Sometimes the debris or throwaway of one year is precisely the
material that needs to be preserved or conserved in another. Trash becomes a
nesting place, or the familiar terrain of wildlife.
That was an insight neighbors of a vacant lot brought to the
table at a public hearing of a certain Massachusetts' town's Conservation Commission on a recent Thursday.
When the Commission came to the matter of a notice of
intent on a certain property I'll call Fordham Place, it heard from an environmental
consultant for the landowner, who made a speaking
of the landowner’s intent to put a single-family home on what is now a vacant
lot within a buffer zone just outside a designated wetland. Consultant also said, as
if to allay concerns, that this intent comes with a “detailed plan for
restoring and re-vegetating the area.”
Commission members agreed that the notice of
intent didn’t apply to the actual wetland, rather, to a discretionary buffer
zone outlying the wetland. But they also
indicated that they wanted to personally inspect the site before moving
forward.
They tentatively scheduled that inspection for the following
Monday.
It wasn't until they opened up discussion to the floor that things got interesting. Talk turned to the
need to remove “debris” from the wetland area behind the property in question.
Cipher Cimma, of 42 Fordham Place, along with other neighbors, observed that people
have been using the area as a dumping ground for a long time, so there is now a
lot of debris.
Kathleen Curran, from intersecting Ringo Street, spoke of the wildlife
she has seen on the lot, and cautioned, “If you remove the debris, you might be
removing the lot.”
At some point, then, trash ceases to be the enemy of "conservation" and becomes part of that which is to be conserved. An obvious enough point, really, but I have to say I was amused by the unexpected 
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