OPINION: Scorched Earth

The building boom since World War II has raised its own kind of scar on the U.S. landscape: the freshly bulldozed plain overgrown with contractors’ shacks and self-conscious new homes, but bare of almost all its original vegetation. Only a few trees escape the bulldozers of the new “development” architects, and they are usually covered with handy red signs reading: “This way to the model home.”

Conservation experts and tree lovers have looked on grimly, but generally in silence. But last week, after a lady in St. Louis complained about the loss of 100 bulldozed elms near her property, Fred Meyer, tree expert of the Missouri Botanical Garden, let out a long-overdue squawk to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“This incident has brought to a head the ire I feel every time I drive by one of these new ‘scorched-earth’ housing projects,” he wrote. “This [bulldozing] practice often involves several acres of beautiful and otherwise very valuable woodland which the prospective home owner might have used as an integral part of his home surroundings. Once their job is completed, the contractors and their gangs quickly disperse to some other desert-making campaign. But what about the poor homeowners—the people who are going to live in those houses? The best they can do is to plant sapling elms and maples and wait 20 years.”

After his letter appeared, Dendrologist Meyer got an encouraging response from people who sympathized with his protest. Concurred the Post-Dispatch: “A house built on a sun-baked scar looks uncomfortably hot in summer and barren and uncared-for at any season. Many times, its builder has destroyed what is of far more value than what has been created.”