Bob La Trémouille reports:
I have submitted the following letter to the Cambridge Chronicle. It was published on line on July 28, 2010.
Editor
Cambridge Chronicle
I am pleased to see that, for the time being, Cambridge will not destroy four excellent street trees near Hoyt Field. This would have followed on the destruction of 12 even better street trees behind the Hyatt Regency and on major destruction of trees around the Magazine Beach footbridge.
One or more city councilors will tell us about an “effort” to “improve” regulation of street tree destruction. Playing with these regulations commenced one week after the city council voted to allow destruction of 17,000 square feet of densely grown trees for highway construction. The council voted to exempt themselves from public hearing on this destruction.
Environmental destruction by the City Council and the City is far more massive than their irresponsible destruction of street trees. Thus street tree regulations were silly when passed and “improving” them does not make the regulations less silly.
There is the coming destruction of the main part of the Alewife reservation by Cambridge and its friends. There is the ongoing destruction of perhaps thousand of trees at Fresh Pond by Cambridge. There is the planned destruction of hundreds of excellent trees on Memorial Drive by the state working closely with Cambridge.
There is the dumping of poisons on Magazine Beach to keep alive sickly grass introduced after the destruction of healthy green grass which survived the better part of a century without poisons. There is the decrease in size of those playing fields for a drainage system to drain off poisons which should not even be there. There is the wall of introduced bushes walling off the Charles River from Magazine Beach. There is the nonstop, heartless abuse of the beautiful, 30 year native Charles River White Geese.
Cambridge public works projects are routinely destructive.
The City Council and its friends do not want people to know of their ongoing destruction of our world. They want to talk about what they do not destroy.
The Monteiro civil rights judge accurately called Cambridge “reprehensible.” She gave the City Council a strong argument for firing the city manager without pension and without golden parachute, with permission of court. Her initiative would go some way to save our environment as well.
Regrettably, the environmental and city manager problems rest on a city council which wants to brag about what it has not destroyed rather than stopping the destruction of which it is such a clear part.
