To the editor:
In a letter published in last week’s Enterprise, an author wrote in favor of the current proposed routing of Segment 9 of the SBHT. His arguments are reprehensible, short-sighted, and out-of-date.
First, he notes that few trees in the trail’s footprint will live to be adults. He estimates about 284 of the 7,300 trees to be removed will be saved. Arguing that because something will die naturally, it is justifiable to destroy it now. This is both alarming and reprehensible.
Further, his argument follows the short-sighted reasoning that since trees are plentiful, to destroy an individual — even nearly 7,000 individuals — does no harm. For him, each tree has a low marginal value. The onefi sh-at-a-time decline in worldwide fisheries (even in Lake Michigan) illustrates the eventual fallacy of degrading the value of an individual example of a plentiful resource.
Finally, with up-to-date biological understanding, it is clear that healthy forests are biotic communities where each plant, animal, fungi, and mineral communicates its part to the whole. To think of an individual of a species as an expendable basic unit shows a need for understanding that the entire community of species is the basic unit of a forest or any biome.
TART Trails can be valuable assets for the human community but are not assets for natural biotic communities. Indeed, alternate routes can be found to extend the TART Trail network beyond Bohemian Road without compromising sensitive natural biotic communities.
We need not destroy nature for people to visit nature.
Douglas Jones, Ph.D. Maple City Pittsburgh
