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Newtown, CT, USA
Newtown, CT, USA
Newtown, CT, USA
Newtown, CT, USA
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As world leaders gathered in Copenhagen this week to assess how they might reconcile humankind's insatiable thirst for fossil fuel-based energy with the life-sustaining systems of this planet, another group of people concerned about the environment

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As world leaders gathered in Copenhagen this week to assess how they might reconcile humankind’s insatiable thirst for fossil fuel-based energy with the life-sustaining systems of this planet, another group of people concerned about the environment worked in the relative obscurity of Newtown to establish some basic environmental ground rules for local developers. The two groups, working on opposite ends of a very long string of discussion about our proper relationship to the natural world, shared a common purpose: to leave to future generations a world unspoiled by our use of it.

To date, most of Newtown’s efforts at environmental conservation and protection have been aimed a safeguarding the town’s lakes, ponds, watercourses, and groundwater. State law has armed the local Inland Wetlands Commission with powers to regulate land uses that pose potential hazards to our water supplies. Beyond that, Newtown, like most towns, has few formal defenses available to its Planning and Zoning Commission against the careless or willful destruction of natural resources and ecosystems.

The town’s Plan of Conservation and Development does list as a goal the conservation and protection of natural systems in order to maintain indigenous wildlife and plant life, and it calls for a strategy to “develop methods and support actions that protect wildlife and plant life habitat areas identified as ‘endangered, threatened, and special concern’” by the state Department of Environmental Protection. (The commission is empowered by similar language in state statute.) The Planning and Zoning Commission is poised to implement some of those “methods and support actions” in the form of environmental regulations that address more than just the contamination of water resources. We are happy to see the commission finally address this crucial goal in the town plan.

The town practically got a written invitation to take this action in the form of an order from a Danbury Superior Court judge to perform an environmental review of a controversial resubdivision proposal known as Hunter Ridge on Mt Pleasant Road, which is the subject of a lawsuit. When there is a need to make judgments about the environmental impact of development, it helps to have a set of rules and standards for making those judgments. Anything less invites arbitrary decisions and still more lawsuits.

After an extended lull, housing markets are beginning to stir again, and the lure of Newtown is bound to quicken the pace of development here in the coming years. Since most of the land that was easy to develop has already been built out, much of the new development will be located on marginal land — land that because of its steep slope, or ledges, or isolation in rough terrain has been overlooked before. In  many cases this is the same land that has served as the last refuge for indigenous plant and wildlife species, living resources that identify this place as distinctly southwestern New England. Without these critical remaining habitats, we become just another set of interstate exits in a homogenized American exurbia. Perhaps more ominously, we break a few more links in the chain of life that holds the earth’s natural systems together.

As much as we wish world leaders success in their efforts in Copenhagen to save the planet, we should all be prepared to get off the sidelines and assume our own share of responsibility in that task by doing what we can, as soon as we can, to leave the people of Newtown 50 and 100 years from now a hometown with functioning ecosystems.

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