A coalition of conservation and business groups are putting their support behind six environmental projects — from Montgomery County’s agricultural reserve to the National Mall — they say will be essential to preserving the region’s quality of life.
All the projects are now at critical junctures, members of the Washington Smart Growth Alliance said at a Wednesday news conference.
“They’ve reached a crucial point in their lives as conservation initiatives,” said Lee Epstein, of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, who chairs the alliance’s land conservation committee.
Also on this year’s list of the group’s regional conservation priorities are restoration planning on the Port Tobacco River watershed, protecting Merrimac Farm, maintaining the Mattawoman Creek watershed and restoring Four Mile Run.
The group’s proposal for the Montgomery County reserve is to buy out the rights to build one home per 25 acres still held by some landowners in the 93,000-acre zone, preventing what is called “significant fragmentation” of the farmland.
Much of the group’s effort is centered on raising awareness of the six projects and elevating them as priorities on a regional scale. Epstein said it will also endorse the initiatives with local governments as they wind their way through the approval process. The push appears to represent an accord between two classically opposed forces: development and conservation.
“One of the things we have to do is introduce ourselves to the conservation community that’s not used to working with us,” said Robert Kaufman of Augustine Land and Development Corp. and member of the group.
It’s an obviously limited truce, complicated by the fact that development practices are blamed for some of the problems outlined in the group’s report. Conservationists are targeting Maryland’s Mattawoman Creek watershed, for example, because growth and highway projects “threaten the existing forest cover so essential to protecting the watershed and water quality,” documents from the alliance say.
