Summer 1999

Summer 1999

Fouling The Waters

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Fouling The Waters

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By Massachusetts law, Spy Pond is defined as a “Great Pond.” But to those who are well acquainted with the pond, it’s not as great as it used to be. I became a Spy Pond watcher five years ago, when I moved to a house in Arlington that has a view of the pond —(...)

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Buying Land in Harwich

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Harwich -Under a lowering sky, voters make their way toward the gym at sprawling Harwich High School for the second (and final) evening of town meeting, on Tuesday, May 4. The night before, they had put 52 articles to bed and still gotten home in time to catch the 11 o’clock news. They had approved(...)

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An environmentalist in the city

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An environmentalist in the city Not so many years ago, Gregory Watson learned more than he ever thought he’d need to know about dairy farming. As commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture, he traveled the state meeting with food producers, including an active group of dairy farmers who were pressing for milk(...)

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Environmental Spending and Cleanup

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Massachusetts has been known as an environmentally friendly state–often at the expense of the business community. But how much does the Commonwealth actually spend on environmental programs compared to the rest of the country? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the state and its cities and towns together spent about $270 per capita on environmental(...)

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Counterpoint

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Home builders, highway planners, and hamburger vendors who have catered to America’s appetite for sprawl for half a century can’t seem to acknowledge why a growing number of their customers now demand more livable places. The sprawl builders note that America has a bounty of open land from sea to shining sea. But a lack(...)

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Hot Summer Reading

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Gov. Paul Cellucci and his old friend Bob Durand popped into the Beacon Hill headquarters of the Appalachian Mountain Club earlier this year for a brief ceremony celebrating Durand’s appointment as secretary of environmental affairs. Representatives of the state’s major environmental groups were in attendance and high praise was directed the governor’s way for choosing(...)

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Argument

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As a native of the Midwest, I am often struck by the close, dense urban lifestyle of the Boston area. But density is only part of the New England landscape. Having spent several years in New England (I attended Colby College in Waterville, Maine), I am also acutely aware of the vast amounts of open(...)

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Economy

Recycling Economics

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When it comes to recycling, it sure seems easy to be green these days: After all, everyone knows that the more a community recycles, the more it saves on trash disposal costs, right? So why are the state’s biggest cities lagging behind? Boston recycles only 10 percent of its residential garbage, according to the most(...)

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Land Use

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Sprawl. The subject is coming up everywhere from Al Gore’s presidential campaign to back yard barbecues in the state’s booming ‘burbs. Old-timers in just about any community in Massachusetts can probably point to a subdivision or a strip mall and remember when it used to be a farm, or a forest, or an open field.(...)

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Greenways

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Jennifer Howard has long loved to hike along the Taconic Trail in the Berkshires, from the hollows to the lowlands to the ridge. The birds, the wildflowers, the views – they always remind her how lucky she is to have access to some of the state’s most beautiful natural resources. Now Howard is doing her(...)

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