Quiet Corner Headed For Fate Of Bergen County, NJ?

NOANK–Noted marine artist and illustrator James A. Mitchell of Noank has published a letter in the Mystic River Press strongly criticizing the environmental stewardship of Stonington officials and citing the general threat to all the “little seaside towns from Guilford to Westerly.”

Mr. Mitchell says the whole quiet corner could be headed down the same road as taken by Bergen County, NJ, and suggests that politicians replacing trees and marshes with car lots and big box stores ought themselves to be replaced.

Mr. Mitchell’s letter, in the Dec. 22, 2005, issue, said:

The poet of New England said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

If Robert Frost had lived around here, he would have had to change it to “Something there is in Stonington that doesn’t love a tree”–or much else in the landscape for that matter.

Since when don’t mature spruce trees “fit in with the new high school?” Too big? Are trees not regulated to proper size, to fit in with stark modern buildings? The recent destruction of large pines is right in line with a longstanding policy by Stonington politicians and builders of parking lots and gas stations, along with marsh fillers for car lots and big box stores. It’s forgotten now, but in sight of the lost pines was the big swamp maple right across from the old police station. It was cut away for no reason, not even a parking lot.

About that time, 1970, the golf clubhouse at the corner of Route 1 and Flanders Road got bulldozed for a gas station and the two rare elm trees cut at the entrance, the stone pillars destroyed–nothing there now. More recent is the senseless destruction of all the big trees to make a shadeless parking lot for the A&P grocery. Included in this destruction was the century-old maple tree, 80 feet in from the centerline of Route 1. With it went the fieldstone house.

Then there was the row of trees by the Seaport on Route 27, all cut because, as the Museum explained, one was diseased, so they all had to go for a sidewalk.

Unfortunately, Stonington is not alone in uglification. Drive over to Saybrook, once the jewel of the shoreline, now a sea of car lots. Stop by Avery Point campus where the copper beech was cut down to make a sidewalk in spite of student protest and cut down on a Sunday when the students were off watch.

On Route 2, a fort-like cinema block house was built and an entire forest slaughtered, hundreds of trees gone so that the thing could be seen from the highway. Now comes a “floating zone,” really an enabling act to open the door wider for big developments to ease in.

All these little seaside towns from Guilford to Westerly are subject to losing the charm that attracted people in the past. If this trend is not halted, the quiet corner could wind up like Bergen County, NJ, now down to less than 2,000 unpaved acres.

The only thing that could stop this would be legislation such as in England where the cutting of large trees is a serious matter. May I suggest that if a marsh can be replaced, why not a politician?

Environmental Impact | December 22, 2005