Speaking for the Trees

 The best Halloween decoration I saw in October was a fake tombstone with some dirt and a shovel next to it. The simple inscription read “2020”. Yes! I think we all want to bury this year and be done with it. Now here’s another local worry -- the plans for turning Camp Buxton on Pond Street into a solar farm. The Boy Scouts of Rhode Island, longtime owners of this rustic camp, want to lease their mostly wooded property to a solar energy firm, which would install a solar farm. We have always worried that the Boy Scouts would want to sell such an extensive and desirable parcel of land at some point.

Installing a solar farm would involve cutting down hundreds of trees, mostly pine but some deciduous as well. The property borders Wilmarth Bridge Road and extends down the north side of Pond Street for about one-third of a mile. The back of the camp ends at the Palmer River. The solar farm plans call for a buffer of shrubs between the fence and the road, but plantings of rhododendrons are hardly the same thing as a woods.

At a meeting of the planning board on Zoom in late October, longtime neighbors of the camp, of which I am one, voiced their concerns about this plan. It is easy to understand why people would be upset at this planned destruction of such a large wooded area. After enjoying living across the street from woods for many years, home-owners would be facing a large field of solar panels instead. Speaking for myself, I mostly feel sickened at the proposed destruction of all those trees.

People who have moved to Rehoboth from elsewhere often say that they chose to live here because of the woods. I spent my childhood living literally across the street from a noisy, smelly, and polluting paper mill in the Midwest, back in the 1950’s. Talk about something you do not want to live across the street from! It left me with a lifelong desire to be near woods, streams, and ponds, since those were my favorite outings as a child. Imagine living in a leafy and peaceful setting all the time. Now imagine how people would/will feel to have to see and hear the constant whine of chainsaws tearing down nearby woods.

The quandary behind forests vs. solar fields is a tough one. Massachusetts is a leader in solar energy, yet the New England states are the most heavily forested in the country. There’s the problem. Even though solar power is a clean, quiet and renewable source of energy, trees provide a vital service to the environment in sequestering carbon.

But even if using solar panels results in a net gain in energy while allowing for loss of trees (according to one study I’ve read), trees are more than individual plants. A forest is an ecosystem of its own, with other plants, animals, and soil. Forests are also far more attractive than solar farms. There are studies and articles online you can read to get a more thorough evaluation of the solar farm conundrum. What I am writing here are just my own thoughts, the first of which is why does everything have to be so complicated?

Chopping down trees always reminds me of the Dr. Seuss book “The Lorax”. Dr. Seuss intended a deeper meaning for this book than his usual whimsy. He wrote it shortly after the first Earth Day over 50 years ago. The story is about someone (called the Once-ler) realizing that he can make money from the colorful Truffula trees in his woods. To make a short story shorter, this character goes on a tree-cutting binge until they are all gone, all the animals have moved away, and there is nothing left but a wasteland. In the midst of the tree-cutting, a curious little fellow, the Lorax, appears from a Truffula stump to reprimand him for the destruction. The Lorax says sternly: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”

The proposed changes at the Boy Scout camp are not exactly parallel to chopping down Dr. Seuss’s mythical Truffula trees, but the Lorax is on my mind nevertheless.