Date: 5/2/25 9:05 am From: Ann Gordon <chesterann...> Subject: Re: A provision win -- for the land, the wild ones, and the people.
Kudos to Anita to all those up in favor of wildlife and our future!
On Fri, May 2, 2025 at 9:21 AM Lynn Foster <lfoster5211...> wrote:
> Beautifully written, Anita, and wonderful news. Let’s hope it holds and
> the Quorum Court doesn’t reverse.
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On May 2, 2025, at 8:40 a.m., Anita Schnee <
> <000003224553d416-dmarc-request...> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> ~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
>
> Anita Schnee
>
> http://catself.wordpress.com > http://afriqueaya.org >
> <http://afriqueaya.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/afriqueaya_eplogo.jpg> >
> ~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
>
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