speaking for the voiceless in this humanocentrically devouring world – the trees, the birds, the water, the terrain. As the crow flies, proceed east-northeast from downtown, through residential areas developed years ago, past a cemetery, some schools, a commercial intersection with hardware stores and restaurants and gas stations and a coffee shop and a tailor and a grocery store and a liquor store and a bank and an ice cream parlor. Past two tightly platted residential subdivisions. Another cemetery. Fly just over the county line. Settle on 25 acres of woodland, ponds, and pasture, owned and lived-on for maybe a century by the same old Arkansas family. And then fly just a few feet to the east, to a narrow strip around eight acres long, currently occupied by a lawn, a house, a swimming pool, and some woods. Stop there.One owner. Two developers. One conditional-use proposal to put up a parking lot, so to speak, on those eight acres: to bulldoze it all for a sprawling storage facility. When the surrounding area is already dotted with storage facilities, behind the metal doors of which languishes the backwash of stuff relegated by this insatiable world of ours.Fly back, crow, fly back. As of December 2023, there were at least 19 species of birds that over-winter on the neighboring 25 acres. The acreage is a crucial stop-over for other birds that migrate through a corridor of relatively undisturbed terrain stretching from rural Madison County to the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks to Lake Fayetteville. Most of that migration happens at night, guided by the stars. But 24/7 floodlights from a storage compound would disorient the birds. Many would crash. Many would die.Not to mention the construction uproar and disruption to the residential surroundings, and a host of other problems crowding in: damage to watershed, attraction of potential criminal activity to a thinly policed edge of the county, traffic danger to schoolchildren, sinking property values, the bad precedent, the loss – the dreadful list goes on and on.All that rested in the hands of the Washington County Planning Commission. Those consequential hands. A strange thing, really. A few vibrations in the air, just a little “yea” or “nay,” and all manner of consequences tumble forward.Person after person spoke up. Homeowners. Landowners. Bird-watchers. School-children. The women lawyers. (Not to make it about gender, but as a young woman non-lawyer, there was a time in my life when segregation was legal and I couldn’t get a credit-card.) Not a single person spoke in favor, except for the developers.So this Planning Commission of five – who had just voted, again over objection, to approve conditional use of a massive RV park in the wilds around Beaver Lake – this time, enough votes swung the other way. The proposal was denied. It was a narrow vote, but it was enough.On this Mayday, in stark contrast to the tightly formalized proceedings inside the courthouse, some others of us also stood outside with a bullhorn, protesting the other oppressions we’re all being subjected to at the moment. Cars streamed by, honking in solidarity.The storage-unit developers have 30 days to appeal to Quorum Court. A venue not known for its sympathetic treatment of people like us. We will be watching closely. We will show up again if we have to. Firm resolve is the order of the day.
