Published: May 18, 2008 09:55 pm            

GUEST VIEW: Orleans County’s assets shouldn’t be overlooked

Audubon of New York’s Winter 2008 Newsletter reports an 80 percent decline in field sparrows, an 87 percent decline in eastern meadowlarks and a 98 percent decline in grasshopper sparrows in New York state. There were no figures for the vesper sparrows that have long occupied a roadside niche on the back roads of Orleans County.

One might ask, “What difference do such numbers make?” After all, white-throated, chipping, tree, white-crowned and song sparrows are still common. “And didn’t you recently comment on four fox sparrows being in your yard?”

What difference does it make that woodcocks are becoming a distant memory here? Perhaps none, unless you observed their rhythmic stalking of earthworms, or stalked them yourself as a 10-year-old with his father in the 50s. I guess that’s life. Some insist it is inevitable that, over time, things “disappear.”

What does that have to do with us?

What difference does it make that swales, once avoided out of self-interest by the farmer-owner-steward on his Farmall H, are sometimes “cultivated” by the eight-wheeled, four-wheel-drive behemoths of today, operated by employees who don’t own the land, or have any concept of the big picture? The fact that no crop other than rice would grow in such areas is irrelevant.

What difference did it make when some subcontractor with a caterpillar trackhoe “pruned” the mature trees on an adjoining property west of Eagle Harbor Road last week? After all, the “work” was meant to make it easier to farm the adjacent field.

Did it matter that “site work” was done at the Medina industrial park several years ago with a bulldozer in the middle of June?

When drainage ditches are funneled into Orleans County quarries, does it really matter?

Would a bigger, better landfill between the Erie Canal and the Falls Road Railroad access with its double edge effect — and adjacent to another quarry — have been such a big deal?

And what are the people opposed to a new stone quarry in Shelby thinking? My God, Orleans County needs economic development! The fact that it would bring heavy machinery, trucks and constant noise to an area alongside a National Wildlife Refuge and will have difficult to foresee effects on the water table shouldn’t be cause for concern?

This country has always been big. There has always been a great deal to destroy, and it seems the attitude persists that there still is. As “bad boys,” some of us feel we have a birthright to be indifferent about the process. It is typically excused as necessary to the advancement of “progress” and “economic growth,” even on those occasions when no legitimate case can be made for either.

Mindlessly and unnecessarily compromising the assets of Orleans County with the foolish haste more often seen in those who have no idea where they are going makes little sense to me. I would go so far as to say that some of what we are doing should qualify us for the “loony bin.”

Why, for example, would the Village of Albion have paid $2,400 a few years ago to cut down three healthy sugar maple shade trees on West Bank Street when it would have been cheaper to leave them where they were?

Why would a landowner use a track hoe and a bulldozer for two and a half days to open a drainage course through a woodlot when he could have been paid by a logger who would have removed the wood, leaving the landowner with funds to pay an equipment operator to cut the ditch in half the time?

If mowing town roadsides after the third week in July would make it possible for vesper sparrows and others to succeed in rearing young, would the towns be willing to delay it when possible? Presumably such a consideration has not been made in the past because town highway superintendents were unaware of how critical their mowing timetable is to the success of such natural assets.

As the Albion Betterment Committee tried to point out to the Town of Albion about five years ago, there are many things we could be doing to moderate the damage to the tremendous environmental assets of Orleans County while contributing to our progress.

Does it matter what time of the year you have your woodlot logged? If you’re all about taking what you can and have no sense of obligation to the place you have called home for the past 40, 50 or 60 years, it doesn’t. If you are not contemptuous of Orleans County and actually give a damn about it, your legacy, and the future, tell the loggers you talk with that you want it started after, say, August 1 and finished by April 1. Let them log in a county where the environment is less valued during the spring and early summer.

Excessively anthropocentric attitudes abound in today’s world. It too often is all about us. Former EPA Administrator Russell Train’s “Caring for (The) Creation” is a speech most have not heard or read. Some wouldn’t understand it if they had. I suspect there are quite a few people in this county who do understand the imperative of being better stewards of The Creation. But we concede too quickly. To me, being passive observers of its destruction and abuse is no longer an option.

Gary F. Kent is an Albion resident.

        

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