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Challenging Environmental Crossroads
by Ellen Mass, November 2002


As you all know this winter is a great and challenging environmental crossroads for this unique Boston area urban wild (the MDC owned Alewife Reservation - 115 plus acres.) Peter Alden has called it a unique urban wild "small package" for Boston area.

You can most certainly make a difference as to whether our severely contaminated and dying marsh Reservation areas remain abused, trashed, as encampments, and inaccessible. You can determine whether we move forward in process and delight with what some experts, including Robert France, Assoc. Prof at Harvard Graduate School of Design, has described (off the cuff) as some of the finest wetland-watershed modeling of anywhere in New England. The public still has an important role to plan in monitoring, accessing funds, criticizing and fine-tuning the final model, and supporting legislators who have worked so hard to bring funding to the master plan and to the city's storm water management hydraulic modeling. Also, the public MUST be involved with monitoring and maintenance issues forever. Wildlife and the public require it.

Your involvement means that FAR can be a very effective far-reaching organization to ensure projects are done and many groups are involved - a loose confederation, as Stew Sanders has so often encouraged, coming from many groups and projects. We must grow to accommodate various youth groups and neighborhood interests, using individual initiative and friendly organizing, minimizing city-town politics. We must demand that the natural environmental requirements of our urban wild, and its watershed complexities, of great biodiversity, operate by base line watershed principles (see on the web for U.S. standards at Center for Watershed Protection, and EPA standards) and go to city of Cambridge and Cambridge Conservation Commission website for preservation and conservation.

Also go to the Mystic River Watershed Association's website for principles and projects. www.mysticriver.org