Bedford Minuteman
April 3, 2003

Letter: Plenty to 'focus' on right here

In the March 20 Minuteman letters, a Massachusetts Port Authority spokeswoman offered a strange sort of "congratulations" to Save Our Heritage for having Bedford, Concord, Lexington and Lincoln designated by Scenic America as being "a Last Chance Landscape," so defined as "'when there is both a threat and a potential solution.'"

The spokeswoman seemed angered that the area has been singled out for national attention and that Save Our Heritage has been applauded without equal attention to MassPort, the cause of the threat to the area. Among other pieces of "information" that might be slightly tainted by being submitted by an employee of MassPort whose livelihood depends on an ever-enlarging, ever-encroaching Hanscom Airport, happily she offered some advice to those opposed to the proposed expansion: Namely, "to focus on the many real threats to the environment and natural habitat of this great country. By focusing on the ...airport, they are passing up on opportunities to shine their spotlight on a legitimate threat."

Well, I can rise to that challenge. To wake up and realize that we are, wherever we are, living in the environment is rather like becoming aware that we speak prose. We don't have to go to the Grand Canyon or the Red Wood Forest to see the environment. Should we care to "focus," there's plenty of environment around here worthy of our attention.

Meriam's Corner in Concord, for example. Here MassPort proposes to build a traffic rotary, obliterating a site where world history was changed. At Meriam's Corner Americans began the first true battle of the Revolutionary War, chasing the British for six hours from Concord to Boston. It looks like a house lot, just as Gettysburg looks like a farm field and recently, to some, a fine place for a shopping mall.

Build a traffic rotary at Meriam's Corner? It would make just as much sense to use the Grand Canyon for a garbage dump and turn the Red Wood Forest into a toothpick factory. Maybe New England's "environment" isn't as obviously awesome as that of other parts of the country, but if people of MassPort would take a few walks to consider what was begun at Meriam's Corner, at Walden Pond, at the North Bridge, at the collection of homes and inns with the plaques that commemorate political, religious, literary history made there, maybe then MassPort would understand why this little environment is the destination of people from all over the world. Maybe MassPort would understand what all the citizens' and the worlds' citizens' fuss is about. Maybe MassPort will begin to consider for expansion the three airports that have requested it.

In the meantime, bravo to Save Our Heritage, and many thanks.

Ruth Bragg
Hancock Street
Bedford

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