Driving by the Naval Air base, I was once again confronted with the ongoing deforestation across Bath Road from Coastal Classic & Sports Car and Fat Boy Drive Inn. Come on Brunswick, does your Naval Base redevelopment have to look so utterly blighted, like a really bad haircut that will never recover?

Also, there was a truck parked with a load of balled and burlap trees waiting to be planted! To destroy an entire mature forest ecosystem, just to plant some spindly “ornamental” replacements which will, most likely, decline and/or die just like the rest of the Cook’s Corner mall parking lot trees. Some days I want to go roust mall management and ask why they actually pay people to plant and then maintain (= assault) these pathetic trees with mounds and mounds of mulch year after year.

I’m no Master Gardener. But I do know rules #1 and #2 of tree planting: Do not plant too deeply in the soil, but allow that knob at the trunk base to be above the dirt line.  And do not add mulch up the tree trunk!  Otherwise, it means sickness and death by allowing (or forcing) insects and moisture into the trunk.

Wouldn’t it be smarter to invest in a strategy to preserve more of those original healthy and majestic, infinitely more valuable and visibly pleasing mature forest trees, each with its own complete ecosystem, to envelope your new development, showing your commitment to the community, the planet and our health?  Everyone would benefit from some sort of environmental, eye-appealing/curb-appealing compromise between your development and the irreplaceable wildlife habitat that you keep ripping down.

I don’t know about others but if I’d wanted to see more strip mall parking lots with sickly ornamentals, I would have stayed in the mid-West. And who doesn’t, by now, understand the link between forests, ecosystems, species’ survival, clean air, and climate change? Will we humans ever really get a clue?

Sandy Maggied,
Georgetown