Bob La Trémouille reports:
1. DCR Meeting, General.
2. Formal communication.
1. DCR Meeting, General.
On Wednesday, January 14, 2009, the Department of Conservation and Recreation conducted a public meeting on its bridge repair program.
Former Transportation Secretary Fred Salvucci spoke in favor of delaying the BU Bridge repair to coordinate it with other highway work pending on the Boston side.
The next meeting, in a striking but typical example of bad faith, will be January 27. It will be combined with a discussion of the Craigie Drawbridge at the Museum of Science and will be conducted on the MIT campus near Kendall Square. A subsequent meeting on the footbridge over Memorial Drive connecting Magazine Beach will be held at the Morse School.
Interesting. Non controversial meeting held in Morse School in the neighborhood.
Two meetings on highly controversial BU Bridge repair, first conducted in Boston in response to a request from the Cambridge Conservation Commission, second conducted in Kendall Square combined with another bridge.
Business as usual from a strikingly irresponsible DCR.
I responded on January 15, 2009, with the following letter to the Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs and to the Secretary of Transportation and Public Works, copies to DCR and the Governor.
To put it succinctly, it is my opinion that the DCR is belligerently destructive of the environment, is using the bridge repair process as an excuse to forward its cause, and is making a mockery of the public reviews by locating environmentally sensitive meetings, BU Bridge, in inconvenient locations while putting environmentally neutral meetings in convenient locations.
The DCR’s public description of the Charles River White Geese shows that heartless animal abusers sound strikingly like heartless wife beaters when talking about their victims. I provide a page full (the PS at the end) of web citations on the Charles River White Geese, a tiny portion of the cites available. Why is it that the heartless animal abusers are saying one thing and so many people are treating these very valuable beings as something to be cherished?
2. Formal communication.
I attended the “public meeting” on the accelerated bridge repair program last night sponsored by the DCR.
I was distressed but not at all surprised to hear Commissioner Sullivan refer to environmentalism as “pedestrians and bicyclists.” By doing so, he reaffirmed his department’s contempt for the animals, the land, and the natural vegetation which are his duty to protect, a duty for which DCR has contempt.
A few days ago, I attended a Boston Conservation Committee meeting in which the DCR made a presentation. A commissioner asked about why bordering vegetation on the Muddy River was allowed to get as overgrown as it has. The DCR representative looked shocked. If they did not let it get overgrown, animals might get on the land from the river.
The DCR has been poisoning the eggs of as much waterfowl as it can get away with. The DCR has been destroying as much natural protective vegetation on the Charles River as it can get away with. The DCR warps whatever it does to destroy resident animals, visiting animals and natural protective vegetation.
The DCR’s head is firmly in the 19th Century with the bizarre environmental destruction associated with its that century. The DCR is an aggressive part of man destroying our world.
The DCR and its commissioner are unfit to make environmental decisions. He should be fired, and his agency should be cleansed of his fellow environmental destroyers.
In implementing these destructive policies combined with continuing practices of bad faith and flat out lying, the DCR, since 2000, has repeatedly promised to do no harm to the Charles River White Geese who have lived for nearly 30 years in a mile long habitat centered on the BU Bridge.
They DCR demonstrated their lack of fitness for their duties by proceeding with starving the Charles River White Geese by the bizarre wall of vegetation introduced at Magazine Beach, heartless destruction of habitat, and the ongoing replacement of GREEN maintenance at Magazine Beach with CHEMICAL maintenance and the associated poisoning to all animals who eat off it. A representative has recently bragged that the wall starves the geese.
The DCR likes the accelerated bridge program. It gives them another chance to find excuses for environmental destruction.
To no surprise, they are attacking the beautiful and valuable Charles River White Geese.
The program puts staging in the middle of what little of their habitat which has not been taken from them instead of under Memorial Drive where it belongs. The staging would destroy the last ground vegetation which the DCR has not destroyed since 2004 between the BU Bridge and the BU Boathouse.
The program puts a new water filtration device in the habitat for drainage off the BU Bridge which should connect instead to existing drainage under Memorial Drive. Why do something that makes sense when you can destroy animal habitat?
The DCR has told the Charles River White Geese to move. The DCR claims to have no duty to their charges. The DCR is totally unwilling to destroy the bizarre wall of introduced vegetation at Magazine Beach to allow the Geese to return to their feeding ground at Magazine Beach for most of the last 30 years. The DCR is totally unwilling to continue Magazine Beach in GREEN maintenance instead of introducing their beloved chemicals. The last time they introduced their beloved chemicals in support of NON WATER RELATED activities on the Charles was at the playing fields next to Mass. General Hospital. Their beloved poisons did not work, so they added Tartan and poisoned the Charles River.
