Neighbors of Burned Homes Pained by Suburban Sprawl

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Neighbors of Burned Homes Pained by Suburban Sprawl

Newspaper article

By: Felicity James

Date: December 11, 2004

Source: James, Felicity. "Neighbors of Burned Homes Pained by Suburban Sprawl." New York Times. December 12, 2004.

About the Author: Felicity James is a staff writer for the New York Times a daily newspaper based in New York with a daily circulation of over one million copies.

INTRODUCTION

The Earth Liberation Front (ELF) is an eco-terrorist group that has been active in the U.S. since 1997. ELF attacks individuals, corporations, and governments that, in the organization's view, place monetary gain ahead of the natural environment. It uses economic sabotage to inflict financial suffering on those deemed objectionable.

ELF, modeled after the Animal Liberation Front, formed in England in the early 1990s after the splintering of Earth First! The organization spread to the U.S. in 1997. It is a loosely-knit collection of individual cells without any centralized leadership. Anyone can join the group as long as the individual follows the ELF philosophy of protecting the environment by targeting corporate budgets. Since there is no formal membership, anyone can claim an action on behalf of ELF. Many but not all cells send a communiqué to the ELF press office for distribution to law enforcement and media, thereby claiming responsibility for a violent action.

ELF began by spiking trees and sabotaging logging equipment. It moved out from the forests and into more densely populated areas in 2004. The shift reflected anger at suburban sprawl into previously undeveloped areas and a clash between long-time rural residents and refugees from suburbs. ELF began targeting building developers who logged land or filled in wetlands to make way for new homes. Fire became the ELF weapon of choice. Arsons and attempted arsons around the nation, but mostly in the West, were linked to ELF by the federal government.

PRIMARY SOURCE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 11—Blue plastic ribbons dangle from some saplings that line the mouth of Araby Bog, delineating the wetland boundary, as recognized by the State of Maryland and the development companies that are building 500 homes in the area. About one hundred feet away, the tree branches hold a few pale pink ribbons, marking the edge of the future housing lots.

Up the small hill from the mouth of the bog, clearly visible through the naked trees of December, are the large houses of Hunters Brooke, where thirty fires were set before dawn on Monday and ten houses were consumed by the flames.

W. Faron Taylor, the deputy state fire marshal, said on Saturday that investigators had not narrowed their search for a suspect, but after the blaze it was widely noted that a group of eco-terrorists had set fires at other new buildings or developments from San Diego to Long Island, NY. In those cases, however, a loosely knit group, the Earth Liberation Front, explicitly took credit—and that has not happened here.

Whatever the motive, the fires have highlighted a long and contentious battle over whether this instant dose of suburban density belonged here. The flames seem unlikely to alter the outcome: the developer of Hunters Brooke said this week that the houses would be rebuilt.

For years, local citizens fought their way from the Charles County Planning Commission to the federal courts to preserve the bog. It was not just the wetland, one of the few remaining magnolia bogs in the mid-Atlantic region they sought to preserve. They cherish their isolation from Washington's inexorably spreading suburbs. They do not want to lose their chance to see the full panoply of stars in the deeper dark of a rural night.

For Patricia Stamper, a sixty-six-year-old government statistician who has lived up a dirt road in the Mason Springs area with her horses for thirty years, it is impossible to untangle her concern for the environment from her anger that "a high density housing complex is being dumped on us all at once."

She lives less than a mile from Hunters Brooke and a few hundred yards from the companion planned development called Falcon Ridge, which will also border the bog. Asked which was more important, keeping the bog pristine or preserving the quiet life she sought when she moved here, Ms. Stamper said, "You're asking me to make an artificial choice."

David Boswell is also feeling crowded. His great-great-grandmother, in 1902, bought the old slave quarters he owns one mile down another dirt road near the rear of Hunters Brooke. Mr. Boswell, who is thirty-seven, said: "there was a woman in the paper who said she wanted to move out here in the country and see a hawk in the trees. What about me? I'm already here. I've been working on my house for years. Now I'll have their street lights across the way."

The clash of cultures that has been an inevitable consequence of suburban sprawl for fifty years has slowly changed its context. Rising environmental awareness has coincided with the ability of ever-more-distant national homebuilding conglomerates to plant dense modern developments far into the countryside.

Of the 1.7 million dwellings constructed in 2003, fifteen percent were in rural areas, according to Gopal Ahluwalia, a statistician with the National Association of Home Builders.

