A mourning dove searches for supper on Aspen Ridge.


If you don't care about the human beings displaced for the Aspen Ridge project, how about the wild things? This mourning dove is walking on Aspen Ridge fill dirt (mostly gravel and yellow slimey mud when wet) checking for edible items. The greatest loss is the rich topsoil that was hauled away in hundreds of dump truck loads. Even if the same soil were brought back and put in the same spot it would not function the same because the thick layer of almost impervious soil would still prevent water from soaking through to the aquifer and roots of plants from reaching to where groundwater formerly was nearly always available. Such land is basically unusable for the real needs of human beings and other living things forever. More evaluation of soil on potential development sites needs to be done and a person added to the staff whose job would be seeing that only minimal disturbance of healthy, absorbent soil would occur. The mindset of people planning projects needs to be adjusted to recognize that replacing tillable soil with red dirt or any dirt with less organic matter and more hard mineral content is unnecessary and has predictable, almost irreversible BAD long-term consequences for the watershed.