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...