Arnold’s Farewell

I suppose it is about time I said goodbye as your (supposedly anonymous) news writer all these years since the Highland Park Environmental web site started.
I’m now in Hayward California (another Tree City USA town), but I’ve left a good part of me behind in Highland Park. I feel still committed to the open space of HP and sometimes check in on the hpenv site or the borough site to see how you’re doing. I see that many of my suggestions in the Environmental Commission’s draft Open Space Plan have been lifted right up and put into the HP Master Plan’s latest update. The main one is for conservation zoning of at least parts of the areas in southeast HP sometimes known as Buck Woods Ravine and Upper Meadows. Go for it. The new zoning is Highland Park’s most crucial open-space work yet to be done, joining onto the on-going trail-and-restoration projects in the lower Meadows.
I’m watching, too, for how my other pet project, the Eugene Young Environmental Education Center, will be used. Among the things I’ve “left behind” are most of my nature/science books and collections (a big herbarium of dried plants in 3-ring binders and smaller samples of fossils and natural objects). My hope in housing them in the Center was that there could be certain informal open times there where citizens and kids after school could just drop in and browse.
Highland Park in the last few years has become one of the most environmentally conscious towns I know (with the rare townwide “Backyard habitat” certification the next goal). I’ll keep a lookout on the web site for your/our further progress. I may even be able to drop by briefly in October and see for myself. Posted by Arnold Henderson 7/2010