>
> It has taken 15 hours, and 38 outgoing messages, but I am now caught up
on my
> e-mail after laying low for the last few weeks.recent
> afternoon.

Thanks to the "holiday" season I am currently catching up on 1,191 posts on
6 listservs. Its an opportunity to satisfy an old curiosity and keep track
of how many of these I actually read and how many make me reach for the
delete key after one sentence. An interesting point is that BP wins hands
down as the list with the highest proportion of read messages (of course,
its also the one with the least traffic). So far the read/kicked ratio
elsewhere is about 1:12.


> Whatever happened to the discussion concerning the gravel road in Maine?

I've been avoiding reporting on this since it brings up a whole passle of
conflicting and complicated thoughts that I haven't had time to work
through yet.

In the simplest form- my friends chose a route (pun intended) which has
satisfied their needs, but ,to my mind, does harm equal to that from the
scheme proposed by the Selectman. They hired a lawyer who presented the
town with an injunction against proceeding with preparatory tree removal,
bases solely upon arguments that the town was trespassing by engaging in a
taking without due process and claim of eminent domain. This effectively
brought the Selectmen to the table and an agreement is being worked out
that will result in the road being rerouted to a point where its nearest
shoulder will pass by the house at a point 25 feet further away than the
furthest shoulder now does. In all, about a quarter of a mile of road is
being relaid on a new path.

Partly, this plan of attack and willingness to compromise was arrived at
because there was such a short lead time to the public meeting that other
avenues could not be explored; partly, because not all the residents of the
road were in agreement that the widening was such a bad thing; partly,
because the environmental group most immediately involved was not willing
to act in a timely manner; but mostly, I think, because my friends really
saw this as the best possible outcome. They are outsiders, were being
chided by locals for being pushy outsiders, got their backs up, and
proceeded, initially, in a heavy-handed manner that pretty much undermined
any effort to open up lines of communication with the power structure (who
are an especially dictatorial lot, in this case) and large parts of the
community. Absent that, they felt that getting anything, even by threat of
lawsuit, was a long shot. And, I suspect, though they aren't going to tell
me this, moving the road further from their house probably is more what
they really want than is any adherence to environmentalist or
preservationist principles. Being friends as well as clients, I have
decided to not make an issue of what I think about how they handled the
matter. I also feel a little guilty that I just couldn't find the time to
do any more than just feed them some ideas and pass on the info collected
from BP and PL. I've got a pretty good record in local battles of this
kind: Not always winning but often effective in broadening the argument to
get some thinking going about wider social issues than ever became part of
the dynamic in this instance. Mea Culpa.

There's a stunning continuity to our posts and how they all mesh together,
isn't there. In this instance I am  thinking of our discussion of
discourse, and what resulted here from its absence, discussion of the need
to generally prepare the ground for preservation efforts by making the
issue at least as central to people's thinking as Bill's chocolate lab
(which will never be as central to my thinking as is my choc lab), the
world of regulations, and the interplay of government and citizenry
concerning preservationist issues.
Chalk this one up as a case study of how not to get the job done on any of
these issues.

Bruce