Another strip mall is coming to the rural tier

The strip mall (Crain Corner) is coming to the rural tier in Woodland, Upper Marlboro, Maryland. Few will mourn the environmental loss because the environment is free and infinite and has no value until it is no more. We seek out unique places for their differences and local specialties and then to accommodate our sense of want we build chain stores which destroy the very reason we came in the first place. How much open space should we preserve? New York had to secure almost 2000 acres (Drinking water for New York City comes from reservoirs in a nearly 2,000-acre watershed located in Delaware, Greene, Schoharie, Ulster, Sullivan, Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess counties. Together, these reservoirs provide about 1.4 billion gallons of drinking water per day.) in upstate New York to secure drinking water, but here in Prince George’s County being far mores savvy environmentally we know that water comes from the tap and is infinite and always there. We have no good reason to protect a river for a few fols to enjoy, so let’s build parking lots and retail stores.

Prince George’s County drew a line and said no more urban development past this line, but lines are political so the county is thinking about redrawing the rural tier demarcation so that a few property owners can make some money, and the rest of us shall simply pay more taxes for any clean up of the environment that happens to come along later. This is the money now idea that got the country into its current economic morass and is the problem that is getting the world into the environmental sink-hole. The building of the mall is couched in terms of why we can’t get some of what you have, but the result is to destroy the we have and give the new residents a damaged and dysfunctional ecosystem. The issue is sometimes cast in the light of the old ethnic majority versus the new, as if the new majority does not care about environmental issues, but rather is inclined to pave everything over. I think this wrong and slightly insulting.

Most people I know would never pay to live next to a strip mall; some might pay to live in a rural area, others to live in an urban area with green space, but so far I so not see any real estate advertising “house next to trash containers behind strip mall…good quality of life location.” If yet another strip mall for Prince George’s residents is a mandatory necessity, then let us build the mall next to the residents in need in areas planned for development; let us not carve up more open space that is finite and irreplaceable, and say how wonderfully we are developing our county. Let us rather have the visio9n to contain our sprawl and redevelop areas with in the planned development zones, areas where the ecosystems are already destroyed. Let us fix up neighborhoods and bring retail to them if they want it or green spaces if they need them, let us not pave over the rural tier of Prince George’s County