We all could be birds in a box
I was in Wal-Mart recently and my heart went out to the little finches fluttering around inside the store desperately seeking a way back out of that big box.
They didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they flew in, or how difficult it would be to find a way back out. They will adapt to living inside a box away from the sunshine and green growing things, and will survive by pecking holes in the dog food bags – for a while. Are they the canaries in a coal mine, showing what is “in store” for us?
A developer is in the process of trying to put a set of big boxes in a wheat field on the Whitman County side of the state line. Moscow will soon make the decision about whether to allow 77 acres on the east side of town to be converted from agricultural land into more big boxes. That is the equivalent of turning a space the size of downtown, (A Street to Seventh Street, and Washington Street to Jackson Street) into concrete and asphalt. Moscow doesn’t have a cap on the size of the boxes they can build or any say in what happens to the boxes abandoned or put out of business by the “development.”
We aren’t yet walled inside the boxes the developers are trying to build for us. But like the little birds, it will be very difficult to find our way back to the sunlight and green space once we go there. Living things don’t survive well in concrete and asphalt even if it is warm and lit up all the time.
The time is now to decide which kind of green our community needs most.
Get involved.
Krista Kramer, Moscow