The management of the BU Bridge repairs has been done with typical lack of responsibility. The environmental irresponsibility in the project is in Cambridge. The Cambridge Conservation Commission asked for a public hearing. So the DCR conducted one, in Boston.
The DCR is now conducting other public meetings concerning their bridge projects.
They are repairing the pedestrian bridge to Magazine Beach over Memorial Drive. This project is environmentally responsible, so a public hearing is being held at the Morse School near Magazine Beach.
They are also conducting another public meeting on the BU Bridge project. The meeting has been combined with the environmentally neutral Craigie Drawbridge project, on the MIT Campus near Kendall Square.
Typical bad faith.
The destruction of nearly all the ground vegetation between the BU Bridge and the BU Boathouse has been conducted with no meaningful public input. The BU Bridge repair project would now needlessly destroy all that which they have not destroyed to date.
The annual destruction of as many eggs of waterfowl as they can get away with is conducted with no public input.
The destruction of as much protective vegetation as they can get away with on the Charles and the associated driving away of migrating waterfowl is conducted with no meaningful public input.
The bizarre wall of introduced vegetation at Magazine Beach has been conducted with no meaningful public input, although DCR apologists, with the usual lie techniques, conducted a photo opportunity to brag that this WALL would encourage swimming. While useful natural vegetation is destroyed twice a year, this silly starvation tool is allowed to grow without apparent limit.
The poisoning of the dirt at Magazine Beach is being conducted with no meaningful public input.
Public input on any of these projects would be irrelevant in any case.
The DCR’s heads are firmly in the sands of the 19th Century. The DCR is aggressively destroying as much of our world’s environment as it can. The outrages at and near the BU Bridge/Magazine Beach must be reversed, and new outrages ended.
PS: Heartless animal abusers sound a lot like heartless wife beaters. Both do a lot of flat out lying about how useless their victims are.
To no great surprise, the heartless animal abusers at the DCR and their apologists put out lies about the VERY VALUABLE Charles River White Geese.
The following are but a few URL’s obtained in a Google search for the Charles River White Geese. Fire the DCR commissioner. Fire the rest of his crew with their contempt for the environment and for the living beings in it.
• The Charles River White Geese website: http://www.friendsofthewhitegeese.org.
• The Charles River White Geese blog: http://charlesriverwhitegeeseblog.blogspot.com.
• Historic Pages Photo Appreciation, proving historical analysis dating back to 1989: http://www.historicpages.com/geese/wg.htm.
• Della Huff’s Show on goslings: http://www.pbase.com/dellybean/goslings
• Roy Bercaw: Visit to the Charles River White Geese, June 16, 2007: http://enoughroomvideo.blogspot.com/2007/06/charles-river-white-geese-June-16-2007.html.
• Roy Bercaw, A day at the Goose Meadow, April 2000 (note date in framing portion differs from the date in the video): http://enoughroomvideo.blogspot.com/2007/07/friends-of-charles-river-white-geese.html
• Cambridge Candle, January-February 1999: http://www.cambridgecandle.com/candle_online/jan_feb1999/14_geese.html
• Zip Docs 02139, documentary about Charles River White Geese: http://cctvcambridge.org/node/2037
• MOVIE: “White Geese” by Akai Hoto, on deviantART: http://akaihato.deviantart.com/art/MOVIE-quot-White-Geese-quot-25167453
• Pictures taken along the Charles, 2004.07.16: http://www.aq.org/js/gallery/2004.07.16-charles/
• Freeman A. Report: 07/22/01, Charles River Wildlife Killings, The Charles River White Geese: http://www.freemanz.com/fzdc/political/01_07_22/index.htm
• Radio Boston, The Charles River (photos of the White Geese): http://www.flickr.com/groups/782470@N21/pool/with/2566129288/
• Charles River White Geese, YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXYQqjoidIM
• Photos of the Charles River White Geese, Linden Tea: http://www.flickr.com/photos/linden_tea/2196474800/
• iNaturalist.org report, observations by Tueda: http://inaturalist.org/observations/185
• White Geese video by Amy Rothwell: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6983789396318540077
• Fun on Foot in America’s Cities by Warwick Ford, Nola Ford: The Cambridge White Geese greet visitors: http://books.google.com/books?id=gAmIj4gh_7oC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA22&dq=%22Charles+River%22+and+%22White+Geese%22&source=bl&ots=qUMjZm1ZPN&sig=2IRf_Rnz7cnP1xX4IkEB31x9wr8&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result
I will post this communication on charlesriverwhitegeese.blogspot.com. That will give you an electronic version to simplify check of these citations.
At the top of the list of links in the blog is a link to my prior communication spelling out quite exact ways to responsibly accomplish the BU Bridge project while being a responsible member of the world’s environment.
