The New York Times > National > Neighbors of Burned Homes Pained by Suburban Sprawl
Followup to the gigantic arson in Maryland, about which there have been reports (including this one) that mention environmental terrorists as the perpetrators. As yet, no suspects named. But here we have the NYT focusing on the long-standing opposition by neighbors to having this development built. Whatever the motive, the fires have highlighted a long and contentious battle over whether this instant dose of suburban density belonged here. The flames seem unlikely to alter the outcome: the developer of Hunters Brooke said this week that the houses would be rebuilt. The demon named Sprawl, bane of academic urban planners everywhere, rears its ugly head. It's so...unplanned.

...For years, local citizens fought their way from the Charles County Planning Commission to the federal courts to preserve the bog. It was not just the wetland, one of the few remaining magnolia bogs in the mid-Atlantic region, that they sought to preserve. They cherish their isolation from Washington's inexorably spreading suburbs. They do not want to lose their chance to see the full panoply of stars in the deeper dark of a rural night.

For Patricia Stamper, a 66-year-old government statistician who has lived up a dirt road in the Mason Springs area with her horses for 30 years, it is impossible to untangle her concern for the environment from her anger that "a high density housing complex is being dumped on us all at once."
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