SteveJudd

Here in Queen Anne's County, Maryland, the Chesapeake Bay is being degraded by suburban sprawl and the construction of bay homes for the Washington elite. The Bay, once teeming with oysters, clams, crabs and fish, provides only a small fraction of what it did fifty years from now. The Bay aquaculture, as in the three century human aquaculture, is being destroyed. The Chesapeake Bay may be safe for boaters but it is dying in many vital ways. Anywhere elese is this happening?

jnn1964

The once beautiful countryside in Northern Virginia is now an ugly mess of tacky subdivisions and low-rent commercial corridors.

zootsi

It's happening here in New England also, but on a smaller scale than in some other areas. Scenic forest and farmland are slowly becoming second home sites or malls. Money talks, and how can you blame a farmer struggling to make ends meet, selling out for millions to a developer. There's something wrong with our system when we loose all of our greenspace to commercial development. One hope is land trusts, which pay landowners to give up the right to develop their property. It has been fairly successful up here in New England, but still only has protected a tiny percentage of developable land.

SteveJudd

Zootsi, I would join the Sierra Club if I thought they'd adopt your land trust idea for the eastern USA, where it is more needed than anywhere else. Unfortunately, the Sierra Club seems geared to wealthy yuppies who wish to bike and hike large, hard-to-get-to, western parks and wilderness areas.

J_Correa

Steve - I had to laugh at your description of the Sierra Club - very accurate indeed