Over 80 residents attended a special, joint meeting of the Upper Roxborough Civic Association and Residents of Shawmont Valley Civic Association on September 7, 2022 to come together to address SCEE’s potential sale of 24 acres of forest.
Two days before, SCEE announced a “temporary suspension” of the RFP process to sell the Boy Scout Tract.
The crowd was united in their continued opposition to the sale, and agreed that only a resolution in which 100% of the 24 acres is preserved is acceptable. This could be accomplished by the placement of a preservation easement placed on deed of the property.
Jamie Wyper and Rich Giordano, leaders of the civic associations, revealed they have been in conversation with some wealthy individuals who might be able to pay enough for SCEE to place an easement on the property; a sum that would likely total millions of dollars.
Wyper read an excerpt from Henry Beston’s “The Outermost House:”
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize and disregard our animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more compete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.
