Comprehensive thinking on open space

Pike County Commissioners have been fleshing out their open space bond proposal, the Scenic Rural Character Preservation Bond, which will address a growing roster of issues: water quality, protection of wildlife habitats, expansion and enhancement of parks and recreation areas and the improvement of county planning.

While at first glance this might seem like an expansion of the original mission of protecting open space, it is more of an unfolding of what open space really means to all of us and why it is important in the first place. If maintaining open space were just a matter of leaving land empty, there wouldn’t be much point in it. But open space is a key to a great deal of what makes quality life possible for all of us, and not just from a purely aesthetic “tree-hugging” perspective.

Want to keep water readily available and its quality high? Then you need to preserve wide areas of natural vegetative cover to receive rainfall and filter it gradually and directly into the water table. Vast unbroken areas of pavement, construction and landscaped lawns, in contrast, will channel rainwater runoff over surfaces, picking up toxins from lawn chemicals and automotive discharge and dumping it into the streams and rivers.

For this same reason, open space is necessary to reduce the possibility of flooding, which is greatly exacerbated by water traveling rapidly over surfaces rather than being gradually absorbed by forest canopy and the roots of vegetation. The recent events in New Orleans remind us of the damage that can result when the human desire to occupy, dominate and manipulate the landscape eliminates nature’s own mechanisms for controlling extremes. There, by building levees and dredging the Mississippi for shipping, and draining wetlands, we prevented nature from depositing silt and creating delta land and barrier islands that could have protected New Orleans against the full force of a hurricane.

The relationship between preservation of open space and the protection of wildlife habitats is even more obvious. Urban and suburban areas tend to have very little biodiversity: humans have a tendency to plant a great deal of grass which provides neither shelter nor food to animals since it is not allowed to go to seed, a lot of annuals, a few ornamental evergreens and not much else. There are few animal species that thrive in such an environment—except the pests that multiply unchecked because the barren environment has killed off all their natural predators. To give just one example: small mammals are the principal natural enemy of the gypsy moth, and a reduction in their natural habitat would tend to make gypsy moth infestations more common.

One of the most interesting items in the list of items to be funded by the Scenic Rural Character Preservation Bond is county planning. The report of the Pennsylvania 21st Century Environment Commission highlighted the idea that the “fragmentation of decision making across agencies and through multiple levels of government” is a major cause of sprawl. That means that in order to make sure that land is being used in a way that preserves nature while continuing to serve humankind, a coordinated effort among all the areas and levels of government involved is needed. Through open space planning, the county can encourage individual municipalities to create comprehensive plans of their own and implement zoning and regulations that will preserve land and promote smart growth in those municipalities in a way that meets the individual needs of their residents. Not only that, municipalities can coordinate their efforts, vital in a world where the way one area treats its own land can have a critical impact on the next town over.

The Pike County Commissioners’ delineation of the land-use elements that would be funded by the open space bond is encouraging. It shows that they understand that open space is not just a negative concept: not simply a lack of development. Even for those who have no particular interest in the beauty of nature, it is related in an intricate way to many of the things that make life worthwhile for all of us. The fact that the latest polls have shown an overwhelming support for the issue suggests that the residents of Pike have figured this out for themselves, and we hope they show it on November 8.

Dr. Punnybone

The Great Out Doors