Now, however, many rural areas are home to sophisticated transplants like Ms. Stamper, or her friend Ellie Cline, a former real estate agent who lives in Araby House, a colonial-era home. They can find their way around a county government. They know or are quick studies on environmental rules. They can reach out to experts and environmental groups with money and muscle when a fragile environmental area, like Araby Bog, is jeopardized by loss of water, polluted runoff or any other incidental consequence of development.

They can form organizations like Save Araby, Mattawoman and Mason Springs, or Samms. With aid from pro bono lawyers, they can sue.

The 6.5-acre magnolia bog, soon to be flanked by developments, is one of the last of its kind in the mid-Atlantic region. Roderick Simmons, a botanist with Maryland Native Plants Society, said that the 100,000 gallons of water flowing daily from the bog into Mattawoman Creek, and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay, is" ultra-pure spring water."

It is ringed by sweet bay magnolias and carpeted with sphagnum moss, and is home to several rare or threatened plants. Robert DeGroot, president of the Maryland Alliance for Greenway Improvement and Conservation, said, "this is a very small pristine area just full of plants that you don't see anywhere else."

A Charles County spokeswoman said the one hundred-foot buffer zones would protect the bog, but a geologist's report prepared for Samms this summer said this had failed to protect from "dense residential development" in the surrounding acreage whose groundwater refreshes the bog.

"This is akin to saving Niagara Falls while allowing the St. Lawrence River to be diverted," the geologist, Tony Fleming, wrote. If development must proceed, he said, lots should cover several acres. Hunters Brooke has quarter-acre lots.

The bog was not on many people's radar when Hunters Brooke LLC first applied for county government approval in 1993. Preliminary approval of their plans was granted in 1994. Beginning in 1998, there followed a minuet of appeals and lawsuits by the opponents, coupled with county commission decisions that favored the developers.

After final approval, appeals and state and federal lawsuits helped delay construction until this year. One county commissioners' meeting after another, according to the files of The Maryland Independent, a local weekly, ended with the developers—subsidiaries of the Lennar Corporation, one of the largest developers in the nation— getting the needed waivers and postponements.

The average time from application to construction is two to four years, Mr. Ahluwalia said. This took more than a decade, if the end point is marked at the dismissal of the environmentalists' suit against the Army Corps of Engineers last month.

Then, Monday, came the fires. Environmental groups and their local allies were quick to condemn the arson. Investigators pointedly refused to rule out any possible motive, from financial interest to eco-terrorism to thrill-seeking.

Gale Bailey, a Charles County native who lives close to the bog, said that the fires were upsetting, but that she had no fear for her own home. David Boswell, asked if anyone local could be responsible, said quickly, "I didn't do it," then smiled and blushed. Rod Coronado, who sometimes acts as a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, took no credit when reached by telephone in Arizona this week but said he supported the idea of the arson.

Some say such fights over development, whether waged with matches or lawsuits, are usually futile, because the growth of areas like Washington will continue.

Jacque Hightower, a federal government executive whose new Hunters Brooke home suffered moderate damage in the fire, said, "my wife and I, we've worked hard to be able to buy a home such as this." He added: "Times are changing. Everything's changing around us. It's going to change, regardless."

Correction: December 16, 2004, Thursday An article on Sunday about a proposed real estate development near an environmentally endangered bog in Maryland referred incorrectly to the neighbors' lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers over its decision to allow construction. A partial summary judgment in favor of the neighbors was issued in July, and last month the corps withdrew an appeal of that decision. The suit itself was not dismissed.

SIGNIFICANCE

In February 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) listed the ELF as the largest and most active U.S.-based terrorist group. Between 1997 and 2003, ELF claimed to have inflicted more than $100 million in damages from "ecotage." Although no one has died as of mid–2006 in any of these operations, ELF's campaign against loggers, SUV dealerships, and others it considers threats to the planet have galvanized and polarized the environmental movement. While some environmentalists argue that success can only be achieved by combining legal and illegal tactics, others regard the ELF attacks as dangerous stunts that make environmentalists seem irrational and dangerous. Those opposed to the environmental movement have already lumped bombing in with nonviolent tree-sits, boycotts, lawsuits, and picket lines. In doing so, they have found support for new laws against environmental activism in the West.

As of May 2006, several federal court cases against ELF members were currently pending. The eco-terrorists were charged with plotting to blow up a U.S. Forest Service genetics lab in Placerville, California; the Nimbus Dam and a nearby fish hatchery in Rancho Cordova, California, and cellular telephone towers and electric power stations in unspecified locations. The attacks do not always stop the development. The arson of a $12 million Vail, Colorado ski resort building in lynx habitat led to the collapse of the established grass-roots opposition, and the construction of an even larger resort with even more habitat destruction.