1. Phil Barber Reports.
2. Alewife in Context.
1. Phil Barber Reports.
I saw these three about a month ago at Alewife. Doe and two nearly grown fawns. Hard to photograph in the fading light & they were well camouflaged
Phil
2. Alewife in Context.
Alewife is at the opposite end of Cambridge from the Charles River, but it is very much the same problem. It has been a pristine woodland, the Silver Maple Forest.
Alewife abuts State Route 2 on one side (a super highway), the public transit subway “Red Line” Alewife Terminal on another, a commuter rail line on another, and a residential neighborhood mostly in Belmont on the fourth side.
The outer portions are privately owned. The privately owned parts are zoned by the municipality for massive development. The core is government owned and pristine, except for government destruction.
Alewife has their own fake group. The leader / creator of the group has spent decades telling concerned folks to yell at private developers obeying municipally created zoning and
● ignore yelling at the municipalities which created the irresponsible zoning about the irresponsible zoning, but yell at developers obeying the municipally created zoning; and
● totally ignore governmental destructiveness of the governmentally owned area.
Exactly one victory has existed to protect the environment at Alewife, a zoning petition written by me and organized by Sheila Cook. That zoning petition has resulted in the return to nature of a privately developed large parking lot located between Route 2 and Alewife Station.
Exactly one victory has been bragged about by the woman who created the fake group: the destruction of 3.4 acres or more of the pristine Alewife Reservation by Cambridge and the same state agency fighting to destroy the Charles River.
Here is a photo which originated in the City of Cambridge bragging about the destruction at Alewife. It was distributed by a press release from the City of Cambridge.
Private media was too smart to print this photo. The private media is telling the lie that the fake protective group is protecting Alewife. The private media did not want to report that Cambridge was bragging about destroying 3.4 acres plus of this previously pristine Silver Maple Forest.
Reporting this would be the same as reporting that the private media had been passing on a lie that the fake protective group was protective, especially since the ‘leader” bragged about the destruction in the Cambridge Chronicle and ran around the city bragging about her achievement to whomever would listen.
This photo came from a website controlled by a very visible activist in the Cambridge machine.
The trees outside the cleared area formerly occupied the ENTIRE area which has been cleared.
I have a friend involved in the fake group. I strongly advised him to expel the member AND CREATOR who had been bragging about the government destruction. I argued that her behavior destroyed their credibility.
He rejected my advice, and so his group continues to yell at private developers obeying zoning and ignore the very high probability that the publicly owned portion could very readily be destroyed by the government.
The area is a flood zone. The initial explanation for the governmental destruction was flood protection. The trouble is that the destruction provided but a fraction of the storage needed. The only way to get the flood storage needed without destroying the untouched government portion is for the government to join with private developers in providing flood storage under new construction.
The legal term would be to take an easement under all developable land and to pay private developers for storage under their property.
But the fake group is obeying orders from their creator: “Do not look at what I am destroying. Look at what I tell you to look at.” THE EXACT SAME MANTRA COMES FROM THE FAKE GROUP DESTROYING THE CHARLES RIVER. So the fake Alewife Protective Group yells at the private developers.
Needless to say, this fake protective group was created after the creator had had meaningful discussions with the Cambridge Development Department.
The Cambridge Machine strongly likes this sort of activism. Tilting at windmills keeps trouble makers out of trouble. If these activists were not tilting at windmills, they might get involved in a winnable fight, saving the government owned portion of Alewife and getting MUNICIPAL flood storage included in new development.
Instead, the real impact of the fight of that fake protective group is to fight for TOTAL destruction of the Silver Maple Forest while loudly yelling exactly the opposite.
But they mean well. And the Cambridge Machine tells them how great they are.
