These obligations begin with respect for the community which pays the bills for WMU’s existence and wants its dedicated green spaces protected. We had agreements which must be honored.

The obligations continue with receiving a gift with respect and honoring the legacy of Robert and Jack Welborn who fought to have the land transferred to WMU when others also wanted it. The stated intent was for WMU to act as stewards of the public trust and keep it as green space for public use. Jack Welborn weighed in heavily at the time of WMU’s earlier attempt to build the BTR Park on Asylum Lake and the Orchard. It isn’t correct to disregard the legacy left us by our own elected representatives.

A public university is furthermore under a profound moral and historical obligation to be a moral rudder and to do the right thing, diffficult and expensive though it may be. Academic freedom and the life of the mind are not idle meaningless concepts whose time is long past. There is a history of student insurrections deposing despots, of professors being tortured and executed for the stating the truth and refusing to recant. Who else should be redeveloping abandoned industrial brownfields if not a public research university with a college of engineering? Who else if not the wealthiest country in the world with the greatest per capita consumption of material goods should be looking at new ways to conserve and protect what remains rather than grab what it can and use loopholes in the law to evade the intent of deed restrictions?

The current BTR Park used up a massive piece of real estate in record time due to abominable planning. A modest-sized city could have been built upon the Lee Baker Farm. Instead of forward thinking green developments that husband the precious resource of land with high density developments, we have widely spaced land-wasting development schemes that are poster-children of the worst kind of urban sprawl – the kind which does damage to nature while accommodating very little human use. Here is the place that forward thinking architects might have made their mark and shown what could be done within given constraints and made the land useful for expansion into the next century.

The environmental community is reasonable to be sceptical of the promises made and broken and being made again. If the massive Lee Baker Farm was purportedly “used up” in ten short years and we can see with our own eyes how much empty space for infilling remains, how is the 54 acres of the Orchard (or the enchanted forest as proponents among WMU students are calling it) going to save the situation? When will the monster be hungry again and once more break its word to all around and want a compromise on the Asylum Lake side of Drake Road? Will half be enough this time and how soon will the monster be hungry again? Will it ever be satiated? Will compromise ever mean giving back some of what was taken away or is it always to be a metering of the rate of loss until some day there simply will be nothing left to lose? .

I suggest that it’s time to draw a line in the sand and say it’s been enough. Make do with what you have, husband your resources and show us better ways than the failed ways of the past.

Ladislav Hanka
1005 Oakland Dr
Kalamazoo MI
USA 49008
(269) 388-5631