Why is it OK to destroy a perfectly healthy forest?
Is it ignorance because someone didn’t bother to research?
Is it because their education stopped when they left school?
Is it because they dislike wildlife?
None of the above.
Sussex County Council and the Sussex Planning & Zoning Commission simply don’t smell what developers are shoveling.
Long-term planning is an arduous task. No question about that. But the last starred listed item must always be, “What are the impacts?” Stopping at the dollar signs is short-sighted, because the long-term impact will cost the government, the citizens and the coastal community overall a fortune in health, safety and well-being. Developers will be long gone because their goals are short-term investment, quick financial turnaround, then move on to the next opportunity. It is very similar to day trading. Narrow-minded, cash-rich businesses have no peripheral vision.
Beginning at 7 a.m., six days a week, Lewes’ Robinsonville Road and the surrounding communities experience the blaring, searing sound of forest destruction. It is like fingernails on a chalkboard when the speeding saw rips into decades-old trees and tosses them in a heap like trash. Nests are flung where animals spent the warmer months making their winter homes. The earth vibrates when the pounding of fallen trees forces those animals able to flee their once-protected homes to no homes at all. The vulnerable, smaller and hibernating creatures perish. The acres of healthy living forest and wetlands that once served as an ideal ecosystem, a canopy of shade and a CO2 warrior are reduced to a soggy graveyard. For what? It is because when the battle is the environment versus money, money wins. How pathetically populated does Sussex County have to become before our representatives understand the county’s environment also includes citizens who consider health, safety and well-being valued priorities?
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