Geese just a sample of the wildlife and native people of Northwest Arkansas displaced by immense human population

Please click on images to ENLARGE view of geese over Arkansas 112 on December 26, 2009.

What route do you take from your home in Northwest Arkansas if or when you have to drive to XNA?
If you aren't into the acronym scene, XNA is the designation the federal aviation gurus have given to the former Fayetteville airport ripped out of Drake Field in south Fayetteville and created anew in a beautiful part of northwest Arkansas that might be described as a high plain: prairie land on a relatively high plateau with springs and CLEAR, COLD STREAMS.

Take Arkansas 112 between Fayetteville and the Highfill area and you might begin to see what so many of us are fighting for when we discourage mindless development of this magnificent area.
Any route one travels to and from XNA can reveal a lot of the magnificence of the Northwest Arkansas of only a few decades ago and even of a century or more ago.
If you stay off I 540 and travel some of the various other routes to the airport, you may begin to understand.
Essentially, the damming of the White River was the final damning of Northwest Arkansas, one of the most magnificent regions of the world.
Get out and look at the old barns and farm houses instead of the "starter castles" and see the free-flowing streams instead of the concrete-bottomed ditch that drains XNA to an Illinois River triburary.
Notice the prairie and the steep, wooded hillsides and the geese and ducks and other wildlife. That is what NWA was all about only a few decades ago. The springs and rich soil and the vistas from the highlands made people settle here.
The native Americans who previously inhabited the area before the U.S. was created and before the Louisiana Purchase took it from the French, didn't overpopulate the land. They lived on it and prospered on its natural features.
Now the area's natural beauty and potential to provide easy access to sustenance for human beings and other living things is shattered into many small pieces by subdivisions, many of which have failed as the boom in easy loans and temporarily high-paid buyers and short-sighted bankers and greedy people in general found willing buyers and sellers among the many mostly land-appreciating descendants of the area's 19th-century settlers and newcomers from faraway areas.
Anyway a person chooses to approach XNA, the mix is the same: The nearly two-century-old buildings, trees and eons-old land forms juxtaposed with the failed dream castles of the newly wealthy workers and the greedy, land-ignorant who would seek profit without a smidgen of understanding of what they would be destroying.